When she gets home, Paige is very independent. I was worried about how it would be to work at home with her around in the afternoon, but I had forgotten that I used to work at home all the time with her around. She can keep herself occupied, whether she comes and plays with her Squinkies at the table next to me or heads up to her room to enter into some imaginary universe. It’s nice to just have her around (well, when she’s not being unpleasant).

She’s also bringing papers home now that we are really enjoying. In today’s set, she talked about her favorite animals: “I like budrflys and pigs.” With Kate, I can remember thinking that type of thing was cute but hoping she wouldn’t spell that way forever. With Paige, I know that it won’t last forever, so I am able to enjoy it.

Number three is growing up pretty fast on us. She will be 6 in April, and that makes me feel like we’re leaving “little kid” stage. Which seems odd, because it doesn’t seem like very long ago that I was thinking we had left “baby” stage. She has been a handful, and that makes it harder to remember that the time is worth cherishing. But I hope that these next few months make for nice memories and send us into the next stage with smiles on our faces.

Here at the end of this weekend I am feeling the way I often do: it’s not think I am unique in having some hard times. This is the way it is for everyone. And if I’m honest, I know that the life I lead is remarkably charmed. Still, there is a grinding quality that everyone goes through, even if not everyone responds in exactly the same way. I try not to begrudge anyone the small favors that life might throw their way, because I know that things can be hard.

Still, although I tend to dwell on the negative stuff here because my nature is to go in that direction, I have learned over the past few years to hold onto the second part of the quote from the title. No, not “…and then you die.”

“…God is good.”

When I count my blessings instead of the minutes until the kids go to bed…when I realize what a luxury it is to let my mind relax instead of spinning through things I think I “have to do”…when I enjoy the relationships I have in my life instead of being melancholy because things have changed…then I realize a sense of peace, and all the hard crap is still there, but it’s bearable. Those good things are gifts from God, and I hope that through all the griping it comes through that I am incredibly grateful.

Still, those troubling times were not present in such great amounts that I wanted to run screaming from the house. Donia took Quinn to his basketball game, which gave me a little time to be at home with the girls and call my mom to wish her happy anniversary (45 years – wow!). For dinner, we made a journey to an Italian place that several people had recommended. Apparently the family that owns it has several children with celiac (and I think maybe the parents have celiac too), so they have made an effort to have a large gluten free menu with several items that are typically verboten (like fried or breaded foods). We got a plate of fried mozzarella chunks, and Donia and Kate were able to get dishes that they both really enjoyed.

All in all, it was a day with some minor victories and no major defeats. I would declare victory and head off to bed, but if I crash now I’ll wake up well before 6:00, so I need to keep myself awake a while longer.

The problem is that I don’t think a clear head will necessarily lead to an abundance of patience. The kids have been particularly troubling over the past week. Lots of fighting, lots of whining, lots of non-compliance. I know that it’s that time of year when they have been cooped up and have energy to burn, but that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. Last weekend was a rough one; it seemed like the kids were taking turns pestering me while the other two fought. So that makes me apprehensive for this weekend. We do have a few things going in our favor. Donia and I have probably breathed enough fire this week to scare them a little bit. And we have Kate at a “Girls Night Out” at her school this evening, so hopefully it helps for her to have a special event to start things out. So, I suppose we’ll see what happens. Honestly, even with a little apprehension, it still feels pretty good to have the weekend arrive.

Another thing I have been thinking about lately is how surprised I am over how much I still think about the people I used to work with and go to church with. I’m not surprised that I still miss them, but they float through my mind on a fairly regular basis and I wonder what they are up to and how they are doing. I’m thinking now that the two topics are related. The more we have our own routine here, the more it highlights the things that are missing from the old routine. For me, the people at work were certainly a huge part of that. Whether or not I felt like I had a close personal relationship with them, I was seeing them and talking with them on a daily basis. That accumulates to something significant over 10 years. Even aside from the time factor, the relationships at CompTIA are very different because of the way we work together and the sizes of the teams. We also haven’t quite found a church home yet, though we have found some individuals that we have connected with, so there’s nothing at all replacing that routine.

I had a couple conversations on Facebook yesterday where this came up. It was really nice to connect, and it was also nice to be able to say that I missed seeing them around and to hear that they felt the same way. One of my favorite quotes is “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” This whole moving thing continues to be very bittersweet, but I suppose I could modify the quote to be “Don’t cry because you miss them. Smile because you’re missed.” It’s good to have friends, even if the connections have become something very different from what they were. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m very glad to be on Facebook to keep those connections going. I’m hoping that this year there are a few chances to meet people face-to-face, rather than avatar-to-avatar.

