Okay, well, not ALL my chores. It’s fall and a decent enough day to start the seasonal swap of things from the garage to the shed (lawnmower, bicycles) and from the shed to the garage (mostly snowblower and shovels). I also moved the winter tires over as I have the car getting serviced on Monday and they’ll swap tires at the same time. I usually aim for November 15th, but they called a couple of weeks ago to prompt service so I went ahead and booked. It’s not like I’m driving anywhere though. We also did a grocery pickup today. Nothing too exciting. Oooh, three loads of laundry too…how exciting is THAT? Or burgers on the BBQ in November?
Today I choose to do (some of) my chores. Tomorrow, we’ll close up the gazebo and soon I’ll have to really finish sorting the garage so I can park in there for the winter.
So I had a bit of a strange end to my work week. I have mentioned, I think, that I retire in about 5 years, and so I expect that is probably 1-2 jobs in the public service before then, likely staying at my current level. I made a huge change about 3 years ago, screwing up a perfectly good job for what I hoped were greener pastures that turned out to be burnt crab grass. But you make your decisions going forward with imperfect information, and I don’t dwell when things don’t work out except insofar as I review what my emotions were leading me in certain directions. Understanding the choices I made, so to speak.
Anyway, I have a decent job, not the most exciting, and while I have had a couple of jobs available to me that would complicate my life, they weren’t anything that intrigued me. Then a boss offered me, or more accurately suggested to me, a change that would enlarge my duties, shift things around a bit, and generally give him a good solution to another problem, the proverbial two birds with one stone. And I said, “Sure, probably.”
But over the course of a day, as I had a couple of other conversations with people, a couple of them asked me the same question about an alternative I wasn’t considering and it got me thinking of the possible change not as a simple incremental tweak so much as a real choice. If I “take” the new job, it’s like choosing between my current job or the new one, not just adding to my duties. And I realized that I probably wouldn’t choose that second job in that A/B choice world instead of a simpler equation of A + some new stuff = B job.
And because I trust the people asking the question, and the way they framed it, I thought about it in a way that changed the options from A/B or A+x=B to A / A + x = B / C. Which is possibly leading towards a fourth option of D. It is not without complications to consider, but I’ve enlarged the conversation to include more variables about what I want to do with my last few years in government. And it might even lead to me choosing a single job that I will do until I retire.
Today I choose to listen to other people’s questions and it helped me improve my own questions and options. I’ll blog about it if and when things firm up more but it made for an interesting last couple of days.
Today (Thursday) was a really long day that started off sucky and continued most of the way through that way.
My eye was bothering me on Wednesday night, and I’m pretty sure I have pink eye. Again. Frustrating, I haven’t BEEN anywhere and with a month since the first time, it’s hard to believe it’s still a live virus in my own house anywhere. Anyway, I woke up with a headache, likely a sleep machine issue as my throat was a bit raw, but I had a chiro appointment scheduled. When I went to do the COVID screening, I had to screen myself out — headache, sore throat and possible pink eye? Yeah, probably nothing. But probably nothing and nothing are not the same thing, so cancel I did even though my ribs are screaming at me that they’re in the wrong position. Sigh.
But I still had an errand to run, and I was late getting back for my 9:00 a.m. meeting. Then my computer didn’t want to connect. By the time I was online, and connected, the day had started without me and I was playing catchup. I washed out my eye a couple of times, warm compresses, Tylenol for the headache, blipping through. I felt almost caught up by lunch.
After lunch, I thought my first meeting was at 2:00, but FFS, no, it was at 1:00 p.m., and by the time I figured that out, I had missed it. It was just a quick consult with someone wanting to run a trivia game like mine at work, easily rescheduled, but still not very professional and highly annoying. My sleep has been screwed up so I was lagging all afternoon, trying to be productive.
A 3:00 p.m. meeting woke me up with some HR options to consider for the future, a potential rejigging of my current job, and then search mode for another 2 hours while I tracked down info I need for different things, breathing time for work…usually about 3:00 each day, my schedule starts to ease off and I’m free until the end of the day to plow through docs. I stay on top of email pretty well, but some are more than quick hits and I have to move them to the end of the day to sit down and read / digest.
