Category: Autobiography

Gap Year

sandybarker

There is an Aussie rite of passage that is not really part of American culture. This rite is also shared by the Kiwis, Brits, Irish and even the South Africans.

It is the ‘gap year’, where young adults leave their home country and go on grand adventures. They almost always end by moving back home with their parents, because the are spent – financially, often physically, and sometimes emotionally. For many (myself included) the only thing better than the gap year, is coming home from the gap year.

So, what are the Americans doing when the English, Irish, Kiwi and Aussie youth are gallivanting around the globe, tending bars in London, backpacking through Scandinavia, volunteering at refugee camps in Haiti or getting blindingly drunk with other intrepid gap yearers? Many of them go to college – an American rite of passage, some join the workforce, and some do take advantage of their youth, their savings account and the best wishes of their loved ones, and go on a gap year adventure.

When I left high school, I did not go to college – or uni, as we call it – right away. I had blown my final exams, because at seventeen I was essentially burnt out from 2 years of 4-6 hours a night of study. When I announced about 3 weeks before the final exams that I wouldn’t be sitting them, my parents informed me that I would. Fine, I thought, but I won’t study. And in a rare act of defiance, I didn’t. I did okay on these exams, and was accepted into the University of Western Australia. But I didn’t go. Instead, I lounged around on my dad’s couch with my unemployed best friend, cashing fortnightly dole checks.

My dad’s tolerance for this behavior wore thin after a surprising 8 months (I would have kicked me off the couch in 8 weeks!), and I went out and got a job. At a grocery store. As a ‘checkout chick’. I do not know how my parents felt about that at the time. I was a bright girl, and working in a supermarket wasn’t exactly my dream job, but, I was only 18. I didn’t know what my dream job was, and so I settled for something easy and close to home. I quickly rose through the ranks, and by my 19th birthday, I was the manager of the checkout chicks (and guys). It went to my head a little, but the power put shine on a job that was otherwise quite dull.  By that time I had also locked onto the dream of going to college in the U.S. so, I was saving frantically to move there.

By the end of that year I was living in LA – with my aunt and uncle.  And so began my gap year.

My aunt and uncle are only 10 years older, so the living situation was actually much cooler than it first sounds. Even though I was under-aged, we would have fun nights out at bars and pubs. I never got carded like I do now; people cared less, or the laws were less stringent, but for whatever reason my 19-year old butt sat on many a bar-stool that year.

I got a job at the local AMC cinema, where I met my boyfriend and a gang of best friends. I added two other jobs to the mix, as I needed to save cash for tuition. I worked in an auto parts store and a Blockbuster. The worst of my jobs was Blockbuster. My manager was the same age as me and a complete tool. Had I known anything about karma at the time, I may have understood the irony of the situation.

My best job was at AMC – all the free movies, popcorn and diet Coke a girl could want! Plus, my boyfriend and best friends were there.

The auto parts store was kind of smelly and often boring, but I learned a shitload about cars. Men can be real assholes to a pretty girl who works behind the parts counter, so I learned my stuff fast. “You do not need new jets for your carburetor because your car is fuel injected. You’re just being a jerk and trying to trick me. Next!” Booyah!

I worked seven days a week, and took little time off. Amongst all the shifts – some of them back-to-back, I found time to go to Rosarito Beach, Mexico, Big Bear, and to Palm Springs. I was only 19 so I thought that these were exotic locations. Life was seriously fun.

I did eventually get to college after a year of working three jobs, and having fun with my friends and boyfriend. I did a semester at BYU (yes, that BYU) which was both amazingly great and completely depressing.

Amazingly great:

  • My oldest friend, Jules, was also at BYU, and we have a lot of fun – even now
  • I lived in the dorms and adored my roommate
  • My girlfriends and I went dancing two or three times a week. (Provo is not like the town in Footloose, even though the original film was shot there.)
  • I had French class 5 days a week and j’aime Francais!
  • I got good grades with little effort

Completely depressing:

  • My boyfriend lived in California
  • I was very poor, so would accept dates just to go to a movie (see point #1)
  • After three dates, most guys would propose
  • It was cold and snowy (winter semester)
  • I was so poor I would do my roommate’s laundry if she paid and I could throw my clothes in with hers
  • My non-French classes were ridiculously boring
  • Did I mention that I was poor?

The semester came to a close, and I was destitute. My time in the dorms had come to an end, I had no money and no job, and my boy in California broke things off. If I’d had a dog, he would have been hit by a car. Things were grim. I talked my way into a job – and an advance on my paycheck, and crashed at a friend’s place for about 6 weeks.  Aside from the dancing, which continued 3 nights a week (the Ivy Tower: Wednesday, ladies night, free entry, Friday, free entry before 8, and Saturday, $1 entry), I was miserable.

