Mom arrived last night late. Kris and I had just enough time for me to arrive home from Vancouver, dash home and clean up, then rush to the other airport and pick up Mom. She had to wait only a few minutes (okay, five) for me to show up.

Today was a ridiculously casual day. Given the stress of yesterday (including the issues with the difficult client), hanging out with Mom was a great relief. Kris had called mid-morning, asking if I could bring his forgotten ultimate gear to Greer at lunch, so Mom and I dashed up to Palo Alto to help Kris out. We then continued up to downtown to Title IX, Waterworks and Bay Leaf, a vegetarian (vegan?) restaurant that Messina introduced me to.

We dashed back home and tackled my to-do list. That to-do list that has been growing beyond my ability to keep up. Mom managed to get a few items done, for which I'm grateful, but just having her here was the best part.

Mom is in town for the gallery opening of Karen's Retrospective showing. It's a bittersweet event, as it's the biggest of any of Karen's gallery showings, but it's a retrospective, a view back on her life, now that she's dead (why is that so hard to write? I wanted to write, "now that's she's passed on" or "left us", but all that does is gloss over the fundamental fact that she's dead, she's not making any more artwork, she's not going to meet up with Kris and I for lunch, she's not going to play with her dog, or redo her house, or any of that, she's dead).

We'll head over tomorrow around noon. Kris has been very supportive of this. Even BJ and Chris will be in town. It'll be good to see them tomorrow.

The most humourous part of the day was when Mom said something personal, then turned to me and asked, "You're not going to blog that, are you?"

No, Mom, I won't write about your sex life. If I can't write about mine, it seems quite unfair to write about yours on the Intarweb.

What happens when your highest level of stress is caused by the client who pays the lowest fee? What happens when the demands of one client are disproportionate to the returns received?

Most people cut bait, instead of trying to fish. Or they cut bait much sooner than expected.

I tend to bill about 30-50% more hours a month than Mike does. He earns 50-100% more a month than I do. If I'm not deriving serious joy from those extra hours, I'm doing something wrong.

I'm doing something wrong.

I've been unhappy for a long while now. My unhappiness has been growing along with my stress levels. My joy in life, however, has been decreasing, along with my love of ultimate (playing, organizing, developing), desire to go outside and hike, my time spent gardening, number of books I've read for pleasure and hours spent with Kris.

It took me a long while to figure out that the first three paragraphs were seriousl contributors to the results of the fifth paragraph.

But now that I've figured it out (Mike and Kris figured it out months ago), I want fix the problem, adjust things, move on. I want to enjoy life, ultimate, programming, gardening, reading, Kris (and not in that order). Except that I'm already committed. Committed to projects, committed to solving problems, committed to one more task.

One more.

One more.

Is it always one more? Does it have to always be one more?

No. And that's my new answer. No.

No no no no no no no no no.

Many years ago, like the year 2000, Kris ended up in the hospital for the first time in our relationship. It was terribly stressful for me, being my first time heading into the hospital, not knowing what to expect, what was happening with Kris, what I should do. I had never been in the hospital for anything but a visit here and there, certainly never overnight, huddled on the guest chair, passing out at 5:30 am, two hours after Kris had.

Kris stayed three days that first time. The first night, I was too exhausted to notice much around me. The second night, however, I was more aware, and noticed the hospital noises. I heard her first around midnight.

"Mary!"

But it sounded more like "MaaaAAAaaare reeeeeee!"

Across the hall from Kris was a very old woman. At the top of her lungs, she would cry out every minute or so for Mary. Sometimes she would call out "Help me!" but it was consistent.

Consistently frightening. This woman was in need! She was calling out! Why was no one helping her?

I know! I'll help her!

Yea, clearly a retarded thought, but hearing this old lady call out every minute for who knows how long was clouding my judgement.

Clearly.

So, I wandered over. As I was leaving Kris' room, he looked at me, and called out to me. "Don't go. Kitt, don't go. It won't help." I ignored him, and went across the hallway and into the calling old lady's room.

"Do you need help?"

"Mary?"

"No, I'm not Mary."

"Help me, Mary."

