accidental

In a few short weeks, I will be working from home full-time. The company I contract with moved into their building a little over two years ago and signed a seven-year lease, thinking it would have plenty of room for them to grow into. A cube for every worker bee, an office for every manager, a chicken in ever pot, et. al. Well, things didn’t quite work out. People are sharing offices. The current 8-ft x 8-ft cubes are being replaced with 8-ft x 6-ft cubes. Conference rooms are being removed (even though there never seem to be enough rooms for all the meetings people schedule) so more cubes can fit in. Despite all these changes, and even though there are empty cubes right now (before most of these changes have happened), there will be only four or five empty cubes in the entire building, and thus I have to give mine up. I’m torn about it - being completely independent has always been my goal, but not having as much face time with my clients will make it harder for me to compete with their agencies for projects (even though I’d save them about 60 percent of the cost). And there might be some office politics involved in the decision to have me give up my space (especially since half the department is made up of contractors, which was the big argument for my removal). Either way, I’m sure everything will work out. I really do work better when I’m not in their office, because I don’t have the constant interruptions. But I’m wary of how it will affect the number of jobs I receive from them. I’m also nervous about suddenly having my main form of socialization being cut off, so I’m looking for co-working opportunities. If anyone in Denver wants to share their office a few days a week - I don’t take up much space, I’m pretty quiet, and I’d happily pay rent (within reason).

In 10 days, we’ll be on our way to the Big Apple! Other than some pre-show planning for NSS, I have done little-to-no trip planning for our visit. I might have to run to a book store and buy one of those touristy city guides; the scale of the city is so overwhelming to me, and since Melissa will have to work some of the time we’re there, I don’t want to feel completely stranded. I also need to help Jason find something to entertain him while I’m at the show; I invited him to come with me and he might stop in for a bit, but the aisles and aisles of paper will get pretty boring for him pretty quickly.

Speaking of the National Stationery Show - it took three days altogether (spread out over a week or so), but I finally made it through a first pass of the show exhibitor listing. There are roughly 1300 exhibitors this year (300 of them are first-time exhibitors), and after my initial round of review I have 133 exhibitors that I’d like to visit. Some I’ll just pop into, some I’ll want to pick up a catalog and order form for, and some I’ll want to spend some time chatting with. So now I have to go back through my list and separate everyone into the appropriate groups. I also have to pull together my credit sheets, get my sales tax license photocopied, confirm delivery of my business cards, and do a whole host of other things to prepare. Yesterday I called in to a pre-show webinar for new buyers and received an amazing brain dump of info from the panel. I hung up afterward feeling simultaneously excited and completely overwhelmed.

Life feels like it’s moving at light speed lately. We’ll go to New York, we’ll get back and I’ll start my full-time at-home schedule, then it will suddenly be my 30th birthday, then we head to Texas for my niece’s wedding, I’ll take a solo trip to Mississippi to visit Anna, I’m planning to go to Vegas for Photoshop World, there are some other conferences later in the year I’d like to attend… and then suddenly the holidays will be upon us and we’ll be making our yearly treks to New Mexico and California to visit Jason’s family. And in the middle of all that I have to get enough work done to sustain me so I can get the side business going, while still taking a break here and there so I don’t go nuts. I’ve become obsessive about updating my calendar lately, because it seems to fill up so fast.

Hunter Douglas has dashed our sliding window panel hopes and dreams. The comparable product at Home Depot was around $600 with a valance upgrade, so we were thinking the pricier Hunter Douglas version couldn’t be more than $1K. WRONG-O. Try $1800. That’s… that’s…. that’s insane, is what that is. But we’re in a bind because we need very specific headrail dimensions and the Hunter Douglas product is the only one that will fit our window. So we either pony up the cash or live with our stapled-up vinyl temporary blinds. Ugh. The saleswoman tried to tell us that it cost so much because it was a new product. Call me crazy, but if were launching a new product, I’d want the pricing to at least pretend to be competitive in the marketplace.

