Daily prayer

I've needed to add regular daily prayer into my life for a long time. This is gaining especial importance now that the girls are becoming old enough to actively pray with me (and prayer is becoming easier - it's so much easier to do something "for the children and family" than "for myself").

Enter this website: Daily Catholic Prayer. Simple, but good.

I've been trying to remember to say grace before meals, at least at home. The girls are eager to join in the ritual of prayer, even though they do not fully understand it. Children are so eager to say, "Thank you!" I need to add prayer in before bed as well, but ritual prayers alone do not feel right to me.

I think examination of concience is perfect, however. The girls are so eager to be polite and "nice". "Thank you", "I'm sorry", and "Please" come naturally to them. Saying one of each before bed, to God, seems so natural and . . . right. And ageless. These words are appropriate at all stages of life - they are limitless in their capacity for sophistication and expression, and grow as we do.

Maybe someday we'll be ready for daily Mass or Rosaries, but for now I'll focus on a humble foundation. This temple for worshipping the Lord is not yet ready for a steeple.

My favorite gem: A prayer for work.
"Direct, we beg You, O Lord,
our actions by Your holy inspirations
And grant that we may carry them out
with Your gracious assistance,
That every prayer and work of ours
may begin always with You,
and through You be happily ended.
Amen."

What kind of job I'm looking for

First, my background:
- I have a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Washington, which is a pretty good school for CS (it's often ranked next after Berkeley - around the 5th / 6th best school in the country when I graduated).
- I have 6 months experience as a software development engineer intern.
- Since graduation, I have worked in the test discipline.
* Nine months as an Software Test Engineer contractor at Microsoft (MS) (working for Volt)
* One year as a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) contractor at MS (working for Volt)
* Eight months in current position as MS SDET in Internet Explorer
- I may be making a career switch to development - but need to conduct some informational interviews first to learn what QA outside of MS looks like.

I'll post a link to my resume once I get around to updating it.

So the first thing I actually need to do is to conduct informational interviews at various companies to see what their 1-2 years experience test development and entry-level software development work is like. I've heard that testing outside of MS is very different, and I'm not sure I'm interested in a test career outside of this company.

Right now, what I need most is contacts for informational interviews with software development professionals and software testing professionals in a variety of companies. I will not be looking for a job in these interviews - rather, I will be trying to decide what kind of company I am interested in working in, and whether I want to continue my career in software testing or make a career move to software development. If I spend time on unemployment, I will *need* to make contact on specific jobs, so I should use this time to figure out the big picture information I will need to make those contacts useful.

I am especially interested in companies that match any of the following points:
- Are in or very close to Everett
- Have great benefits, especially health benefits
- Are concerned with making the world a better place, either by directly working towards that goal (like Catholic Charities . . . but I don't think they're hiring for my role right now) or by taking steps to give as a company and encouraging giving and volunteering by their employees (MS does a great job with this)
- Are full of enthusiastic, active people who really love what they do
- Have room for flexible schedules for employees (like 7 to 4 schedules instead of 8 to 5, or "just get the work done and be here from 10 to 4" - like at MS)

I'm still working out what my needed and desired salaries are. I'd prefer full-time work with a great company, but contract work at a company that I *think* is great would be OK if I can find a good, small, personal contracting agency.

Yeesh. Re-reading this post is giving me the shakes. It's very real. The only thing I've been through in my life that had a similar emotional impact was finding out that we were expecting twins. Of course, my first reaction there was happiness - but then I started reading about the health risks and challenges, and I was really roller-coasting emotionally for a while, between excited anticipation and fear. Here, the first reaction was being upset - but the roller-coasting is pretty similar. As long as I keep pushing forward when I'm feeling optimistic, I should be able to coast through the down-periods and just focus on prayer until I'm ready to get back to work again.

I know other people who have been through similar problems before - so that's an advantage over the twin pregnancy. I can talk to friends who have been through this before. Obviously, it's not the end of the world. The really scary parts of job loss are fairly far down the road - a lot of things have to go wrong before we're really in trouble.