It was time to admit to myself that my little adventure was over. Jules was heading home to Perth, Australia, and so would I.

I called my mum. Collect. “Hi mum!” “Hello, sweetheart.” “I want to come home.” “Oh that’s wonderful!” and then because she knew me well, “How much money do you have?” “$5.” There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Okay, well I will call your dad and we will work something out.”

And she did, and we did, and Jules and I flew home together in August 1990. She moved back in with her parents, and I moved back in with mine (my dad and step-mum’s place). And so ended my gap year.

Perhaps I was not as intrepid as today’s 19 year-olds. But in mine I went to two countries, learned French, lost the 30 pounds I had gained sitting on my dad’s couch, lost my virginity, learned to drive on the LA freeways, found out the difference between an alternator and a starter motor, refused several proposals, and survived being homeless and unemployed.

I did okay. ; )

In fact, I am proud of my 19-year-old self. She was gutsy and passionate. I remind myself to tap into her when I am feeling scared or indifferent.

And just because they make me giggle, have a look at this series of videos entitled “Gap Yah“.

New Year’s Absolutions 2011

sandybarker

It is now 10 days into 2011 and I have nothing by the way of resolutions. Nada, rien, niente, zippo. And because, “Have you made any resolutions?” is usually the first thing that follows “Happy New Year”, the question has been posed a lot.

So I started to ponder “why?” –  why haven’t I sworn to lose some pounds,  to be better at the things I should be better at, or to finally begin that project/class/new venture I have been meaning to start?

I haven’t really got a decent answer to this epic question. Maybe that should be my resolution, “I resolve to determine why I have no New Year’s Resolutions (except this one).” How very meta.

I have, however, been mulling over some New Year’s Absolutions, things I can absolve myself from once and for all. So here they are.

I absolve myself from:

  1. Losing a few pounds. I can sprint upstairs and carry heavy boxes. I can walk 6 blocks uphill to the bus stop without puffing or sweating. I can give myself a break on the ‘couple of pounds’.
  2. Finishing the re-write of chapter seven. Chapter seven has haunted me for months from its prominent position on my desktop. I currently have no desire to finish chapter seven – perhaps I never will. One day I will gain world-wide notoriety for being the only author to publish without an end to chapter seven. I am moving chapter seven off my desktop immediately.
  3. Buying a bike. I prefer my cycling indoors, so if I thoroughly exhaust myself I do not then have to cycle all the way home. Plus, we live in Seattle. Where there are hills. Big ones.  Oh, and did you know it rains a lot here?
  4. Reading Oprah book club selections. I have started four of these, and I put down three of them. I am sure that there must be some that aren’t trite and/or depressing, but I can’t be bothered weeding those ones out.
  5. Sneaking a peak at work email when I am home. This is very, very naughty. I get sucked in – and a quick peek becomes an hour, or three. I will cease it immediately – unless it is a snow day and I am working from home.

There, that’s five. A good number, five.

Happy New Year.

 

 

Writing with abandon

sandybarker

by larryfire

I have been writing a book for nearly a decade.

When I type out those words it seems impossible that it has been that long, but it is true. Nine years ago I started penning a travel biography about my time in the UK and Europe from ’96 to ’97.  I began this project old-school; I literally wrote the first draft.  By hand. Onto paper. With a pen.

I still have the first draft packed into a box in a friend’s attic in Sydney.  In the book’s first incarnation, chapters either read like journal entries or as essays. It took about 2 months to get everything down on paper.

I then began systematically typing it into a borrowed laptop. Technology was relatively primitive back then so I backed-up my files onto floppies. As I re-drafted over the years, the thumb drive changed my life, and I put the floppies away with the first draft. Then came an external hard-drive, and now my book (a wholly different-looking beast than how it had began) lives in The Cloud.

But I digress…

Once it was input into electronic form, I worked away at my book in spits and spurts. I wrote about the process in a previous post (Write Now!), so I won’t bore you with it again.  The last line of that post says, “Yes, I need to get back to my book.”  And yet, here I sit some 6 months later, and I have managed to squeeze out a paltry 4 chapters.

To change the subject, I saw an old friend last weekend. Well, she is not old, but we have known each other for the better part of 20 years. She, too, loves an American and lives in the U.S. A work trip afforded me the chance to see her and meet her husband (lovely bloke). The fates smiled on me doubly, as I was able to take more away from the reunion than the simple pleasure of catching up.

