Corporate Hippy

Hello again world.  Its been awhile since we’ve talked.  My bad.

I want to talk about becoming a farmer.  Nick and I have secured 2000 sq. ft of farmland at Michigan Micro-Farm and along with my cousin Jon, we’re going to grow organic vegetables this summer!  I loved doing the CSA last year, but am suddenly completely enamored with the idea of growing exactly what I want and getting my hands dirty to do it.

This is Michigan Micro-Farm

We picked up a brochure for Michigan Micro-Farm when leaving the Sherwood Brewing Co. a few weeks ago.  Our CSA partners from last summer had just told us that they weren’t interested in doing it again this year.  We we’re pretty sure we didn’t want to take on a full share ourselves, and were considering a half-share when we stumbled onto this.

We can hardly grow grass in our backyard, because of light, trees and dog(s).  So, growing vegetables is pretty much out of the question.  My cousin Jon has always wanted more help, more space and more opportunity with his garden, so we decided to have a partnership of sorts, where we could grow enough vegetables for all of us and then some.

Behind Nick is our garden!

Last week, we met Jon to buy the seeds for the garden – I hadn’t yet secured our spot with MI Micro-Farm, but knew they had plenty of space available and Jon wanted to get the peppers started!  We drove by the farm that night to check it out.  One of the owners happened to be out there, so we chatted and secured a spot right then.  Now, its for real.  Game on.

Our garden at Michigan Micro-Farm

We stopped by today and it looks like our spot has been tilled.  We’re going to get some manure and get started planting very soon!  Jon has started some tomatoes, peppers and such already at home.

After visiting our garden today, we went to Lowes to buy some quick supplies to build a compost pit.  We had a pile of leaves left over from last fall that never got picked up (since we don’t really have grass in the back yard, its not a huge deal to leave some leaves for spring).

Nick fashioned this compost pit in record time. Nice.

The compost pit went together really quick and easily.  Unfortunately, that meant that we had to get to moving the wet and heavy leaves all that much quicker

Close up of our compost pit.

It was actually a pretty perfect opportunity, because the leaves had already started to decompose and do the work we wanted them to do.  When they were finally all moved into the compost pit, the driest of the leaves had been moved to the bottom of the pile, and the wet ones are on top.  It was like doing a full mix of an already-in-progress compost pile that we accidentally started last fall.  I love accidental planning

The dark spot is where the pile of leaves was left over from the fall.

Our plan for the yard is to build a patio, using patio blocks, to cover most of the dirt area where we have the hardest time growing grass.  We have been mildly successful growing grass in the back-most part of the yard, so we will probably place sod in that area of the yard.  I’m looking forward to the patio part .

We also filled the tiki torches and cleaned the porch chairs today.

life hippy compost, garden, micro-farm

This time last year, Ray’s Mountain Bike Park held a women only day at the park.  It was on a Friday and my friend Kristi was planning on going.  She and I went down together on Friday, stayed overnight and the boys came down to meet us on Saturday.

I didn’t think I was going to be able to go this year because of the MMBA annual meeting on Sunday – in Lansing this year.  But, when we were at Ray’s a few weeks ago, Nick suggested I go just for the Friday-women-only part.  For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me.  Kristi was game, and so I took the day off work and we hit the road at 7:30 am yesterday.  A great way to spend my birthday, I say.

I just can’t seem to express how great this place is.  And to be able to go there on a day when its not open to the public (read: really crowded) is just so fantastic.  And then, to have awesome women instructors in every section is the best birthday present I could have asked for.  I had a great time .. for a little while ..

Before lunch, I was working on the rock garden in the beginner room and after a clean run through, I went for a little more speed on my second run.  Well, I lost my line and as I was falling, I put my foot down .. and my ankle twisted .. then my knee twisted .. and then the whole leg collapsed underneath me ..

Years ago, I sprained my knee while downhill skiing .. I don’t think it ever fully recovered ..

So, I was laying on the rocks, my leg collapsed underneath me, and my bike on top of me – I was kind of still “strattling” the bike – with my left leg underneath me, and my right leg still over the bike.  I was stuck.  And as I was trying to straighten my left leg, I felt exactly the same (although MUCH less intense) as when I was laying on that ski hill .. I was pretty sure my day was done at that point ..

