Hat on Top, Coat Below
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Soon the Sun Will Be Up
December 20, 2003
As I type this, it’s a little after seven in the morning on a Saturday when I don’t have a plane to catch or any other time-sensitive task to do. This is bizarre behavior for me to be up so early on a weekend. Stranger still, I’ve been up since five. Five! That’s just so far out of the realm of normal that I don’t know what to make of it. I woke up a little before four and just never got back to sleep, so I got up. Bubba was still sleeping when I went downstairs to grab a diet Coke, but he roused himself long enough to see if there was a bonus yogurt drop opportunity associated with my off-schedule appearance (there was, because I have a hard time resisting cute little perching creatures).
I came back upstairs and wrote my morning pages, starting with a long reflection on what the blazes I was doing up so freaking early and moving on to my inexplicable case of Christmas stress. There is no reason I should be stressed about Christmas. I’m not overloaded with holiday tasks. Mr. Karen put up the lights. We didn’t put up even the small tree. I haven’t had to set foot in a store to shop for gifts because my list is so short and the internet so handy. I didn’t even make a dish to pass for the company party. (There’s always too much food at these things and I made up for it by helping set up and emptying the trash a couple times during the night). All I had to do was send out the cards, and Mr. Karen had said it was fine if we didn’t even do that.
I thought about not sending out cards. How lame would that be? I wasn’t feeling relieved about not having to do it and wondered how I could justify sending ones to my online friends but not the family when it occurred to me that it was not yet six in the morning and I could just do the cards right then and be done before breakfast. So I did. They’re not chock full of personal notes like in other years (unless the recipients have the power to discern what I was thinking as I addressed the envelope, in which case they know what I would have written if I had gotten an earlier start), but they’re ready to mail. Of course almost all of them will be late, but that’s something of a family tradition.
Next on my morning agenda is a trip to Weight Watchers for my monthly weigh-in. There’s no doubt I’ll be up, especially after the party last night. I didn’t eat mass quantities, but I didn’t try to stay under my points limit for the day, either. I don’t think I want to get to a point where I can look at a tray of delicious cheese and say “no, thanks”. What kind of life would that be?
A year ago, I questioned my status as a geek girl. I’m still the only female web developer at Purple Systems; I don’t think any women were even interviewed the most recent time we hired a programmer. Whether that’s because the females with ASP and SQL experience have so many options that they don’t want to bother with a small pond like ours or because there’s bias in our hiring process, I don’t know.