Larissa (her real name) is a creative type too. We met studying for our respective Bachelor of Arts degrees, both with a major in Theater Arts. She has come full circle after some professional detours and is currently rehearsing a Sam Shepherd play, and is a voice over artist and teacher. I, too, have had some professional detours from the stage, which is why I know I love to write.

I moaned to Larissa that I have no motivation to write my book at the moment. Or any moment, really. I work at a computer eight hours a day, and while I mostly love my job, it does not inspire me to sit at a computer when I am not there. There are many things I would rather do when I am at not at work: reading (Oh, how I love other people’s books!), running, movies, conversation, cleaning, laundry, and a thousand other things that seem more appealing that the thing that I supposedly love to do most.

I also mention to Larissa that I am inspired by something else at the moment.

I want to write the story of how I met Ben, of how we fell in love while living a world apart, and how I ended up packing up my life and moving to another country to live with a man I had yet to spend more than 5 consecutive weeks with. I want to write about that.

But there’s The Book…

How do I abandon one book to start another? Will I ever finish it if I keep finding distractions – literary or otherwise?

Yes. No. Maybe.

Which brings me back to my conversation with Larissa.  “You are not abandoning your book. You are putting it away so that you can follow inspiration. You can always come back to it later.”

She said this while we were walking through Whole Foods looking for the ingredients for my Quinoa/Wild Rice Salad. Suddenly, right there next to the bulk bins, it made sense. I needed to give myself permission to abandon my book, so that I can follow what inspires me now.

On the flight home I scribbled furiously into a scribbler pad. I filled 20 or so pages and there is (much) more to come. A lot of the content has already been written and will come from travel journals, emails,and accounts that I wrote for us after our trips together.

In the car on the way home from the airport, I recounted my epiphany (thanks, Larissa) to Ben. He recalled that a favorite author of his said, and I am paraphrasing, “Some of my best work happens when I am procrastinating from the work that I am supposed to be doing.”

I have asked Ben’s permission to be candid. He has given it. I think. For weeks now the first lines have been bouncing around inside my head. “It seems a little ‘hokey’ to say that I dreamed about Ben before I met him. But I did.” Since deciding to abandon my book, those words are on paper now.

Oh, and recipe for the salad to follow. It is incredible – no, really!

The Gray

sandybarker

You step out into it. It consumes you, touching you in ways that make you uncomfortable. It doesn’t have your permission, but you have no choice; it forces itself on you. Sometimes you can forget that it is there, but not today.

Its companions are damp, cold, and quite often, wind.

The damp seeps into your clothes, chilling you from the outside in, while cold nibbles at your extremities turning them blue and then white. When wind intrudes, it cuts through to your very bones. And yet this trinity of misery is not as powerful as their master, The Gray.

You have adopted a stoop: head down, shoulders rounded and protective. A frown has made its home on your face. Your curl into yourself, wishing away the pervading presence of The Gray.

It invades your every thought. It pushes you down from above and sits heavily on your shoulders, on the crown of your head, on your eyelids and the tip of your nose. You do not stand tall. You are never not cold.

Your mood is gray. You crave nothing, hate nothing. Everything is neutral. Extremes have no place in your existence. Your soul has been doused in peroxide. Sometimes, just there in the periphery, you see glimpses of passion, of disagreement and debate. Yet you have succumbed to the numbing, and do not participate.

You make jokes about it with friends and colleagues, trying in vain to lessen its hold on you. The jokes are stupid and only serve to highlight what you so desperately wish you could disguise: that you crave sunshine like a starving man craves a hot bowl of soup.

You ignore it, pretending that it is not just there on the other side of the window pane. You laugh so hard you made no sound. You scoff potato chips straight from the bag. You make lazy love on a Sunday morning. You read the latest best-seller, voraciously turning the pages. You meet friends in trendy coffee shops and drink $4 lattes. You pretend and pour yourself a gin and tonic, with fresh lime and extra ice. You drink it with the thermostat turned to 78. You pretend that it is light outside.

You seek camaraderie among fellow ex-pats. Californians become your closest allies. Those who are native to this place apologize. “It’s not usually like this”, they say. They are tired of The Gray too. Yet it continues to out-stay its welcome. You cannot remember last summer, except in snatches of blurry images, the colors fading each time you recall.

And sometimes, just when you think The Gray will always be there, it goes.  Warm air floods your lungs, and you can feel the freckles forming on your nose as you tip your head to the sun.

You are forgiving in these moments, forgetful of the how much The Gray weighs, of how dense it is. You become lighter. Your exuberance is contagious and those who love you flood back, eager to bask in your joy, to share it, no longer having to pretend with you, but sharing an important truth: that light is life.

