Grimm no more

Relief is on the horizon at work.  My new co-worker started on Tuesday, and of the 115 extra cases I'm handling right now, I have given her 6 of them!  And I'm planning to give her 5 more this week. 


Last night I left the office after 8.  Oddly enough, I was grateful for it. 


I was grateful that I was able to put in the extra time yesterday to allow myself to "tread water" (i.e., maintain an even number of screaming emergencies that need attention in my in-box, instead of going home with a higher number than where the day started). 


I was also grateful that working late didn't mean leaving a lonely or pissed off husband at home -- he was at the office past 8 too.  Crazy stuff happening in his work world lately. 


I was also grateful that working past 8 is novel for me.  I had a job for about 7 years where I was in the office from 8:30ish until after 10 pm, and frequently after midnight, on a vast majority of days.  That was the normal there, and it wasn't all horrible (though I did gain weight and felt like my dating life was basically on hold), I made lots of good friends, got great experience, etc. (of course being paid well never hurts). 


And finally, I was grateful that both of our extra effort and hard work is noticed, and at least in my case, appreciated (probably in my husband's too, but we haven't discussed).  Yesterday at 7:30, as my husband and I touched base about when we were going home and what we'd do for dinner, both of our bosses were still working as well.  We decided to give it another hour and then touch base again.  In that hour, sometime around 8:15 maybe?, my boss left.  On his way out, he told me that he'd talked to our divisional president that day, and I've been approved to go with them to a conference at the end of January that I really wanted to attend.  Usually our company hates sending people to stuff like that -- lost revenue plus travel expenses -- so this felt extra special. 


But anyway, all that wasn't the point of this "short" post.  When I finally did get home, I heated up some food from the prepared section of the grocery store and sat down to watch TV while I ate and while I waited for my husband to get home.  I made a decision then, and then I waited until he got home to make sure he approved of my decision -- and then I deleted about 50 hours of Grimm off our DVR.  We just weren't watching it.  I hope I'm not missing out on some awesome show.  We liked the first season okay, but then never got back into it. 


Now our DVR has all kinds of space and it feels oddly freeing.  No pressure to clear it off (not that there was any pressure in the past, or that if there was, it motivated me to actually do anything about it). 


Not planning to add anything new.  Our current "regularly record and watch" list is:
Law & Order SVU
Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown (and any of his other shows)
Fareed Zakaria GPS
Amazing Race (my show, not "ours")


And our current "record but don't regularly watch list" is: 
Americans (not airing currently)
Bachelor/Bachelorette (not airing currently)
Tyrant (not airing currently)
Simpsons (rarely watch but still record)
Family Guy (rarely watch but still record)


The other show we're watching ... no surprise to people who know me in the real world ... Amazon Prime's series The Man in the High Castle.  Like it so far, only about halfway through the season. 

Status check

Radio silence around here lately because there hasn't really been much to report. 

Life is just ticking along.  Working, running, all that stuff. 

Work is actually getting better.  The new attorney hired into our group in early January has taken about 3-4% of my caseload, but every little bit helps.  Especially since three of the ones she took are in active litigation, and two of them have upcoming mediation settings (in Indy) in the next 60 days.  That's a big relief for me.  The other thing that has helped is that the flow of incoming cases seems to have abated a little.  I feel like for the last month, each Friday morning, my email inbox is less of a disaster than it was the week before.  It always tends to blow up on Fridays and over the weekend, but if I can actually reduce the number that sit needing attention each week, I feel like I'm making progress.  Right now, the number is down into the mid-50s.  A lot, yes, but way better than the 80-110 that it seems like it's been since we came back from vacation several months ago and I was in the thick of overwork.  I've been doing better on the getting big reports drafted on schedule, though I still drag my feet a bit in getting going on the ones that require the most work.  I'm totally staying on top of voicemail (I have one message that's a few weeks old that I need to return, but I've been doing the behind-the-scenes stuff necessary to return it).  And the two unpleasant cases I've had in the last few months (also pretty much just these two ever), seem to be getting a bit better -- one settled, and one will hopefully settle. 

