domesticat's blog

I’m about to head out on the road again, and thanks to a quirk of airlines, I’ll be flying into Vermont and out through Boston. I’m doing it purely so I can roadtrip through Vermont, and see what there is to see.

I have no idea what I’ll see, but I’m taking my new camera rig.

Any suggestions?

Wondering why Vermont? See this map, and it’ll make sense:

Time to cross New England off of the list, once and for all!

When I put yesterday’s fresh rounds of travel into TripIt, I saw a line that summed up my year:

You’ve traveled 43,660 mi to 44 locations.

I nodded, thinking to myself about the places I’ve been, the people I’ve met — or reconnected with — and felt profoundly grateful. I’ve been welcome in a lot of places over the past year, slept on a few new couches, met delightfully new recombinations of humanity. All unique, none replaceable.

Extended amounts of travel, over time, affect you. The anonymity of airports begins to rub off on you after a while. If you’re not careful, your web of connections to the world at large comes at the price of feeling a little  less seated in the place where you ostensibly live: when you consider where to shop, or where to order takeout from, you first reset your expectations by asking yourself what city you are in today.

I’ve been dreaming about this week for a long time: the week where I finally had the carpet removed from our house, and put in the hardwood I’ve wanted for so long. 

It is Saturday, and I’m sitting with headphones on, and as usual, the details of the reality didn’t quite match my rosy envisionings. I didn’t anticipate that we’d find water damage on the right side of the chimney, requiring an immediate roof repair.

I imagined finished rooms. The bedrooms, hallway, office, and sewing room lived up to the expectation. The foyer just needs quarter-round to finish off the look, and the living room is half-completed. We tore it up with the best of intentions, 

but the water damage meant that we had to hold it in a partially-unfinished state.

Disclosure: rant.

The article I read this morning (“How Marissa Mayer Figured Out Work-At-Home Yahoos Were Slacking Off”) infuriates me. I understand why it does; it makes me defensive because I, too, am a work-from-home employee for a tech firm. In our company’s parlance, that phrase becomes “I am WFH.” I am WFH because my company’s closest office is over a thousand miles away from me, and it would be financially and socially disastrous for me to uproot my life. Nevertheless, it’s easy to fear that my company might someday make the same decision Yahoo did.

If I want to work at Acquia (and I do) I must either be extraordinarily successful at being a WFH employee or I will have to give up my completely paid-off house and take a six-figure mortgage in either Boston or Portland. 

I have what you may call “incentive.”

So, I can finally tell you. I got promoted.

I am moving off of the front lines, at my company, into more of a management role. I’m shifting from the badly-named tier 1 team (tier 1 at this company is FAR more than what you’d think of as “tier 1” support, probably T2 or T3 anywhere else) to a Training and Documentation Coordinator.

The question was pretty simple: how did one person in Alabama become a ticket-smashing machine while maintaining clear communication and genuine customer focus?

The follow-up question is even simpler: and how do we teach this intangible?

I have, in essence, a mission that is as singular as it is far-reaching: figure out what made me awesome at my job, even though I was never the most gifted coder or diagnostician, and transmit culture, values, and troubleshooting skills to every new employee that comes after me.

Care, feed, and garden my team.

After agonizing over the idea for over a year, and fretting and wondering if it could ever work out, I’ve set a major house plan in motion today: we’ve ordered replacement flooring for the house. We’re taking the yuppie plunge, and shifting from carpeting to engineered flooring, because that’s the best quality we can get, given that our house is on a slab foundation.

So … yeah. That crazy idea is finally a thing, a real thing that we’ve now put real (ouch) money (ouch) down for. We caught the beginning-of-year sale that the local flooring shop has, and we’re paying someone to do the furniture moving and installation, but this is finally happening.