Fantastic Four(th Month)

I miss writing about my life. I feel like it keeps me in touch with myself. I intend to start writing again more frequently.

Updates:

• I lost 15 pounds (possibly 17-18, but I don't know if I trust this new scale that we got)
• I got my PhD diploma a couple months ago
• I am just starting to apply for jobs again, and I feel like I'm in a much better place now
• My tropical trip is totally booked, minus the fun events and adventures that we need to sign up for
• We went to the Washington State Fair a couple weekends ago. We rode a monster truck, watched "dock dogs" compete in a jumping competition, went to an animal exhibit, and did other fun stuff. He got donuts that he claimed are the best he can remember having (he's a donut fiend).
• I am trying to seriously work on my sleep. I slept about 9.5 hours Friday, but got up at 5 this morning after just about 4.5 hours of sleep (had a HORRIBLE nightmare about work). Seems like any progress I make on sleep (9.5 hours on Friday) is just totally negated the next day (4.5 hours of sleep). My goal is 9 hours per night, although 8 hours on average would be a tremendous achievement.
• I have a costume planned for this year's festivals - I'm paying someone to hand-craft it because I don't have time. Next year though, I'm going to hand-make this one I really like. I just am not ready for a big project like that right now.

I'm excited about getting a new job and living in a big city. There aren't a whole lot of jobs open for my field in this geographic location right now, so I decided to change my game plan. I made a list of actual companies where I would like to work because they have good cultures, good work-life balance, and they are in the area. 

I want to find somewhere I can stay for at least 3-5 years, because my resume has no indication of longevity -- I only stayed at my last 3 jobs for 1 year 2 months, 1 year 6 months, and now 1 year 2 months at this job. I need a longer stint, which means I need to find a place I am happy at. I made a list of 25 companies that I plan to watch and apply for any new job opening. There are currently 2 semi-related job openings that I'll be applying to today. They are jobs that are related to skills I have, but aren't directly in my field. 

My plan, because of the lack of current "perfectly relevant" job openings, is:

• To get an "in" with a company I like and work there until a job opens up in my field. I expect it will be easier to transfer to a position internally than externally, partially because if I start working there now I'll have the advantage of having direct experience with that company.
• As far as timeline, I've just really started my job search this weekend. I am about halfway done revising my resume. 
• I need to really start studying topics in my field so that I can start preparing for technical interviews (which is the most stressful part of interviewing). 
• I have also come up with a plan to fast-track some projects at my current job so that I can finish them and put those on my resume. I plan to put in some extra hours to get this done because there isn't enough time at work to get additional projects done. 
• Also, I really need to start working on getting 3 strong references. To do this, I plan to ask my current supervisor and the coworker I work with a lot at work (he's basically the VP of my division, so I think he would be good). I feel like I'm on shaky terms with my supervisor, so I need to work on that area the most. This is another reason I want to fast-track a few extra projects on my spare time, so that I can impress him and show a lot of accomplishments over the next month before I announce that I'm leaving.
• I plan to study for technical interviews over the month of May and start applying to jobs now whenever I see them. The tricky part is that I'll be on vacation for 2 weeks in May, so I may need to do some studying for interviews while I'm there. I'm thinking a minor amount, maybe 30 minutes a day (which equals about 1 journal article). Then when I come back, start studying more often. 
• My ideal plan is to study for interviews, prepare myself, and apply to jobs throughout the month of May, and hopefully get interviews in June. I hope to start a new job in July.

I'll update the trip pictures when I can -- J has to finish formatting them in his special program before he'll let me get final copies of them. Off to grocery shop, go on a nature education program, and do some job prep work!

Spring

I feel like I'm about to start getting back to life. I have lost 10 pounds. I've been working out 3-4 days a week for the last month. I've been working like crazy for the annual project going on at work right now, but hopefully that will calm down soon.

Went to the park last Friday with J, sat there and watched Mount Rainier, the Sound, and the mountains for a while. It was beautiful. On Sunday we went to the lake downtown and then walked down the port until we found a restaurant. I had blackened salmon and it was really good. I've been eating fish and eggs again, due to the allergies. Some salmon doesn't gross me out -- I've figured out ways to make it taste acceptable so that it doesn't really bother me too much anymore. We plan to go to a concert next weekend.

