Kingfisher Cove

“I’m So Glad to Be Here!”

Mojo checks out the new garage floor:

Can You Give Me a Halleluiah?

Actually finished up EARLY. (However, it ended up being two deadlines today…)

Hit the road about 2:30 and arrived at Harstine in the blessed sun and warmth about 4:30.

Seems strange to see my car here!

*Blank Stare*

Tomorrow is my final day of this work-hell (at least until next week). God almighty, what a miserable few weeks it’s been. I can’t even.

But the proposal deadline is tomorrow and I’m taking a 3-day weekend to try to recover from the trauma, the insanity, the godawfulness. This experience has honestly been beyond the pale. I fully expect the shingles to rebound on the other side of my body.

The bummer is that I suspect tomorrow will be a completely hellacious day trying to put this beast to bed, and John took the dogs and the cat down to Harstine today. It is so strange to be here at home with all the animals gone! (And John!)

So I need to decide if I’m going to drive down (alone) tomorrow night after I get off work, or if I wait until Saturday morning. I anticipate that I will be a sagging sack of worthlessness tomorrow night. It sucks to have to drive to Harstine by myself. John has probably 20 times more vacation than I do, though, so I suppose I’m going to have to get accustomed to this while the house is under construction.

To top off all the shitty shit of this week (actually this year so far), I just now broke one of my most favorite, coveted pottery bowls that is totally irreplaceable because the potter died. Shit!