You start to forget The Gray.

And yet, it has not left, not for good. It has only waited in its own shadow, just long enough for the forgetting to begin. And then it returns.

You fight it. You are drowning and want to push through its viscous mass and break the surface into the light. You want a warm breeze to play with your hair, and trickles of sweat from your elbows and knees. You want the steering wheel to be too hot, and to sink your bare toes into the sand on a sun-soaked beach.

You hope. You know there will be an end to The Gray. But not today.

Photograph by Oliver Neilson

Heatwave in Seattle

sandybarker

by bangladeshihindu

I have a confession to make.  I am one of those women you see at the gym who reads magazines on the cardio equipment.  I have another confession.  I feel superior to other women who read magazines on the cardio equipment, because I am working on level 20 while they are usually on level 4 or 7.

I don’t necessarily think that I am a better person, just that I am getting a better workout.  And something I have discovered about reading while working out, is that once in a while I am endowed with a true ‘ah-hah’ moment.

These are rare while I am reading Hollywood gossip, and really I only read those magazines for the pictures, not the articles.  Sometimes, though, someone leaves an Oprah, or a MORE magazine at the gym and I end up reading something that actually changes me a little.  I return home with a renewed sense of purpose, an inspiration or a fresh perspective.

It was one of these moments that led me to hot yoga.  I was deep in the heart of an Oprah magazine.  “’Adventure’ doesn’t have to mean trekking through the jungle or bungee-jumping.  Being adventurous is to deliberately move outside of your comfort zone,” I read, heart-pounding, face red, and sweat pouring.

That night my girlfriend, Carlie, sent me a text.  The week before we had talked about how she did hot yoga, and how I wanted to try it.  This was the moment of truth, my moment to be adventurous.  “6 tomorrow morning.  Meet you there?”  I replied, “Sure!” before I could talk myself out of it.

So, I took my nearly 41-year-old tight hamstrings to hot yoga.

I loved it.  I loved being hot. I loved stretching myself – both literally and figuratively.  I enjoyed the low candle light and the relaxing, but very hip music (nary a whale call or a raindrop to be heard).  I thoroughly enjoyed a rhythmic and strengthening hour of Vinyasa.

Allow me to interject with the brief (and sporadic) history of “Sandy and Yoga”.

  • I can’t remember when I did my first class.  It was the 90s.
  • I had a crush on a beautiful, sexually-ambiguous Eurasian yoga instructor in Sydney, so I attended his classes each week for a whole month.
  • I do a series of sun salutations before I fly.
  • I lived with a yoga instructor, who chided me about doing weights and running, until I did a perfect jump-back from Crow to Plank, which finally shut her up.
  • I fell in love with ‘Body Balance’ classes, which combined yoga, Tai Chi and Pilates choreographed to music.  Those fed my body and my attention-span-of-a-two-year-old mind, but I moved to America where there are no Body Balance classes.
  • I did no yoga for 18 months, and became stiff and sore more frequently than stretching at the gym could combat.
  • I tried hot yoga and signed up for two months unlimited attendance.
  • I go here three times a week and I feel great.

Thank you, Carlie, for leading me on a new adventure.

I do sometimes question if I love the yoga, or the fact that it is hot in the studio.  Living in Seattle, I am rarely hot.  Showers are hot, of course, but I mean with my clothes on.  Most of the time I am focusing on ‘not being cold’, so the yoga studio offers welcome relief. Still, hot yoga is something I have always wanted to try, but never did ‘til now.

That makes it my adventure du jour.  Next is participating in a flash mob…

Write now!

sandybarker

I want to get back to writing my book.  Let me qualify that: I need to get back to writing my book.

My book starts as a series of journal entries (both personal and travel) and letters in 1996 and ‘97, long before I know I will write a book.

In 2001, I start writing chapters, by hand.  The chapters flesh out story snippets and descriptions of people and places.  The chapters expound on inner turmoil, extreme loneliness and a budding thirst for a less-ordinary life.

By the end of 2001, I am typing these chapters into a computer, adding more details, more perspective and more poetry to my word count.

I print out what I consider the second draft and edit onto the pages.  Like the cliché that I am, I carry dog-eared pages with me everywhere, reading and re-reading the story of me.  My book, a travel biography, begins to take shape and I move chapters, fool around with format and finally settle on a 3-part tome.

Part One. Narrative. Documenting the end of life as I know it.  My alone-ness.  My fear of drowning.  My knowledge that doing something, anything, is better than doing nothing.  Not knowing what ‘something’ to do.

