Busy-ness and Business

Quite the weekend. Learned a lot. So this weekend I:

• Helped support the team through a crapstorm of system issues for the accuracy of student enrollment (fun!)
• Nearly finished refinishing and chalk painting a desk and hutch for my husband.
• Worked out each day (developing new habits, totally addicted to bullet journal, but that’s another story)
• Got the kids school supplies from last Spring (!) fully organized along with their supplies for this fall (they were labor, I was management)
• Rearranged a few furniture things to get a bookshelf into my “bedroom office”
• Wrote on novel both days (woo hoo!)
• Dyed my hair (honey blonde, a bit of a change – next step is to add deep red to the ends, though my husband made the comment “I think it’s great that you still want to do stuff like that at your age”)
• Considered divorce (just kidding, but related to previous bullet)
• Finished Lord of the Rings trilogy with the kids (pretty much the same way I remember it last time – people walking, things chasing them, a bigger evil chasing the evil away, and the evil people are conveniently ugly. Have had to explain to my kids that this does not mean evil people are actually ugly. Sometimes the reverse is true.)
• Watched episodes of Chuck with the kids (remote in hand, we fast forward some parts). We do add dance breaks during the beginning credits which is uber fun.
• Worked on performance reviews for work
• Worked on a bunch of other stuff for work
• Basically worked half of the weekend, because it improves my anxiety going into the new week
• Listened to a great great Freakonomics podcast on Is Economic Growth the Wrong Goal. Love this idea, except it assumes a certain critical mass of humans doing the right thing for it to work. BUT I will say that Amsterdam really approaches the economics of this from an incentive and de-incentive approach, which can work, but only if it’s excruciatingly well-designed.
• Listened to a podcast on Meet Like a Boss from the folks at Radical Candor (who rock). Pleasantly surprised to find out I’m on-pointe with much of this, though still a few new techniques to try. Very interested in the concept of fusing movement (i.e. walks) with meaningful conversations. Thinking my way through how you would do that in pandemic era in Louisiana, whereby if I walk outside my door I start sweating.

I felt like I crushed it! (Keep in mind that I listened to the podcast while I was refinishing the furniture. I don’t have special time-extending powers.)

Not really sure exactly what I was trying to crush – maybe the temptation of eating lots of sugar while reading my detective novel? Love those British procedurals. They have the most civilized police and criminals. They also make all these in-jokes about different accents and the persistent class system there, which makes me feel really good about the opportunities in the good old US of A.

My attitude has definitely improved since I have minimized my exposure to news, which is the absolutely worst. Every time someone tells me “Can you believe that so and so said?” I tune it out. Of course that person said that. Because we’ve lost our ability to have conversations or seek resolution.

Sometimes I think we’re living through the fall of Rome, witnessing the rapidly accelerating decline of a nation. We have forgotten simple things about human nature, simple things about how to treat each other, and I’m done with this. Head officially stuck in the sand. The lack of civility is killing me – also the willingness to be wrong. If you’re not wrong on a regular basis you’re ignoring learning opportunities, and you may be suffering from confirmation bias, as many smart people do.

So, approaching the week optimistically. Feeling productive. Glad to be back at home, in the house, kids back in the neighborhood. Feeling less vagabond, and more settled. But still, freedom comes with not owning things – that’s a post for another day.

-SDM

And, in case you’re interested… the opening credits for Chuck are the perfect family dance break!