Traditional Gender Roles?

So Dan's off on a Navy cruise, his crew is another officer (male), 6 male midshipmen and 1 female mid, who he describes as a dynamo. When they were divvying up responisibilities - which midshipman is going to be the navigator, who wants to be the engineer - the young woman said she likes to cook. Dan said she's very very good, treating the crew to meals like ceviched fish, pasta alfredo, stir fry. Quite a welcome change from the usual midshipmen fare, which often seems to consist of pop-tarts and canned stew. So if she likes to do it, and she's good at it, why does it bug me that the *only* woman on the crew is the cook? The Naval Academy is not a liberal arts college, no doubt her major is something like political science or engineering, maybe I'm reading too much into this. Is this generation so truly gender-neutral that she's oblivious to the symbolism and its just a coincidence?
Or am I stuck in the sixties, when I'd sabotage any attempt to get me to do kitchen chores just to rebel against the assumption that that was the girl job? I willingly took out the trash and shoveled snow, I just didn't want to be cast as the automatic choice for housework just because I was the girl.

Bored?

“Only boring people get bored.” My 4-th grade teacher had a proverb or one-liner for any circumstance. “Find something interesting to do, and do it. Make your own fun.” When my brother and I complained of boredom, my mom’s approach would always be, “I have some chores you can do, if you can’t figure out anything else.”

But now, I’m bored. Dan’s at sea and I’m lonely and sickish and the drugs make me sleepy and I don’t do solo well. Lunch of cheese and tofu-turkey sandwiches, dinner of reheated leftovers or ramen noodles. I’m not even motivated to make myself a pot of coffee. I’m working from home and I’ve done all the easy jobs and I don’t have the energy to tackle the hard ones. Spent most of yesterday dozing on and off.

“You can tell a lot about a person, by what he does when he has nothing to do.” I think that’s the grownup version of my 4-th grade teacher’s line. Dan and I have programmed our cellphones to count down to 9/9/09. 103 days left! For a long time, my mental line was, OMG, can’t wait, can’t wait, not soon enough. Now its, OMG, it’s coming up too soon and I’m not ready! When I was 17, the beginning of my freshman year in college, my life stretched before me, wide and green and forever, all the possibilities were open. It was wonderful and rather scary. Now at 54, I have that feeling again. What do I want my future to look like? What will I do with the gift of freedom? I doubt that I'll be "bored" when we take off for the Bahamas by sailboat!

Happy Bird-thday!

The gang, celebrating on in the cockpit on Gaviota

3 years ago yesterday Dan had his emergency surgery, and now we celebrate that close call. In the hospital, they'd given him steriods that made him ravenously hungry, yet he couldn't use his right hand very well, so how to eat? He joked that he was like a baby bird, always hungry yet all he could do was tip his head up, mouth open, and wait to be fed. So "bird" became his private nickname, thus "bird-thday."

We had a fabulous weekend! Dan had suggested that he wanted a quiet, private celebration but that was not to be! Friday, we were sitting in the cockpit having a cocktail and quiet conversation when Pete & Tracy dinghied by and stopped in for a chat. No sooner had they left when Juan and Pablo came over. We pulled out all the snacks, olives and hummus and cheese and wine, and talked until well after dark. Never did have dinner!

Saturday, friend RoseAnn suggested we have a special dinner composed of all Dan's favorite foods to echo the time he couldn't eat. We bought salmon, potatoes, green beans, broccoli. But instead of a quiet dinner, we were invited to Juans for a 'small gathering' that turned out to be the Fiesta de San Ysidro (sp?) - the festival devoted to the patron saint of Juan's home town of Madrid. Hilarious bilingual conversation and fantastic food. And learned some fascinating cultural tidbits. For example, Juan's friend Antonio (sociologist? middle school social studies teacher?) said that you could divide people culturally in Central and South America based on the native Indian tribe they descended from, and which starch they favored and would eat nothing else - thus Mexico is a 'corn' culture; and one area is rice and beans; and further south they use potatoes; etc. And Pablo had us all in stitches as he described running with the bulls as a teenager. When we'd eaten and drunk our fill, we went home and were dissecting the party (a.k.a gossiping) when we heard a loud BANG! We looked topside and there were fireworks that we saw twice - once in the sky, and once reflected in the creek. The fireworks were for the end of the semester at the Naval Academy, but for us, they celebrated 3 years without cancer.

