Kimberly KG

I was trying to pay attention to the meeting, I promise.

First there was one.

Then two.

Then three.

The bird left just as happy as it arrived.

A young man on my team at work shared recently that he was waiting to hear if his mom had cancer. Not surprisingly, the fear was evident in his face and his voice. Gratefully, the doctors gave her an “all clear” not too much later. While we talked, I couldn’t help but think about how young he looked. He IS young.

I was his age when I found out my mom had cancer. I didn’t feel young at the time; I very much felt like a fully grown adult who mostly had things figured out. I definitely didn’t. I have wished for more years with my mom a million or so times, but it hit me pretty hard this week how young I really was.

While celebrating my neighbor’s 7th birthday this weekend, with dog treats for the birthday girl and all the good boys and girls walking by and cake and rosé for the adults, this beautiful creature made an appearance.

I don’t usually post much about my work. I also haven’t been posting here as much as I’d like. Those two things are related.

I joined this company in September to manage a team of engineers. That team has a nice variety of experience levels, backgrounds, interests and skills. They cover the full stack and QA. It’s a good group of people. It is bigger than a 2 pizza team but not too bad. The most obvious challenge the team faces is timezones. We are spread from the west coast of North America to Bosnia. I do 1:1s with folks starting at 7 a.m. for me and team meetings at 8. The people outside of North America log off for the day when those are done. It was a struggle to get going with this schedule, but it’s been working. Living somewhere near the middle would be better. Oregon is not that.

In early November there was a plan to shuffle some folks around so I was expecting to add four more engineers to my team starting in January. This is now way more than a 2 pizza team, but still the same set of time zones.

In the middle of December I got an email announcing that I would be managing a team of engineers in India due to some broader org changes. On paper, this made sense. That team is responsible for a core capability and my other team was so far the only consumer.

You know where it doesn’t make sense? Timezones! Those lovely humans are thirteen and a half hours ahead of me most of the year. I can’t be the kind of manager I want to be for a group of people that the only time we can overlap is for a short window of time in the early morning or late at night.

I’m pushing for them to get a manager that lives a whole lot closer. I’m worried people might question my work ethic, but I’m willing to take that risk. I want them to get a manager that can help them grow just as much as I want my evenings back.

Watched: Project Hail Mary 🍿

Various clubs around the area, including the astronomy club, were offered tickets to an advanced screening of this movie. I was really excited to see this and I enjoyed it as much as I hoped I would.

Everyone was warned not to record any part of the movie and then people kept standing in the doorway with some little device that they used to scan people, presumably making sure no one was recording? That was a little weird. Separately, this was my first time going to a movie at the Lloyd Center Regal theater. I don’t know of another IMAX theater in Portland with seats that are so comfortable.

Watched: Kiki’s Delivery Service 🍿

Thanks to @manton for the pointer, we saw Kiki’s Delivery Service in 4K IMAX. I’ve seen the dubbed (non 4K IMAX) version a huge number of times, but we watched this one with subtitles. They extended some of the scenes and changed the nature of others a little bit, but it’s still just delightful. One of my favorites.

blog.adafruit.com/2026/03/0…

I’m not sure our tech future is working out as well as it could have.

One of the designers my software team works with opened his first PR on Friday. (AI was involved.)

Anyone want to guess what every single meeting I’ve had since has been about?

The U.S. is going to run Venezuela now?

I’m angry. I’m particularly angry that I expect everyone to grumble a little bit and then go back to pretending we’ll be able to vote these traitors out in the next election with no other action necessary.

Wordle 1,654 1/6*

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It finally happened.

Having firelight be the theme for day 3 of the 12 Days of Winter Wonder was convenient after the power went out at 1 a.m. and didn’t come back until 8 this evening.

This is a work in progress, but it looks cute with the candle light. Would I recommend stitching by candle light? I would not.

Day 2 of the 12 Days of Winter Wonder is cozy.

When Ally moved home earlier this year, she came with two cats. (She shares custody of them with her best friend.) Neptune more moved into my lap than into our home, however. While Neptune sleeps in my lap, his brother Beau is often snuggled near my feet under the blanket I drape over myself. When I think of “cozy”, I can’t help but think of the hours spent each day with fuzzballs keeping my warm.

I thought it might be fun to participate with the 12 Days of Winter Wonder photo challenge. Portland hasn’t been below freezing once this fall, so of course the first prompt would be frost.

This photo represents a happier part of a stressful winter day.

I’m not really one to post or talk about celebrities, but Rob Reiner’s death hits hard. I woke up still with a pit in my stomach. Seeing the nonsense the piece of shit in office wrote turns that grief into anger.

Watched: Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair 🍿

This is being shown in 70mm at the Hollywood theater in Portland, Oregon right now. This was a real treat, even with sitting in a theater seat for four and a half hours.

There’s an atmospheric river going through Portland this week. It seemed like the day never started on Monday. Somehow the sun forgot to come out.

I learned we were under a high wind watch as well as a flood watch at just about the same time a huge tree fell in the neighbor’s yard. I’m really hoping this isn’t the start of another windy wet winter. I’m still not over the stress from the big storms two years ago.

I’ll be sleeping in the basement until this is over.

Watched: The Family McMullen 🍿

We watched this movie and the prequel today. They were both rather fun.

Ally is still on the ship off the coast of Georgia so we definitely missed her for Thanksgiving. Sam came up for the long weekend and Matt’s parents came for Thanksgiving dinner. This term for Sam is rather strenuous so he spent most of the weekend either doing homework or sleeping. It’s great to have him home even if I’m just sitting next to him trying not to make noise. Ha!

As usual, I tried to recreate my mom’s apple pie. As usual, it was pretty far removed from the magic she used to create. I realized that this was actually just fine and somehow that let me enjoy the process a little more. It was my best pie yet.

One bit of excitement was getting to meet Sam’s girlfriend, Alex. Sam has a pretty solid track record for choosing good friends so it was no surprise that he’s chosen a lovely person to date as well.

Watched: The Roses 🍿

This was fun, but perhaps a little too serious for my liking at times.

Watched: The Outfit 🍿

My neighbor recommended this and I’m glad she did. I’ll gladly watch it again.

A short video of the river near Clarkston.

Last weekend, I went to visit my sister so we could celebrate her birthday and Guy Fawkes Day together. She lives in Clarkston, Washington which sits alongside Lewiston, ID at the confluence of the Snake and the Clearwater Rivers.

My nephew, as you’d expect, enjoyed the fire.

It was great to spend a little time with my sister and get to know her boyfriend a little better. While I was visiting, we helped shuttle one of her friends so that he could spend the day on one of the nearby rivers. This gave us an opportunity to go exploring. We spent some of that time trying to take photos that we actually liked of the fall colors. Her new iPhone did a better job than my not so new Pixel 8 Pro. Trying to get the colors in photos to match what you actually see continues to frustrate me.

I put my favorite photos in a collection. Some of them don’t seem terrible.

As I’ve mentioned before, the drive through the Columbia River Gorge to get there and back is amazing. It’s hard to comprehend just how much water is moving through there.