It was a great weekend, hanging out with him. It was just great. Things are pretty stressful at work, but I'm trying to just continue acting how I would normally act and forget all the bad attitudes and unprofessional behavior and just keep acting like how I would act. I don't know why people are so unhappy or rude, but at least I can control how I act.

I have only recently felt ready to "move on" with my new life. I have felt physically better in the last month, even given the incredible decline in sleep (the last couple months of sleep have been worse than when I was defending my PhD). I have been proud of myself for maintaining my health, my basic lifestyle, trying to learn at work, keeping a positive attitude at work in the midst of unpositive attitudes, and for trying to move forward and grow into a new person with a new life. I am proud of myself for how well I've kept it together.

Hawaii trip coming up this year, hopefully some more local trips too. I'm looking forward to doing some traveling with J.

The Fourth Decade

What is my fourth decade in life like so far?

• Got a PhD
• Living with the person I love more than anything
• A well-paying job that's exactly the work I want to be doing
• A beautiful view from our apartment of the Cascade Mountain Range, the Olympic Mountain Range, Puget Sound, the Capitol, and a partial view of Mount Rainier
• The nicest penthouse on Kauai will be ours for 8 days, along with a photo shoot on the beach
• A salary and the ability to start paying off my debts
• Lots of crime shows
• Lots of playing Fantasie Impromptu, nocturnes, Debussy, and Michael Nyman on the piano
• Totally new style of eating
• A fiction book in the works

What's next for this year?

• Learning the banjo
• Hiking and camping
• Costume parties
• Getting back in shape
• Cleaning my belongings
• Crater Lake
• Cannon Beach
• Vancouver BC
• San Juan Islands
• A new job in Seattle?
• A condo in Seattle?
• Finishing my fiction book and self-publishing
• Submitting 2-4 journal articles
• Getting my certification
• Friends
• Getting married
• Possibly planning for kids
• Possibly getting a dog

Orcas Island

J and I went to Orcas Island last month. The iPhone pictures don't do it justice. The beach below was so blue and beautiful. We rented a car and drove around nearly the whole island. We spent the rest of our time sitting in our room staring at the sound. It was a great getaway. I was really, really sad to leave. We got a good deal with a Groupon and ended up getting about $50-75 in free food throughout the weekend, plus a good view. 

Our favorite beach on Orcas Island

Sitting on our bed, this was the view

Sitting on the deck you can see the ferry landing

After we went there I got my heart set on buying a house there. I hope we can have a vacation home there that we can visit really often.

When the pantry door closes, another one opens

Things are going better. I have barely been sick since I jumped into the allergy-free diet. I have felt SO much better. I've only made a couple mistakes, but so far I've been really consistently not sick.

It's amazing what you take for granted...food was my LIFE over the past few years...it was the only thing I could control when my life was out of control and I felt helpless. There was always food to look forward to and it was something I had control over. The same week I finished graduate school, I developed that massive list of allergies. It was very frustrating to me that the same week that school ended and I should have been feeling great, I developed that list of allergies.

In a way, perhaps it was my body's way of saying that I am living a new life now. I don't NEED food anymore. I have control over so many other things now that I didn't for the past few years. I finally have a life. It's a pretty sick lesson in many ways, to finally make it through a PhD and literally the day after you finish school you become allergic to nearly everything on earth.

I've always been an avid food label-reader, but you really have no clue the nature of what I'm going through unless you really start looking to avoid CORN, SOY, WHEAT, BARLEY, RYE, ALMONDS, ONION, CARROT, PEA, SESAME SEED, FLAXSEED. Those alone are in nearly everything. Just take a look sometime when you're shopping and try to find foods without ANY byproduct of foods from that list alone, let alone all the other stuff on my list. Plus, I used to also avoid dairy and meat, and mostly ate organic food. Yeah...it's just too much to handle now with all those restrictions.