My Mac had been starting to run slow, and the IT guys at work had a new image that could be put on the machine to try to fix things up. I decided this was probably a good idea since I had been testing their patience a bit with my overzealousness for upgrading. So I backed everything up – the work stuff to their cloud service and the full hard drive to an external machine. I figured I was covered. The machine got its shiny new image, and I started the process of getting things restored. Everything came in from the cloud service just fine. The only issue was that I had to re-sync the files from my team’s shared space on Box. Then I plugged in the hard drive to restore everything else. After recognizing the drive, it asked if I wanted to user encryption. I almost decided to grab the data first, but then I figured to go ahead.

What’s the worst that can happen?

My thinking was that the computer was asking me if I wanted my future backups encrypted. It actually wanted to encrypt the entire disk. So it started this incredibly long-running process, during which it looked like my previous backups were inaccessible. This did not make me happy for multiple reasons, not the least of which was that I had to leave the machine running overnight at work so the encryption could complete. Still, I assumed that once the process finished, I’d be able to get to the backup.

When I got to work this morning, the encryption had finished! Yay! The backups were still not available! Curses! I couldn’t find any answers online, and when I called the Apple Store they just told me to come on in. So I pretty much had to punt and wait until I could go in, which I did tonight. I explained the problem to my assigned Genius, and he gave me a perplexed look. Not good. I fired up the machine and showed him how the backups were not available from inside the Time Machine application. He was still perplexed. Then he suggested we try something else.

“Go into Finder and just select the hard drive. Yeah, now you can see the folders for each one of the backups…and you can just select the one you want…and there’s all the data.”

My elation was tempered by my humiliation at a solution that I think Kate might have been able to stumble upon. We did run into a weird permissions problem that wouldn’t let me copy the entire folder all at once, but it became evident that the best course of action was to work around that rather than solve it. So everything is back to normal now and life can go on.

So what have we learned? Think through things – several times – before major operations on the hardware. Also, I’m not always quite so smart as I might like to think.

I usually remember that Kate is pretty smart, probably because she has always tried to act older than her age and has alway enjoyed using her mental abilities. The other two have always acted a little more like I would expect kids to act, with the running and playing and not necessarily trying to engage us in conversation. So I tend to forget that they are kind of bright too, but every so often they remind me.

Paige is reading now. I had thought that we would have some big celebration for surviving a third tour of “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons,” which I did with the first two and Donia started with Paige. Paige sometimes tolerated them and sometimes didn’t, and she seemed to be getting the hang of it. Then all of a sudden we noticed she was reading things that the lessons wouldn’t have taught her. After we switched schools, her teacher wrote us a note saying that she was sending some extra material home since Paige was reading so well. The other day, I read a book with her and had the thought that she was reading better than Kate was at that age. Which may or may be true, since I don’t have empirical evidence, but it was still kind of cool.

Quinn got into the Discovery program at school, and tonight he went to the open house introducing the program to the third graders (they all start the program next week). They took some test to determine who qualified for the program, and tonight for some reason they explained to everyone which percentiles the scores represented. A score over 130 was the top 2%, and Quinn got a 131. So that was pretty cool. Of course, since they had explained about the percentiles, Quinn sees the score and announces in a stage whisper “I’m in the top 2%!” So we might have talk about keeping a low profile.

The thing with these two is that while Kate is likely to use her intelligence for good, they might lean a little more toward using it for evil. Especially that little one.

• Shoveling: Hard to say, but at worst it was a wash between the two. I thought it would be better here since the driveway and sidewalk were both shorter, but the driveway is wider too. My wife, upon reading this, will begin to have her blood boil over my continued resistance to purchasing a snow blower. But I think we’re going to be OK. I almost had Quinn help me out on the driveway, which I think he could have done. But I decided to just handle it myself this first time. Still, I believe my dream of free labor will be coming true this winter.
• Bringing the kids in: Better here thanks to the large entrance we have. We have a mudroom coming in from the garage, but it’s tight because it’s a skinny room and the laundry machines and a double laundry tub. The front entrance has space for the kids to come in, and it’s a little more out of the way than our front entrance in Rochester. We didn’t have “snow clothes removal” as a part of our house-hunting criteria; we just got a little lucky.
• Schedules: The snow didn’t come overnight, so we didn’t have to deal with it this morning. Oddly enough, it felt like it would have been worse to shovel and get ready to go, even though Kate and I leave around the same time and the younger kids get on the bus later. Not sure why – maybe I just hate that whole scramble and it will never seem good. The afternoon was going to be a little tricky. I was going to have to leave early to give myself time to get home for Kate’s swim practice, then work a little more from home. Which is about what I might have done before, just with a longer commute. However, Kate decided she didn’t want to swim AND CompTIA told us to get out and beat the rush. We sometimes made management calls at IBM, but since we were working with other teams in other places, it felt like the machine was still running. So this was nice.
• Parking: My favorite one. There is a deck at the Sara Lee building, and I park all the way on the bottom. No walk through the weather, no scraping of the car. Beautiful.

