Tag Archives: family

Just Give Me a Minute to Catch My Breath

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In the last week:

  • Annie’s grandmother died
  • Zoe spent her first period of time apart from Annie (3 days)
  • Burrito (our cat) is not eating, which is how her sister started deteriorating before we had to put her down.
  • I worked a 66-hour work week
  • Our friend Eric was in a motorcycle accident (he’s got road rash, but is otherwise okay)
  • Annie’s dad and brother Zach totaled a car trying to get to the funeral (they’re fine, the car is not)
  • Annie strained her knee, and is on crutches

Our friends and family have been overwhelmingly supportive, and we’ve managed to scrape together enough money to cover the unexpected doctor and veterinarian bills, so we’re doing well, but are mentally and physically exhausted. Tomorrow morning we’re driving to Walla Walla for the funeral. We’re coming back on Sunday, and then I’ve got a couple days off so we can slow down a bit and try to regain our sanity.

First, Light a Fire

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The best advice my father ever gave me was to start a fire.

My family owns a cabin out in the middle of nowhere. For nine months a year, it sits empty, and during the summer, various branches of the family take turns vacationing there. It’s beautiful, but the first family in has the responsibility of “opening” the cabin for the season — cleaning, yardwork, de-winterizing, etc. It’s a lot of work, and when you first arrive after two full days of driving, it can be pretty overwhelming.

My father would often volunteer to open the cabin. When we arrived, he made a point to always start by lighting a fire. Not because you need one right away, but because it’s a quick, simple task, and when it’s done you immediately feel like you’ve accomplished something.

When I’m doing production work on a website, there’s usually a daunting list of tasks in front of me. I need to create the page templates, populate all the content, slice up all the images, and QA every page of the site in several browsers. Whenever I start to feel overwhelmed by it all, I remember my father lighting a fire, and pick a simple task to knock out of the way quickly and build momentum.

Once you get in the zone, you can plow through a giant list of tasks pretty easily. At the start of a project, your biggest challenge is motivation, so do yourself a favor and start your job by lighting a fire.

Note: This was originally posted on my work blog, and I’m re-posting it here for archival purposes.

Fourth of July at the Beach

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Zoe's Fourth of July Outfit

For the fourth of July, we got Zoe dressed in her adorable little patriotic outfit and headed to the family cabin at the beach. Every year, people get their fireworks and set the off on the beach, and if you take a lawn chair down, you get a pretty good display. From the beach by our cabin, we can see the “big” fireworks display from Rockaway and have a good view quite a ways up and down the beach to dozens of other families setting off their fireworks.

Zoe Watching Fireworks with Poppa

It was Zoe’s first time watching fireworks, and because it was so late, we were a little worried that it would freak her out. A couple hours after she went to bed, I put her in the front-pack and we all walked down to the beach. She woke up as we walked, and when we got our chairs set up, I undid the pack so I could turn her around to sit in my lap and watch. I expected that she would either get scared, or she would get excited and want to get down and play in the sand. Instead, she was just interested enough to stay awake and watch, but tired enough that she never really moved, just pointed every now and then and said “pretty.”

Fireworks!

We also got to try out the fireworks setting on our new camera, which works suprisingly well considering that we were hand-holding it instead of using a tripod.