I woke up this morning to the first frost of the season. It was chilly and I had to scrape a thin layer of ice formed on the windshield before I drove off to work.
Things are continuously looking grim. I went back to work and one week after I started, they laid off 10 people out of about 200. Pat's work is also laying off 5% before the year's end and I worry about our stability. I walk down Chestnut Street in Philadelphia and I see that many of the stores are vacant now. It wasn't like that a year ago.
A few years ago, I wasn't concerned about lay offs at all. But now, with a mortgage and 2 children, stability and security takes on a bigger role. We'll see what happens. Usually, we're just too busy to dwell on this too much.
Now, I'm a working mom of 2 children. It's chaotic. Since I cannot cook dinner after I get home with 2 kids hanging on to me, I prepare much of it at night. This means that after dinner and some play, after we give them bath, read, and bedtime, our night is far from over. We clean the kitchen, wipe down the floor (because it's really gross every night), do the dishes, pack lunch, then prepare for the next night's dinner. By the time we are done, there's little time to just kick back. But I won't complain since I do still have a job and I assume that's the role most parents with small children play.
Last week, we broke both of our digital cameras. Sisi dropped one and I dropped the other. That sucks but I quickly replaced one since we need to document our kids. They just grow up way too fast. Sisi started taking a few steps. Just a few but it's so cute.
Today at work, I learned something so amazing that it totally made my day and made me angry at the same time. A year of absence from CAD didn't affect me much but I sometimes draw a blank on certain commands. Today, I was preparing a sketch for an ASI and I drew a blank on how to draw a viewport. My colleague showed me how then he said "you know how to scale, right?" So I said "of course, zoom, 1/48xp." Then he gave me a shocked, are-you-serious kind of look. He said "yeah, sure, but you can just click here and do this." Wow. Now, why didn't anyone teach me this before. So I asked if this is a new function for 2009. He told me that it's been around since 2000. What the !?X?. Until last week, I was trying to calculate how to scale 3/8"=1'-0" and I still don't know if my calculation was correct. And now I find out that I could have done all this with a click of a mouse. Really, why didn't anyone tell me.
This past weekend, Mercer county had their annual touch-a-truck day. They bring all these vehicles used for municipal services and let the kids go all over them. Terran's favorite was of course, the garbage truck. He liked the driver seat but he absolutely loved standing in the back and hanging on to the truck. For some reason, that garbage truck was the cleanest truck I've ever seen. We got Sierra on a USPS truck and she loved it. We all had a blast and Terran kept asking when we can go back. Not til next year sweetie.... Photos to be uploaded.
Terran is so much fun because he has so much to say these days. Ask Terran who he's going to vote for and he will say "Obama!" And he will say "I'm Obama kid!"
