Things that are happening right now

I have five days left of work left in Istanbul.

Our site will be in production tomorrow for the first time to a limited audience. Production, baby!!!! The single most important thing in software, and yet something that often we lose sight of and never get to because of politics, people, processes. Our team has been chasing this goal for months and we are just steps away from the finish line. It feels exhilarating.

My mom, dad, sister and the boy's mom and brother arrive here in two days. We'll all spend a crazy weekend in Istanbul together. It will be a jetlagged whirl of mosques and art and kofta for them. I can't wait to show them around.

Then next Wednesday, the boy and I will say goodbye to the team here and board our flight to Delhi. From there we'll take a connecting flight to Jaipur and spend a week there celebrating our roommate's wedding.

And after that... well, it's actually still sort of up in the air. I should find out in a few days.

There is so much excitement and so much uncertainty. As always, near the end of projects, I find myself in a glass box of bittersweet emotion. Whenever those feelings start to flood in, I am reminded of how fortunate I am. To be alive and healthy, to love and be loved, to have a job that enables me to experience these things, and to truly enjoy what it is I do.

2014: over and out

Last year, I resolved to:

1. Think and act more positively.

In retrospect, I'm not sure this was a great resolution because it is difficult to quantify. I'm reflecting on the intention behind this goal and I don't think I was more or less positive than usual. We'll call this one a wash.

2. Floss every day.

Possibly the most boring resolution ever but hey, oral hygiene is important. I think I flossed 3 or 4 times on average a week - so roughly every other day. I'm sure my dentist would still consider this inadequate, but for me it was a marked improvement. Like my skincare routine, flossing is one of those things I tend to forgo if I'm exhausted at night, which of late has been almost every night. I think it comes down to mental outlook - I consider not brushing my teeth an act of sacrilege. But skipping flossing is ok because flossing is a bonus. I'd like to change my attitude on this and start making flossing a must have instead of a nice to have. Grade: C

3. Visit ten countries that I have not been to before.

I knocked this one out of the ballpark! Probably because of all the extra time I had from not flossing. Here are the new countries I visited (in order of appearance, with some accompanying posts featuring that visit):

1. Scotland (1, 2, 3, 4)
2. England
3. Netherlands (no blog entries, pictures here)
4. France
5. Spain (1, 2, 3)
6. Turkey (1, 2, 3)
7. Austria
8. Slovakia
9. Czech Republic
10. Portugal (no blog entires, pictures here)
11. Wales (some pictures here, along with the beautiful English countryside)
12. Greece
13. Denmark (pictures here and here)
14. Germany (pictures here)
15. Montenegro
16. Croatia

Not a shabby country to blog post ratio either. A+

In 2015, I resolve to:

Stop working so much. In my first years as a professional, I've always felt the need to compensate for my lack of experience by working extra hard and making my job my number one priority. Over the years, ThoughtWorks has given me opportunities to take on stretch roles so that I can continue to grow. But even with more experience under my belt, I haven't been able to shake off that mentality that work should come first. And naturally, the more demanding roles require more of me. So if anything, I've become more addicted to work. Symptoms include being glued to my work e-mail, feeling intensely guilty when on vacation, missing team dinners or events just to get that one last thing done, and regarding 11 or 12 hour day workdays as normal/acceptable/fine. I'm not feeling burnt out quite yet, but if I continue at this rate, I will be a charred black lump of coal.

This doesn't mean I'm going to sit on my ass, turn on Netflix and eat flaming hot cheetos until I pass out (though that does sound good for one day). I want to still work hard and be proud of what I am doing; I just don't want to become masochistic about it. I resolve to work more smartly, to say no or to ask for help when I'm feeling overwhelmed, and to find some more purpose to my life (volunteering, or maybe tutoring) that pulls me away from the job but still makes me feel accomplished.

Find and promote females who are doing awesome things. I consume a lot. I read, watch, listen, subscribe, follow, pin, retweet, like, etc. And I mean I literally consume a lot too (particularly when I can get my grubby paws on Korean barbecue). You know what the vast majority of the producers of these things have in common? They are men. Men author the books I read. Men defeat the baddies in the movies I watch. Men give the keynote speeches that rock the industry I work in. Hell, even in the food industry, men dominate; of the 2,500 restaurants in the world that are Michelin starred, a measly 10 of them have female chefs.

Whenever possible, I want to look for what women are doing in these areas; I want to hear and amplify their voices, too. As part of the #readwomen2015 movement, I resolve to read 8 books by female authors this year. I also want to consciously extend this gender bias to other areas in which I an a consumer - film, music, sports, politics - and hopefully along the way, discover some positive female role models that I can look up to and elevate.