Part Two. Narrative.  A journey in a wide circle.  Defeat.  Triumph.  Forging relationships.  Learning that I don’t know everything.  Learning that I know a lot.  Drinking in facts and places and more people.

Part Three.  Episodic.  The circles continue, concentric, overlapping, my life a Venn diagram.  Hating myself.  Loving myself.  Losing myself to excess and pretended celebrity.  Stillness.  Silence.  Sleep and a momentum that ultimately forces a new trajectory.

Years pass.

I occasionally dust off a printed copy.  What draft is this?  Eight?  Eleven?  I lose track.

“I am in love with this,” says a friend.  “But it should be a novel.  It should be in the third-person.”  I disagree, and re-write chapter one for the fifty-millionth time.  Each time I re-write it I love it more.

“It’s wonderful, Sweetie,” says my mother.  “She has to say that,” I think.  But she actually does love it.

I feed it in cruel increments to willing and select friends.  I want critics, not sycophants to read it.  Only that will make it better.  I write in sporadic and manic phases.  I accomplish much, then nothing for months, years.

In 2009, I sit in modest, yet well-decorated apartment in a foreign city, and I read chapter one.  “This should be a novel, in the third-person,” I think and I smile.  It has taken me years to get to this point.  I tell my friend, herself a writer, a successful one.  She is pleased.

I dig out the letters and journals from a decade before, all brought from my homeland for this very purpose, and I read.  I remember a girl I once knew, one who loved passionately and had her hopes crippled.  I think of her fondly as I might think of a distant relative I was once close to.  She saddens and angers me, yet I know I will always be protective of her.  She is, after all, me.

I return to the keyboard, and I start at the beginning, a very good place to start.

Chapter one.

I write the story of a young woman called Sarah.  She has a whole life, most of which I have yet to discover and some of which echoes my own life.  I love her, as fiercely as I love the girl in the journals and hand-written lengthy letters collected by loving parents and returned years afterwards.

I feed it to a new friend in meaty chunks.  She wants more.

It flows out of me, like a mother’s milk.  Chapter one.  Two.  Three.  Six.  And then, nothing.

Months later I return to the pages I wrote and do not recognize the words.  “Who wrote this?” I wonder and then remind myself that I did.  These words are mine.  And they are good.

Yes, I need to get back to my book.

Excess packaging

sandybarker

I have a somewhat minor frustration that comes up on a daily basis. Packaging.

I realised the other day when I was unsuccessfully trying to open a cheese stick, that US manufacturers do not seem to discriminate between things that can poison us if ingested, and actual food.

Trying to extricate the highly delicious and somewhat nutritious cheese stick from its extremely excessive packaging (a tough plastic bag that won’t open without scissors, and a shrunk-wrapped plastic ‘easy-to-peel’ tomb) resulted in so much contortion, a coworker thought I was trying on a girdle.

My eye cream comes in an even more ridiculous array of packaging: inside a jar, inside a plastic shell, inside a box, inside shrunk-wrapped plastic. By the time I get the eye-cream out of its packaging, I have three more frown lines on which to put it.

My favorite example of excess packaging is anything that comes in a plastic bottle. From vitamins to ketchup, I must first contend with the shrunk-wrapped hard plastic seal that surrounds the lid. It has perforations so that I can do this easily, but for some reason (perhaps because they suck), these perforations do nothing. I have to get out the scissors.

At this point I can twist off the lid, but underneath the lid will be a foil covering stuck so tightly to the neck of the bottle, I have to dig under its edge with a fingernail. Even the ones with the handy pull tab cannot be pulled off. I invariably resort again to the scissors, which I wield with an agitated stabbing motion. I have missed a few times and stabbed myself, but this only provides another reason for expletives to pour from my mouth.

Once the foil lid is removed, I can usually access what is inside the bottle. If it is vitamins, I have one more gauntlet task: a wad of uncooperative cotton wool. Imagine the clown car at the circus. Pulling the wad of cotton wool out of a 5cm vitamin bottle is like watching the clowns get out of the car in a never-ending stream.

When I can finally reach the vitamins, I check the ‘use by’ date to ensure that they haven’t expired while I was trying to open the bottle.

All of this may seem exaggerated, and as I tend towards the hyperbole, you will be forgiven for thinking so. However, long-suffering boyfriend can attest that these exact enactments are real.

This brings me (the very long way) to our giant clean out a few weeks back.

Our home is spacious for a one bedroom apartment, but it does have its spatial limitations and we were not optimizing the space that we do have.

It did not look like this

but it felt like it did.