More of an update on the job issues

I have a bit more information about what will be happening with my job. It's bad and good. I can say that I expect to be working at another company in the near future, and I don't expect to be fired.

I'm almost looking forward to things changing now. If I ignore how much my knees are shaking, that is. I'm trying to figure out what I want to get out of this change - dreams I was putting off because things were just settling down and I wasn't ready to change things up again - and this situation is also giving our family a much-needed shake-up. Our family seems to struggle with luxery and comfort. We hang together much better in tough times.

Please pray for us to be given to from the gifts of the Holy Spirit, espceially fortitude. And give thanks to St. Ignatius for that wonderful truism, "Pray as if everything depended on God. Work as if everything depended on you." I may be paraphrasing - I've never read the original text, just others quoting him. But those words describe very well what I need to be doing right now.

I'm on the clock right now, so I need to get back to work (I guess this is my 15 minute break - I don't usually take those, I normally blog during lunch or just before or just after work). I'll post on what kind of job I'm looking for during lunch, in case anyone has any practical help to offer - and also because I need to firm it up in my own head.

Thank you for your comments and prayers. I can't tell you how much they help.

Prayers please

I have good reason to think that if I don't start doing better at work, I may lose my job, and I'm feeling very scared. I don't know if I can deal with yet another round of changes while I'm still feeling exhausted from moving and all the family stress. I don't have much optimism left right now. Logically, I know we'll get through this one way or another,that God is there - but emotionally, I'm just tired.

I'm hoping I can pull everything together enough to keep this job. I suspect I'll actually feel better once I get through the shock - although it shouldn't have been such a shock. I knew things were going badly. In a way, it's good to have my intuition confirmed.

I was hoping to have a little energy to start looking at the presidential candidates. Guess I'm not going to get that for a while.

I'm trying to pull myself together enough that I don't break into tears on the bus. I cry very easily, so that's going to be tough. I'm feeling a little bad about feeling so bad - a friend of a friend recently learned that she had cancer,then learned that it could be contained. I know people go through harder challenges, but I just wish I didn't feel so darned guilty for putting my family into *this* challenge.

Got a lot done this weekend!

This was a great weekend - lots happened, lots got done.

We started out taking a walk as a family to the local produce store. They give major discounts for cash but we only had $15 in bills, so it was kind of fun to pick out the best values and get the most possible for our money. We walked out with four nectarines, four yellow apples, 2 lbs. grapes, two bananas, 10 lbs. potatoes, a coconut, 4 baby avocados (cute, but turned out mediocre), and 2 mangoes. I was pretty happy with that haul :-)

We went home, ate fruit, and the girls napped while DH and I did a few chores and then played an online MMO for a bit. When the girls woke up we just hung out for a couple of hours, but tempers started fraying as we headed into the evening. Finally we just packed up, gassed the car at the cheapest local station, grabbed food from the AM PM, and went to the beach for an inpromptu picnic. Everyone had fun and came home tired.

This morning, we dropped the girls off at the grandparents, then went out for pho (cheap Vietnamese soup - wonderfully delicious). We talked a bit about how to organize things a bit better now that DH is in charge. He said he'd be interested in me making a regular meeting agenda, so I'll get around to that when I get a little time. We're doing our meetings twice a month, the 1st and 16th.

Then we went to Mass, and got the wonderful treat of praise and praying without being distracted by our children or by accusatory glances from older members of the congregation. After Mass, I planted the five tomato plants and pepper plant that the grandparents had given us - after first uprooting a huge patch of daisies and clearing out a little more of the evil "corner of weeds" growing up behind the shed. When the girls came home, we watched a couple episodes of "The Adams Family" together (nursing . . . sigh) while DH cooked spaghetti squash and hotdogs, with cheese on the side - and then headed back out so I could get in another hour of weeding. The corner of weeds is now almost done, and it was impressive - containing no less than 5 weeds over 6 feet tall, most of which had fallen over under their own weight, as well as a multitude of other random plants. I found a few surviving flowering plants hidden under the vines, milkweeds, and grass, too!

