back to work.

I received my assignments for the year this week. I know, it seems a weird time. I've found that time in general is pretty odd in AdultLand. There's nothing to really separate one year from another. It used to be that the school year defined when things happened. I lost my first tooth in the first grade, I got braces in the middle of eighth grade, I worked as a hotel housekeeper between my freshman and sophomore years of college. And then, what? Using my age doesn't seem to help, as the older I get, the more those years blur together. I broke my arm when I was seven and four-fifths, but I moved to Raleigh, oh, sometime in my early twenties.

We won't even discuss the lack of a summer vacation when you're an adult, one of the harshest realities that a youngster fresh out of school must ever face. The only difference summer makes for me now is that it's still light outside when I leave the office for the day. Why did I want to be a grown-up again?

Our company is on a yearly release cycle, which does provide an odd sort of timeline for me, though I'm not sure if it's one that I want to use. Hrm, when I bought my house, I was working on that file tool window, and when Josh had his bike wreck, I was working on the feature that exported the user's options. I don't particularly want to associate life events with a dialog or feature in a piece of software. I guess I'm just not that hardcore about software.

I was thinking about all this today, which is the beginning of our new release cycle and right in the middle of summer vacation for the youngsters. I could tell, because I was wearing my flip-flops at my desk. I had grabbed a fresh notebook out of the supply cabinet and was christening it with my name and the year. It's a blue notebook this year, not to be confused with the yellow notebook I used last year and the green one from the year before.

In college, I would go to the back-to-school sales and buy single-subject, college ruled notebooks in different colors, one for each of my classes. And then I would label them: Modern Algebra, Assembly Language, History of Rock Music. By the end of the semester, I didn't need the labels anymore, as the colors themselves were associated with the classes in my mind. Some classes required more notes than others, and so by the end of the year, some notebooks were more than half untouched. I saved those to use the paper later, and now I can glance through them to see formulas I copied during the fall of my junior year or notes I jotted down during the summer session before I graduated. There are also pictures and catchphrases, which sometimes can be understood by reading what else is on the page, but more often seem like non-sequiturs when taken out of the context of the day it was written more than four years ago.

Today, I label a blue notebook with my name and the year. The blue notebook is clean right now, but it will become a historical document of my work-year. As I work on my features over the next several months, I'll write down notes and ideas in there. I'll create sticky colored tabs for each assignment, using different colored inks to write down questions, my own answers, sketches of dialogs, and TBDs. I'll stick post-its all over the place to create checklists and remind myself of important points. Will the paperless society come up with a replacement for a well-used notebook?

Today is the first day of this year, the year of the blue notebook. I already have my assignments, but I don't yet know what events will occur in the coming months that will be associated with this year, these feature assignments, the blue notebook.