I felt tightly bound by too much stuff, too much clutter, too much useless junk, too much excess packaging. I was starting to feel claustrophobic in my own home. I was freaking out.

I mentioned in passing to Ben that we should have a big clean out. He looked a little less than enthused. I tried talking it up.

‘Yeah, it’ll be great. We’ll go through the whole house and open everything up, pull everything out and then throw away what we don’t need. Then we can organize all the cupboards and drawers!’ The Virgo that rose in my Taurean chart when I was born was rising to the challenge. The Scorpio I live with was not.

I tried a different tack. ‘I hate my closet! I hate it. I hate that I can’t find anything and everything falls all over me and I hate it!’ This tantrum went on for another 45 seconds until strong arms went around me, and I calmed down. I looked up at the owner of the arms (Ben). ‘I want to clean out our place and make it feel like home again.’

He responded in the only way a man can when he is faced with big hazel puppy dog eyes, ‘Okay, Babe’.

And that is how it came to pass that one Saturday we opened every cupboard, drawer and box in our apartment. We pulled out everything and only put back what we wanted and needed. The crap was thrown out, recycled, donated and given away. (It is only crap to those who don’t want it). I bought tubs and baskets to organize all our stuff.

We took a trip to the tip and visited Goodwill. We filled 8 bags for the garbage and recycling. It took 6 hours, including the time to thoroughly clean our apartment.

We stripped bare and reconstructed our home, ridding our selves of all the excess packaging. At the end of a long day, we sat sipping a much-deserved glass of wine and admired our handiwork.

Devoid of clutter, our apartment felt like home again I no longer felt suffocated.

I still have my daily battle with actual excess packaging, but I am slowly becoming more skilled with my scissors.

No excuses

sandybarker

Three months and five days.

That’s how long it has been since I last blogged.

Now, as millions of people world-wide are setting (and already breaking) New Year’s resolutions, I find I have no plausible excuses left.  And so I blog.

Since I last wrote, I started working at Groundspeak, the days have turned dark and cold, and I no longer have to give myself pep talks to get out of bed in the morning.  These are all big changes for me.

Groundspeak has been all that I thought it would be when I went to the first interview back in July.  I walked out knowing that I wanted to work for these people, even if they only wanted me to make coffee and empty trash cans.  Fortunately, they want far more from and for me.

There is an incredible atmosphere at Groundspeak and it comes from the people who work there.  It is a positive, creative, clever, engaging, and supportive atmosphere which makes working there a pleasure.  Every day is different, and my boss, Jenn, frequently asks, “When you signed on to work for us, did you think you’d be doing this?”  The truthful answer is frequently, “No”.

Amongst the administrative tasks and responding to emails, I have worked on a project with the Geological Society of America, I am planning a three-day event for 100 in the UK, I am learning German, and I know how to simulate a generously proportioned chest with two stuffed frogs.

I am truly enjoying my work.

The weather on the other hand…

It is winter again.  I feel like there wasn’t really a summer, so it is sometimes hard for me to see the light at the end of the Winter tunnel.  Summer 2009 consisted of some Spring weather, some Autumn weather, and about a week of Summer when the mercury hit 95+ for 7 days in a row.

Seattle-ites moaned and stores ran out of fans, but I loved it.  And then it was gone.  Before I knew it the days got shorter and the temperature dropped in increments.  I have summer clothes that I never had a chance to wear, and most of them are currently vacationing with a friend in Columbia.  I thought I owed it to them.

I should say, though, that the Winter Solstice was marked with as much celebration at work as Christmas was.  “Hooray!!!  It is the shortest day of the year!  Longer, brighter and warmer from this point on!”  I had to agree that this is something worth noting, if not celebrating.  Especially as Solstice fell during one of the coldest weeks of the year: -8C daily maximums = “Brrrrrrrr”.

The last big change is that I no longer need to have a chat with myself each morning about getting out of bed and facing the day.  In August of last year I feared I was dropping into a deep funk.  I had landed my dream job, but wasn’t able to start.  Red tape was choking me and I feared that my new employers would give up the long wait to secure my work visa.  Two months later, the only thing standing between me and a new place of work was a stamp in my passport.

I should have been thrilled that the company was flying me back to Australia to finalize the paper work.  I would get to see family and friends (and the sun), and I could start working the day after I arrived back in Seattle.

I should have been ecstatic, but I was too terrified to feel anything but all-consuming fear.  “What if they say no and I can’t come back to my home (Seattle)?” became my mantra.  Friends were reassuring, the company was reassuring, Ben was reassuring.  “It will be fine.”  “It is a formality.”  “You’ll be back here and working before you know it.”