So, yeah, I’m taking Monday off to try to regain my sanity. But guess what? When I go back on Tuesday, I have ANOTHER proposal to jump into…

~~~~~

In an attempt to look at more uplifting things…

Remember this picture with the metal “pan” placed on top of the shop? Well, they poured the concrete over it and we now have a garage floor!

So that’s pretty cool.

And right after John (and all the animals!) arrived at Harstine this afternoon he sent me this picture of the beams from the beach:

WOW!

(As always, click the photos to embiggen!)

I’m also feeling rather uplifted because the weather forecast for this weekend is absolutely stellar for this time of year. Pushing 70° Sunday!

What Real Men Do

26 seconds of awesome.

And In Other News…

No Harstine this weekend, which is a crying shame as (at least right now) it’s sunny and pretty outside. Doesn’t it always seem to go? But John has to work so it’s not to be.

But stuff got done down there this week! Contractor John sent us some pictures.

In the shop, workers put up the metal beam:

And then THIS is pretty dramatic. They installed the metal pan over the top of the shop that will be poured with concrete (next Wednesday) and will serve as the floor of the garage! Sounds kind of strange, but John said this is how they build parking garages (on a much larger scale, of course):

There is actually quite a lot more for them to do, like a significant amount of welding and wiring in a ton of rebar in the pan, plus bending down the rebar that’s sticking up along the walls to secure the pan before the concrete pour.

Meanwhile, over in the gully, more posts are up and at least one more glu-lam beam is installed:

So that’s pretty cool!

John and I have both had some rough weeks, so we went out to dinner Thursday night at Wally’s Chowder House downtown in Des Moines. We used to go out to dinner often, but we haven’t for ages. So this was a major treat. In fact, it was a HUGE treat! Get this: One-pound lobster tails. Yes, you read that right! They were amazing!

The tail shell over-ran the plate!

We had sides (that we could barely eat!), and shared a half-carafe of white zin. And solved the world’s problems! It was so good and so fun, and much needed.

With all the horror at work, I’ve been spending my evenings in total escape-mode. Haven’t been quite the reading fiend I was there for a while, but I’ve watched two chick flicks via Amazon on Demand – “Pitch Perfect” and “Bridesmaids.” Totally escapist, no heavy thought necessary. A few chuckles here and there. (And a few eye-rolls, too).

Another thing I hadn’t done in a long time was play an adventure game on my laptop. I really enjoy them, but I’m picky. They need to tell a story (preferably a decent one), no guns involved, you can’t die, and I like to have the option to skip some of the puzzles (I’m not big on puzzles). Mostly I like advancing the story. It can be a lot like an interactive book. I like to download games from Big Fish, a company whose office is right across the street from where I work in Seattle. I played a murder mystery game (a little lame, but still entertaining and it met my basic requirements). I would REALLY like to find some games the same caliber as Syberia or The Longest Journey, but I haven’t seen anything like that for a number of years now. Boy does time scream by when you’re immersed in one of those things. The downside is that you blink your eyes and it’s suddenly bedtime, which means the horror of another work day is just another eye-blink away.

One more thing—I made a little arty glass thingy:

Dystopian Alternate Universe

Or… “Boys Behaving Badly.”

Or… “Unhinged.”

Take your pick of optional titles. Any of them will do.

I really don’t know how to describe how utterly awful these last couple of work-weeks have been. It’s beyond anything I’ve experienced before, beyond the realm of what a functional work environment is supposed to be. No A/E (architectural/engineering) marketing proposal is ever a piece of cake (understatement galore), and if you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you know the kind of angst I go through whenever I’m in the thick of these spawn-of-the-devil activities. Herding cats doesn’t even come close to describing it.

What is it about engineers? And I feel perfectly OK about using a hasty generalization there. I’ve been dealing with them for 33 years now at several different firms, and they are all similar ilk. They don’t listen. They don’t read. I swear, when it comes to having to focus on a proposal that truly requires their engaged, technical input, they don’t care. (We don’t get work unless we do these proposals and win them.)

But these two weeks have truly taken the cake.

I think I’ve mentioned that my previous “boss” (who replaced my marketing boss that they let go last September) retired the end of last year. He was the company’s senior VP of one of the major business units that I support with marketing, and we got along really well (and I’m missing him terribly). I appreciated how he could rein in those Attention Deficit Disordered engineers and get them on track , motivating them with common sense and intelligent, pointed, logical questions and input that ultimately steered the proposal in the right direction.

The guy who replaced him? Not so much. Contentious meetings with him screaming and yelling and accusing and threatening—and yet HE doesn’t follow through himself, HE doesn’t listen, HE doesn’t read the RFP or his emails, HE doesn’t focus on the details.

I gleaned those details from the very beginning and outlined them for everyone. It was completely ignored. And I REMINDED everyone throughout all of this about those details and I CONTINUED to be ignored. And now all of a sudden, the light bulb has exploded and this is what I get: WHY DIDN’T ANYBODY TAKE NOTE OF THIS? OR THAT? WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU ALL THINKING OR DOING? ARE YOU IDIOTS?

Yeah, so I copy and paste my emails dated two weeks ago with those very things highlighted and…you guessed it. Ignored. Unread. Speaking about it out loud? Talked over. Constantly. Not heard. Lost in the din of screaming and yelling.

I feel invisible. I feel like I’m on a strange, dark, alien, alternate reality planet somewhere and I actually don’t really exist.

I’m dealing with people who are truly unhinged. It seems that everyone around me is a male Michele Bachmann. Or the vicious clown in your worst horror novel (or nightmare).

No damned wonder I got shingles.

(There’s so much more I could say, but what’s the point? Plus, it’s Friday night and I don’t even want to give this any more thought until I have to climb back into hell Monday morning).

So Windy!

All last weekend was windy enough to make those two coveted days pretty darned miserable, and today/tonight is just godawful windy out there! The house is literally shuddering. (Yeah, I’ve known worse, but still…) Constant gusts in the 45-50+ mph range, with the “sustained” winds not much lower than that. I’m amazed we have power. I had to slip the slider into the pet door so that 1) it wasn’t going yabbidy-yabbidy every damned second, and 2) to block the wind from blowing my socks off. Brrr!

The white caps on Elliott Bay in Seattle (view from the office, when I’d stand up in my cubicle to take deep breaths as a result of horrible work-stress) were quite impressive (and pretty). We had times of drenching rain slamming against the windows today, but that wind also blew a lot of the clouds away so we had blue skies at times. This was taken from one of the office windows (which had rain drops on it, obviously):

And it was a shitty day. I won’t go into detail, but much of it had to do with incompetent people. People! There are so many difficult, self-important, unbearable PEOPLE!