Running is also slowly getting better.  I'm not losing weight, and I'm kind of still in an eat-some-crap-every-day rut, but at least it's not getting worse.  I think giving up liquids (other than water, morning green smoothie, and nuun on long runs) is helping.  I've been surprised how much I alcohol and soda.  I almost never drink soda, but crave it when I can't have it.  And I don't drink much, but I seem to want that too.  I'm not at all surprised that I'm missing espresso and tea...  Anyway, back to running.  My times have been getting stronger, but I still have a lot of work to do.  I ran my favorite 5k of the year this weekend.  Two good miles, and then I slowed by about 40 seconds in the final mile.  I ended up only about 90 seconds off a course PR for me, and only about 2.5 minutes off a PR.  That's a lot for a 5k, but at the same time, it's not as bad as I would have guessed it would be.  I put it in a race predictor and it has me about 7 minutes off a re-Q, but maybe with a flatter course...  The downside to two pretty good miles -- I feel like I tweaked my calf.  Super tender to the touch.  Had it checked out on Sunday (ummm, after I ran 13 miles), got instructions to take a few days off, ice, light massage.  Anyway, aside from potentially a few days off now, I've at least been showing up for my runs and I feel like that's the biggest step.  If I keep doing that, the work will eventually pay off.  I never really committed to a spring half, so I may just not run one unless I come across something good.  I'm considering the Lakefront Marathon in Wisconsin for the fall.  I really wanted to run Steamtown, but I think given our schedules, we're going to be flying over to Europe on October 8, so once again, travel choices leave me with limited marathon options. 

Travel for fun has been non-existent since Mardi Gras, which was already exactly one month ago.  We were thinking about trying to combine a work trip that I have in early April to SoCal with a trip up to San Fran to see my new nephew, but thankfully, we hadn't banked on that because now it looks like the work trip will fall apart.  I have been travelling for work, but mostly just overnight trips every couple weeks.  Philly has been horrendously cold!  But April has a lot of work travel on the books -- a couple Philly, one SoIll (does that work like SoCal?  Southern Illinois?), and maybe the SoCal trip.  In all, looks like I'll be on the road most weeks, but hopefully mostly short trips.  So now we're trying to plan fun trips for May, which should be better work wise.  We're planning on DC and Charlottesville for my reunion and to see my bestie, and then maybe San Fran and wine country around Memorial Day. 

So I don't really know how to report I've been filling my time other than working and working out.  Last week I finally was better about doing some running commutes to and from work.  Of course, last week was the week I got back on the horse -- because it was spring break so it looked like traffic wasn't bad.  Oh well, it was good for me.  Now I just have to sustain it! 

We've been watching far too much TV in the last month or so.  What we've been watching lately:
Bosch (detective series on Amazon Prime, we both read and love the books), just finished
The Bachelor (guilty pleasure, husband watches it with me to be nice), just finished
Amazing Race (more me than my husband), in progress
The Americans (both love it), in progress
Better Call Saul (just me), in progress, 1 episode on the dvr
House of Cards (both love it), waiting to watch season 3, our netflix isn't showing up on the tv and I don't like the idea of watching it all on the computer (which we did with Bosch).

Anyway, that's the current status of things here! 

25 years

Wow, can you believe the Tian'anmen Square standoff was 25 years ago yesterday?  I heard that on the news and it was surprising.  I wasn't exactly politically aware at the time, but it was maybe the start?  It's definitely one of the first events on the news that I remember. 

Other memories of significant news events before I really started paying attention:  Oliver North's testimony (my parents watched a lot of it), the Challenger explosion (I watched live in elementary school), the Berlin Wall coming down (I was babysitting and it was on the front page of the paper sitting on their coffee table, and it was on the news when I turned on their TV), and obviously OJ. 

I paid some attention to the news in junior high since my history teacher gave us quizzes about current events, but not much of it stuck with me.  Regardless, I remember that on June 4, 1989, I was slowly starting to understand more about the broader world. 

This is what the Today Show said about it on Wednesday morning to mark the anniversary:

"Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Tian'anmen Square massacre and there is heavy security in central Beijing.  As tanks rolled in on June 4, 1989, Chinese troops opened fire on student protesters.  More than a million demonstrators had gathered in central Beijing in the lead-up to the incident.  Video of a lone protestor standing in front of a line of moving tanks became one of the 20th century's most powerful symbols.  The exact death toll is unknown but is widely believed to be in the hundreds."

Per The Atlantic:

Twenty-five years ago today, the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) violently cleared Beijing's Tiananmen Square of protesters, ending a six-week demonstration that had called for democracy and widespread political reform. The protests began in April of 1989, gaining support as initial government reactions included concessions. Martial law was declared on May 20, troops were mobilized, and from the night of June 3 through the early morning of June 4, the PLA pushed into Tiananmen Square, crushing some protesters and firing on many others. The exact number killed may never be known, but estimates range from several hundred to several thousand. China's censors are blocking Internet access to the terms "six four," "candle," and "never forget," broadening extensive efforts to silence talk about the 25th anniversary of China's bloody June 4 crackdown.

