rachel@home

Lost

Usually, my sense of direction is pretty good. Drop me down anywhere in the Pierce/King/Snohomish county area, and I can get myself turned around and knowing where I am in no time at all.

And I rather like that about myself, that I can miss my exit and get off at the next one and find where I'm going with only a couple of turns and not have to get back on the freeway to try again from the beginning.

But my image of myself as someone who knows where she's going is about to run abruptly into a solid brick wall.

Right now, at work, I'm on the 12th floor of a 13-floor pyramid-shaped building. That means my floor isn't very big, and even when I was on the 11th floor, that wasn't very big. I could navigate around no problem, from the copy room to the kitchen to the elevators and back to my office. Swoosh, swish, I was there and back again.

In a couple of weeks, though, that's all coming to an end. My team is moving to a downtown office, and I got my first look at it today. It doesn't have the quirky art-deco charm that the current castle on the hill has, but it's not bad. Natural light, a decent kitchen, much easier access to Starbucks or Tully's, depending on my mood, near all kinds of restaurants for lunch, plus the giant Asian grocery store, with all sorts of wacky treats is right across the street.

What it also has, though, is rows and rows of cubicles that all look exactly the same, and when you find your way out of the cubicles, there's hallways with banks of elevators that all look exactly the same.

What I have come to understand from analyzing the situation is that my good sense of direction comes from paying attention to landmarks and remembering where they are, so when I find myself in a situation with no landmarks, I'm way more lost than a person who depends on memorizing which way to go.

Today, I went with a co-worker to look at the new offices, and she led me there, and led me back down. When we got back to the elevators, I had gotten myself all turned around and completely confused. Then, we went to a meeting in the building next door, and after that meeting, I followed someone else to the place where the shuttle between my current building and my new building stops.

As I was waiting for the shuttle to come, I looked back across the street at the building I'd just come out of, and I realized that I had absolutely no idea which of the several buildings across the street my new office building even was.

I can picture my first day of trying to go to work in my new office. I'll have to go into the one building that I can find downtown, and beg the security guard to show me to my new office. Later, I'll try to go get lunch, and will get lost again. After that, they'll probably they'll pin a note on my shirt and recommend that I think about a GPS.

After about a week or so, they'll be snickering and pointing when I walk in, and a week after that, they'll be diving under their desks, pretending they're not there.

I obviously need to leave a trail of breadcrumbs, or maybe some of those construction paper footprints that teachers cut out and tape to the ground for the first day of kindergarten. Maybe I can even get them color coded -- blue to go to my office, yellow to the kitchen, green to Starbucks... I think it could work!

Paperwork

I just got an email from the University of Washington saying that my MBA application is complete! This is the personal email, which means that all the parts of my application are there, not just the autoreply email I got when I submitted it electronically.

This is good news, as I feel like it just about killed me to complete it.

On March 31, I went to the university before I went to work, and dashed all over campus, trying to get my transcripts, a copy of my GMAT test scores, and the survey form all together and turned into the MBA office. I had a 10:30 meeting at work that I needed to get to, so it was a bit of a race.

I managed to make it to my office by 10:32, with the only casuality being the survey form, which I figured was really optional and I couldn't complete because I couldn't find a pen or pencil in my bag, my purse or anyplace else. Ridiculous, but true!

On the evening of March 31, I had to finish my essays. Unfortuately, I had a terrible headache and just went to sleep.

I woke up early on April 1, the day the electronic application was due. I revamped my essays, wrote one of them, and updated my resume before I took the girls to school. Then I went and had coffee while I re-read and edited all of my papers.

I went home, entered all my editing, and reviewed my application, then sent it off on its way through cyberspace.

That was Wednesday. My headache never really went away, and Thursday, I went home from work early. By Friday, my head still hurt, and I was starting to think it wasn't just stress, but something else.

Saturday, I stayed in bed all day, with a sore throat and sniffles.

Sunday, I went to Bellingham, and felt okay.

All of last week, I woke up with a sore throat and had sporadic headaches, and today, my headache still isn't entirely gone.

As you can see, this MBA application has about done me in.

They're mailing the first round of decisions somewhere at the beginning of May. That decision will be either a no or a maybe. Then there's 'evaluation day' on May 22, after which they make the final decisions. I have no idea how many people make it to evaluation day.

After I get in, assuming that I do, I will get to start on a new round of paperwork -- the FAF. Let's hope I can finish that and manage to stay out of the hospital.

I always knew I didn't like paperwork, but it wasn't until this MBA application when I realized just how much paperwork didn't like me.

Growing Up

Last week I went to an assembly at the girls' school, led by the 4th grade. Katrina had a couple of speaking parts, which she did very nicely, and she played the recorder and the xylophone as well.

When I was sitting and watching all of the kids file in, the kindergarteners came in first, and I could hardly believe how tiny and young they looked. The first graders didn't look a whole lot older.

I can remember when the girls were that small, and I'd see the 5th and 6th graders and they'd look so old and so grown up. It's hard to believe that the girls are now the ones looking old and grown up, while the 1st graders look so tiny.

I found some older pictures of them, when they were smaller, and added them to the picture page: here. They were so adorable!

   

In other news, I turned in my MBA application yesterday, a whole eight hours before the deadline, then promptly celebrated by getting sick. I planned on staying home from work today and just dialing in on my laptop, but when I went to dial in, the modem on my laptop had mysteriously quit working, even though it was working just fine the night before.

I dragged my miserable self into work and gave my laptop to the people who fix those kinds of things, and got a whole new laptop, with my hard drive neatly popped out and placed in the new laptop. Then I left work and was paged before I was even on the freeway.

After I got home and solved the problem, I fell asleep to Without A Trace for the second time. It was me, really -- this wasn't a particularly boring epsiode, even though it did put me to sleep promptly twice.

I think right now Tivo is recording a Law & Order: CI episode that I haven't seen, so I'm planning on falling asleep to that shortly. Nothing puts me to sleep like Law & Order.