Look, I am being a little tongue-in-cheek here. These things all add up to very little. But I’m still happy to have minor victories.

When I mentioned it to Donia over the weekend, it seemed kind of unbelievable. Today, though, it felt more like it did when Kate turned one. I remember everyone asking “Can you believe it’s been a year?” And I remember saying “Yeah, it’s definitely been a year.” When it’s been so hectic, it feels like an awful lot has happened. Even with time moving a little faster as the kids are getting older, selling the house and moving added so much to 2011 that my flight into Chicago and wide-eyed entrance to the CompTIA HQ seems like a long time ago.

As far as work goes, I don’t have any regrets about the decision. Now that the newness has worn off, I can feel the frustrations of working life starting to set in. But I recognize them as muted versions of some of the frustrations I had at IBM, so I just handle them the way I was learning to back then. Also, the worst frustrations are completely absent. There are things I miss – mostly the camaraderie that came from intense work and the feeling of being a rung up the ladder as a manager. I knew I would miss those things, though, and getting peace of mind and reasonable workload is a good trade. Beyond that, I’ve been able to do things that wouldn’t have been available to me at IBM: writing in an official capacity and traveling for both education and presentations.

I do feel like I’m still getting to know the place, especially since it was slow starting while I was living in Rochester. There are still several ingrained behaviors that keep me from completely feeling like I fit in. Just like the frustrations, I realize that the discomfort probably won’t ever go all the way to zero (and maybe it shouldn’t, lest complacency set in). And just like the frustrations, the good outweighs the bad in the personality of the association. We had a great meeting today going over the budget and the rationale behind it. It’s the type of thing that can’t happen in a large company, and even then I’m positive that not every organization would take the time and explain things like that to help keep the employees informed. I feel like there is a lot of good momentum and potential, and that’s a nice feeling to have about the place that is providing your livelihood.

It’s been a great year. Not without its issues, but overall very rewarding. It will be several years before we’re able to fully evaluate the decision to turn our lives upside down; if things keep improving from this first year, I think we will be in good shape.

Donia asked the other day if I wasn’t bored with all this time off. I’m honestly not, and I think most of the jitters about going back to work are there because I know there isn’t another viable option, so going back is inevitable. Because of that, I think I tend to shut down and enjoy some tranquility, knowing that the chaos will start up again soon enough. The kids certainly get stir crazy, and that translates to me getting a little crazy. But left to my own devices, I feel like I pass the time without getting anxious. Which, again, I know is not for everyone.

This vacation was broken up into stages, which may have helped keep things interesting. First there were the days before NC, which ended up being busier than I thought since there was a ton that needed to happen and we were also kind of reeling from Kate’s diagnosis. Then the drive down to NC, the time there, and the drive back, which I’ve already covered. Finally there were the last few days here at home. I was surprised at how much got accomplished during that time. I never thought I would get as far with the 2011 photo book as I have, the Christmas decorations came down in a hurry on New Year’s Day, and we even entertained the Grosses on New Year’s Eve. Even with all that activity, I was able to let my brain hibernate. I might not say I’m looking forward to getting back to work and the whole routine, but I think I am ready for it.

More than anything, that has been my favorite part of this vacation: the feeling that my mind is ready for the challenges ahead rather than struggling through day-to-day survival. Even looking at the calendar today, I found myself thinking about the whole week ahead and not just Tuesday. Unfortunately, I don’t think my wife would share my enthusiasm and mental clarity. Our minds work in very different ways, and it is pretty rare for both of us to be feeling refreshed and calm at the same time. My goal is to hold on to my feeling while helping her find her own. With the new school and work schedules, I’m optimistic that we just might be able to make it happen.