I’m still bitter about the loss of my marketing assistant that they refused to hire full time. Learned that the COO bought himself a brand new all-electric Tesla. Have to pay for it somehow, I guess.

Honestly Disgusted with Society

Over the weekend I followed the trial of the Steubenville, Ohio, high school football players accused of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl. The defense attorney for one of the boys said, “He made one mistake, but he is otherwise extraordinary.” Meaning that he was a helluva high school football player. Meaning, boys will be boys, let him get on with his extraordinary life.

The judge found the boys (in juvenile court) guilty and they will serve one year in juvenile detention. And then heads exploded everywhere. Lots of town-tears, for the rapists. Including the media:

Then today, Fox news “let slip” the victim’s name. And she is getting death threats.

When Nate was four, the Mike Tyson rape trial was all over the news, day in and day out. Any time the television was on, all you heard about was Mike Tyson rape-rape-rape. And little four-year-old Nate asked me one morning as I was getting ready for work (and to take him to daycare), “Mom, what’s rape?” So yeah, I was late for work that morning. (And heard about it). You have to gather your thoughts quickly and take into consideration what is age-appropriate. So what I said was, “He touched a girl when she didn’t want to be touched. He touched her in her private places [Nate knew about that], and he hurt her.” Then I said, “When you are older, it’s important that when a girl doesn’t want you to kiss her, or to touch her, that you don’t kiss her or touch her. No means no.”

I taught him about sex education early and regularly so that there wasn’t a certain time when he was 11 or 12 that we had to sit down and “have that talk.” He was aware throughout his boyhood, and it mattered a lot to me that he grow up to respect women. (Whether he does or not approaching 27, I’m not entirely sure. I sure hope he does).

At any rate, I realize now that I should have said more. It’s not just “no means no.” I saw this today and it is exactly what everyone should be teaching their sons:

“We need to teach our sons that no means no. And that silence means no. And that drunkenness means no. And that being passed out means no. And that “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure” or “maybe we shouldn’t do this” means no.

We need to teach our sons that women and girls are actual people. They’re not just bodies. They’re not just holes. They’re not inanimate objects to be used at will.

We need to teach our sons that degrading women isn’t funny in any context.

We need to teach our sons that watching something happen and not intervening is every bit as bad as participating.

We need to teach our sons what it means to be men."

It doesn’t matter that a woman wears provocative clothing, or teases, or shows up at a bar alone. It doesn’t matter if she says “yes” and then changes her mind. It doesn’t matter. It only matters that men control themselves.

Is that why the men of Islam require their women to wear burkas? Because they choose to not control themselves?

Does the Steubenville, Ohio attitudes reflect what has become our country’s rape culture? WTF?

Finally Took a Walk!

I bundled up in a hoodie with a fleece jacket over it, armed with tissue to staunch the flow of gale-force-wind-induced tears and nose drippings—and between rain showers we walked the building site and then the beach!

I was also armed with my iPhone so I could take some pictures from perspectives other than the trailer deck! Wow. What a difference that made.

That beam is a bit more impressive up close!

This (below) is looking at it from the “box” side of the gully (you can see the camping trailer nestled up there in the nose bleed section):

Doesn’t John look sort of like a prison inmate standing in the prison yard or something? (Lol!) That’s actually his shop. We’re hoping that all this concrete won’t be especially prominent once the wood framing starts going up. If it is, we’ll need to come up with a plan to mitigate that. Paint? Some kind of stone facing? Lots of tall or climbing plants?

Lots more poles yet to go up:

AND THEN…

Get ready for this! The view from the beach! Truth be known, I hadn’t been on the beach since long before all of this started, mostly because the access was obstructed with logs and brush piles, etc., and also because the route down now is even steeper than it used to be and I admit it made me nervous. But, it was OK, especially since the soil is pretty well compacted right now after all this rain (but not saturated at the moment). You are clicking these to embiggen, right?

TA DA!!!!

Remember, we are aiming for this (sorta… but with poles). [the arrow was to previously point out the “box”):

Like this, except without the rounding roof:

We actually captured our little walk just perfectly with the sun peeking out and providing some much needed color. The Olympics were even out for a little bit!

And we end with weenie butts on the berm.

I’m Bored, so…

…I’ve been goofing around here in the camping trailer while the wind absolutely HOWLS outside. (The upside of that is there are brief patches of blue sky and sunshine, but venturing out there would mean the risk of fir cones and tree branches pummeling the head).

I’ve been playing around on Google Earth. (Love that program!) And I thought that my far-flung readers (all two of ya!) might enjoy getting an “idea” of where Harstine Island actually is. In fact, I am constantly gobsmacked that coworker Seattleites have no clue where it is! “Where is Harstine Island? Never heard of it. Is it in Washington?” And these are Washington natives. Go figure. I suppose I may not have heard of it, either, if it wasn’t for a friend I’ve known for quite a long time whose parents own property on the island and later retired to it. I remember her making a “run to Harstine” to drop off her son at his grandparents’ for a weekend or vacation when he was young. (He’s now in his late 20s). So yeah, I’ve heard of it for a while. It is relatively remote, after all.

Here is a “pulled-back” view of western Washington and you can see Seattle as a go-by. You will definitely want to click these to enlarge because otherwise they’ll make your eyes cross. (P.S. I love maps!)

(Above) – here you can see Seattle with the squiggly line under it. The “X” is where John and I live in Des Moines (and from where I commute to Seattle every weekday. Believe it or not, it’s only 16 miles, even though it takes close to an hour on a good traffic day…). The circled “South Hill” is where I grew up in Puyallup. To the left, that small circle around the blue dot is where our property is on Harstine Is. It’s a 75-mile drive from our house, because of having to circumvent around all those curvy bodies of water. As the crow flies, it’s really not very far! So many times I’ve thought how cool it would be to have a helicopter.  (Heh).

(Above) – This is a little closer in and the yellow “star” is where our Harstine property is, on the southwest side of the island. We look across to Squaxin Island, which is uninhabited. How cool is that? Total wilderness over there. (We do hear coyote choirs now and then).

(Above) – This is about as close as I can zoom in from the satellite image without it totally pixilating, which is sort of frustrating. (I know the technology is available…to the military).  Anyway, this shot was taken obviously before any land clearing had taken place, but it was while we were there because you can (sort of) see our blue Durango parked! The structures you (sort of) see are the camping trailer and our boat tent. You can also see our neighbors’ McMansion next door.

Uhm, no. Our house will not be a McMansion. Just a little unusual because of the “bridge” span of the gully.