I’m finally taking some time off work. First real stretch of days off since October. Gah, how did that happen? Oh right, we have been so short-staffed at work since December that it has been impossible for me to get away.
Day one of the vacation has been spent inside, rain pouring nonstop since early morning. I don’t mind. I need a day of decompression before I can even contemplate what’s next or how to spend the next few days.
Don’t squander them, my inner nag says.
Last January, I did one of these so I could remember how it was taking care of a newborn while on maternity leave. I figured I’d do one again while I am a Working Mother of a Toddler, so that in a year or two when my life has changed yet again (spoiler alert: it just keeps changing!), I can look back and try to remember what this life was like.
So here is a pretty typical LT day, told in pictures. To see the captions, you have to toggle on full screen and click the picture, I think. You can hit pause and then scroll through them at your own pace.
I got my two papers launched so I’m taking a week off. This feels obscene in some ways. Like, what could a person do with an ENTIRE week off? This means I will likely squander it in pajamas, watching TV shows I don’t care about. But I am not going to allow myself to feel guilty no matter what I do this week.
I have small goals:
• Give the cats a bath
• Watch the debate
• Get a haircut
• Carve a pumpkin
• Take the Buds on some adventures
• Get supplies for somebody’s big First Birthday Party
• Finish up some design projects
• Not check work email
• Go on a date with my man
• Take some dang pictures
I’m up way past my bedtime and I have had some bubbly and I’m feeling so full of the need to create that it nearly cripples me. I can’t wait for the job to level out, to get some Me Time back, to start making stuff again. I feel like I’ve been a mercenary in an unfriendly city for two months already and I’m not sure how that happened but I can’t say I didn’t expect it to a certain degree. Still, I want my life back and when I get it back it is going to feel like obscene luxury, I tell you.
Over the years I have always wondered, when a blogger I followed made a last-minute “I’m leaving the city!” announcement, why he or she waited so long to announce it on the blog, and why there was usually a lack of contemplative “what does it mean for my life that I’m moving?” kinds of posts in the run-up to the departure. And now I know that it’s because when you decide to rip your life up from the roots and cram it hundreds of miles away in a new city with a new home and a new job and new routines and new expenses, THERE IS NO TIME TO LOOK AT YOUR NAVEL, NOT EVEN FOR A SECOND TO REMOVE THAT NASTY LINT YOU’VE BEEN IGNORING FOR THREE WEEKS.
And so here it is, my big announcement: I am packing up and moving this crazed little life to Nashville to take a new job. I have been at The CA for seven and a half years and, as you can see from a recent post, things lately are not great. But let’s not dwell on that; it’s actually much more accurate to say that I have been offered a really interesting opportunity that is going to help me grow careerwise and personally. I’ve accepted a position as Gulf Coast team leader at the Gannett Design Studio of Nashville. I will be helping manage the design of five newspapers in the Gulf Coast region. It’s a robust gig, one with a ton of responsibility. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little intimidated by the prospect, but I think that’s because I have been doing my current job for so long that it’s scary to think about doing something I’ve never done before. It’ll be much less actual live design and much more mentoring, planning, organizing, communicating, and managing.
I’m heartbroken in many ways to be leaving Memphis. I feel like my time here was cut short and that I had a lot more Memphis living in me. But I made it count; I met some of the most amazing, interesting people in this city, and I got to be a part of some incredible things because of those people. Memphis will always be home to me and I will always cherish my little house on Midland because it is where my baby boy was created and where he came into this world. Memphis will always be sacred to me because it’s a tough city and living here has made me a stronger person. And also a more grumpy person but I think that would have happened anywhere. Many people don’t see the beauty in a city like Memphis and I’ve had more than one person use my moving as an opportunity to tell me how much they think Memphis sucks. That’s too bad; I think it takes a special kind of understanding of the fucked-up kind of beauty and humor the world can present to really appreciate it here. And the music. I am going to miss that lazy pulse of bass-driven blues when I have to trade it for twangs and fiddle strokes.
I’m sad that Holden will be leaving his first friends, but I know we will be back to visit and I hope our friends feel free to drop by if they find themselves in Middle Tennessee.