Jason’s uncle and his wife came into town briefly on their way to Wyoming, so we had a chance to show them around Denver a little and share a meal at El Senor Sol Saturday night. It was a high point in a weekend that involved breakfast with a couple of my coworkers in Boulder, being financially violated by Hunter Douglas, seeing “Baby Mama” to kill time since we’d already wasted the gas driving to the ‘burbs, engaging in some retail therapy at Borders, looking for garage ceiling storage at Home Depot, beginning to clean out said garage, doing something weird to my left ankle so putting weight on it hurts a bit and stuffing our faces at Carl’s Jr. Monday came too quickly, as it usually does.

And then I had a dream that the creative services department at the company I contract for rescheduled their off-site without telling me and I was the only person stuck without a ticket on the once-a-week flight to Guam. Yes, that Guam. Perhaps I’m having some anxiety about being separated from the group.

We picked up our barstools, and they’re lovely. Now we officially have a “dining area.” And I convinced Jason to make stop in Cherry Creek at the Room & Board store after we visited their warehouse to get the barstools, so now I’m waiting on our next delivery - my new desk. I went with the 72×30 desk with the 48×24 return, so I can keep my L-shape but have a slightly smaller footprint, with a frosted glass top (someday I’ll upgrade to the white quartz, but that can wait). It’s being delivered tomorrow morning, and I’ll be spending my evening cleaning off my current desk and disassembling it to get it out of the way. I was pondering my desk in the shower this morning and it occurred to me - these two Jerker desks are the last pieces of furniture we still have from our shopping spree at the Houston IKEA before we moved to Colorado five years ago. Ah, memories.

As scheduled, we also went to Home Depot last weekend to pick up temporary shades. We had a heck of a time finding them, and when we got them home we immediately regretted buying them. The ones we put up when we moved in were nice, vinyl ones (if temporary blinds can be nice) with a pull-cord in the middle so we could raise and lower them. These just had clips which I guess you could use to clip them open; we initially used the clips to attach a butter knife to the bottom of each blind so they’d stay down. They also lost their stick almost immediately, and when I came downstairs the next morning they were on the floor. Thankfully we’d saved the old unsticky ones and Jason stapled them back up. But the whole thing made us acutely aware of our need for something more permanent. Before we moved in, I had suggested to Jason the idea of sliding sheer panels to cover the windows; I hate vertical blinds with a passion, and nothing else seemed practical. It took me a few months, but I finally discovered the right combination of Google keywords for the equipment I wanted. Turns out there are companies actually making this product already and we didn’t have to do it ourselves like I’d expected. So last Sunday we went to Home Depot to check our their sliding window panel offerings. They were somewhat limited, but we managed to find some fabrics we liked. The trouble came when figuring out dimensions - we wanted an inside mount, but because our window has a door with a handle, and because the width of the panels’ headrail was several inches, the rail wouldn’t fit. There’s an outside mount option, but we have furniture covering a portion of the window (see this picture?) so we wouldn’t want the panels to stick out into the room. We were trying to save money going the Home Depot route, but it looks like we’ll have to get spendy and buy Hunter Douglas panels - they have a proprietary rail system that will actually fit our window because it only requires one track. And so the window saga continues. We’ll probably visit a Hunter Douglas showroom this weekend to get our order placed.

With the exception of a day of snow last week, the weather in Denver lately has been gorgeous. Which means offices are getting emptier. WhiteWave’s Friday office hours end at 2; in the winter, no one really leaves, but when the sun is shining… you can almost hear the sound of a vacuum being created by the mass exodus out to the parking lot. We walked downtown last night for dinner and a movie, and Commons Park was overrun with dogs and bikers and a small group of people who had strung up ropes between some trees to practice tightrope walking.

For us, sunshine means the bikes come out of the garage. Jason has been biking to work on half-decent days (i.e., when there’s no snow on the ground), but last weekend was my first real trip out. We rode down the Cherry Creek bike path, past the country club and to the mall area - just over 10 miles round trip - and had a picnic lunch before heading home. And I was definitely saddle sore - since we’re probably going to be biking a lot more than we did in the ‘burbs, it’s time to invest in some padded shorts. The day after our outing, I rode down to Jason’s office (10 minutes, tops, one way) to meet him so we could ride home together, and… it was uncomfortable to say the least. I complained at length about the pain in my rear, and Jason’s response was usually, “Really? I hadn’t heard.” Funny guy.

