A little bit of this...

You know in movies when they show the passage of time they will show a calendar with the days ripping off? Yah...that. That's what this year has felt like. It's late May for heaven's sake!

I swear I just woke up and was January 1st. And as I sit here typing I sure wish I had more to show for the first 5 months of this year, but alas...it is was it is.

So to get you caught up...here's a list.

1. I'm so very happy for my friend The Patron Saint of the Smart Mouths today for she is getting married. She's kissed a lot of frogs to find this gentleman. And while I've never met him and really only know the Patron Saint via blog land (and one meeting in NY several years ago) I can't help but smile for the happiness she's found.

2. Work. Work. and more work. Things were looking up. For an entire week I didn't feel the need to work extra hours. Then I evoked some power by saying a client's name out loud and it must have released ALL the clients. See, I have 32 projects currently. That's a lot, I won't lie. But the reason we can handle that many projects is because a good 20 is all that is usually active. I have 28 active right now and all of them are needy. Throw in a catastrophic mistake or two and you get yourself behind and find yourself working 12 to 14 hours a day. Don't get me wrong, I still love my job, but man...I'm getting tired. Here's just a peak of one day:

This is my dashboard in Wrike...the cool new tool we use to manage ourselves.

3. The Niece and I walked the Color Run last week with some other friends. They all walk WAY faster than I do. Way faster. The next day I was so dang sore...a good sore, but man all I could think of was I shouldn't be that sore from walking. It was a much smaller Color Run than last year. In fact, sponsored by an entirely different group. Still we had a blast and the weather held out for us. Snooki the Orange Duck went with us. She only came out once...for this photo...she's shy.

The Niece and I before the walk.

After. See...we aren't as dirty as last year.

4. Last Sunday was Sunday dinner. I went Mexican this month. I really need to start pulling out more recipes and getting a bit more creative. Work makes me not have the time and I feel like my friends are suffering from the lack of new and different food at Sunday dinner (I really don't feel that bad...). At any rate, I made The MomUnit's enchiladas and tacos. I was craving the enchiladas for several weeks now. Unfortunately my local store doesn't carry the enchilada sauce that makes these out of this world. So I was just meh about them. I'm going to start searching for that enchilada sauce that I like and stock up.

5. Sometime last week as I was closing my computer after 14 hours of work I realized I need a break. I know, Dah, right? But more than that, I need to take myself somewhere and unplug for an entire day. Some place I can just sit and think. Just me and perhaps a journal. I feel like my life is very unfocused right now (well, focused on work) and I miss me. Not sure what or where or when yet, but I'm noodling it around in the noggin.

Until next time...and God only knows when that will be. I'll leave you with this.

A Week in the Life...

By the time Friday came around, I was so very glad to have last week past me. It quickly became one of those weeks where everything  I touched turned to crap. I speaking mostly of work things that is.

It's bound to happen really. When you manage as many projects as I have, you are going to make mistakes. And I can accept mistakes. I can. I cannot, however, except as many mistakes as I happened to unearth last week. In fact, there was a point in time on Friday where I thought about quitting and getting a job at McDoanlds or something.

But the thing about mistakes, they make you stop and pause a moment. I had to consider the process and all the reasons behind these mistakes. Was it all me? Was our process flawed in some way? Did I need to revisit how I manager certain aspects of my job and the resources involved? Once I started digging into it more, I was not the only one responsible for these mistakes. There were other players involved.

Not that I'm one to point fingers, because I'm not. If I want to avoid this feeling moving forward, there are a few adjustments that need to be made and some rather uncomfortable and difficult conversations to have.

And above all, last week is done. No need to linger on the bad.

So instead, I went to the Seattle Sounders game yesterday with the Niece and another friend of mine.

It all started with breakfast at McCoys Firehouse. We couldn't just have breakfast. No we had to start our pregame drinking early. My friend R is a big fan of whisky. He has some favorite that he orders every time we go and every time I drink it I know it's going to warm me to my toes and my lips will be numb in no time.

The Niece had never been to a Soiunders game before so we opted to do the March to the Match. Which is just a bunch of fans (hundreds of fans) meeting in a park near the stadium and with the "crazy" fans walk down the road to the stadium chanting and singing.

The sun was out and it was getting warm. We had fantastic seats. And above all, the Sounders won. Which, by the way, we weren't expecting. So there's that.

Agent Orange came out to watch with us.

And what is it with the National Anthem? I can sit on my couch and sing it without any emotion. But you put me in a crowd of 40,000 people all singing our National Anthem...it gets me all misty eyed.