It’s scary picking up and starting again when just two years ago I thought I was going to be settled for a good long while.
Which reminds me: Anyone looking to rent a house?
I joked week before last about us having to adopt a new system at work because at the time I thought it would be a few curse words and a few chuckles and then we’d get on with our lives and just make do, but every day at work since last Monday has been the worst day of my life, and I wish I was exaggerating but I’m actually being entirely serious and, yes, I know how pathetic that sounds and, no, I don’t particularly care how pathetic you might think I am. Because I know I am not the only one who feels this way and I know I am doing everything to try and make the system work for me, but I am being stymied at every turn. I would venture to guess that the vast majority of folks working the production side of the day (ahem, night) fantasize about snuffing out their own lights and escaping the bubbling Hell that putting out the paper has become in one short week because it’s not like this is some temporary setback we are going through. THIS IS NOW HOW EVERY SINGLE NIGHT AT WORK IS GOING TO BE FROM NOW UNTIL THE PAPER FOLDS ENTIRELY. It’s going to be this endless cycle of slow load times, slow save times, fixing other people’s shit that I was told I wouldn’t be expected to fix, fruitless searches for where someone else put something, fruitless searches for where I MYSELF put something, crashes, network downtimes, proofs taking two minutes to print if they even print at all, stories disappearing, photos not scaling, crashes, corrupted files, inconsistent edits, boxes that won’t update, crashes, jumps that won’t move, advance pages that were never created, ad makeup putting things in the wrong spot, un-re-named factboxes, crashes, incorrect stylesheets, missing library elements, did I mention crashes?, confusion between what’s a snippet and what’s a library element, extra spaces, corrupt notes mode, forgotten folios, crashes, untoned photos, and JESUS PLEASE TAKE THE WHEEL.
Does the average newspaper-basher have any idea what it’s like to go from being able to do your job with speed and efficiency and a semblance of competency to, one day, being completely hobbled in all those areas and then some, and to have to spend an ENTIRE SHIFT on what used to take you three hours at most. Say you are a doctor and suddenly you can only speak and be spoken to in Spanish, except the only Spanish you have ever been exposed to is the Spanish that you heard on a tape about whale songs for three hours one day and also, guess what! That tape was formal Spanish, not CONVERSATIONAL Spanish, so you are really fucking lost.
And the real bitch of it is that our fantastic system that they chucked to the curb is what made it possible for the company to lay off ALL THOSE PEOPLE way back when — remember all those layoffs? — because that system was zippy and fast and easy and made us much more efficient than we had any right to be, all things considered.
But now here we are with the same amount of people — a skeleton crew on a good day, a veritable ghost ship on a bad one — and the same amount of pages to get out, but we are using a system that requires six clicks for every action and three minutes of waiting on it to talk to the cloud and think about What It All Means before it actually does anything, and then sometimes for no fucking reason it decides to time out or crash anyway. Those minutes add up and suddenly it becomes difficult to do your usual workload of 1.5+ sections every night plus advance design plus copy editing plus web posting. And let’s not even talk about trying to sit and think about how to make anything look good.
I’m eaten up with impotent rage and frustration over how all of this has gone down. We got screwed over. We weren’t ready to launch and they made us. The backend wasn’t ready to go and they made us go anyway, totally unprepared. And everything has been completely fucked for a week and counting and we have to raise holy hell to get any guidance and help on anything. We’re scrambling, trying to stay ahead. Putting out fires on deadline every night. This system. This fucking system. I feel sorry for any paper who felt like moving to Saxotech was an upgrade for them. What were they using before? A chisel and stone? Smoke signals?
No one really seems to want to talk publicly about how horrible Saxotech is. I don’t understand why. We need to talk about how fucking horrible Saxotech is so they will fix the horribleness and I can do my job without having to scream-cry on the way home from work every night three hours after I was supposed to get off because something went horribly wrong and no one knows why. If the company thinks they are saving money, I would like to see those receipts because we are all having to log a ton of overtime just to get the paper out every day.