I wanted to believe them.

Then I talked to my dad.  “Darling, what will you do if they don’t give you the visa?”  Finally.  Someone actually said it aloud: my greatest fear.  Once he said it, he immediately dismissed the thought, “Don’t even think about that.  It will be fine, Darling.”  He was right, and so was everyone else.  I flew back to Sydney, had a (worry-filled) weekend with my family, attended the visa interview and walked out 15 minutes later with the visa.

Then I was on vacation in one of my favorite cities in the world.

And you know what happened then.  I flew home home to Seattle, started work, and lived out the rest of the year.

We celebrated Ben’s 30th with a huge party at our place.  We had a Thanksgiving dinner with 5 other couples, all close friends of ours, and then took off for a weekend away in a mountain cabin.

We enjoyed my first Seattle Christmas with my mom visiting from Las Vegas, and Ben’s Seattle family, and we saw in the New Year with dear friends, Nicole and Josh.

It was an extraordinary end to 2009, but I am very happy to start 2010.

I am healthy, I have love in my life, I have a great job and even greater friends, and soon we will be traveling to Europe.  I have much to be grateful for.  I can even spin the weather: how nice it is that I get to wear winter clothes, knee-high boots and my new (extremely cute) earmuffs.

So, here they are, my resolutions (it has to be done).

1. I will blog more frequently than once every three months and five days.  In fact, I will spend more time writing for myself than I have in the past few months.

2. I will continue to volunteer my time.

3. I will do flexibility training (yoga, Pilates) once a week.

4. I will learn something new (um, not quite sure what that will be yet).

Happy New Year to you all.  May it be prosperous, filled with adventure and spirited pursuits, and peaceful.

Leaving home and homeward bound

sandybarker

Sand1

I have been home in Sydney for the past week to finalize a work visa for my new job in Seattle.  The trip, while being ‘immigrationally necessary’, has been the greatest gift. 

When I landed the position at Groundspeak two months ago, I was thrilled – and then a little sad.  I realized that it meant I would not see Australia, my home, for at least a year and a half. 

Hence, the reason I have treated this week as a gift.  The work visa was approved on Monday morning, and while I awaited the return of my passport, I enjoyed every moment of being home.

I have hugged old friends and chatted excitedly on the phone to others.  I have swapped stories, gossip, concerns and triumphs, catching up on nearly a year of absense.  I have talked at length with my dad, and spent an evening of laughter and tears at my aunt and uncle’s dining table.

I have indulged in many cups of coffee made by top-notch baristas, and stocked up on Jaffas and BONDS undies.  I have taken dozens of photos of the most beautiful coastline in the world, filled a ziplock bag with sand from Bronte beach, and raided my storage boxes for much-loved books I want to take back to Seattle.  I brought one suitcase, and I am taking two back.  I have a tan. 

And after just a week on Aussie soil, and my accent is as thick as ever (Ben calls it my Aussie accent ‘reboot’).

Sand3

In a few hours I will be jetting across the Pacific Ocean on my way home.  When I get there it will be one hour after I left, which I love, because it feels like ‘time travel’.  I lost a Thursday on the way over, but am happily swapping it for two Saturdays. 

On arrival, after hugs and kisses, and unpacking and showering (is there anything that feels better after a long-haul flight?), Ben and I will head over to our friend’s place for their housewarming party.

I will get to hug my new friends, and swap stories about our escapades over the past week, and plans for our upcoming holiday season.  I will spend the rest of the weekend trying to get on Seattle time as quickly as possible, for on Monday morning I (finally) start my new job.  I cannot wait.

So, I leave home to fly home, just as I did a week ago.  When you have two places you call home, you are prone to twinges of homesickness, you will always miss loved ones, and you will sometimes slip into the annoying habit of comparing the two places – even if only to yourself. 

But you will also have more love in your life, more joy, more nostalgia, and more hope for the future than you can possibly imagine. 

I do.  And I am very grateful.  For all of it.

Geocached up

sandybarker

P1020885

So, I have landed a new job.

As soon as my work visa is sorted, I will be working for Groundspeak, who run Geocaching.com among many other things.

Geocaching, as a recreation, was new to me when I applied for the job.  I researched it, and decided that not only did I want to work with the people at Groundspeak, but that I wanted to become a geocacher.  And so I have.

Ben and I signed up right away – when I was mid interviews.  He has one of the fancy schmancy phones that does everything – including answer the phone – so we were all geared up with GPS technology.  We created an online profile, and searched for caches based on our zip code.

