Rain

Crazy, crazy rain today. Umbrella-in-Seattle crazy. I suppose I could have worn a coat.

Slept in today, could not get out of bed. Had to go straight to work without stopping and ended up needing to go to Fred Meyer during lunch to get some supplies and gas up the car. When did gas prices explode again? $4.09 after 10 cent discount. Blech.

I've been trying to get my arms around a project that started before I got there. I finally got to a point where I knew t how much development is estimated - 16 to 18 weeks plus 4-8 weeks for testing. (That was my next goal - convincing people testing needed to happen with development.) And then I was informed we'd only be afforded 12 weeks (11 to go) including development and testing. That's caused panic in a number of people but not me. The developers will need to reduce padding, the business owners may need to pare down their feature set and management may have to look at finding more resources. My job will just be to keep track of lots of bits and pieces. (My boss' boss recently said in a room with my peers and my boss and his peers that I'm good at wrangling - nice bit of validation.) In the end, this is a brand new product so the minimum feature set is pretty extensive. We'll figure something out. And I can start planning he product's next release.

Didn't do anything today to simplify my
life except look into consolidating some of our financial dealings (research-only), but I did watch a lot of TED Talks and cleaned the oft-neglected laundry room. No reading yet, but I plan to do some next.

The kids did well tonight, Rachel made her own dinner after deciding she didn't want what we were having and I gave Ben a bath, but it was short because he kept jumping and splashing.

Apparently earlier today he was a major handful, including breaking his
changing table. That served us well for the few bucks it cost us off Craig's List four years ago. We'll need to get another, but for now, I flipped it upside down and then shoved something between two shelves to make it a massively strong surface for changing him. We'll need to immediately reinforce anything we buy - those things aren't typically designed for a boisterous jumping 4-year old autistic child.

I ended the day barely positive on calories. I'm almost back to my pre-pancake weight hooray. The rain had stopped by the time dinner was over and I briefly looked outside and considered raining but then thought of a million reasons not to (including needing to pay bills and shave) and so I didn't.