I won't lie that the first couple times I went grocery shopping, I cried right there in the store, looking at everything I could not have. I felt hopeless that there was basically nothing I would be able to eat. But I did find a couple things, including exactly one brand of pizza...which just happens to be amazingly good :)

I believe that maybe this door closed so that another door could open. Of course, you can never see the door that has opened right away...that's why the saying works. You're so busy looking at the door that's closed that you fail to look down the hall at the open door. Well, I spent a good 1-2 months looking at the closed door. That is, until I went in and got allergy testing and figured out what was making me sick. I'm SO glad I got tested. I will say that having to avoid all those foods has forced me to totally redo my diet. I'm talking TOTALLY. Most of the things I am allergic to were things I ate my whole life, nearly every day, and I loved them dearly...and they never made me sick. Here are the cornerstones of my new diet that I've had to adopt over the past month -- I eat most of those every day, as there is not much else out there besides this list:

• Coconut (shredded, milk, oil, ice cream)
• Juice (cranberry, papaya, cherry)
• Yogurt (whole/plain, chia seeds, banana, and this hemp/buckwheat/chia granola)
• Eggs
• Rice (rice bran, rice, rice pasta, rice pudding, rice crackers, rice bread)
• Millet (I think this is what I used to feed my parakeet...)
• Salad (spinach, avocado, pecans, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, pear, tomato, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, cranberries, raisins, parmesan)
• Plantains
• Potatoes, sweet potatoes
• Beans (black, pinto)
• Potato chips
• Guacamole
• Apples
• Cheese
• Chocolate
• Dried fruit (apricots, mangoes, pineapple)
• Kiwi
• Vegetable chips (sweet potato, beet, etc.)
• Broccoli
• Tapioca

That's pretty much it. There are other little things like ginger, gingerbread cookies, buckwheat crackers, a few other treats I've found. I'm mostly concerned that if I just stick to this list, I'm going to become allergic to those foods too, and then I'll really be screwed!! Soon I'll be left with just water and fish...hey, isn't that Gollum's diet? Hmmm...lol

I met with a nutritionist last week. It wasn't very helpful, but it did encourage me to think about trying to restore my immune system and treat my allergies. I need to try to fix my body and she got me thinking about a diet that claims it can help with that. I'm definitely going to look into it, but I'm not convinced. However, I believe that I can get better because in grad school I developed an allergy to almonds and I stopped eating them for 2-3 years...then I gradually reintroduced almonds to my diet, and voila -- I was eating handfuls of nuts every day for years. Until November 2013.

I'm eating pretty well, considering. My fat and sugar intake are too high (because many of the treats I can have are sugary and coconut stuff has lots of fat), so I'm working on shifting things around. I worked out 2 days this weekend :).

Quick rant on food stuff... :)

I have decided to eat eggs again regularly, which has never been a huge deal to me because I believe life begins at birth (but that's just my view), so to me I'm not eating "meat" when I'm eating eggs. :) I've decided to loosen up on salmon too, so hopefully I can start eating that more often. I have difficulty with fish, but I refuse to eat animals unless things get dire. FYI I think people make a lot of assumptions about vegetarians and vegans. My refusal to eat animals is only partially based on not liking the idea of eating animals. It is primarily based on the gross negligence, money, waste, resources, and horrible effects that have come from growing animals for food (watch any of the documentaries on this topic).

The carbon footprint is huge, let alone the fact that people who support those types of mass-producers are allowing them to alter our bacteria structure. So now I am vulnerable to resistant bacteria because some farmers feed their cows shitty stuff and it changes the bacteria. The point is, THAT is what bothers me, not so much the gross-ness of eating an animal (which is partly there). I take similar issue with mass producing other types of food and altering our food structure (GMOs), so it's not like animals are my one and only thing. I am anti-engineering our environment just for our ease and benefit. But that's a story for another day :). I buy local, organic, and non-GMO as much as I can. Once I get a garden, I'm going to do a lot more growing. I think I grew and ate about 5% of my food in 2012 (I had a garden with someone). I hope to increase that to 10-20% this year or next. Fewer trucks to transport food, less crappy unripe food in the market. "Less crappy unripe food" -- that's a good motto for a store eh.

New year

Been a long time! It has been a crazy couple months since school ended. Found out I'm allergic to a HUGE amount of things. 26 out of the 60 items they tested, actually.

