My time in Austin, TX is drawing to a close. Next week I am moving to the Bay Area. (Alameda Island if you know the area.)

I got a new job in downtown San Francisco. I have been working there since Nov 11, 2013. I spent the first week actually in SF, staying in a hotel downtown, and I’ve been working from home here in Austin after that. (If you’ve been reading along, I went full time as a girl on Nov 9th…)

The office is closed for remodeling right now, so they figured rather than ask me to move out there and then work from home anyhow, why not just stay here in Austin for an extra month and enjoy the holidays here… and then move when things are very slow and we’re closed for the holiday break.

My old gig was for a company that I’m going to call Intergalactic Probes. (That’s not actually the name, hehe.) I worked on the team that kept all customer-facing web assets up and running. If someone from outside of the company could reach it, my team owned it. It was our job to ensure the stability and uptime of the website, a mission we took very seriously.

I’m proud to say that when I got there the website was really up-and-down, but 2013 was the highest level of stability that ip.com had ever seen in the company history. (Again, not the real URL!) I can’t take the credit for that, I was just a member of the team that did it, but it was a good challenge. One of our subdomains was “sine.ip.com” and the joke inside the company is that we named it that as a warning to our customers that it goes up and down and up and down. 🙂

The old gig was very corporate. There were 7,000 employes in the company and it was publicly traded, which meant things like SOX were very much in effect.

The new gig is … totally different.

It’s a small company – around 200 – and while it’s not a startup, it’s way smaller and way more laid back. There are more people in the eCommerce team at IP than there are in the entire company here.

I’m on the operations team for the company’s products. We operate at a much bigger scale than I ever did at IP. At IP my team worked with dozens of production servers – here we have thousands. It’s going to take me a while to get spun up, but I’m enjoying all of the new things I’m getting to learn.

If there’s one thing I learned at IP, it’s that I am not a corporate kinda gal. When I worked for the school I was on a small team. We had the power to do whatever we needed to do to get things done. At IP it was heavily siloed, which I found extremely frustrating. What seemed like simple things to me became very complex because suddenly I was having to do cross-team communication and all sorts of cross-team things to do what felt like something that should have just taken me a few minutes to do.

I know this is very normal in corporate environments. The folks on my team were largely from the corporate background and were just used to it. Their normal response is “yeah, that’s how it works.” And I get that. In a big company, it has to be siloed like that… that’s how I was able to leave and it was not a big deal. My total impact, while important to the area I had control over, was not that huge in scope. It’s easy to replace someone in that sort of situation because everyone’s roles are well defined. I get it!

It’s just not my style. I like being on a small team that owns the entire stack.

I have zero ill will against IP. If I had kids and my job was not the main thing in my life, it might have been a paradise. They treat the employees very well and the management is very easy to work with. They were super, super nice to me and I am very thankful for that. Most of the people I worked with were either parents, or planning on being parents, and in that sort of lifestyle, IP is a great place to work.

I dreaded for years how I was going to come out at work. I’d been there long enough that everyone knew my by my old name. There were no unisex bathrooms. I am sure we could have made something work, but it was a huge stressor to me knowing that sooner or later I’d have to come out at work and tackle these issues head on. (To be fair to IP, the senior management of the company had my back and I’m pretty sure they would have done anything they could have to make it work!)

Oddly enough, even for a company that’s 30+ years old and founded and headquartered in Austin, I would have been the first openly trans employee. I’m not sure that’s an honor I really wanted to have.

On my first day at the new job, it went like this. “Hi everyone. This is Bunny. She’s our new engineer.” …and that was that. All the stress I had of coming out at work, and it was over in like three or four seconds. Switching jobs was the right move without a doubt! It took all of the stress away. I guess that’s a big benefit of working for a tech company in the Bay Area.

My new team is amazing. They didn’t even bat an eye. I’m just one of the girls there now. I wish all transwomen were as lucky as I am in this regard.

I was in the Bay Area last week looking for an apartment. I knew I had found the right place when the apartment manager and I had a long, fun talk about house rabbits. Turns out she fosters for HRS and has four rabbits in her apartment. She even brought me a cute buck named Clover to hug and play with when it came time to sign the lease. No, I’m not planning on opening my doors new bun just yet, but it’s really nice to know that when I’m ready, there will be no issues with my apartment manager. 🙂

I always seem to find the house rabbit people no matter where I am. This time I did it before I had even moved in!

