inter alia.

Evidently I don't write blog posts these days. I started the blog when I went to Chile, and happily my life is not so eventful as it was in Chile; I'm unraveling a bunch of emotional stuff that I don't want to blog about, and then I have this fabulous job, but I'm a manager and that comes with an extra need for discretion. Even the dog has settled into a routine, as long as that routine involves alternating between "lying on hot pavement," "lying on Chris," and "lying next to Chris," with food scattered throughout, especially if the humans are thoughtful enough to drop bits of cheese.

Walks are also important.

(I've considered assembling some sections of fence just so she can stick her head through them.)

Work is quite nice, on the whole, although I have 14 direct reports across 4 different teams, and both those numbers are too big. I mean, I can do it, inasfar as it can be done, and I'm doing it successfully, but it's far from the best thing either for me or for my army of dreaded minions. I can't track the work very deeply, or get much into the product/business end of things, and it turns out that with this much scope, it can be very difficult to catch little problems before they become medium-size problems.

Anna got the house painted! It was a horrid, peeling taupe, and now it's a nice light sage with a purple door. It spruces up the whole intersection. She's currently mulling over plans for our small back patio, and advancing the garage replacement as quickly as possible, which is not very quick at all: we didn't know this at the time, but if replacing the garage were going to be easy, someone would have paid cash for the house long before we got to it.

The boy! The boy is very large, scarcely qualifying as boy-sized, now. He's scarce months away from being taller than me, and he's 12! We may end up putting bumper-foam on our doorway lintels, until he gets the hang of whatever awe-inspiring height he ends up at. (I don't think he's gangly or awkward. He's always had his own quite distinct manners of movement, and so far he's just a bigger, adolescent version of that.)

The Snugglehaus abides.