"I'm not Mary. What help do you need?"

"Mary, help me!"

I clued in and left. Hustling back into the room, I tried to avoid Kris' gaze.

"I told you."

"Yes, you did."

"There's always one."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

He then went on to tell me about how each and every time he was in the hospital (and that number was more than two), some person was calling out. If it wasn't "Mary!" it was "Help me!" or "Betty!" or "Charlie!"

Each time after that, when we were in the hospital overnight, we'd hear the lone caller serenading us, and we'd laugh about there always being one.

Today, in one of the sessions, one person kept asking questions that were well below the technical level of the intended audience of the session. The questions were starting to irritate other participants, with the exception of one other person, who joined the session hijacking attempt. The two of them went off on a theme editing tangent that clearly indicated their lack of Drupal experience, much less theming experience.

Yes, I agree that there needs to be a balance between helping new users and advanced users, developers and themers. But, I was frustrated by the first person asking questions (well, the same question in fourteen different ways, even though it was previously answered thirteen times).

I leaned over to Mike, "There's always one."

He replied back, "But usually two."

Yeargh!

I $%^& hate losing posts because of some stupid system bug. Which, of course, just happened. Unbelievably anNOYing. Argh. Of course, it was a brilliant post, too. the contents of which I've nominally forgotten.

Attended the first drupal session, which was originally "Theming system enhancements," but rapidly became, in the spirit of BarCamp, a self-directed discussion of theming goals as defined by the community. Adrian did his best to show us his goal for the theming system (being one of the lead developers on the Forms API, as well as the theming system). Many of the changes were exciting, some less so.

The best contribution to the discussion was made by Matt, when he mentioned that Wordpress was going through similar theming growing pains recently. He said the best decision they made was to identify their audience (those who know nothing and have no desire to learn anyhing (referring to HTML), those who know HTML and CSS, and those who know PHP), then design their themes and theming system for the desired user (the middle group, the HTML/CSS folks). Designing a system for one type of user is way easier than designing for all users. By a lot. Matt channeled Jason of 37signals and said, "Simplify your requirements."

They (Wordpress) tried the CSS Zen Garden approach, having only specific CSS classes that need to be overwritten, but everyone hated it (mostly because the content in a real site isn't well defined - CSS Zen Garden works because you can design to the pixel since the content is fixed, not so in a real life). So now they have theming functions, too.

I had more session insights, but they were on the last post. Which was eaten by the electron ether.

The next session is Actions and Workflow by John Van Dyk and the Bot in Lullabot. The idea here is to add a workflow engine into the drupal system, allowing complete configuration of process flow in creating, publishing, modifying, and approving content. Mike isn't convinced of the need, or the UI, given his experiences with simple state engines of "only" six states (which would have made John's proposed UI so complicated any user's eyes would cross upon loading the page). I'm not unconvinced, in that the proposed changes make actions role based (an author can write an article, and an editor can publish it, which would work very well for the UPA).

We'll see. He seemed interested about halfway through the session.

I'm having problems sitting for any length of time, my left leg being much worse than the right leg. Between the cut on my hand from a branch and the back of my knees, I'm being extra careful to wash my hands a lot.

In a remarkably mad dash to the airport, I managed to forget a whole bunch of things I normally bring along with me on trips. Probably not a bad thing, as I'm not heading to a third world country or anything similarly potentially tragic if I really needed what I forgot. Just another conference/workshop thingy in less than two weeks.

Mike and I took Caltrain to BART to SFO to fly out to Vancouver. We're here for the Open Source Content Management Systems Summit, which used to be a mini-Drupal conference, but merged and opened up to other OS CMSes.

That "opened up" part was a large reason why, yet again, I saw Matt in a random place (or rather, a not so random place like the Vancouver airport. Mike was getting money at an airport ATM when Matt walked up and said hello. We shared a taxi to our hotels, which were three blocks or so apart, so it worked out well. I think it was the most I've ever talked to Matt, and good to introduce Mike to him. Matt told us how he first experienced snow quite recently, which was totally awesome, though he did say he didn't go skiing in it.

So, conference starts tomorrow. Should be fun.