I realize writing about work is reckless and stupid but honestly if they fired me for running my mouth and insulting corporate’s honor, they would be doing me a favor. Because — I don’t know if I have mentioned this — MY JOB MAKES ME WANT TO HURL MYSELF INTO ONCOMING HERPES-INFESTED SHARK TRAFFIC.
Tera:
I miss you already, baby. I hate to even have to write this letter but it’s out of my hands. They’re taking you away from me. You and I had our last fling Friday night but on Monday you’ll be gone and I’ll be forced to get to know someone else. Someone who has already been needlessly cruel to me, someone who is unfailingly tedious, someone who is inexplicably difficult to understand while simultaneously being idiotic. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you? That’s right. Saxo.
It didn’t have to be this way. You and I are star-crossed lovers, in a way. No one in power understood our love and they wouldn’t listen when we told them how perfect we were for one another. They made a decision to rip us apart for the good of the Scripps family. I hope you don’t think it’s your fault. Because you’re beautiful, Tera. You’re sophisticated and simple, but not in the way that means dumb. In the way that means easygoing, you know?
Tera, I want to apologize for all those times I got angry with you. I didn’t realize just how benign your quirks were until I met Saxo and all his issues. He’s a bit on the crashy side, so I’m pretty jittery around him. And did you know he doesn’t even let me place a jump if someone has a story open? I mean, he just won’t budge, even if we’re in a rush on deadline and it would be helpful to let someone edit a story while I’m laying it out.
And I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but the elements on his pages don’t update automatically, even if you close and re-open them. Not even jumps! So some editor can chop a story in half and, if I had already put it on a page, I would never, ever know that its content had changed until I highlighted it, went to the MWC menu and clicked “update box.” I mean, that’s scary, right? To withhold that kind of information from me and assume that every editor is going to come tell me when they’ve made any kind of change? Or to just assume that every designer is going to be constantly manually updating every box? It was so amazing and simple and sweet that you would just automatically update the elements on my pages if someone made a change to them. I didn’t have to do anything. You just took care of it and it allowed me to quickly and fluidly adjust to content changes. Tera, I never thanked you for that. I was a fool. A fool!
Your quirks kind of seem cute, now that I think about it. Like how every time I’d hit shift + F under a picture to make a cutline, and you’d make the last story I had touched change formats, so that I’d have to go hunt down that story and change its format back. It was like a little game of hide and seek we played. Or like how sometimes I’d have to try to place a jump line, like, three times before it would take. I thought that was really annoying until I accidentally deleted a jump line using Saxo. I couldn’t figure out where it went or how to get it back, and it wouldn’t let me make a new one. So I had to manually build one. That took me fifteen minutes to figure out, and I had to have my boss help me. It was humiliating. And do you know what Saxo did then, as if to rub it in? Froze up for a few minutes and made me just sit there and think about what had happened. He kept doing that all night long. I kind of worry about his health a little bit.
And I worry about his memory. I mean, I have a lot of trouble getting him to find where I have put things. You, of course, had a superfast keyword search function and I could find nearly anything as long as I could manage a decent keyword. Plus I could just search for a slug with a certain date in it or section prefix. Saxo thinks that is silly. He prefers that I search by toggling different sets of eight or so parameters on and off. Sometimes things I make just disappear into the ether and I can’t seem to get him to help me find them. Do you think he is hiding things from me on purpose? Like it’s some sort of weird power play? Or do you think he’s just kind of an idiot?
Tera, I don’t want to embarrass you, but you are really the best CMS I have ever been with. I haven’t been with THAT many, jeez! But I’ve been with enough to know that some are clearly better than others, and some are built in a way that really just works better for publishing daily deadline-driven print media. Here’s a good example: You know how, when anyone would write a story in Ted (your writing/editing program), the copy would automatically generate in the correct body copy font, with the correct leading and optimized kerning and H&J, and how extra spaces between periods and paragraphs would be ignored unless you specifically told the program to honor them? That way, if someone copied and pasted from some random document into our system, it would automatically be styled correctly with minimal effort on our part? Yeah, Saxo thinks that is dumb. So anything we copy and paste into Saxo looks how it was copied and pasted, and we have to go through it and manually remove extra spaces and apply the bodycopy style. And there’s no cleanup script like you have, no button to push to remove double hyphens and turn them to em dashes or turn straight quotes to curly quotes. It’s like Saxo WANTS me to screw up and look stupid. If he really loved me, why would he want that?
