use real butter

To: you
From: me

Hot, dusty, tired, and a little sunburned. Also covered in white, yellow, orange, and purple pollen. Lots of grass stains. It’s a Claritin kind of trip. Totally worth it. Achoo! See you when I get back.

-jen

joshua trees and goldfields

tidy tips among other asters

expanses of yellow

poppies move into an old burn area

cherry tree in blossom

meeting in west lake

dinner at my friends’ house (with tea)

cherry blossoms blooming in queen anne

grilled lamb sandwich at salumi’s

rainy day

muddy, rainy day in skagit valley

but lots of daffodils!

friend’s cute dog (when he wasn’t trying to rip me to pieces)

awesome falafel at the golden beetle

for jeremy

my friend, lu

shauna and danny at the coffeehouse

sitka and spruce

lovely dana

anchovies

lara enjoying a great lunch

grilled artichoke salad with poached egg

visiting with (and meeting!) jessie (cakespy)

in lara’s new studio

fantastic light

cabbage and pork belly salad at delancey

someone is excited for pizza

at the hotel for the next part of the adventure

It’s one thing to have an injury because you went yard-saling down a back bowl. It’s another thing to have an injury because you were working on the computer for too long. Overuse, bad ergonomics, poor posture – it happens over and over again. I’ve been working on a computer since I was in high school: data entry, programming, more programming, image processing, data analysis, programming and web design, more image processing. And these days it isn’t enough to just work on the computer – it seems most of my professional and personal communications are mainly through the interwebs.

Sometimes I walk away from the computer so I can feel like a human being again. Sometimes I have to stay away because the muscles get inflamed from fine repetitive motions and lack of range of motion. This past week I was off the computer to let my body heal. I had a lot of time to think about it too. Something needed to change.

my office desk

I have a good desktop setup, but after I got home from Santa Fe the first thing we did was go out and replace my old office chair with a Herman Miller chair. Meanwhile, I was heating, icing, and exercising my back. Sitting always made things worse. I loathed that any computer time required sitting and said (on Facebook) how I wished I could mount my computer onto my treadmill. And the links came in for people who had converted their treadmills to workstations. I read about them and even emailed with a friend’s friend who built his. Jeremy and I discussed design issues and functionality driving home from his parents’ house a couple of days ago. I’m the engineer. I planned it all out.

24 hours later… the exercise room is also an office

The point is not to run a 6 minute mile while cranking out emails to your clients. No, no, no. That’s an even BETTER recipe for hurting yourself. I have always been a firm believer that if you are truly exercising hard – then you can’t be reading a book or typing a letter. However, I can easily walk a mellow pace of 1-2 miles an hour and do a lot of the things I used to do while sitting on my hind quarters: emails, phone calls, scheduling, writing, reading, research, tweeting. Image processing still remains something I’m leaving on my desktop in the main office.

phone, keyboard, mouse, monitor, speakers (for the tunes, yo)

**Jump for more butter**