Not all of October has been sunshine and rainbows. Actually none of it, since this is Seattle October – it’s been more foggy mornings, hazy afternoons, fallen leaves covering the sidewalks and the occasional bitterly cold wind cutting through my five layers of clothing. Yes, layering is still in – look it up, people.

In addition to our first newsworthy winter storm (admittedly a very low bar for our drama-starved local news stations) I’ve also been brewing a storm of my own since early October, inside my head. As the chaos of this storm has grown with each torturous day and each insomnia-filled night, so has my sanity quickly but silently slipped from my grasp like so many grains of sand pouring out between my outstretched fingers. Lacking clarity of purpose and with no clean space inside my mind on which to organize my jumble of memories, dreams and hallucinations into coherent thoughts, I have been drifting through each day a ragged, hollow shell of a man, consumed in my own anguish.

For you see, I have lost my iPod. Picture a world without music. Like a movie that has no soundtrack, mine has been a journey that lacks accompaniment. My secret weapon for maintaining sanity amidst a tumultuous life, my crutch, my companion, my addiction… stripped from me by cruel fate and a messy apartment.

I don’t truly know when it happened. I’ve re-examined every flash of recollection in my mind so many times that the true memories are intermingled now with both the hopes and the fears, creating a fable that is woven so tightly I have lost faith it will ever be unraveled to separate the yarns of truth from the red herrings spun into gold. There was a day, however, that sticks in the flurries of my mind. A day when I broke routine, when I didn’t put my iPod in the usual place. I needed a little extra 160-beats-per-minute fix that evening and indulged in such on the walk to my parking lot, rather than tucking my friend safely into my bag. When I switched from “walk” to “drive” I moved it from pocket to cupholder – still within arm’s reach. At home it was transported safely into my room, unloaded on the bed along with the other contents of my pockets – or at least, that’s one of the clips played so much in my mind that I’m convinced it must have happened that way. I stacked it with the other things I intended to pack for vacation the next day.

A day went by before I packed to leave, and on that day it was nowhere. I settled on traveling without it – against my better judgement – and left for a week empty of both hand and heart. When I returned the memories were foggy, the clutter piled even higher, and the last known location of the iPod lost deeper and deeper in my mind’s abyss.

Weeks have gone by and the detachment has grown severe. Each day I cease to function a little more, slowly but continuously wilting like a plant denied the sun, retreating into a confused malaise of mumbling, self-doubt and misanthropy. In a rare moment of clarity today I determined to cut my losses, to sever the bleeding limb and cauterize the wound to salvage what of life’s blood still flows in my mind’s musical veins. I found another iPod on ebay, and bid on it, and won. The same model as before, a 60gb iPod Photo, far from the cutting edge but a seamless replacement for the missing puzzle block in my life whose lack has rendered the puzzle’s image irrecognizable.

My purgatory has a limit, and it is marked by a UPS tracking number.

Sunday night in Seattle Center, the last hours of a great weekend visit from Mom. Danielle and I are both really lucky.

This is actually a Ford Ranger entirely covered in black duct tape. Yes, someone actually did that to their truck.

First weekend in October – Oktoberfest in Leavenworth, our third annual trek east over the Cascade Mountains for the world’s third-largest such ‘fest in our own local Bavarian village. We were on a schedule and a budget this year – as most of us were leaving for a week or two in Hawaii the following weekend – so we didn’t do our usual long weekend in a condo with a big hot tub. Instead the crew compromised on a 15-pass van and an action-packed daytrip, with yours truly at the helm (I did have the chauffer’s cap on, after all).

It was a great day, beautiful and sunny in faux-Bavaria despite dreary Seattle skies and a rain-soaked drive both ways. We continued some growing traditions and started a few new ones, and were having so much fun when it came time to leave that the party continued in the van all the way home with very few incidences of highway napping, a rarity on a group roadtrip.

What’s with all the hats, you ask? Funny hats are an international Oktoberfest tradition! (Really). For our third annual trip Dave and I felt we needed to adopt this practice, so we hit the costume stores and the hats (a big hit with the group) were passed around all day for the camera’s benefit. These are all Erica’s photos, btw, so huge props to her for being the ever-present shutterbug as well as the Gwen Stefani to my Justin Timberlake.

Yes, we’re all wearing vests. One of our traditions is the “Oktober-Vest”, and weirdly enough we’re actually starting to become known for it around Leavenworth Oktoberfest circles. We are “the vest group” to increasingly more people in this fellowship of funny-hat-wearing beer enthusiasts, which is all the more reason that we’ll be back next year with crazier hats, tackier vests and whatever new traditions we dream up between now and next October.

There are so many things to catch up on in October, as it’s been a busy, exciting month and I’ve been e-gagged since nearly the beginning of it. I’ll try to start at the beginning but I make no guarantees that I’ll regurgitate things in the order they were digested. Wow, that analogy was kind of gross.

Let’s start with October 1st. It was a Monday, the first day of the month and of the week, and my first day in a new job. Same company (although it changes a little every day since we were acquired by our new overlords) but a new position, as the Technical Program Manager. It’s the kind of position I’ve worked for since college, a hybrid between client service, software development and management where my success will come from knowing as much about my favorite parts of the business – technology, operations, business development – as possible while being able to almost completely ignore the parts I have little interest in (sales). I feel very – for lack of a better, less-hubris-filled word – proud that I’ve been able to claw my way up the ladder into the job I’ve wanted despite maybe not taking the most direct path there. August was my three year anniversary with the company and this will be my fourth position there (each one a promotion) because I have never let myself be satisfied with “good enough” and I’m happy to say that approach has paid off in this case. Everything has worked out, including a lot of right-place and right-time luck, and I finally feel like I have a career and not just a job. For the first time ever I actually look forward to handing out my business cards, and it’s a nice feeling.

Perhaps one of the best parts of the promotion was the faith my bosses had in me to assume the significant new responsibility. My direct manager was completely supportive even though I would be moving out of his team, and he’s made my transition as easy as he could and continues to be a huge help. Our department boss is someone I’ve never been able to read well and whom I’ve always felt didn’t really like me much, so hearing her praising my skills and experience and saying she was excited to see me take the job was at first unnerving and then really motivating. I’ve definitely come to feel highly valued and greatly appreciated by the people I work with, which is a great situation to walk into every day. I hope that as our division continues to grow and as the company as a whole is broken apart and swallowed up by something much larger that the teams of people I’ve been spending this October with are still the same faces I see around the meeting tables next October, too. I’m definitely happy to be where I’m at and looking back into the blog archive that’s not always something I’ve been able to say.