Barley

Corn

Oat

Rye

Wheat

Sesame seed

Peanut

Soybean

Green pea

Almond

Black walnut

Cashew

Hazelnut/Filbert

Pistachio

Cabbage

Cantaoupe

Carrot

Cucumber

Mushroom

Onion

Green pepper

Squash, yellow

String bean

Navy beans

Flaxseed

Hops

Yeah. I have no clue what to do. Well, actually I do. I can't be vegan anymore. I finally got sick of being sick so I went to the store and bought everything in the store that didn't have these items. I felt GREAT for the last 3 days since I started the new diet.

Been thinking about a new job. Not a whole lot open that I'm interested in and qualified for, but it looks like I'll be qualified for some soon. Seems like a lot of openings still require 5 years of experience. What's up with that? When do they hire the entry-level people? I've been targeting certain projects at work so that I can finish them and put them on my resume for a job search in a couple months. I'm hoping I can get a new job in the summer. I'm hoping to get a job in Seattle and move there late this summer. 

I just need to work as hard as I can now and get ready for applying. I might try to get my certification in May so that I'll have that too, plus it will force me to study the content in my field. I'm hoping to submit a couple publications from this job too, so I need to get moving on those so I can do it before I leave the job.

Going to bed now -- trying to get more sleep!

Thanks...giving

Today is exactly 3 months after JB and I moved in to this new place in Washington. I'm so glad he's living up here with  me. We get to do fun stuff on the weekends. He helped me through the last push of school (which I still haven't heard OFFICIAL word back from, but I'm no longer doing work for it) and I am so happy to have him back in my life. I'm thankful I have gotten to spend so much time with him this year, since around July of this year. I felt an immense sadness without him in my life.

I'm thankful for the view I have in this apartment. I love looking out at the horizon and Puget Sound every day. I love seeing the seagulls flying outside. I love seeing Mount Rainier in the mornings, looming over everything.

I'm thankful to be done with school. I'm REALLY thankful to be done with school. I still haven't quite adjusted to the new schedule (i.e., lack of constant work 24-7), but I feel like I'm finally getting there. I've only had 5 weekends "free" after finishing everything for the PhD.

• The first weekend was also right after I went back to work, so I was really just doing errands and catching up on everything to get ready for work and stuff. 
• The next weekend I went to the beach and had an awesome 3-day weekend in an oceanfront room. I pretty much did nothing except write my book, go on long walks on the beach, and have parties with JB. He said he hoped our room would have a mini bar so he could have all the snacks he wanted, so before we went down there I put together a mini bar for him - chips, bean dip, multiple kinds of pop, pringles, sour gummy worms, peanut butter M&Ms, etc. I made him his own mini bar and he LOVED it :).
• The third and fourth free weekends I spent just been trying to recover. I was cleaning and organizing the house, trying to catch up on bills and budgeting, getting back into exercising regularly, spending more time cooking and eating well.
• Last weekend (Thanksgiving break) I went to Portland and spent 2 days with the family. We went to 2 movies in the theater in one day (hah!), Gravity and Thor 2. Both were high quality and really entertaining. I also played on my parents' piano when I was there and it made me so happy. I'm going to start that up again soon as JB brought up the keyboard that we bought when we lived in OH. Today I feel like I've FINALLY started to come back to normal. I felt some urges to start meeting people again, and I went on a big house cleaning kick yesterday and this morning. I feel like I'm at the very beginning of "leveling out" in terms of recovery. I'm not there yet, but I finally feel like I'm STARTING to be myself again. I'm thankful for that.

I'm thankful for my job. I make pretty good money for only working 40-43 hours a week there. I have freedom to choose which projects I would like to work on, and I REALLY enjoy the projects. I am really interested in the ones I'm working on now and I love the work more than any full-time job I've had. 

I'm thankful for the future plans I plan to accomplish. Hiking, traveling, comic cons, costume parties, playing banjo, playing piano, getting a dog soon, having close friends, writing and publishing a fantasy book for fun, time to watch movies, concerts, video games, photography, etc. I'm really excited about it all and the fact that I've already made plans for some of it. :)