Tera, I’m scared. My short relationship with Saxo so far has been nothing short of a nightmare. He’s belligerent, constantly beeping angrily at me and bombarding me with these long, prison-letter-crazy error messages. He is persnickety, crotchety, he doesn’t respond well to change, and he moves so slowly that I fear for the sanctity of our deadlines. But most of all I fear for my sanity. Because every time I try to do something simple and it takes me an extra six clicks and a couple of superfluous drags, I am going to think of you and how easy you made my job.
I miss you already. I hope we can rendezvous again some day.
Love,
Lindsey
I just finished my first full week back on the clock. My boss mercifully is letting me work from home this month, and my workload all week was pretty light so I could get adjusted to being back. And so I could work out the technological kinks involved with a remote login (and there were plenty of technological kinks, but mostly in the form of my router dying midweek and then my new one coming with a crappy LAN cable that made setting it up particularly frustrating). I worked in the dining room the first two days, the nursery the third day, and the office the fourth and fifth days, since working in the nursery wasn’t exactly an option, given that I have a child who goes to bed during my shift. Working in an office sounds nice in theory, but in reality I was only technically inside the door of the office, which is as far as I could get the cable to stretch. It put me a foot from the litter box, which reminded me of the last time I had a major internet meltdown and had to temporarily make do with a rigged connection. Why do I always end up with a temporary setup so near the litter box? This question perplexes me.
Anyway, blah blah blah. I am caffeinated.
Holden has been a champ this week and gone to sleep right on time for his daddy, who has kept our routine intact (with just a few minor changes, some of which involve him reading different books — and doing voices! — at bedtime). Sometimes Holden’s so tired he falls asleep mid-bottle.
It has not been easy, emotionally, for me to pry myself from him for even a few hours in the evening. I sneak away from my desk whenever I get a chance to so I can snuggle him or nurse him, if I have time and he’s hungry. But his daddy is in charge of the nighttime routine now, and goodness, I did not realize how much I would miss giving my baby a bath and putting him to bed. I ache when I think about how in just a few weeks, I won’t even be in the same house to hear him cooing or splashing around in the tub. I will be miles away, banging out pages on a computer in a cubicle. Boo hoo.
I’m so fortunate to still have a job, and I am grateful for the flexibility my bosses have shown during this transition. No question about that. I’m just having a hard time with the separation. We have mornings together, and he wakes up smiling and hungry and so very sweet. But letting go of evenings is hard. I guess it will make my weekends at home that much more precious.
The shape of this October is different from all the rest. Already we are nearly halfway in and the leaves are changing, tops of the trees first where they are kissed by sun, cascading down into the shade. Horror movies are on TV and for some reason I found myself watching Saw II the other day even though I’d never seen the first or any other in the series. It wasn’t scary and I didn’t find it particularly shocking, now that I live in a world where there are Human Centipedes. The Food Network is plating its Halloween-themed shows, during which I marvel at how beautiful and inedible a cake made of fondant and spun sugar can look, and how I would eat the shit out of it anyway, just because. I’ve put up my fall wreath on the front door and a strand of spider lights in a window (jankily and with packing tape that keeps falling, I might add), but the rest of the decorations (my big skull faces, bloody handprint window gels, skeleton garland, purple lights, pumpkin candleholder) are in a bag while I contemplate whether I am actually going to feel like taking them down come Nov. 1. I haven’t bought a pumpkin yet or even considered how to carve it this year. Okay, that’s not entirely true. I had a fleeting thought about a little jack-o-lantern family: Two big ones and a teeny one. Because my body is lousy with gestational hormones, that’s why. But then I thought about how much of a pain in the ass it would be to carve three pumpkins right now, considering how they will probably last for maybe two or three days, given the longevity of last year’s gourds.
