Wednesday, September 4 2019

Dear Journal,

It's a cloudy, chilly, misty morning, and even though I'm still waiting for coffee to finish brewing, the smell of fall that hit me when I stepped outside to let the dogs out was enough to wake me up. Of course, now I'm back in side and I'd rather have coffee, but for a second it was pretty magical. The weather says it's supposed to be on the cooler side all day - it shouldn't get above 70 today, which makes me really eager to take a family walk to Glass Nickel for lunch. The cozy work-from-home vibes are in full effect this morning.

Yesterday was a pretty solid day. It felt good to put on a real outfit (something other than my weekend lazy pants) and head into the office. I was kind of bummed that my cookies didn't turn out. The batch was perfectly edible (we've been snacking on them at home), but they were just an impractical, grotesque form factor and I didn't think they earned the right to make a debut at the office. I mentioned them before our morning meeting, and my coworker Heath joked "Nope, sorry - you only get credit for making us cookies when you bring the cookies." Which is undeniably true - there's no sense talking about cookies that didn't happen. That's just some Midwest candor setting me straight. Throughout the day, I was visualizing the thin sheet of rolled out puff pastry, and I think I came up with a way to fix my cookies. I'll try tonight and report back.

So what else is going on? Ah, we're training a new member of our team this week. Two of our summer interns accepted jobs and one of them was back on our team the following Monday. It's exciting having fresh perspective around, but bringing someone up to speed can be daunting. At this point, I've been with my work for a little over three years, and even in that brief amount of time things have changed so much. There's a lot of information. And if that information were a body of water, training new people feels like teaching somebody surf.

After work, I took Rod to Hy-Vee, and Marissa wanted to come along. We were surprised to see that Rod kind of had a bad attitude about the change in routine. "Momma go painting," he scolded as he pointed upstairs. After some undisclosed disciplinary action, he caved, and we all jumped in the car. We decided not to play any music to give him space to think through things. The whole thing was just a sobering reminder that my kid is turning into a real person with his own agenda. He has his own sense of what's normal, and he wants to weigh in on what we do - and not in the cute way where he just blurts out things like "WATERSLIDE" and "BASEBALL" at inappropriate times, but in a meaningful way - where we may feel like doing something but still have a hard time communicating it.

Today should be a good day. I'm going to drink coffee and rock my lazy pants and drink coffee until my morning meeting, then the new hire and I are going to do some more "surfing lessons". Marissa, Rod, and I are going to walk to Glass Nickel for during lunch time, and you can be sure that I'm making another batch of cookies tonight. But as we know, I don't get credit for them until people are eating them - don't let me off easy.

I hope you all have a wonderful day today.