So, we hung out for lunch and swag and Kristi went out to ride some more .. I was gonna use my fancy camera and grab some video .. I was heading into the intermediate area when I saw a group of women looking concerned over a women who had fallen.  It was Kristi.  She’d gotten caught with no momentum at the end of a line and as her bike was slowly-coming-to-a-screaching-hault, she had somehow managed to twist her ankle – one that she had sprained badly in September or October.  So, she hobbled back to the table where our stuff was, and we decided it was time to call it a day

Regardless – it was a fantastic day.  I got to spend ~30-45 minutes in the pump track (its usually too crowded to go near the pump track there) .. and I worked on a line in the intermediate room that I was scared of – and totally cleaned it 3 times in a row.  I cleaned the rock garden in the beginner room on my first shot (also usually too crowded to try).  I met some fantastic women, and there were quite a few women back from last year – which was really cool.

I absolutely, highly recommend this event – its already scheduled for the same weekend next year!  Nina and Dirt Rag put on a really great event and all of the women are so energetic, patient and supportive.  It is really a welcoming environment for women of ANY level.  Fantastic!  Happy Birthday to ME!

And, the knee will be allright.  With some ice and ibuprophen, I was pretty mobile as long as I was careful – walking is fine, but I have to be very careful to not twist or turn.  Stairs and downhills are tough because its very wobbly and doesn’t want to take the weight of me by itself.  But – it was no problem driving home (We took the pickup – manual transmission – clutch – heh).   Hopefully I’ll still be able to spin on the trainer …

All in all – a great way to turn 34!

Like, groove on this, man, biking hippy, corporate hippy, life hippy

I have been quiet lately, because I’ve been working on this:

biking hippy, life hippy Rays, RaysMTB

I’m pretty lucky.  I married my best friend.  We still laugh at each other’s jokes and he’s still the last voice I want to hear before I fall asleep at night.  We enjoy each other’s company and friendship.  I look forward to the next 9 years.  Happy Anniversary, baby.

life hippy

Every few years or so, I make an attempt to present myself in more stylish, feminine fashion.  By this I mean, nicer clothes to work (ie – not hoodie sweatshirts and cargo pants), and perhaps some makeup.  My last attempt didn’t last too long since I was going for skirts most days and that just got tiring after awhile.  Also – the makeup thing was always too much of a bother.  And a few years ago, I switched jobs to a place that is really pretty relaxed and casual.

Ok.  I admit that it is more than just the timing of “every few years” that has sparked my latest attempt to pull my fashionable female shit together.  I’ve recently been indulging my guilty pleasure that is TLC’s What Not to Wear.  And, while I realize these two host people are utterly ridiculous, they do make people look fabulous.  And .. I’ll say that a) I’ve actually learned some things about clothes, makeup, and myself from watching this show and b) I often look at the wardrobes that they’re “throwing away” thinking “uh .. that could be my wardrobe” .. heh ..

Perhaps there is some girl in me after all.

So, I’ve been dressing a little better at work (not so much of skirts, but I actually bought girl pants that fit an flatter .. who knew?).  And .. I’ve bought all new makeup and have been doing pretty well with it.  Nothing fancy, mostly eye liner/shadow/mascara .. which leads me to the real reason for this post and the source of said kunundrum.

Mascara.

I think I was in my 20s before I ever applied mascara.  I was always scared of it.  I’ve found that I really love the way mascara looks.  But I hate wearing it.  I hate applying it.  And, I really suck at both.  Questions for those few women friends I do have:

1 – I can’t seem to apply it without making a mess.  I blink and its on my cheekbones, I get it on my hands on my eyelids .. and I don’t think I’m using a lot .. any tips for applying? cuz .. I seem to be utterly clueless..

2 – I feel it on my eyelashes all day .. they feel heavy and sticky .. and I really don’t think I’m putting to much on .. I mean, its not all clumpy or anything .. is this normal?  Do I just get used to it?

3 – What about exercise and sweating?  It just seems like so much work to have to clean my face before exercise .. but .. Its kind of gross when I start sweating and wiping my face .. blech ..

see .. I hate the stuff … I want to not wear it, but I really like the way my eyes look when I do .. *sigh* .. its a lot more work to be a girl ..

life hippy

I drive a 2002 Jeep Liberty Sport.  Its survived 207k+ miles so far and just had its 5th set of tires installed.  Its been paid off for 2 years now, and seems to keep getting me where I need to go.  It has been, however, begging for attention over the past few months.