This may or may not be a surprise to almost everyone reading this, but about two years ago I started coming to terms with something that had been fighting and trying to ignore my entire life. It was not an easy road to get here.

I am transgendered. (If this is a surprise to you, I mean male to female transgendered.)

This is not a new thing by any means. I’ve had some really awkward times in the last ten years as I’ve gotten more and more active in the furry community. It seems that almost everyone I deal with on a purely text basis had been assuming I was born female and when we’d meet in real life for the first time they were all “Wait, YOU’RE Bunny??”

Even when I was still using a male avatar in Second Life this happened. One year at RCFM I had a really weird conversation with someone that assumed I was a female in real life but using a male avatar in Second Life for some reason. It took some convincing to prove to him that I am actually who I said I am. 🙂 (I guess even when I was trying to be male I sucked at it!)

I’ve been in therapy for a while now struggling with this.

Coming out has been both interesting and oddly rewarding. I started coming out to my closest friends first. Every conversation I had with them went like this: “Bunny, stop. You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. I just didn’t want to bring it up. I didn’t know if you wanted to hear it or not.” (This worked great, by the way. It gave me a feeling as if a large weight had been lifted off my shoulders!)

My family has been mixed but okay. My folks are accepting but not really all that supportive. (But honestly, this is the best I could have hoped for, I think.) My sister was like “about time you came out!” and my brother was clueless, but we’ve never been all that close. I have not been disowned or anything like that, so that’s good.

Work was… well… I just dodged a bullet and changed jobs. 🙂 (More on that later.)

And my friends, of course, have been amazing. I feel closer to them now than ever before.

To answer the question I’m sure you’re wondering now… yes, I live full time as a female. I went full time Nov 9th, 2013. I have not yet legally changed my name but I will very soon. I only go by my new name these days, so that’s a bit of a conflict I need to address.

Getting zapped with a laser on your face is like the worse pain ever.

I’ve been working with a vocal coach on my voice. I’ll be working at this for years, I had a fairly deep voice.

I’m doing this all out of order. I’ve gone full time and live and identify as a female all of the time, but I haven’t started HRT yet. I hope to correct that soon. My therapist and I had a bit of a disagreement over this, and in the end I figured that he was most likely right and I decided to go slow. I don’t recommend doing it this way, but it’s the path I took. 🙂

And yes, I hope there is surgery in my future at some point. It’s expensive and usually not covered by insurance, so sadly it’s most likely a looong ways away. 😦

So there. Hey everyone, I’m a girl. Duuuuuh. 🙂

It’s been a long time since I posted anything here, so I figured I’d post a few updates. Since I’ve got a lotta things to cover I’m going to post several updates so people can comment on different things without having to stomp on other stuff. 🙂

This is something I’ve been meaning to post for a while but haven’t.

I’ve been on a mission to get my health to levels where its never been. I live a very sedentary lifestyle – I’m a System Engineer by day, and someone that uses a computer a lot at night. While I move from building to building a bunch at work, I’m going from meeting to meeting, not actually doing a lot of physical activity. Once I get where I’m going my butt goes back into a seat for an hour or more at a time. This is nothing new — my entire career has been like this.

The most physically fit I’ve ever been was when I was in marching band my freshman year of High School. During that time I was constantly on my feet carrying large instruments around with me the whole time. (I played both trombone and tuba.) That’s about the only time in my life when I can remember actually being in decent shape. We had practices every evening and spend every Saturday on the road at various competitions.

After moving to Ohio my health went downhill from there. I no longer got the exercise I was getting from marching band. I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back I guess I got a bit depressed then as well — I just stopped caring about things like that and I let it get out of control. Funny how I was blind to it while this was happening and it’s only now that I’m able to see it.

I got to the heaviest I’ve ever been when I was in college. I found some photos of myself (which I won’t be posting here, thanks! 🙂 ) a few months ago and was sorta shocked at what I saw. Scared, really, knowing that’s where I’d come from. I was about 150 lbs more then than I am now.

Right after graduating college (it took me seven years to graduate since I was working full time, but I made it!) I started having back problems. I had a few episodes where I couldn’t move at all I was in so much pain… all I could do was lay flat on my back and not move a muscle for fear of triggering a spasm. My Mom came over for a few nights while all that was going on, and I’m not sure what I would have been able to do without her there. We’ve both agreed that I should have gone to the hospital when that happened, but for some reason we didn’t do it. I’m not sure how I would have gotten there, frankly, since I couldn’t sit upright… short of calling 911, I guess. I am very glad I did survive that time and went on to make a full recovery.