This is not about being a feminist or blocking out what men have to say. This is about recognizing that much of what I know is narrated by one group of people; there are others out there, ready to be heard.

Run a marathon. I'm turning 26 this year, so it seems a fitting time to run 26.2 miles. The Chicago marathon takes place in October so that gives me plenty of time to train. I'm thinking it'd be neat to travel and races in other places as well - maybe join up with some of my running friends, like Ashley in New York, Yoyo in DC (though maybe soon in SF!) or Scott in Berlin. I don't have a time goal - I'd like to just finish with my dignity intact.

There you have it, three ambitious goals to kick off the new year. 2014 has undoubtedly been one of the best (and crazy) years of my life. It'll be hard to top getting engaged and living abroad in two new countries. But I'm ready to wind down a little, get back home and kick some ass in 2015. 

Bring on the Balkans (Part II)

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming, folks...

Dubrovnik, Croatia was somewhat of a shotgun visit; we pulled into the city with less than twenty-four hours on the clock to go. Luckily, the weather couldn't have been more cooperative.

Most of us were fans of Game of Thrones, so we were eager to explore the city where many of the Kings Landings scenes in seasons 2 and 3 were filmed. To get ourselves adequately psyched, I taught everyone (including the non-believers) all the complicated lyrics of the Peter Dinklage song.

Finding parking in the city was nightmarish; after 30 minutes of following befuddling signs and being diverted by one-ways, we said fuck it and agreed to pay a random man fifteen euro to park outside his home.

We lucked out again with an amazing airbnb, maybe one of the best I'd ever been to. The only downside was that we had to climb a lot of stairs to get there - and my glutes were still recovering from the previous day's fortress-stair punishment. But the view of the city's Old Town from our bedrooms made the climb worth it:

Seeing Dubrovnik from the walls that surround the old city was #1 on my list of things I wanted to do. We missed the wall tours that day, so we settled for exploring the city on ground. I marvelled at the white stone and the wide streets, all the while half expecting to bump into secretive Varys or sinister Ser Ilyn Payne along the way.

Mini history lesson: Just like Kotor, Dubrovnik has seen turmoil and change. Through the years the city has passed through many sovereign hands, all the while relying on maritime trade to sustain its prosperity. In 1991, Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia and was subsequently attacked in a siege that lasted seven months, took over a hundred civilian lives, and damaged much of the city's historic walls. For a decade after, the city underwent extensive repairs with aid from the international community. What visitors see today of the Old Town is almost all reconstructed in the original style: gleaming white buildings on wide open streets, everything protected within a six-meter thick sea wall of fortified stone. If it wasn't for the plaques and charts around that detail the events of the attack and the city's subsequent recuperation, it would be hard to tell there had been any reconstruction at all.

We enjoyed a beautiful sunset and continued our exploration of the town by night, a bottle of red wine in hand to keep the evening chill at bay.

The evening concluded with a late dinner involving a ridiculous platter of seafood. After we finished our meal, we washed it down with rakia, a fruit brandy that is popular in the Balkans.

The next morning, we awoke early to another perfect day. As we took the steps down back to the Old Town, we marvelled at the beauty that surrounded us. People actually live here, I kept having to tell myself. This isn't an elaborate theme park in Disney world. This is real!

Our roommate was feeling particularly adventurous and commandeered a wee rowboat. He took it for a lap around the harbor as the rest of us cheered on (and hoped its owners wouldn't appear!).

Rowboat returned, we made a beeline for the city wall tours, the first of which opened at 9 AM. Our flight that afternoon was at around 2 in the afternoon out of Podgorica - about a three hour drive away - and we still had to get gas and go through two border controls. So you bet we moved along those walls!

We cut our wall tour a bit short and made a dash back to the car. The journey back to the airport was interesting, to say the least. Our poor rental car was really put to the test as it bore the weight of all five of us and our luggage through the hilly countryside. Most of the windy roads were single lane so we were constantly looking for good passing spots ("go now go go GO!"). And on top of it all, the car's off-brand GPS stopped working so we were retracing our route based on memory, cached Google maps and a healthy dose of optimism. We had a couple of teachable moments (pulling up at the wrong airport in Podgorica, then once we arrived at the right one, our co-worker realizing she'd accidentally bought the return flight for the day before) but in the end, through a series of small miracles, we all made it on our plane, let out sighs of relief, and promptly fell asleep.