And that Atlantic article I linked actually has some really amazing photos if you have a moment to check them out.

Two sides to every story?  I don't know.  I have very complicated feelings about China now, more complicated actually since we visited.  Things seemed much more straight-forward sitting in the US and thinking about theories. 

But one thing that remains crystal clear to me is that the remarkability of the fact that apparently most people in China today do not know what the image of the man standing before the tank signifies when shown photos.   Students in the universities today and young adults particularly have no knowledge of these events.  It's amazing how much a free press and free speech can do in terms of preserving a national recollection of significant events.  The concept of having those search terms blocked really boggles my mind in ways.  Given the new EU laws about "erasing" parts of the internet for individuals, coupled with our reliance on the internet, makes me wonder how easily we could go down this path of altered history ourselves, particularly as Holocaust survivors and now their children pass away.  That's another tangent completely. 

Any memories of June 4, 1989?  Other big news events memorable from your youth?  (I'm usually not one to pose questions directly as those who comment generally have something interesting to say without a prompt, but I'm particularly interested in this!)

In honor of the anniversary, some of our photos of Tian'anmen Square from our trip there in 2012, to date, one of the most interesting trips of my life, fully recapped on the blog in the fall of 2013 I think. 

The entire square is surrounded by massive buildings like these two below.  The square was build in the 1600s, but enlarged to its current size in the 1950s. The "Ten Great Buildings" along the square were also built then.  It reminded very much of the National Mall in DC, with the massive Smithsonian museums set off along the boundary roads.  It also reminded me a lot of Red Square, but bigger.  I believe Tiananmen Square is designed to accommodate more than 500,000 people at once.  Can't remember what the first building I photographed around the square is, but the second is the National Museum of China: 

 

There was a heavy uniformed police presence standing guard, marching about, and mingling with the visitors.  And I got the sense there were plenty of official personnel not in uniform as well.  Of course I took pictures of the guards, which are perfect to show today (well, technically the anniversary was yesterday, but it's my recap post):  

 

 

 

There were also these huge floral displays in the square.  Huge.  You can kind of see a little head down in the corner (if we'd walked directly into a cutout of the display, I'm guessing my head would have been somewhere in the red swirl of flowers on the base), and I'm bad at guessing size, but I'd guess this one was at least two stories tall: 

 

  

 

I didn't get to take any pictures inside Mao's tomb, which is also there at the square.  Here is a shot of Mao's mausoleum.  Hard to see among the crowds and from this distance, but there is an hours-long line all the way around the perimeter (some scamster who wanted (and got) money from us after helping us get to bag drop and through security, snuck us in toward the front of the line, so we only had to wait about half an hour to see Mao's preserved body, but we bypassed at least 75% of the line): 

Plenty of pictures/busts of Mao in the immediate area however: 

 

And a couple pictures just to show the scale of the flowers, buildings, length, towering floral columns: 

 

Apparently (according to Wiki), only 5 photographers were able to have their photos smuggled out of China and published in the aftermath of the protests and the standoff with the tanks.  One photographer had a French student smuggle the film in a cannister of tea.  One hid his in the toilet and sacrificed two rolls of film showing wounded protesters when the police searched his hotel room.  Crazy stuff I tell you.  

Should I Watch?

Last night, I left the office around 7:20, roughly as usual, and drove home.  Most Thursday nights for the last few years, I've attended an Italian conversation group with my husband, but I decided I'm taking this semester off since I probably won't be back in Italy until 2015, I'd like to focus a bit more on Mandarin (and maybe start learning a bit for our 2014 trip), and I was just ready for a break.  Since the running store where I can get our packets for the Turkey Trot closed at 7, I was too late to get our packets, so I drove straight home.  While I can run to work in 3.75 miles, when I drive, it's just over 4 miles since I take the highway. 

So I came home to an empty house while hubby was off speaking Italian.  I decided to eat my favorite Israeli couscous (that we buy prepared from Central Market, it has olive oil, roasted red peppers, olives, green peppers, peas and a few other things in it) in front of the TV.

I was scrolling through channels and saw the bottom entry -- my jaw dropped.

 

Really????

It's apparently really him working on some construction with Amish people. WTH? I suppose that if Honey Boo Boo was on TV, this really shouldn't be surprising.

If you've seen it and it's good, let me know. I'm not averse to adding another train wreck to my watch list for a few months.