While I was laid up in bed I remember laying there and realizing I could feel my heart beating and then feel the blood rush outward from my heart. It was a weird sensation. I told myself “oh no, this can’t be good, I shouldn’t be able to feel this” and figured that my blood pressure was too high. I made an appointment at the doctor afterwards to go talk about this and get my blood pressured checked.

That doctor appointment was a humbling experience.

When people ask me how much weight I’ve lost I don’t really have an answer to give them — because I don’t know. The scale at the doctor’s office wouldn’t go that high. (This was before digital scales in doctor’s offices.) It was really embarrassing. The figure that he wrote down on my chart was just “XXX>” where XXX was the most the scale could do. We sorta guessed what the “>” might be by how fast the balance beam on the scale would bounce back when pushed, but it was just a guess… and sure enough, my blood pressure was very high.

That doctor visit triggered me to go on a massive diet. I lost a lot of weight by doing nothing more than just cutting way back on what I was eating — I didn’t add in the working out piece, I just simply quit eating a lot. It worked great… right up till when I killed my gallbladder.

If you don’t know what a gallbladder does, it stores excess bile that’s produced in the liver. Bile is used for breaking down fat in the food you eat. When you’re as overweight as I was, your body gets really used to creating a lot of bile since it’s constantly having to digest fat. Since I had radically (unsafely really) changed my diet suddenly that bile was just trapped in the gallbladder and never had a chance to get flushed out. It then crystallized and turned into thousands of little tiny gallstones.

I had a bunch of gallbladder attacks, several of which put me in the ER overnight. Gallbladder attacks are one of the most painful things you can experience — I’ve talked to women that have both given birth and had a gallbladder attack and they tell me that having a kid is easy compared to a gallbladder attack. (And when you’re done giving birth you’ve got a new baby to enjoy at the end of it, vs being really sore for weeks afterwards!) After every single attack they’d send me to get an ultrasound done of my gallbladder, but they’d never find anything. Turns out later that the reason they never found anything is because the entire gallbladder was packed full of stones — thus there was no change in density for the ultrasound to pick up on!

After the last one I had a really skilled ultrasound tech at the ER happened to find “something” that didn’t look right to her and was able to convince the doctors of it. They came into the ER to tell me that not only was I going to be admitted to the hospital, but they had a surgeon coming in to remove my gallbladder right then. Prep for surgery started immediately. (Looking back, this is a good thing — I didn’t have time to get worried!)

The suregon told me he’d never seen anything like what I had. He showed me a photo of the gallbladder that he removed and how it was packed full of thousands of pea-sized gallstones. He was just flabbergasted that it has happened since he’d just simply never seen it before.

Recovery from this surgery was slow and it put a halt to my weight loss. I was unable to eat “normal” foods for a while and I just had to eat what I could eat. The momentum I had built up went away — most likely for the best anyhow, since I was doing it wrong.

Fast forward a few years to three years ago. We had just started a fitness program at the school where I was working, which meant I could join the gym next door to the office for just $10/month, so I did. What possessed me to do that I have no idea, but it was a smart move.

The first time I set paw in the gym I was unable to do more than 15 minutes walking on a treadmill. Really embarrassing. I kept working on adding more and more time to the length of time I was walking each day until I made it all the way up to 55 minutes (plus five for a cool down). I didn’t focus on dieting during this time – I was just trying to get into better shape.

After hitting the wall that doing nothing but cardio will do, I decided to get a trainer and take on weight training. I did weight training two days a week with a trainer and cardio every other day. I did this for six months until I found a job here in Austin and moved.

My trainer in Ohio got me on the road to losing weight again. He forced me to write out a food journal for a week, and then we sat down and went over it. That’s a really cruel thing to have to do. 🙂

He showed me how to cook better and we set off to start dropping weight again. (I had put on some after surgery — never got any close to where I started, however!!) This time I was doing it right. Instead of just eating less, I was making sure I ate the right things *AND* added exercise to my routine.

After working with Dave for six months I moved to Austin. When I got here I was flat broke (I was paying both a mortgage and rent for seven months until my house sold), so I couldn’t afford a trainer. Old habits started to take over again.

That changed about 20 months ago when I hired the services of a new trainer — Jeff here in Austin. I spent the first year with him just working on weight training and getting my back stronger, which worked great.