I’ve got a good support structure in place for this beast though.  I stick to the same Uncle Ed’s Oil Change store where the manager now recognizes me when I come in – I’m probably there twice as often as any other customers because of how quickly I burn through the miles.  I like to call these guys my “triage”.  They change the oil, but also do a great job of finding problems that I can’t hear or see.

Like, in September when they replaced my serpentine belt that was demolished, and found that I had a chunk missing out of one of my engine crank pulleys.  And again in December when they found that my water pump was leaking.

So, I generally go from Uncle Eds to Protech Automotive.  Protech are my all-purpose mechanics who’ve done a great job of keeping me on the road.  This week, they replaced my front and rear pinion seals.  Sooner or later, I’ll let them replace my transfer case.

Protech doesn’t do tires … but, I’ve had a great relationship with Bell Tire and I don’t even bother shopping around for prices anymore – they always seem to be the best deal no matter how much looking I do.

I’d really been pushing the limits on that last set of tires.  I really should have replaced them when I had the shocks & strutts replaced in May, but I’d decided to just have them rotated instead.  I had planned on getting new tires before the winter, but so many other things came up (including Nick needing new tires on his pickup) that I just kept pushing it off.

With the weather being so bad lately, I’d decided that I needed to get new tires soon, but when I had it at Protech the other day, getting the pinion seals replaced and having them look at what I thought was a bad wheel bearing, they sternly recommended new tires.  I took that as my cue.

I knew it was bad, and could feel the sketchiness when driving, but I didn’t realize just how bad it had actually gotten until I drove home from Bell Tire yesterday and I wasn’t scared.  It really felt like I was driving a whole new vehicle.  It was amazing.  At first I thought it was all in my head, but when Nick was driving it later on, he completely agreed.  Its really solid and smooth now.  Heh.

But alas, here I am again, waiting for the Jeep.  I’m still getting some weird dragging noise, and I figured I’d have the alignment checked – but they took it for a drive and don’t hear the dragging noise.  Which means, I’ll probably take it back to Protech again next week to have THEM listen to the dragging noise *sigh* .

Its great to have  a support system, but its tiring to keep having to call on them.

life hippy

I realize the irony of posting about how I’ll probably be posting more, and then, not posting for a week.  I really do.  But, alas, life is hectic at times, and this week left me burnt out and fried.  Work has been really busy.  I’d gotten really behind on projects and day-to-day maintenance at work as I had some big projects and issues that took a lot of my attention for most of the fall.  And, just before Christmas, one of our team members quit, and his position isn’t going to be filled because we’re in a big time spending freeze.  So, same amount of work, one less person.  The math is easy.

Now, I do kind of like being busy at work.  It makes the time fly and I generally walk away feeling kind of like I’ve accomplished something, rather than the defeat I felt for most of the fall.  But, it really really wears me out.  I almost feel out of breath sometimes, just from thinking so hard.

But, at least my commutes have been nice and slow.

I saw a lot of this, this week.

Actually, most of the week wasn’t to bad.  But, I did have a 2+ hour drive home and a 2+ hour drive in – all in one week.  Ugh.

Als0 very busy outside of work this week.  On Monday we had our Metro North Chapter meeting, and on Tuesday Katie, Kristi and I had a girl-date with coffee and yarn.  Katie wanted to learn to knit and all Kristi and I needed was an excuse (coffee and yarn?  hell yeah, I’m so there).  They even came to the ‘clem!  It was wonderful and super fun.  For some reason though, not a single picture.  I had the stupid camera, but forgot all about it.  Jessica calls it camnesia.  Anywhoo, Katie did a great job and it was really fun.  I think we’re going to try and make it a semi-regular thing.

Wednesday was supposed to be a spin night at Mike’s place, but it was one of my 2 hour commutes, so we didn’t make it over there.  We opted for spinervals at home and pasties for dinner – YUM! (thanks Kristi, we’re still eating our treasures from August, with 2 left still!!!).

Thursday was nice and mello.  I had a pretty decent drive home.  I detoured a bit to stop and pickup a new toy for Nick at MicroCenter, then went to Meijer for some essentials, and bought good steaks for dinner.  Nick had an MMBA state board meeting, so I just watched a little TV and surfed the web some while he was on his call.  It was a really nice, quiet evening.