Do the hardest thing in your inbox FIRST

I tried this experiment last Wednesday - I did the two hardest things in my inbox first. Usually, I save them for midafternoon. My logic is that I'm waiting to build momentum, but in fact, I end up distracted most of the morning, half-thinking about the yucky thing ahead, and having a mood of dread most of the work day. And sometimes a sense of crisis if I don't have time to get it done before going-home time. So Weds I tried getting the hard part done first ... by 10:00 both of the hard emails were written and I had a sense of being able to glide through the rest of the day, could even afford time to go out to lunch. Wow. It felt great, so I decided to see what it would be like if I could keep doing the hard thing first, all week.

I was able to follow the plan 3 days out of five, and they were great. One day, I had something urgent to do in the morning that I had to do first, it wasn't the hardest thing in my inbox, but I don't have total control of my time. And bang! I was back in my old pattern of dreading the thing I was postponing, the hard thing, and didn't start on it until almost 2. And then one other day, I just couldn't get going and wasted most of the day in administrivia. Overall, the experiment was so successful, and I was so pleased with the 3 days I did the hardest thing first, that I'm going to try to continue, and even look for ways to do that in my personal life.

Whodathunk I'd finally get this time management thing figured out just in time to retire?

Just-In-Time? or Just-In-Case?

I recently read this article, called "When and How to Say Enough." This author claims that a lot of our woes, from clutter to weight gain, come from the subconscious idea from caveman times, that good things in life are scarce and you have to gather them when you find em, just in case. But in modern times, things are abundant and come into your life when you need them - synchronicity, or just-in-time. And that disconnect between modern life and ancient impulses is the problem. I thought her "excercises" at the end of the article might make a good blog challenge. It turned out to be more "challenging" than I'd bargained for!

* List 10 times you thought that there wouldn't be enough of something and you survived.
1: Right before laundry day, I invariably think I have nothing to wear. Also invariably, I've never ever gone to work stark naked. Therefore, I did have something to wear after all. Just that it was something that I didn't like as much as the stuff I'd already worn. Or, I retrieved a pair of jeans from the laundry bag that were "relatively clean."
2: I had just put in an offer on my first home, a townhouse, and underestimated how much earnest money I'd need. This resulted in my standing in the grocery store with $3 until my next paycheck. (A good friend offered me a loan, which I took, and paid back at the end of the month.)
3: My bedroom as a kid had what I considered waaay too little bookshelf space for my collection of science-fiction paperbacks and knicknacks. Then I figured out that stacking the books double-deep gave me all the space I needed, looked good, AND created a couple of cool little hiding spots in back for treasures.
4: Skill: Our boat had developed engine trouble and we had to come into the marina's work slip under sail. I had never even practiced doing this before and now I had to do it for real - and the slip was lined with iron rails so a mishap could cause some damage. I did it awkwardly, inelegantly and a little too fast - but right on, and no one was hurt and nothing was damaged.
5: I probably shouldn't mention all the times I came into the gas station and put 13.8 gallons into a 14-gallon gas tank, should I?
6: This is just HARD. I can't think of 10. Does that mean I've led a pampered life?

