I got an unexpected compliment today. FZ yelled over the wall today that some people are able to write things that make sense and that was a good thing. And he was talking about meeeeee. Which was very flattering. And then he commenced to start lobbing things over the wall for me to essentially re-write.

This is okay. It is part of his knowledge transition plan in preparation for executing the dreaded R-word, which is happening within the next year… Alas… I did not scream when I heard this but I wanted to. I love everyone I work with but me and FZ communicate in kind of a particular way. We are both very detail oriented and we come up with questions not everyone has thought of. He is MUCH MORE KNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT OUR PRODUCT THAN I AM and that is why I will miss him sooooo much.

Lest you think I let this compliment go to my head. FZ is a VERY good writer but it isn’t his job to write functional specs and those beasties have some kind of particular writing requirements. After I caught my wits, I yelled back over the wall to say, “You have to know that almost everything I write starts out as Word Salad.” I think it’s called Process Writing (or was when the beach urchins were being taught to organize their thoughts into pieces of writing way back when). You begin by simply capturing your thoughts willy nilly and then edit any number of times. Getting rid of extraneous words and whatever and rearranging it all into some kind of logical order. For my job, that usually means bullet points interspersed with tables and pictures of various sorts.

Y’all are kinda going, “but I can’t usually even understand yer blahg.” It’s okay, the GG frequently says that and sometimes I’m not even sure I understand it. And so many times I edit it in the cold clear light of the next morning to remove run-on sentences or repetitious crapola or whatever. Or sometimes I just leave all that stuff. I write at the end of the day and with the distractions of cooking dinner and catching up with the GG and whatever else is going on, it can be hard to write coherently.

Then I came home and got another unexpected compliment. A beach urchin said that she doesn’t remember ever not having a home-cooked meal as a child. Now. It is not true that we fed our kids home-cooked stuff every day but we really did do it most of the time. Did she always eat those home-cooked meals? No, she certainly did not. Of course, there was a lot of filler stuff like Kraft Mac’n’cheese and ramen noodles around here for many years. Microwaved pepperoni was extra speshul… But she gets that I tried. And maybe that’s why the beach urchins are such good cooks now (although I didn’t teach them anything) and why they work hard to feed themselves and their friends with fresh food. 🧡🧡🧡

P.S. Oh yeah, after a few years of procrastination, we pulled a certain trigger today. The Engineer may know what we did if he is watching from the Party Bote Edmund Fitz. The rest of y’all’ll have to wait [wink wink]. Except for Stargazer.

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