The partner question February 1, 2016

It has been a long time since I had a partner.  My husband Roy – Annie’s father - died eighteen and a half years ago, and though I dipped my toe into the dating scene and became close to someone in the interim, nothing took wings.  Logistics certainly got in the way: working full time in a fast-paced field combined with raising my daughter alone left almost no time to meet people, much less to forge the deep bond I would have liked. 

In truth, I was very hesitant to experiment with new relationships when I was raising Annie.  I had seen too many children whose affections were jerked around by a string of boyfriends or who were ignored or even abused by stepfathers.  I reasoned that Annie without a daddy, but with a fully engaged mom, was perhaps better off than Annie with a series of losses.  Sadly, I have come to question that decision many times in the past few years, as certainly Annie would have benefitted from the love of a father.  I failed to provide her with that.

Now that the high-pressure career is behind me, now that Annie has begun to settle into her own life and work, and now that I appreciate how much I need to attend to my own life, I have decided to revisit the partner question.  My young friend and colleague Laurie convinced me to try the online dating service OKCupid.  She also coached another colleague, Lindsey, who was getting a divorce, to do the same, and the three of us have been comparing notes in the process.  I think Lindsey will surely find a partner, as she has jumped in with great enthusiasm.  As for me, I’m just at the beginning, enjoying the journey a bit more than I thought I would, and finding the humor in our adventures.

The GCHQ Puzzle January 31, 2016

Sometime in December, I received an email from my friend Delia, who forwarded me a Christmas card in the form of a puzzle from Britain’s spy agency GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters).  The puzzle consisted of a grid with a series of numbers and one had to deduce the pattern it produced.  It was engaging and I sent it on to two friends of mine from Marin Oratorio, Julie and Mike, who I suspected would enjoy it too. 

It turns out, however, that the grid was just part 1 of a 5-part puzzle and that each subsequent part had multiple subparts.  I was clearly now out of my element, but fortunately Mike was in his!  He proved to be a good match for these geeky “spy guys”, because many of the puzzles involved computer codes and languages, Dr. Who, Lord of the Rings, John Le Carre, and some Harry Potter thrown into the mix – none of which I had read or knew anything about.  Mike and I egged each other on, but he is responsible for 95% of the success.  The deadline was today, and with a bit of cheating along the way (shall we call it reassurance?), we have made it to the end!  Now we need a new puzzle passion – any suggestions? 

The bucket list January 15, 2016

Two years have passed since Annie and I tramped in New Zealand.  It was that journey that compelled me to organize a bucket list, yet I’ve made only one dent in it so far: the French Open to watch Nadal.  Since then, I lost all track of the list in the midst of devastating family trauma, but now as we are healing, I am daring to pull it out once again.  The list is not impossibly long nor are the adventures overwhelmingly difficult, but each requires a bit of get up and go:  hiking in Iceland, a safari journey to the Olduvai Gorge and Serengeti, exploring Israel, Petra, and Turkey, trekking in Bhutan, bicycling in southeast Asia.  Well, one could go on and on. 

The new year rekindled my resolve, and I began with the top of my list: Machu Picchu.  Last week I booked a trip with REI for Annie and me to trek the Salkantay Trail next Christmas.  Now I am toying with a yoga-focused trip during the summer solstice in Reykjavik, and then there is ever-tantalizing RAGBRAI – the bicycle trip across Iowa.  My architecture teacher Bill does RAGBRAI every year and encouraged me to join in.  He commented, “It is the kind of thing where everybody is happy to be alive”.