Thrihyrne

I tend to write for about 30 minutes in the early morning with my first cup of coffee, just small sections of things before I can handle looking at a computer. I've been primarily working on my Dreamspinner novella sequel, the one that may not ever be contracted, I realize. But maybe the first one will sell enough and they'll want to support a sequel. Anyway, I was writing it yesterday and the protagonist and his lover were discussing how they'd get from their cottage to Dowth, maybe a mile or two away. The protagonist asked if they were driving, and the lover noted he doesn't know how to drive a car, so they had bicycles. To which the protagonist surprised me and his lover by saying that he doesn't know how to ride a bicycle. I love it when my characters surprise me with information about themselves I hadn't planned out!!

Since I finished my Yuletide story so quickly, I went to the 'Dear Yuletide Letter' spreadsheet and have selected an Orphan Black request that I'd love to write. Just a short vignette missing moment from an episode in season two we watched a couple of weeks ago. I've never written a pure gift fic before, but I'm really excited to write something in a fandom I've both never written for, and one that I'm currently enjoying myself. ♥

I'm about to have the most social couple of weeks than I've had in maybe a year or more! We'll be enjoying Thanksgiving with our dear friends sanguinity and grrlpup, a tradition I feel so fortunate to get to share with them, then Thursday the 4th Evan and I will attend the Portland office Airbnb holiday extravaganza. This is only the third ever local event where a +1 has been invited. :P Should be interesting since I'm still remote and don't know a good 5/6 of the people who work at the office now. We'll plan to go right at 7:00 and hang out for 2 hours or so before coming home and letting the younger set get crazy with an open bar. Saturday the 6th we have another holiday event with dear friends who've returned to the area from Utah, and then Tuesday the 9th one of the highlights of my month happens: one of my very dear colleagues who's also a remote employee is coming to Portland to visit the office again. She's gathered up a bunch of us who are now 'old timers' in Airbnb-parlance (nearly 2.5 years or longer) and mostly remote or only-recently-not-remote women to go out to dinner. It's a foretaste of how I'm now viewing next year's One Airbnb 2.0 to be held at HQ in SF. I didn't go last year; I was very conflicted in how I felt about my employer at that time, and was personally struggling with a lot of things that I'm not now. I'll be attending this year, and really looking forward to getting to see all of my remote buddies and talking about non-work things. :)

I'm very glad to have returned pretty much in the condition that I departed. This means that my flights were gratefully uneventful and my luggage made it with me and I'm back to my love and my home and my primarily quiet life. :)

As this is a public space I won't say too much about HQ except that having a huge open space may be a good way to promote creativity, but it's AWFUL for trying to do any kind of customer-facing work. It's loud and hard to concentrate and impossible to make outbound phone calls. It simply makes no sense for customer support and I'm very, very glad to be back in my home 'office.' On the other side, it was tremendous and heart-warming and illuminating and disarming to meet so many of my fellow remote employees in one place. I re-bonded with my roommate who I got to know during our pop-up office time last year, and spent a fair bit of time with a few select others. I will say that for someone like me, being fed breakfast, lunch and dinner at HQ for several days was really great. Nobody appears in my kitchen and cooks for me when I'm here during my shifts! ;)

Here's a link to a photo of me in proximity to the Golden Gate Bridge:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/88838401@N03/8997005617/

I'm hoping some other group shots and dinner photos will get handed around, but who knows. In having a much-needed 1:1 with my team lead in person, I found out that they actually need somebody to do something that greatly interests me, which is database management and being able to retrieve and make sense of data in a meaningful way for our team. My eyes and face must have lit up when we were discussing it, and now I'm going to be teaching myself SQL. evannichols has said he'll give me an overview as well. :D

In very exciting news, I'm writing again! Not on the Aldarion Numenorean story, but on a HP Charlie-centric fic. evannichols and I tried out setting aside an hour yesterday evening to work on our respective creative pursuits (non-knitting, in my case) and it was great. I'm really happy to be writing rather free-form with this story and seeing where it goes.