Last year (2011) in June I started hitting my diet heavy again. My goal was to start right after RCFM, but I got stuck with that really nasty con crud that we all seemed to get right after RCFM and it took me a few weeks to recover. Once I did, however, I started dieting and haven’t looked back.

Since that time I’m now down about 80lbs. According to the scale here at the house I have four pounds to go (vs nine pounds on the gym scale) to reach the goal that my Doctor and I set out to hit all those years ago. I’ve been dropping a pound a week lately, so I’m within three months of hitting my goal weight.

I’ve decided that I’m not going to stop there. If I get to that goal weight and weight is still coming off, I’m going to just let it keep coming off. If I can get to my goal weight and then keep it off for two YEARS, I’ll start trying to think about getting surgery to remove some of the excess skin that built up from my college years.

So what have I learned from all of this? The biggest thing is that I have a food addiction.

The doctor tells me that a food addiction is almost exactly like a drug addiction to your brain. It gets used to the chemicals that are released while eating, and then becomes addicted to that sensation. Unlike a drug addict, however, you can’t separate yourself from your addiction. A meth addict can keep away from the drug, but I can’t get away from food.

It’s a weird thing. Two parts of my brain fight at times. Let’s pretend it’s lunch time… the logical side of my brain says “you need to consume 400 calories of food to provide the fuel that you need to make it to dinner”, but the food-loving part of my brain says “hey, there’s a pizza buffet down the road from here!” (And then it really gets fun when I start rationalizing things… like reminding myself that the pizza buffet is only $4.50, but a healthy lunch is $7.00! Thus begins the internal dialog of “you’re really going to pay more to get less??” ARUGH!)

I have to consciously ignore that part of my brain and just listen to the logical part. It’s a constant struggle that I’ll most likely have to deal with for the rest of my life. I can’t let my guard down or less I’ll find myself giving into that addiction and I’ll be right back where I started, and I don’t want that.

I’m one of the lucky ones. I caught my food addiction in time. Today my blood pressure is completely normal, I am not diabetic, and by and large I seemed to have managed to escape the dangers of being so overweight. Odds are this is because it didn’t happen till I was older and I caught it in time.

I’m in nearly as good of shape today as I was in high school, and hopefully within the next year will be able to surpass where I was even then. (I’m 34 in real life.)

The day I hit my goal weight I’ll be sure and post back here and all over Twitter. I’ll be overjoyed when I finally get there.

I have been using Google Reader for many years to keep track of around 150 websites and read new content on them constantly. In my line of work things change quickly and staying on top of the tech news and developments can be a difficult job to say the least.

Today I have realized that I must be totally color blind. I cannot tell the difference in the gray, light gray, dark gray, light dark gray, lightish gray, medium gray, light medium gray, light light gray and dark medium light gray that now makes up Google Reader. I can’t tell what’s been read and unread unless I look very, very closely.

To make matters worse, I work my day job almost 100% from a laptop with the monitor dimmed a lot to save on battery life. In this state I’m completely unable to see what’s read and unread in Google Reader. (And even on my desktop PC with monitors running on AC it’s not much better.)

You would think that a company with so many bright colors in their logo would understand that there is more than just gray in the color spectrum, but I guess not. They know more than I do, and I don’t see a way to revert the changes back to something with more contrast and/or colors.

I’m dismayed. I’m not sure what to do. Google Reader provided a service I can’t get anywhere else – a way to stay on top of tech sites from three devices and have my read/unread counts follow me. (I use the web interface on my Mac and PC and Feedler on my iPhone.)

I really don’t want to have to write an RSS reader that syncs back to a database, but if that’s what I have to do, that’s what I have to do. 😦

Last week I had minor surgery. It was all external and I’m fine and going to be fine long into the future, but the recovery from this is pretty terrible.

I’ve been spending the last five days recouping at home… which has been interesting, since I’m not really up to sitting in front of the computer for too long. I’ve had time to realize just how much I depend on my computer for entertainment! 🙂

On the bright side, I got to see a few baseball games from start to finish, something I haven’t seen in years. (And if St. Louis makes it into the World Series with Texas, I won’t know who to cheer for — the local team, or the NL Central! I guess no matter what happens I’ll be happy.)

I’m going back to work tomorrow and I’ll play it by ear. I hope to at least be able to stay up till lunch, and then come home and work the rest of the day here. My sofa is a nice comfy place to sit, an office chair… not so much.