Nothing that exciting after that, but by 8:00 p.m., I was exhausted. I struggled to stay awake for another 30 minutes and then it was clear I was done. I crashed by nine. And promptly woke up at midnight. I thought it would have to be at LEAST 3 or 4 in the morning, but no, it was only midnight and my body was saying, “Yep, you’re done”. FFS.
I hate time change, if that is what it is. I get it every year. But my eye’s bothering me, my ribs are out of position and it will take a bit of self-care to get everything realigned in the next week myself instead of getting the chiro treatment yesterday. I don’t have time for my sleep to be screwed up too.
But today I choose to listen to my body which said it was time to sleep. The fact that I also had to listen to it when it said it was time to get up again is irrelevant, I still choose to listen. And I’ll have to do my stretching routines to see if my ribs will slip back into some semblance of normal.
I have been feeling like a lot of my posts on my blog are mechanical of late. I have posts about trivia, choices I’m making, computer things I’m doing. Lots of experience, relatively routine topics. I wanted to poke myself to come up with something new.
I dipped into a book called “Question of the day” by Al Katkowsky that I got some years ago. I have others, including some that are tailored towards parties, like “Would you rather…” or “truth or dare” or “what if…” type questions.
But the one today also ties into questions of gratitude. It asked what debts you owe to people that you cannot repay. I had a blast writing it, and I’ll probably write about the same topic again next week, and maybe the week after, and maybe the week after that too. Hopefully not in as much detail as Part I about teachers.
Today I choose to ask myself a thoughtful question about who I owe.
The name of the book club is not really competitive book club, but it’s a bit of a “in joke” for the members. Last year, I created a PolyWogg Reading Challenge where I had a “bingo” card for some friends to have a low-pressure book club to read different categories of books and “fill” spots on the bingo card for different genres or themes. It was okay, but it wasn’t that compelling, and people just tended to do their own thing.
For 2020, people suggested some changes to the reading challenge, including:
More monthly “categories” with a few specific ideas about themes (we added Indigenous for example);
Some flexibility within the month with a bit of nudging; and,
They want badges.
I kept wanting to say, “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges”, but as moderator of the small but mighty band of intrepid readers, that seemed discouraging. However, I wasn’t sure how to do them, what they would be for, or if anyone would care, even when they were asking for them (the desire for badges prompted the joke that we were turning it into competitive book club). Some months I have struggled to stay on top of the monthly totals and award the badges. A few months it was close to the middle of the month before I wrapped up the totals for the month. In short, there were times this year with the isolation where I just wasn’t feeling it.
It isn’t that I wasn’t spending time on my computer and couldn’t get to it; I just wasn’t enjoying it that much. Back in July, I had an idea and it turned out to be really terrible…for me. The way the monthly badges work is that I generally offer them four categories of books for the month:
A. A few specific books from the theme for the month (I pick them, but I take suggestions too); B. A secondary category, generally open-ended as to what they might want to read in that genre; C. A catch-all “Readers Choice” for anything else they read; and, D. A challenge book for the month.
They can get 1 of 5 badges depending on how “hard” the choices are…1 book of their choice, 1 named book, 2 books of their choice, 2 named books, or 3+ books or the challenge book.
My idea for August and September was that you could double-count across the months. So, for instance, if you read a mystery in one month for the theme, you could also count it as a reader’s choice the next month. I wouldn’t double the totals but I would let books count against more than one badge across months. And then I compounded it by offering the same deal for October…books in any of the three months could be used to win badges in the other two months. It was a complicated nightmare to work out and track.
Today I choose to work on the competitive book club by totaling up all the results for the three months. 91 books read in total (without double-counting) by the group, all the badges awarded, everything caught up and reset for November. In addition, I have a plan for December that had me go back and make a list of all the books people have read for the year. I wish I had been keeping track from the beginning, would have been a lot easier. It took some time, but as I said, I’m all caught up.