In my never-ending quest to “finish” the house, we’ve made a few new purchases. The first was a wine bar - being downtown, we have access to some nice wine stores, so we’ve started drinking a little more regularly. And seeing as how our counter and cabinet space is more limited in the townhouse, we’d been looking for some piece of furniture or storage device to get the bottles off the counter and the glasses out of the cabinets. We saw a lot of options, but nothing as functional as the Sloane Leaning Wine Bar from Crate & Barrel. For the longest time, it was only displayed online. But when I wandered to the mall on a Friday afternoon a couple weeks ago, they had finally set up a floor model. And I made an executive decision - it was perfect and I was buying it. There were a few tense minutes while the salesperson checked stock, because two other couples had been looking at the floor model and trying to find someone to ring them up. But I beat them to the punch and backed the Fit up to the loading dock before they had a chance to fight me for my purchase. It’s just the right size, it matches our cabinets, it stores cookbooks in addition to our beverage accoutrements, and now we just need to buy more wine to fill it out. In keeping with the “bar” theme, we headed to Room & Board last week to finally order the barstools we’ve had picked out for weeks. They arrived at the distribution center Thursday, so one of our errands for today is going to pick them up.

A much more functional accomplishment was made in our bedroom. While we’ve had top-down cellular shades up in the smaller windows for months, we had put off installing window coverings over our sliding glass doors (one up, one down, both 108 inches wide) because we couldn’t find exactly what we wanted and most solutions we came across were custom. Since one of these massive door-window combos is in our master bedroom, having it uncovered hasn’t been the greatest method of ensuring privacy. There was a nightly dance that involved Jason peeking out from the bathroom, asking if it was okay to turn off the lights (I usually read in bed) before jumping under the covers. But no more! We bought a double-rod setup at Bed Bath & Beyond and eight panels - four sheers, four opaque to get the entire window width covered - and installed them as soon as we got home. It was like magic. I walked around in my underwear at night with all the lights on just to celebrate our newfound freedom. So now we need to address the door-window downstairs. We put up temporary blinds right after we moved so people wouldn’t case the joint, and they’re now starting to fall off because they’ve lost their stick; it looks pretty low-rent at the moment. We’ll probably make a Home Depot stop while we’re out fetching the barstools just to get a couple more temporary blinds. But something more permanent is definitely needed.

And one more wine-related tidbit. Don’t ever offer to help your husband with dinner by shredding parmesan cheese for the spaghetti carbonara after having two glasses of red wine. My thumb is healing nicely, although it hurt to bend it for a few days.

Our visit from Jim and Leia was AWESOME. We got to show them at least a bit of Denver, and it forced us to take a vacation so after they left we both felt invigorated and perky again. We spent some time in Rocky Mountain National Park - which, in a four-hour period, managed to give them a rundown of all four seasons of weather in Colorado. We also went to the Coors brewery for their factory tour (which is concluded by three free beers) and showed them around downtown. And Jim, the giver that he is, introduced me to my first Jagerbomb. We had a wonderful time, and we only wish they could be here all the time to hang out with.

Jason’s enjoying his barely still-new job - he was feeling a little overwhelmed, but after Jim and Leia’s visit he snapped out of his funk and is starting to fall into a groove at work. The company is doing very well, which means Jason’s job is secure (always a worry when the economy is as unstable as it is now). They’re actually flush with work right now and are trying to to fill some positions to take the load off their current developers. If anyone is looing for work in Denver as a UI Engineer or Java Engineer, let Jason know.

We may tend to the workaholic, but Jason and I are actually planning a vacation soon. In late May, we’ll be going to New York City for a week to visit Jason’s sister. And, conveniently, we’ll be there while the National Stationery Show is going on. Since I can’t stop working, even on vacation, I’m going to visit the show for a couple days (my badge is in the mail!). The show is one piece of the plan for one of my side projects, and if my visit goes well you’ll be hearing much more about it this summer. But it’s just one more way Jason and I are working toward our ultimate life goal - working only when we’re working on something we’re passionate about. For so many people, the bulk of their lives are spent doing things out of necessity. We want our efforts to be directed at things we really care about and are interested in, and if there are more mornings where we wake up dreading work instead of feeling excited about what the day will hold, we’ll know it’s time to make a change. But back to New York - if you have any suggestions for things to do and places to go in the city, let us know!