Last night, we were supposed to spin at Mikes again, but by the time we got there, Mike and Jon were already on the slacker train to veg-ville.  The game was called on a count of lazy and we just watched The Hulk instead of spinning to it.  I must admit, I was looking forward to the spinning, but kind of glad for the downtime.

This morning was slow, we met Nick’s folks in Richmond for breakfast and then hit up Hamilton Bikes to do some chapter/MMBA schmoozing and check the place out.  Its a nice little store, and Dave is a cool dude.

Later on, we met the Scurrs for an early dinner at the original Luigi’s in Harrison Twp.  As is the case when we’re together, it was a nice long dinner – 3 hours of eating and gabbing.  This is what we do best   I’m always amazed that we’re able to accomplish anything as a group – get to a destination on time, get to a destination at all – but we manage, quite well, actually.  And we generally have a great time doing it.  We’re already planning some vacations into 2010 – something about sailboats ..

our friends, the scurrs!

And now I’m just hanging out in my wonderful desk chair (yep, still in love), doing the computer thing.  Tomorrow, we’re going shoeshoing in all this wonderful snow we got today!

life hippy

I’m addicted to my new chair.  Seriously.  I bet I’ve spent more time in the office, at my computer in the past 5 days than I have in the past year.

Yesterday I went to office max to get some “desk accessories” to help with the insane amount of clutter and piles of papers that had formed over time.  See, since I have a laptop, I don’t need to use my desk unless I want to use the big (22″ flat panel) monitor.  And, since I was always so uncomfortable at my desk, I rarely bothered to plug in and hang out there.  Therefore, it was real easy for my desk to become a drop zone for things that otherwise had no home.

I needed a place to put the papers/files/bills/notepads/etc.. that was a bit more organized without being tedious.  Also, I’ve just got my laptop sitting on my desk, and I have to seriously resist the urge to pile papers on top of it when its there.  Since I’ve been plugged in for a couple of weeks now, it was starting to collect things.

In my mind, I was looking for something that would let me put the laptop on top, and have some kind of storage underneath.  But I couldn’t find anything useful for that in the store.  I did, however, find a neat little rack/shelf/inbox thingy that let me put the laptop on the bottom “shelf” and use the other shelves to put things on.

Turns out, its pretty perfect for what I needed.  I was also able to sort out my monsterous cable situation and I’ve loosly budled and velcro’d the cables to the back of the rack.  This way, they won’t fall behind the desk when they’re not attached to the laptop.  I’m really happy with how it turned out.

I also bought a file storage thingy for the other side of my desk where the big piles were.  While my desk is still more cluttered than I’d like it to be, its way more organized than its been in .. well .. ever..

The end result is, I’m spending much more time at my desk and starting to become a bit more productive.  You may have noticed a bit more action (albeit not overly exciting) on my blog lately, and if you follow my flickr feed, you’ll see a lot going on there as well.

life hippy

The first full work week after the crazy holiday season ended with a bang.  I’ve been having trouble getting back into the swing of real work now that people are back in the office.  I didn’t get a whole lot accomplished this week, but started gaining a bit of traction on Wednesday.  But then, the week was broken up by a last-minute training class yesterday in Southfield for my whole team, and I started today with some big-time catching up to do.  The holidays are over, its time to get serious again.

My phone started ringing within minutes of my computer booting up today.  Looking at the area code, I knew it was from Grand Rapids and was pretty sure it was Jerry, calling to ask about some VPN or other; I answered anyway   I dug up the paperwork on the new VPN he needs built and sent an email to the contact at the other end.  Just in time for my phone to ring again.  I’ve been trying to coordinate with an IT consultant to build a VPN for a small medical office to connect to us since June, and my customer called to ask me to please, if I could find it in my heart, could I try to call this guy one more time?  I decide to wait on that for a bit and tackle (what I expect to be) a quick NAT issue for Des Moines.  I read the ticket, call the customer and get the details – all signs pointed to easy cheezy, til I look in the firewall and see that the NAT already exists.  Which means, something’s broke.  Turns out, this is something that USED to work, and STOPPED working – not something that never worked.  It took all kinds of email digging, reading, digging, reading to come to that conclusion.  Heh.  Thanks for the info, dude.