Did I mention how happy I am to be back home? In Portland? In bed, with Evan at my side? ♥

But first, a little bit about my promotion, since I'd noted I'd write a bit about that. I am now in Resolutions which, as you may expect, means coming up with resolutions for users on our site who are unhappy or have asked us to intervene. I'll admit that I was leery of applying, but they seemed to really need the people, and key colleagues kept pushing me in that direction. So I did, and I was brought on. A couple of things have made me realize that actually I think I'm really going to groove on this team, despite it having a lot of pressure and much more real-time communication with people: I was one of 6 people from email/chat who were promoted, and of the 5 of us in the North American group (thankfully there is a small batch in the EU also promoted), 2 are colleagues whom I've adored for a while and am thrilled to be still on their team, and the other 2 are from my own training batch who went straight into chat (I was in email until December) and so I'm getting to know them now. So I'm already feeling supported and among friends, which is great. But also, now that I've completed 2 weeks of training, I'm understanding that much of my role is that I get to be the person acting like an adult, no matter how the users are behaving. I get to educate, to decide to give money or to hold on to it, to surprise a user with an unexpected gesture or to stand my ground and say that my final decision is final. No supervisor is going to come along behind me and undercut what I've decided. The overarching lead for this team has said his motto for us is "You are the CEO of your own inbox." Ah, sipping the delicious nectar of autonomy. :)

( And now, pictures! )

I hadn't posted any pictures of the apartment in a while, so here are a few. Hope you all are having a lovely weekend!

There are so many ways in which I feel more and more grounded these days— in recent days, it's because I came back from Harrisonburg with pretty much all of my belongings. The rug and bin that we shipped arrived yesterday, so it's all here now. In going through it, I came across two lovely and talisman-filled care packages from rainwish that hadn't initially made their way here. Now my altar is truly gorgeous, with fabric, more stones, a Lego Gimli (not from Rainwish, but he is my symbol of strength), a polished circle of stone I'd held on to from my college roommate (perhaps even given as a birthday gift while still in school), and a paper crane from a newer friend, ohthatjocelyn. There's also a colorful cornucopia Thevina/Kristi-centric collage created by emansil_12 on the shelf nearby. I'll take another picture soon. It fills me with such joy to glance over at it, much less spend quiet time there in meditation, or just sitting quietly with my morning coffee, breathing in openness and breathing out anxiety, holding my loved ones in light.

And in other news: The cabled hoodie I'd knitted that never fit properly on me turns out to fit grrlpup like a glove! I'm thrilled that it's with her. There's still enough yarn left (or so I hope, lol) that I'm going to make this vest for myself: The back is equally gorgeous.

Today is my first official day of training as a promoted specialist in Resolutions. This really wasn't the area I'd planned to go to in my time at Airbnb, but the need was there and I believe that once I learn more of the ins and outs of basic protocol, I'll find a very happy home as a 'Resolutionary.' They deal very much in the grey area of disputes and people who are generally unhappy for a variety of reasons. While I do very much enjoy having policies and standards to use as the girders of responding to our users, I think I'll find it quite empowering now to be able to have the tools to grant refunds, take losses, educate and warn (when necessary) with a more authoritative voice so improve our ever-expanding community of users. So… let the training begin!

Having been let down by Comcast (no surprise there), evannichols' and my plans changed for how and where I was going to work for the next couple of days. Today I'll be back at the house on 79th, which actually is great. I moved all of my things yesterday except for desk/office chair/mattress (and some food), so I can work there today and do a thorough floor clean during my breaks! Yay. Tomorrow Evan takes off from BHFT to have movers come from 8-11 or so to move his belongings over. Which means that this evening I'll help in packing up anything I can that doesn't require inside knowledge, and help disassemble his tall cabinets/shelving units. I'll spend the morning in Milwaukie at a coffee shop and then the library for the 8-12 part of my work shift, then head up to my to-be home library for the afternoon. Hopefully by the end of the day tomorrow, all of Evan's things will be at our new apartment, and our internet will be working, and We Will Be Moved. ♥

Pickle bandages. Yesterday morning I opened up the left side of the bathroom cabinet to get something and saw them. I burst out laughing, and kept laughing and telling Evan how much I loved them. He was so happy with my reaction: he knew of my fondness for fun and bright bandaids, and also a love of pickles, and so he'd found those and surprised me with them.

Something else along the retail therapy line: a memory foam bath mat runner from Eagle Bargain Outlet. Our hosts at the Airbnb listing where we stayed last weekend (with the gorgeous view and hot tub!) told us about it, mostly for Evan to find an induction heat plate. And he did! Evan is thrilled. And I'm so happy about my super-soft runner which is actually for my room as I anticipate trying to make my space as ergonomic as possible for working at home, which blissfully starts in less than two weeks.