And now DH is cooking a little extra food for us, enough that I will be able to take some of it in to work for lunch tomorrow! I am quite happy indeed.

When the rain stops, God sends rainbows and roses

We all know the old saying, "When it rains, it pours." I want to add my own addendum to that - the title of this post. When it rains, it pours, but when the rain stops then God sends rainbows and roses.

I've been telling myself that lots of parts of life are going through waves - they have their upturns and their downturns. Normally things are heading downhill in just one or two areas at a time, and I feel buffered by the upturns. This time, I felt like there were gradual downturns pretty much everywhere. But when you get to the bottom of the downturn, you usually hit an upturn. And since everything went down at the same time, now everything is going up at the same time, for at least a while.

So we're getting rainbows - the natural fallout from a storm. There's the joy of rebuilding a strained relationship (because relationship building is more fun than maintaining). Free and easy smiles look much prettier when they haven't been seen for a while. They are our reminders of our wedding vow to each other that things will never get so bad that we try to wipe out the past in a flood of rain and misery (what else can divorce be?) and start over - we can always keep working from where we are, and will always keep trying again "until death do us part".

Then there are the roses - the fresh, good things that come up as a result of the storm, that would not flower without the rain. DH's growing pride in our home, still seeming a touch fragile, but definitely sprouting. The clean home from the maid service that cleaned for the first time yesterday (but the pre-cleaning we did - led by DH - was the real win). There's my deeper understanding that even meddling that someone else says they wants - is still meddling, and is still getting in the way of them doing it themselves. Sometimes even a marraige needs tough love (oh, dear, that means it'll be my turn some day . . . LOL).

The rain analogy continues further - the mess and debris that builds up in our heads is cleared away a bit more after the storm, like dust washed away from leaves and rocks, and the world seems fresher, cleaner, somehow better defined. We can see better the things we care about, and even the air is clearer - allowing us to see further, to view mountain peaks in the distance and grasp better the bigger world around our little niche of life.

True, the ground here is still a bit soggy, and will stay that way for a while. However, that's no reason not to go outside in my bare feet, soak it in, and marvel for a bit.

And now - it's time for me to put my metaphorical shoes back on, take one last look around - and metaphorically head back inside my all-too-literal office and get back to my very literal work.

Getting organized

I'm starting to finally make progress on the pile of disorganization in my life!

I'm using a system called "Getting Things Done" (GTD), described in the book by the same name by David Allen. I like it because it gets to the heart of what I like about most organization systems, and because it works well with computerized tools.

What I like about the basic structure of organization - the list - is that it gets things off of my mind - but until I read GTD, I didn't realize that fact. What I normally don't like is that I don't follow up with my lists, because it's so hard to find the information I need without reading the whole list and sorting through it mentally. GTD has some ways to handle that. and with an online system like "Toodledo" to help, I'm now able to look at my to-do list and, at the top, always see the things that are most important to me right now. With computer features like filtering and sorting, GTD becomes very, very powerful.

For example: The main question I ask at work is, "What should I be doing right now?" I look at my GTD list, and filter by context (work), date (I don't want to see anything that can't be started until tomorrow), and actionability (I have items in my todo list that can't be started until something else is done, and they are labelled to reflect this). Once I have all the actionable items I can do today at work, I sort them by due date and priority (Toodledo rolls these together into one concept called "Importance", and so I just use that), and then by how long the work will take. I do the shortest tasks first, just to get them off of my mind.

The flip side is that I need to regularly add items into my list. I handle this by writing everything down in a notebook when I am away from my computer, and then adding it into my system once a day (I have a repeating top-priority todo for this that is automatically added every day for me by Toodledo). The final part I haven't done yet, but it is to go through the system once a week or so and make sure the list is in order - delete outdated items, readjust due dates, and generally clean house.

So far, this system looks good. Someday I'll read back on this post with 20/20 hindight, and know if it really worked for me or not - maybe I'll leave myself a comment?

Hrm, a benefit to the online diary: I can write notes on my entries when I look back at them from future years. That's a fun idea.