Next, I got a call from Livonia about a website that -just-wasn’t-loading- from within our network.  It worked fine for the rest of the world, but not from inside my little slice of hell.  Let me tell you, this was a stumper.  I banged away on this for awhile and when all signs pointed to DNS, I handed off to our DNS keeper and I decided it was lunch time.

So, I’m back from the cafeteria and I’ve got all kinds of email resonses from the DNS keeper and none of them are useful.  My lunch sits uneaten as I’ve jumped back into troubleshooting mode.  Eventually, I had a brainstorm that lead me to solve the website problem (way to geeky for this here crowd, I’m afraid I’ve lost many already).  I fixed it.  I emailed my customer.  I started eating my lunch.  I opened the fancy-dancy new MMBA forum site for the first time today.  Life is good.  Tomato soup and web surfing.  Yes!

I’m 1/2 way through my bowl of tomato soup and looking forward to my tuna pasta salad when Jack walks by with his laptop and says “you comin?”.  As in – 1:00 team meeting.  Shit.  Damn.  Fuck.

“yeah, I’ll be there in a few minutes”

I finish the soup, leave the pasta salad, grab my laptop and go.  An hour and a half later, I’m back to my desk, digging in to my room-temperature lunch.  I’m thinking I might be able to finally work on that thing for Howie that I told him would be done on Wednesday.  But, then I get an email about that NAT problem.  I try a few more things and offer a couple of suggestions.  Then I realized that I never called my long lost IT consultant, so I figure I’ll do that now.  If I’m lucky, I’ll get voice mail.

No voicemail, but I made contact and set a date to complete the build and test.  Then I sent the update email, which sparked another phone call.  The phone call sparked another email.  And now its 3:30 and snowing out.  Not a chance I’ll be out around 4 to beat the rush.

Finally, I start to work on that thing for Howie, when Mark comes in my cube to talk about the wrench that was just thrown in our plan for our next maintenance window in a couple of weeks.  The 4 of us met earlier to decide what we were going to tackle during our next big outage window (we only get 1 per quarter, so we have to plan wisely) and came up with a really good plan.  Only to find out later in the day that the hardware is not what we thought it was.  I’m not sure why this was such an emergency that we had to get it sorted out TODAY, at 4:00 on a FRIDAY, but alas .. here we were.

We’d gotten most of it sorted out by 4:15, basically with “well, we need to talk to Rob and he’s already gone” and I started shutting down and putting my coat on.  But the conversation just wan’t over for those who were a bit behind.  And, as much as I kept saying “we’ll talk about it on Monday and get it sorted out”, my poor lonely office mate just wanted to keep talking about it today.  *sigh*

Its 4:25 and I’m finally walking out to my jeep.

I made it home sometime around 6:30.

This was a long, crazy day.

geek hippy, life hippy

Its funny how, in 2008, Nick and I each bought 2 new bikes, a big ass HD DLP TV and HD Tivo, a blu-ray player and bought each other new cameras for Christmas – but we’ve been nearly torturing ourselves with hand-me-down desk chairs in our office.  My chair was a freebe.  When the local Knights of Columbus closed down (when I was in high school), my dad helped them empty their “lodge” since my grandpa was a long-time member.  Well, dad came home that day with a bunch of old desk chairs, some file cabinets, a big heavy desk and a 6′ tall metal knight statue thing (I’m not kidding – he called it Bobby).  I inherited one of the desk chairs.  Somewhere along the line, one of the legs got bent and so it wobbled, and didn’t move very well.  In short, it sucked.

My old desk chair - I'm pretty sure its from the 70s

Nick, on the other hand, has been sitting on a chair that he bought at an estate sale several years ago.  Its a really awesome chair, but has been stuck at a super-high height that was just OK for Nick and terrible for me.  Also, its got really high arms that don’t fit under any desk, so he was limited as to how close he could pull himself to his desk.

Nick's old chair - bought at an estate sale.

Well, I’ve finally had enough.  Staples had a sale on all of their chairs, and I splurged a whopping $70 each on new chairs for us.  Let me tell you – its a small upgrade that I wish I would have done a long time ago becuase it is freaking wonderful.

THIS CHAIR WRAWKS.

This is my new desk chair. Please excuse the messy desk.

Let this be a lesson to me.  It doesn’t have to be Aeron or bust.  Sometimes, a small upgrade is good enough.  Heh.  Who knew?

Nick's enjoying his new chair in the sunshine.

life hippy