See ya.

Well, I’m done. This blog has run its course. It got to be more of a burden (har har) than something I wanted to spend time doing. I had all sorts of things I wanted to write about and couldn’t. I’d worry what people I knew IRL would think. I have SO many completed yet unpublished posts, it’s not even funny. I suppose this has essentially become a private journal, so I might as well take it offline.

I hate when bloggers say shit like, “I’m leaving but I might be back so keep checking.” Or “I’m going to take a break, and may or may not be back.” So I am telling you now, I am leaving. And won’t be back. I never back down from my decisions. I’m pretty much done with Burden of Thought anyways. I don’t feel as burdened with thoughts as I used to be before I was a mom. Now I can’t stand people who think too much.

So what’s next? I’m not sure. The next thing will be either a completely public blog or a completely private one. None of this half-assed shit.

I’ll be removing some of my posts or maybe all, I haven’t decided yet. In the meantime, I’d love to keep in touch with whoever wants to keep in touch with me. You can email me at burdenofthought at gmail dot com.

Thanks everyone, it’s been fun. I’ve met some really great people through this blog, and for that I’m grateful. I hope to “meet” more of you one day.

The Death of Cecil the Cat

We’ve finally moved! Yay! I thought we would never close escrow. But we finally did last week, and have been moving little by little since then. One more round trip and we’ll be done! Now I have to unpack and organize…before AJ’s sister and family arrive in less than 2 weeks.

So, I really should be working on that right now instead of reading through my old journals and English assignments. Actually, I skimmed the journals because teenage me is really quite embarrassing and I can’t read them without cringing.

But I had fun reading my creative writing assignments, and I thought I would share one with you all. This was written at the age of 12, and the assignment was to write a poem in the style of The Wreck of the Hesperus by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (It’s funnier if you are familiar with this poem.) Everyone had to read their poems out loud. The class then voted on a winner, and I won. Here it is in all its glory (re-reading it today, that “the” in the last stanza was bothering me so I crossed it out):

I was a morbid kid.

Cuteness Overload

I couldn’t resist sharing. This totally made my day.

Just gimme an ETA!

The company I work for is a big software company. And because it is so huge, everything takes forever to do, and has to go through a gazillion approvals.

When I used to be a customer, it was frustrating. Now that I am an employee, it’s fucking embarrassing.

I cringe when I read through the histories of some of our open bugs. They tend to read like this:

• Day 1
  Customer: Hey this isn’t working.
• Day 2
  Support Person: Try this one really easy thing.
• Day 3
  Customer: That didn’t work.
• Day 4
  Support Person: Oh. OK, try this other little thing.
• Day 5
  Customer: That didn’t work either.
• Day 6
  Support Person: Oh. Um… lemme get back to you.
• Days 7-8
  [Nothing.]
• Day 9
  Support Person: Hey, I’m going to pass this to another person who can better help you.
• Day 10
  New Support Person: Hi. I’m gonna need a day to read up on this bug.
• Day 11
  New Support Person: Can you try this one little thing?
• [Repeat.]

To be fair, a lot of the times the customer takes a long time to try what was suggested. And bugs are hard to troubleshoot because the support person doesn’t know what the customer has added to the base application (usually a LOT) so it takes time to narrow down what it could be. So it’s not always because of us that a ticket drags on and on. Still, speaking from experience as a former customer, the slowness of our responses is maddening.

This is what I’m dealing with at the moment: one of our customers is in the middle of an upgrade, but when they applied a recent patch to their test environment, it caused their application to crash. Obviously, they cannot go live without this being fixed. This bug has been open for over a MONTH, and we cannot get our engineers to tell us when they can get it fixed. I have been pushing them every day just to tell me when they can tell me when they can get it fixed. I’m not even asking them to tell me when it can be fixed! I just need an ETA on the ETA. The worst part is that the engineers are pretty certain they know what is causing the error. They just don’t know when they can fix it.

My manager says that because the engineers support so many different customers’ applications, they are extremely resistant to committing to any dates because another more urgent bug might come up.

