Calm down

      When I was young, one of my life goals was to be a calm, wise, old-soul type person who didn't panic when things went haywire - just assessed the situation and dealt with it, unruffled. Since that was a tall order for someone who was excitable and prone to overreaction back then, I broke it down into smaller bits like "take a deep breath first, then react," "consider your options, then react," and "consider that the worst option probably isn't the most likely, then react." By never taking out the "then react" part, I avoided feeling like I was not being true to myself, and (with some amount of backsliding now and then, of course) just kept working on it.

     I don't know that I had a time frame for that goal per se, other than a vague sense of "before I'm old and retired and don't have energy to do things;" it was just a "someday" idea. To my surprise, I realized recently that I seem to have attained it without even noticing. Work has been a little rough this year, starting with changing positions and feeling like an utter newbie where I had been the go-to person on the team, to finding out one of my goals would be delayed for a few years due to a pre-req I'd overlooked, to finally getting into a very rarely offered training and then falling sick the week before (I masked up and went anyway, because it's that infrequent). Each time, though, I realized that the urge to get angry and rant and rave or seethe about the injustice of it all just... never arose. After literally decades of internal work, my reaction was more a sigh of acknowledging the situation wasn't what I wanted, and then looking at how I could make it work.

     It is weird changing your image of yourself. You know, that quick boxed summary of yourself that you give when meeting someone new that you'll probably be around a lot. I knew I had a temper when I was younger; I knew that if something pushed me over the edge, I'd run the gamut of loudly angry, quietly angry, then simmering resentment until something overrode it, so I'd include that in my self-intro. It wasn't until someone on my new team pointed out that they'd never seen or heard of me being angry (it's not a huge office, so gossip gets around) that I realized they were right; I wasn't that person anymore. And while it's cool to see how years of work has paid off, and I'm a generally happier person overall, it's weird knowing there's a different you that no longer exists. 

Taking stock

     Over the past couple years, I have officially tested my skills in both French and Russian, and got a good enough score to officially use them for work. Two years ago, I started Japanese, because it's a fascinating culture that's very different from the other two, and someday I'd like to go visit without being a rude tourist. I'm nowhere near as fluent in Japanese as in the other languages (33 years studying French and 12 studying Russian), but I can pick things up when I watch anime or read manga. Each language is pretty heavily compartmented in my head, though, so I don't think about the aggregate of my skills, I just think "Oh, I speak other languages, a common thing." (Ironically, the word language is one I constantly mistype and need to use autocorrect for.)

     Due to conflicting schedules, I ended up taking two separate Japanese classes for two weeks recently, thankfully in the same book, but on different chapters. Inevitably, that meant I dropped the ball on one of them, since I knew I'd re-do that chapter in the other class in a month or two. To my great surprise, I still managed to pull off a decent grade on the final exam, and I mentioned this to a friend who also speaks other languages. Their response, while supportively over-the-top, made me pause and reassess where I am. (The next part may sound like bragging, but it's truly me being surprised at how my life looks from the outside.)

     I speak, with varying degrees of skill, four languages. FOUR (I tend to forget English because everyone speaks it, right?). Four wildly different cultures, grammars, and lexicons. I recently met someone who speaks three languages fluently and I was blown away at the idea, yet never once turned that lens inward. Add to that the other hobbies I dabble in, and I see why someone recently said "Of course you know how to do that. Is there anything you don't do?" And while the answer is yes, quite a huge number of things, it's probably good to stop and give yourself credit for what you do do every now and then. 

Staycation! (Long post)

      What do you do with an extra week or vacation and no burning desire to go anywhere? Clean, of course! Ok, ok, I know that's not everyone's answer, but that's what we decided to do. We have a 10'x10' storage unit that we've been saying for a while needs to be gone through, and over the winter, things had sort of piled up around the house, so we blocked off a random week to deal with it. 

     For once, I remembered to take before shots of the mess to be tackled, and it looks like a pretty typical storage unit, full of just stuff. 

     We packed for a full day excursion, and arrived Monday morning at 10am, set up a table, and started pulling stuff out. That weird thing in the middle that's wrapped in plastic is a weaving loom my mother got me quite a few years ago. It is absolutely my retirement/"when I have time and room" plan, but I'm not ready for it just yet, and we can't stack anything on top of it. 

Lesson learned

     Many years ago, I took a Russian 101 level class in spring, then immediately went to Russia that summer. Glossing over how that was a horrible idea, I was faced with two options for class in Russia: repeat the absolute beginner class, or skip the 102 level class to join the second year. Being the ambitious person I was, I chose the second option, and regretted it the whole time I was there. The 102 class I'd skipped had some incredibly vital lessons, such as how to conjugate verbs and noun/adjective declension - things you were (obviously) expected to have mastered by level 2, where they piled on the vocab to fill in that framework. Without that base knowledge, I struggled a lot with new concepts and just generally had a horrible time. 

     Fast forward a lot, and now I'm learning Japanese just for funsies. A local community college offered levels 101 and 102, but nothing past that. I looked around a bit and found a regional society that offers many, many more levels of instruction and even uses the same textbook for beginning levels as the community college classes. Sounds great, right? Naturally, there's a catch... the community college covers four chapters in the book per class, while the regional society only covers three. So my options for moving forward are:

• Review two chapters I've already done and have one new chapter in level 3; or
• Skip one chapter and move ahead with all-new material in level 4. 

     Ironically, the one new chapter in level 3 is... conjugating verbs, and noun/adjective agreement. And this time, I did not hesitate at all; I signed right up to repeat two chapters and give those verbs and adjectives all the attention they need. My dad has a saying he uses often - nothing you learn is ever wasted. I'd like to think I got more out of that horrible trip to Russia than just not repeating a language-learning mistake, but hey, if it helps me now, I won't complain too much. 

Silly sketch - Mooooood

      I miss making sketches; my perfectionism got in the way and made it a chore. So here, without excess fussiness or explanation, is a silly sketch. Enjoy.

Self-storage woes

    For a while, I worked for a self-storage company. One of the perks was a free 10x10 self-storage unit, which I very definitely took advantage of. The company was eventually bought out by another self-storage company, and we were told that the owners had negotiated some sort of deal where they couldn't immediately charge us full rate for our 10x10s, which was pretty nice of them. For the last several years, I have been paying less than $10/month for my space and trying to keep as low a profile as possible, so that no one noticed and did anything about it. Sadly, it seems my luck recently ran out. 

    In December, I got notice that my rent would be increasing to $60/month come May. Sucks, but in light of the heavy discount I'd been enjoying, I figured I'd just suck it up. Until I get a reminder that my February rent is due - I was pretty sure I'd paid a couple months ahead, because why not? I log in to check it and NOPE! I owe almost $100. What? They'd upped my rent to $117 without (I'd thought) giving me notice. 

   Naturally, I wanted some clarification here. I'd resigned myself to $60, but almost double that felt like a gut punch. Got on the website with their oh-so-helpful chat function and, after wading through the automated responses and getting assigned a real live person, was told that they couldn't do anything, I'd need to call this number. Which, of course, closed 7 minutes ago. Thank you, very helpful.