No, this October is different. I’m counting down and not to Christmas. Well, in the conventional sense of the word. I am waiting on a big ol’ present to get here, that much is true. I am scurrying around much like a squirrel preparing for winter, picking up knick-knacks here and there to store in preparation. I’m organizing and reorganizing these knick-knacks into systems that make sense. I’m making lists of things we have and things we need, my hand perpetually coming to rest on my belly, which is so unavoidable now that people are beginning to ask me when my last day of work is (it’s in a month, groan).
My ritual lately has been reading a home birth story or two from the Mothering boards every night before drifting off to sleep. These stories are all so different and some of them more encouraging than others, but they all carry the same weighty beauty, and I am obsessed with tracing the patterns of labor from one woman to the next. I look around my house and try to imagine where I will pace, where I will lean, where I will leak, what spaces will open up to comfort me when things get tougher than I expected. What the cats will do. What Ray will do. What I will do.
Amy came over on Wednesday and brought a birth day gift — a bedpan full of medical supplies that will become my friends: A peri bottle, gauzy underwear, boat-shaped feminine pads, gloves, a bulb syringe. I showed her my birth supply bags and realized quickly just how much I have left to assemble. After this week, I will be clear to deliver at home should labor start spontaneously. That sure is something to think about. We talked about how and when to go about calling her if I think something’s starting, and the procedure for a hospital transfer should one become necessary. She took my blood pressure and listened to the baby’s heartbeat and everything checked out perfectly. He’s in the same spot he’s been in for weeks, little heart just thumping away. Only this week, he’s the size of a crenshaw melon and I’m betting he’s long ago passed the six-pound mark.
My guts are all smooshed by him. I can feel him stretch clear from the depths of my lower left pelvis all the way around to the right, up and around my hip area. He stays tucked up underneath my sternum sometimes but is usually polite enough to refrain from kicking my lungs. Last night, though, he triple kicked me rapid-fire in the side and took my breath away.
A few hours later I woke up choking on my own stomach acid again, this time unable to keep from puking everything up onto myself, my bed, and the big long pillow I hug throughout the night. The vomit was brown from a chocolate protein shake I’d had too close to bedtime, and there were chunks of undigested Special K in it. I couldn’t stop puking. Every time I tried to cough or clear my throat, it would trigger my gag reflex and up would come even more. Ray was in the living room and I couldn’t find my voice to call to him, so I texted him for help. His phone beeped … from right beside the bed. I stumbled my way into the bathroom and just kept puking. It was horrible. Puke, heave, choke, clear throat, cry, rinse, repeat. I am up and down, in and out of the bathroom so much during the night that he didn’t even notice anything was wrong and I couldn’t yell out to him. I finally stumbled into the hall and announced dramatically that I was okay, not to worry! This is my fear, always: That I will finally relent and need help and that I won’t get it in time, for whatever reason. We changed the sheets and I went back to bed, stomach empty and head elevated, pillow and shirt whirring in the washing machine. I conked out and dreamed about Blake Anderson, I guess because I read a bunch of his tweets right before falling asleep.
It was not my finest night.
I’m so ready to be done with work. Organizing the remaining days of child-free time I have in my life around my job is frustrating. I wish my company offered paid maternity leave, even a week of it, so I could take some time off, even a day or two, before my due date. But they don’t so I have saved up every vacation day and sick day I could muster this year, meaning I have had hardly any time off at all this year. It’s crazymaking, but that is how we do things here in the land of the free to work yourself to death, I guess.
There is this running joke in the office now that when the baby is born, he’ll only be comforted by sounds of grunting and stomping and snorting and sneezing and sing-song yawning and humming and throat clearing — the sounds I hear for 8.5 hours every day. Seriously, the human cacophony around me on a nightly basis is sometimes too much for me to take. You would not believe it unless you heard it yourself. I get annoyed and then outright rage-filled because the offending parties have NO IDEA their tics are so loud and annoying and constant, and some of them like to complain about others’ noisemaking. Even headphones can’t drown it all out most nights so I just sit there and selfishly wish for a meteor to hit and make it all go away.
I am ready for a break. Spit-up and around-the-clock breastfeeding and diaper changing sound like a vacation to me. In small part because I will finally be able to see sunsets again, at least for a few weeks. I have missed almost every sunset that has happened since January of 2005. That is deeply, deeply fucked up.