* List 10 areas where you have too much, not too little.
Only 10?
1: Foodie condiments we tried, and thought we'd enjoy making this style of food, so we bought several bottles, only to later get bored before we'd used them all up and moved on to something else.
2: iPod songs, we got a bunch of collections from a friend that are so overwhelming we've never tackled the project of listening to them and sorting through to decide which to keep. Also a bunch we ripped from borrowed CDs, and again never organized. We have no idea what we've got and haven't ever listened to many of them.
3: clothing (see above)
4: building materials either left over from other projects, or salvage. We're imaginative to be able to visualize uses for these things, and eco-conscious enough not to want to just put them in a dumpster. But some projects will probably never get done, so these things just sit there, taking up storage space.
5: scented candles. I can visualize myself lighting them and enjoying their fragrance, but I buy them faster than I use them up.
6: shampoos and hair products I fell for the advertising promises, tried them once, didn't like them, and ... left the partially used bottle in the back of the cabinet.
7: note cards. I buy cute ones, but usually end up just emailing.
8: dried beans. I think this is a carryover from when we lived in the plains of Colorado about 45 minutes in good weather from the nearest grocery store. We could still eat for several weeks just from the foods we have aboard.
9: soup recipes to try "someday." And, we're moving to a warm climate, how often are we going to make soup anyway?
10: cool art, photos in frames, and other decorations for the walls. My parents had collected so much that there wasn't a spare inch of wall space in their home, anything but restful. You couldn't appreciate any one thing, it was so crowded, jumbled, distracting.
11: pens. Okay, this is a weird one. Mostly we accumulate souvenir pens, free giveaways with some company's name printed on them. What makes it weird is that I always write in pencil. 12: Xmas decorations. We have enough to decorate the 3500 sq ft Victorian we lived in when we were stationed in Wyoming. But we'll never own anything that big again. Our boat is 33 feet long by 11 feet at its widest. Our condo (currently rented out) is about 1000 square feet. I don't have enought space to put all those decos up if I wanted to. And now, I having that many "decorations per inch" is no longer my style. I'm favoring a lighter touch - less is more.
13: Boat Fenders. When people tie them badly, they often break free and drift away. We often see them floating by and take them. But, we have enough for our boat, we've given many away to friends and dock neighbors, and still have surplus.
14: Casual acquaintances and e-quaintances. The problem with these is that these relatively shallow relationships that are going nowhere take emotional time and energy away from nurturing the relationships with my true friends and e-friends. (If I sent you the link to read this, you're NOT one of the casual ones!) Especially those who travel, I'm all about out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

* List 20—or 50, or 1,000—wonderful things that entered your life just at the right time, with no effort on your part. Start with the little things (oxygen, sunlight, a song on the radio). You'll soon think of bigger ones. Most [people] realize that the most important things in their lives showed up this way.
I realized that all the IRL friends in my life arrived this way. J. and E., who we met when their little dog ran up to me in the parking lot when they had just moved here. D., whose charter sailboat business was being represented by a woman who was best friends with my office mate. All the cats and dog we had as pets (most arrived as strays). My college roommate and BFF Karen (how we met is lost in the mists of antiquity and freshman year). Our boat - friend D. saw it on a website and thought it would be perfect for us. We didn't even know we were looking, yet. Boat fenders (see above). Our artificial Xmas tree - it was a display model in the store in
Wyoming, offered for 1/2 price on Dec 22. The store manager decided it would be cheaper to leave all the decorations on than to pay the staff time to remove them (and they couldn't sell them without the packages anyway), so he included them all for free. We had absolutely nothing at that time early in our marriage, so it was a wonderful gift! Jobs - I have to admit, I've never applied for any job I've ever gotten, they've always contacted me, or invited me to apply, or interagency personnel agreements. Though, I did apply for several that I didn't get, and I realized later, would have been totally wrong for me. A raft trip down the Grand Canyon as part of a science expedition - a colleague was organizing part of the trip and needed about 30 people to help, any relevant experience at all. Right place, right time. The surgeon for Dan's cancer surgery. Recently, we ran into an old acquaintance who brought us up to date on his own cancer woes (he's well now) and mentioned that he had searched for weeks to find the great doctor who he used. He asked Dan how we'd found Dr. B. Dan replied, pure luck - this was emergency surgery and it was the nearest hospital ... which just happened to have the first Novalis machine on the mid-Atlantic coast. This list could go on forever, which is why I wrote it stream-of-consciousness style instead of numbering it. I suspect I, like the article's author, will still be thinking of things 3 years later.

The Littlest Laptop

I mentioned in an earlier post that for Earth Day we recycled our ancient laptop (hint: it still had Windows 98). We replaced it with this little gem from Amazon. It has flash memory - no spinning hard disk - so the batteries last for about 6 hours. And, with no spinning disk, it's nearly shockproof, at least far more than our big laptop. My hope is that because its so small and light, it will be easy to take to shore and find wireless hotspots while we're cruising. But far and away my favorite thing is that I can turn it sideways and read it like a book (about the same size and weight, too).

A question of scale: is this a very large red bell pepper, or a very small computer?