Life is good.

Progress report on 2012 aspirations:

• Give more – I really enjoyed increasing my donations of both money and clothes, and want to continue this upward trend. [No donations yet this year, but will start making them soon, now that I've filed my taxes and started settling into work. I have started doing some volunteer work for my college choir, so that's going to be a nice addition to the mix.]
• Lose some – I gained a rather unprecedented ten pounds in the last year, mostly due to my nighttime eating, so I’d like to get back to my normal weight. [I've lost a couple of pounds through a combination of changing my night time snack food from peanut butter to cottage cheese and using my chair less when at my desk. Slow and steady...]
• See people – I find myself becoming something of a hermit (partly to spend prodigious amounts of time reading, sleeping, and watching TV, but partly out of sheer laziness). I should spend more time with people. [I've done well about seeing people more so far this year, doing some more social activities on the weekend, and it hasn't actually affected my reading, sleeping, or TV watching that much.]
• Doubt less – I want to be more appreciative and less cynical and regain some measure of optimism. [This is actually kind of taking care of itself. Working on new products with amazing people has changed my outlook a lot.]

Work is going really well. The people are brilliant, and I’m starting to get to know more people on the team, so that I am less wary of sitting in a non-Legal building for more than 80% of the time. I feel like I’m starting to learn more about the products and the issues involved in making hardware, I’ve gained more credibility, and I’ve started having some founder-level meetings (which I never did on my old products), and I’m learning about the kind of information he wants, and the right level of detail and pacing. I even got him to agree with me (instead of the product manager) on a couple of points yesterday, so I think I’m starting to get the hang of this thing. I imagine that this is a little bit like what it feels like learning to ride a bull in a rodeo — completely different from anything else you’ve done, and somewhat scary, because if you mess up, you’re going to get run over by a bull, but pretty awesome if you’re able to figure out how to do it. We released a cool video for the robot cars this week, and have some exciting times ahead. I’m having fun with some of the guys on my team — one of the engineers wants to see if we can patent some goofy ideas we were riffing on last night, which totally cracks me up (but how cool would it be if non-technical lawyer me ended up as an inventor on some robot car patents??) It’s amazing how much of a difference it can make to love your work. I’m making the same money as I was before I switched to this group, working more, and taking less time off, but I love my job so much more than I did in the weird post-reorg world. Superman  is still somewhat mired in that swamp, and I’m trying to convince him to try to join my group, instead. 

Also, I just ordered new business cards, partly to reflect my promotion from a year ago, but mostly because this group has its own cards that are different from the rest of the company. (Different colors on the front and back! And laser cutouts!) Yes, sometimes it’s the little things.

Superman and I just spent a weekend in New Orleans with a couple of my college friends. We ate a ton, went to some museums, walked all over the city, saw some live jazz, and caught up with each other. It reminded me of my weekend trips in Europe, when my friends and I would spend a whirlwind weekend in a city, really digging into whatever food, sights, or activities we could in just two days. Lots of fun, and hoping to do more of this, although the length of flights here can make things more difficult. We also need to take a real vacation soon — Superman has accrued the maximum of 30 days, and I’ve got about 20 days backlogged (I look back on my last job, when I got more days off per year and always used them all, and can hardly remember what it was like to have so much time off). We’re thinking of going to Scotland in August, but no real planning has happened so far. 

I’ve been spending a lot of time comparing different periods of my life, like how I had so much time as a student, but no money, then no time at the law firm, and enough money (although my student loans seemed so huge then that it never really felt like I had any money), then a decent amount of time when I was in Europe, and decent money (that was a good balance — I ended up saving pretty minimally, traveling a ton, and not really thinking about the future, because it all felt like one long hiatus from real life), and now I have less time, but three times as much money as I had before (also, even though my income was always decent, knowing that my student and car loans are no longer bigger than my savings account, and that I have enough savings to last through a five year dry spell just makes me feel much more secure). I think when I wasn’t really loving the products I was working on, I was definitely a bit wistful about my times in Europe, but now that I love my work again, I don’t mind the hours, days, weeks, and months, and although I wouldn’t mind taking more time off and traveling like I used to, I also know that there’s a decent chance I can retire by the time I’m 45, and have the rest of my life to not wake up on Mondays, unless it’s to go diving (when I talk about that to my immigrant parents, especially my dad, who is still working at the age of 70, they are surprised to think that someone might do that, just retire at 45, but hey, one of the reasons I work and don’t have kids is so that one day, I might be able to just do… nothing).

Another big reason I’m happier is that summer is coming! The days are getting longer, the trees have been in bloom since February, the skies are blue, and I am just so much happier when I leave work, and the sun is still up.

So, yeah… after some months of doubt and uncertainty, life is good again. Really good.

Time for the weekend: quiet night tonight, Rock Band with friends tomorrow, Hunger Games and a revisit of our favorite local two Michelin star molecular gastronomy restaurant on Sunday.