So every day I writhe with embarrassment when I have to tell our customer that I have no update on their one single critical bug. I feel like they probably think I am totally useless.

Sigh.

Mute your lines!

I just got off a conference call where there were about 30 participants. It was a status call where one person reported the statuses of a number of items. Since only one person needed to do the talking, everyone else should have been on mute unless they had to ask a question. Instead, during the half hour call, we heard:

• a dog barking
• a baby crying
• desk drawers being opened and slammed shut
• random shuffling sounds
• snoring

Yes, someone was actually snoring on the call. During the first 5 minutes. The call started at 9am, so it’s not like it was super early.

I don’t get this. Why don’t people mute when they aren’t talking?

When I first joined the company, I had to call into an orientation meeting where a couple of HR representatives did a presentation of the company’s policies. During the call, some guy put the phone down without muting and started having a conversation with a coworker. We could hear the conversation loudly and clearly, and the HR lady kept saying, “Hello? Can you mute? Hello?!” but the guy obviously didn’t have the phone in his ear. At one point he started talking about porn. It was very distracting. The presenter attempted to continue but kept losing her train of thought.

Some people.

View from my kitchen window

Ramona's favorite spot

This was the view from the window over my sink yesterday. The weather was gorgeous! Today, not so much.

Our housewarming party on Saturday was a huge success. Luckily it did not rain, but it was cloudy most of the day. We should have had the party yesterday when it was all sunny and warm. Although people generally don’t have parties on Mondays.

This was the first party where we hired caterers, and I am SO glad we did, because I would have been a lot more stressed about feeding so many people otherwise. As it was, I got to relax and hang out with my friends and play with babies. All we needed to do was provide beverages.

We said 2pm on the invitation, but the first guests didn’t arrive till almost 3pm. Most people with kids left around 5-ish. Then the last non-Colombian left at 8pm. The Colombians stayed till 1am! I can be pretty outgoing when it suits me, but I was seriously done being social by 8pm. They discovered the karaoke machine and sang Latin songs from the 80s all night. AJ was loving every minute… he has really missed being around other Colombians and speaking Spanish. He recently met this group of people through one of his Colombian friends and they all get together almost every weekend. It’s been nice for him because usually we hang out with my friends who are mostly Asian.

So, yeah, the party is done. We’re officially back in LA!

Party Time!

Do you all think we are ready? The party starts in one hour!

My favorite time of day…

…on weekday mornings, after dropping the kids off at school, coming home to a pot of coffee and my blog reader, the whole day stretching out before me.

Especially a day like today, sunny and warm, the house (relatively) clean, and nothing urgent to do for work.

Completely unreasonable

For some reason I feel a twinge of jealousy whenever a friend tells me that she is pregnant.

Even though I myself was once pregnant and carried the baby (my younger son) to term.

Even though I do not want a third child.

It’s like a carry-over or something, from my past struggle with infertility.

Boys will be boys

Despite acting like he doesn’t understand what we say, Gege has a very good sense of what is allowed and what isn’t, and more or less follows our household rules.

So because that’s what he learned at school, for a long time Gege thought that he had to sit on the potty to do all his potty business. But one day, we were at a playground and he suddenly started grabbing at his crotch. I asked if he needed to pee and he nodded. We were in our little community playground, and there was no public restroom, and home was a 3-4 minute walk. Since there was no one else around, I quickly decided that he could pee on a nearby tree.

I cannot even describe the look of wonder that appeared on Gege’s face as soon as the pee hit the tree. He completely lit up and got a HUUUGE smile on his face. I didn’t know it then, but I had created a monster.

It started off small, at first. The next day he came home from school and wanted to pee on a bush in our yard. Thinking nothing of it, I let him. But then he wanted to pee there again the next day. And the next day. And the next. He started to get creative and would wave the stream around, in circles, in a straight line, up and down. It got to the point where he would only pee outside. And he would be SO HAPPY doing it. Luckily we have high fences around both the front and back yards. Once in a while I can get him to pee in the potty still, especially when it’s dark outside. And thank goodness he only does poop in the potty.

It just cracks me up because he is such a boy.