Yes, this is me. Toast. I've moved. Hence the lack of notes recently because you know...  It's the classic tale of a Girl meets a Plan, Plan does something stupid (like require actual work), Girl breaks up with Plan, Girl flirts with another Plan, and then Girl realizes Plan A was actually good for her and runs back in a grand reunion scene.

Part of my dev plan was to get cracking on toastchanges.com brand. Don't ask me why. Don't even ask my boss because this isn't his fault. It felt like it was time to stop pretending Dean was going to disappear any minute and to start thinking about the future. That's another don't ask because I don't know why he isn't going to disappear either. I don't know so much that I really need to know about what the future looks like that it does my head in Every. Single. Time. I try to look at it. So for a very long time I just didn't. Now Dean is talking about this year and next year and about what happens the year after that. I feel like his attitude provides a permission structure which allows me to think out over the horizon as well. 

Plan A is a really demanding fellow. Lot's of commanding, arbitrary behaviour, banging around the brain shouting Do This and Do That and then Do the Other Thing. And of course hail the matriarchy, it would be super nice to tell Plan A to go to hell. I'd like to play the field before I get too old to be attractive to other Plans. However, I have arguably a close to two decade investment in Plan A (some would say that investment goes all the way back to the day I decided to take a job in tech training rather than the public sector after getting my Masters which is like... longer... let's just say longer). So yeah, we may be at the point where I can honestly admit that I know what I'm going to be when I grow up. And Plan A is my plan.

Now it's not true that I've been monogamous for all that time with Plan A. I definitely had a serious relationship with Plan T - a tech wizard in Seattle which rules pretty much everything. I also got into a disturbing relationship with a foreigner named Plan ILT. I mean it was so sexy... ILT flew me around the world -- like literally I got to go all over Europe, paid trips to conferences. You name it. Internationalisation/Localisation/Translation, man that was a Plan. I still get a little hot and bothered remembering it. But ILT is a really fickle bastard and dominated by quite frankly a bunch of sexist pricks and basically told me that I wasn't good enough. Bite me.

Now here I am back at the beginning - manipulating hearts and minds for the good of the world. I can't believe I've literally come full circle to the dreams I had at Berkeley, UW and the Capital. Maybe that just proves what I've been spouting on and on about in change resiliency classes; We have a baseline which is the essence of who we are. Maybe Plan A never needed to worry about me. Ultimately, my own nature makes me faithful to it. 

So welcome to the Voice Over at toastchanges.com. It's the running commentary in my head that is constantly checking my work and making sure I'm paying attention to the really important parts.

“My eyes flickered when I heard the Voice inside my head. (You mean you don’t have one? You can get ‘em at Target.)”  ~ James Patterson