Voila!  Over 500 caches popped up within a 5 miles radius.  Um, yeah, let’s narrow that down a bit.

We chose one and headed out from our apartment towards the Seattle Center.  Unbeknown to us, we had picked the day of a huge festival to find our first cache.  Our first task was to navigate our way through the throngs of people all desperate to get their hands on freebies, corn on the cob, or beer in plastic cups.

We rounded a corner and headed down a ramp, finally easing away from the crowd.  You see, when you participate in geocaching, you want to keep a low profile.  No one wants their cache raided or stolen by ‘muggles’ (they have appropriated the term from the Harry Potter series), so you have to ensure that you are discreet.

Down the end of the ramp, and around the corner, the GPS assessed that we were ‘there’.  Now it was our job to find the cache within a 15-25 foot radius, not knowing exactly what we were looking for, and all the while trying to appear like we weren’t looking for anything at all.

It didn’t take long.  Ben took a chance on venturing a little way into the garden bed and it paid off.  The cache was a sealed Tupperware container, and enclosed was a log book, which we signed, and a few trinkets.  We took nothing, but left a coupon for free yogurt.

Success.

We were quite pleased with ourselves, despite the fact that the ratings for difficulty and terrain were both 1/5.  Still, we were no longer non-geocachers.  We went to a film that afternoon, and when we got home, logged onto our profile and shared our success.

Since then we have sought three other caches, two of which were successful.  The third is located in a small nature reserve in West Seattle.  We chose it because we had yet to get out to West Seattle, and it was deemed a 2.5/5 for both difficulty and terrain.  We wanted to kick it up a notch.

We discovered a few things that day.

Firstly, geocaching gets you out of the house, which is a particularly good thing when you realize that you are still in your pajamas at noon on a Sunday.

Secondly, if you choose caches in places you haven’t been to before, then you get to go somewhere new!  This may seem obvious, but it is delightful, nevertheless, to go somewhere  you haven’t been before.

West Seattle gave us this view of our neighborhood.

Queen Anne from West Seattle
Queen Anne from West Seattle

We also discovered the joy of finding a cache that someone else cannot find.  While we were looking for a Rating 1/1 cache close to where I took this photo, we saw other people looking for the same cache.  They were following the readings on their GPS, trying to be surreptitious, and left after they had looked in all the same places we had.  Only we decided to keep trying after they left.

At that moment I looked down and saw a small piece of paper next to my foot.  I picked it up; it was a fortune from a cookie.  It said “Your short-term goal will be realized soon.”  I showed it to Ben, just as he put his hand on the cache.  Cool!

The last thing we discovered that day was that you can try too hard.

We went in search of the 2.5/2.5 cache (that is 2.5/5 for difficulty and terrain).  We had some notes from the previous finders, and we had the location in our GPS, but under the dense canopy of trees, the GPS was rendered next to useless.

It got us in the general vicinity, but we could never seem to get close to the cache, no matter how deep we went into the woods.

At one point I had climbed down a steep incline, fought my way through giant ferns, knocked down about 5o spider webs, and traversed a fallen log that was 8  feet off the ground on its far side.  Nothing.  And the only way out was to repeat all of that in reverse.

After more than an hour we were both dirty, sweaty and a little baffled.  We went back to the main path, and even tried a couple of other small paths.  None of them could get us any closer to the location marked by the GPS.

P1020888_edited-1
Ben emerging from a path

We called it a day.

We walked back to the car, drove back across town and when we got home looked up the cache.  One note said, “The position of the cache is visible from the main path.”  We had tried too hard.  We had been searching for a cache that would have been rated much higher than 2.5/5 for either terrain or difficulty.  We had dug holes, looked in trees, and gone WAAAYYYYY off the path.

But we’ll go back.  I want that cache!

So, as I wait for the visa thing to be sorted, I am learning many wonderful and interesting things about all aspects of the geocaching world.

I have learned that in Western Australia there are  1818 caches.  I have learned that most people I know in North America are geocachers themselves, or know someone who is.

I have also activated the Geocoin given to me by one of the founders of Groundspeak during my final interview.  (Thank you Brian).  I have set its course for the UK, and then Australia in the hopes that it will find its way back to me here.  Isn’t that cool?

And, courtesy of my new boss, Jenn, I have my own geocaching profile now under the profile name, Sandy (for those who have accounts too – they’re FREE!) .  At the moment I share all my caching information with Ben and our joint profile.  Perhaps we will always cache together, as we are loving our mini adventures, but this gives us the chance to broaden our individual horizons too.

So, this is a little insight into my new world.  I hope to see you out in it.