I skipped my update last week, didn’t have a lot to say for the week, and decided I’d just roll it into this week.

Recurring items. I updated my to-do list to include recurring items, like my 7 Questions series which I have done for the first three weeks of the year. Questions 1-21, for reference. Each time, I find at least one that is a bit more thought-provoking than the others, so I’ll probably stick with it. I’m aiming to do those on Saturdays, generally. For my end-of-week series i.e., like this post, I’m hoping to do those on Sundays as I wrap up the previous week and plan my coming week. I was hoping to start posting quotes, doing my stretching, using the BowFlex, daily walking, movie nights, writing nights and game nights. We did half of a game night last week, a bit abbreviated, and we watched TV last week and this, but not movies, just TV binging. Jacob and I had fun playing Human Fall Flat with their new downloadable content, so that was good.

I have, however, completed a few more cooking items…we did awesome dumplings at the end of the first week plus a so-so roast of pork in the InstaPot. The roast was good, but not a homerun on flavour and more work than I think it was worth. It wasn’t bad, just needed a bit more “oomph”. Might come back to that one for a better rub, alter the steps a bit, speed things up. This week, we did a roast of beef, a very simple InstaPot recipe focusing mainly on onions and garlic with some Epicure rub, but again, not a homerun. Perfectly edible, but nothing to say, “Wow, let’s keep THAT recipe.” I was hoping to come up with something that we could build on, but I think we need the trivet to make the meat stay together a bit more rather than turning into a stew.

3D printing. No, I haven’t bought a printer yet. But I had five questions that were sitting on my to-do list for learning, and they’re not the sort of thing to just Google. They were a bit more nuanced than that, and I felt they would benefit from mentors in the local 3D Facebook group being able to answer and expand. I had a worrying concern that the filament would smell (some are even toxic), but the type I’m looking at are relatively minor for odours. People rarely can smell it outside of the room it is, not even as bad as a meal being cooked in the kitchen. So that was reassuring. I also asked about consumables and accessories, finishing the prints, how it hooks up (or not) to a PC, and whether you can make tools for cooking prep (like cookie cutters, for instance).

Reorg continued. I mentioned earlier that Andrea and Jacob assembled the last of the bookcases, and I moved another from the bedroom down. I’ve also moved a lot of other stuff downstairs and this coming week I need to dust off my big boy britches and get my ass in gear. There are 3 small “collections” of stuff to sort still, and then I can finish off the set-up in the basement. But I really need to blast through some of it this week, even if I do 30 minutes at a time. One thing I’m happy about in the re-org, and it is really minor, is that I’ve sorted through a bunch of trivia games. When I was trying to run trivia last year, I was annoyed because a bunch of my game cards were buried in bins. I have a bunch of them set out on my one shelf, ready for some “fixing” and sorting more once I get the other junk figured out.

Health stuff. As part of my health stuff, I need to take a new injectable medicine. It’s kind of like a precursor to insulin injections, hoping I can use this to get some stuff under control. But I need to have a bit of “training” on it, seems relatively straightforward, but I might as well have the nurse show me. Which was supposed to happen this past week but the clinic had not faxed the Rx to the pharmacy…all my normal meds, but not the new one. Oops. Kind of hard to do the injection if I don’t have it yet. Anyway, I followed up, shifted the training to next week, and got the Rx filled. Now I just have to do my training this week and I’ll be good to turn myself into a pin cushion once a week. We also did a meet-and-greet with a new doctor, so we have a new family doctor for Jacob and Andrea, rather than the continued Appletree system. I have a family doctor already, and well, we’re not a good fit generally. I love her interns, her not so much. But I’ll finish up some stuff with her over the next few weeks and then transfer everything to the new doctor. I also took Andrea for bloodwork and Jacob for massage, plus a chiro appointment in there for me somewhere.

Finances. I also managed to knock off a small item for a donation to Soroptimist in Peterborough. I have three other donations that I need to do too, all of which require actual physical paper cheques, envelopes, etc. I’m much better at online stuff than doing labels and stuff. But I’ll try to make some progress this coming week. Oh, and as a bit of a throw-away, I had some gift cards from a restaurant that changed their online setup to require a PIN code, and I didn’t have any. So I followed up, got the PINs, and used them this week. It doesn’t seem like much, but I have a habit of getting gift cards and saving them for something special, and then not using them.

New job. Of course, the REAL accomplishment of the past two weeks is this past week I completed my first week as an Acting Director. I feel like I did well on managing my managers overall, a solid “double” if you like baseball metaphors. For the staff beyond them, I feel like I managed a walk, after a few foul balls, didn’t handle one thing particularly well while the rest was fine. For my “upward” management, I did okay at the start of the week, but I feel like I missed an opportunity for something, going to call it a strike. But I did well on two other aspects of collegial management, building networks and supporting others, while maintaining good work/life balance and helping Jacob with transport issues. So kind of like going 2 for 4 at the plate with a forced error and an unforced error in the field. The stadium lights are on, the players are playing well, but it was only the first inning and no scoring for either side. I’ll take it as a promising start and I’m still in the game.

Other. I also helped my niece set up her website this past week, although we’re not done yet. Just getting it going. I will likely need to spend some more time in the coming weeks, but it’s a start anyway. Not sure what category that falls under.

Conclusion. Not as much as I had hoped. I’m feeling a bit unmotivated on some bigger items so I’m going to review my “projects” list to see if grouping them together makes me feel like I’m making progress in a “category” (like projects) even if several sub-items do not see progress very much in the year. It’s a thought, we’ll see how it goes this week.