Today's my day off- of all days, two of the higher ups will be at our Portland office today, but 1) it's my day off, and 2) I have appointments and a lunch date. And a massage at 9 o'clock, so I'll sign off here. :)

I feel as though I've been going on and on about how much I love my job at Airbnb, so I won't gush more about it here. But I LOVE IT. For those who might wonder what my days and hours are, here's how they are through the end of September: 10-7, PST, Sunday-Monday, Wed-Fri. So I have Saturdays and Tuesdays off. We put in requests for new shifts each quarter, so there's a chance mine will change for Oct-December. I'll also begin working remotely (ie: from home, or Evan's house, or a coffee shop, or wherever I want where there's reliable internet!) in October. So, yay, no commute at all and working in whatever clothes I feel like, plus I can go out for a quick jog or run errands during my lunch and then come back home!

Many of you know that I recently went on a 3-day trip to go camping with Evan, attending an annual Nichols family get-together. In recent years they've met at Spicer Meadow Reservoir campground, and that's where we were this year. So I met his parents and older brother and spouse and couple of other friends who were there. I'd Skyped with them once before, but this was my first time to get to meet them in person. The setting was gorgeous, the weather sublime, the starry night sky phenomenal, and the sleeping on a thin mat on the ground something I didn't miss so much once we returned home. But here are a couple of pictures:
( two photos )

Earlier that week, as noted, my dear friend emansil_12 was in Portland for a couple of days before going off to Lubricus. She and I spent an absolutely marvelous day together, and here's the visual proof. This picture was taken at the building where Evan's work is located, in a large and sunny atrium that features someone playing piano every day during lunch hours!
( together in PDX )

So I'm settling into my work schedule, at least for the next month. Even with that, since I'm working Labor Day, I'll have the subsequent Friday off. In other words, I haven't really been able to settle into an actual routine yet. That may not really happen until October when I'm working at home. We'll see. This week I am so looking forward to my Tuesday off. I'm starting out the day with a massage from my friend Karla, and then getting my eyes checked at 4:00. My eyesight has been funky and not in a good way. Now that I finally have health/dental/vision insurance again, for the first time in 3 or so years I'll get my eyes checked and will probably end up with new lenses. Maybe even new frames!

And this old guy cleaning them with a dental tooth scraping tool.

Well, I did, but this post isn't about that. It's more about a few things of note to do with work, the weekend, and other stuff.

~ The Airbnb pop-up location is located in The Pearl District. I'm growing to love it, seeing the fancy restaurants, Whole Foods, and even an Anthropologie store. I didn't know they had actual stores! I've long been an admirer of their clothes, though only once items were about 80% off. :P I go out and about during my two breaks and lunchtime, seeing what's out there and stretching my legs. Quite a pretty area.

~ I ate my first even lemon cucumber! I didn't know such things existed, but they were growing in evannichols's sister's garden. Their cucumbers, whether those or more conventional, are growing like crazy. I was encouraged to eat my fill, which makes me so very happy. I love cucumbers!

~ As Evan and I were having coffee and chatting Sunday morning (which I actually had off thanks to a generous new Aircorps friend switching with me for Tuesday), I mentioned that I'd realized that I didn't have the energy or attention or time to really go ahead with my Etsy shop idea. I'm not giving up the idea and concept, because I think it's great, but instead of trying to sell these adorable infant's sweaters made of reclaimed and/or hand-dyed yarn, I will mail them on to my two stepsisters who are having second children. The zip-front vest I'll send to my sister, who has a 2 year old, and she can grow into it. It's not that I spent a lot of money getting the yarn, that was part of the point! But I've come to peace about maybe making myself a couple of things out of the yarn I reclaimed and washed and made into center pull balls. It's all good. I'll take pictures of course before I send the garments along.

~ Apparently I won't know my actual schedule for another several days, but I will have Wednesday off and Evan generously took a half day. I'll be making some of my usual weekend calls Wednesday morning, and I'll look forward to hopefully chatting with a couple of you.

~ Thanks to still being subscribed to redheadedmales, I see that there are two red-haired lovelies on the U.K. Olympic team! Daniel Purvis in gymnastics and Greg Rutherford in track and field. :D :D