Tag: work-life balance

Trying To Wrap Up Before Vacation

I am hopefully flying to Helsinki in two days. “Hopefully,” because Finnair is on strike, but in some weird intermittent way, so I am still unsure whether my flight is affected. However, I should know by tomorrow morning, so fingers crossed! Unfortunately, I had something planned before and after my trip, so I could not move it. If my flight is cancelled, I must cut my vacation by two days.

Other than that, I am extremely tired. Work is absolutely crazy. Also, I am trying to use the longer days for longer bike rides. The trains are more and more crowded, and I rarely get a chance to sit down on the 7 AM train. And if I want to take 6:30 AM, bike for 1 hour and ten minutes (that’s what it takes to the Montrose Harbor and back), take a quick shower and change, and get out of the house at 6:10… You got the idea.

There are many conference-related activities, and although these are all good, there are still many of them. We had a meeting with potential website developers today, and I received a response to my email about budget lodging options, and I had to reply. I sent the first catering quote request. And I need to figure out who I can ask to do our social media, because I can’t do it all…

And with this, I am going to stop complaining right now and go to bed 🙂

***

As it is clear from my last several posts, I am on my way to “back to normal.” However, something has permanently changed; in some sense, it is a “new normal,” and I am trying to figure out how the past several months have changed me.

One thing is that I feel removed from “ordinary human feelings,” and I am unsure whether this is here to stay with me. Since October last year, I have been so focused on Prairie Postgres that everything else has become non-essential. I blame myself for not contributing to election campaign, not doing canvassing, not talking enough about the issues. I was among many who didn’t do enough. I definitely didn’t have “cycles” for that, but still.

My decision matrix, my Eisenhower quadrants, were skewed to the sole purpose of making sure the Chicago conference happens, and the Chicago community is not negatively affected. I consistently find myself at a loss responding to “how are things with you, what’s new in your life?” I mean people, who might not be my closest friends, but who know me well enough or care enough so that I can’t reply: “All good, thank you for asking.” Still, I understand that it would be the weirdest thing to start answering such questions with what is really on my mind. Because the honest answer would be something like that: “For several months, some people were trying to make my life incredibly difficult to the point I was afraid to check my email, and they were trying to stop me from doing things which were important to me and to my community. There were many times when I wanted to quit and walk out, but I did not give up, and now everything is good, and nobody is after me.” And that’s the first, second and third most important thing in my life.

I know that I didn’t talk enough with many people who care about me, and I care about them. There were several months of ignoring emails, skipping events, and telling myself that I will have time for all of that later. I can only imagine how many of my friends, especially my “remote” friends think that I forgot about them, or that their lives are not interesting to me anymore.

Looking back at the past several months, I do not know how I did it :). When i was at the PGConf.dev, and when I attended multiple meetups last week, many of those to whom I told about my not-for-profits reacted: oh, you got 501(c)?! Congratulations! Or asked me: is it your full time job? So, I guess, I did something good, and something to be proud of.

Still, I want to get back to “being human,” but Prairie Postgres would still remain not “one of the things” I am doing, but “the most important thing” I am going, and hopefully the thing that outlive me :).

pgConf.dev

I am very happy with this conference. The last time I attended this event was in 2012, and it was before it was rebranded. It was the first Postgres conference I attended, I hardly knew anybody, and didn’t understand most of the talks (and it felt like everyone was smarter than me!) Just to be clear, there were plenty of talks at this conference that I also couldn’t understand, I am just not afraid to say that

I will post more in my professional blog, but also wanted to wave my hand here – I didn’t disappear, all is good!

Last Tuesday

In the past two days, I have slowly regained the sense of normalcy, which sometimes resulted in the desire to fall asleep while walking, but mostly in a burst or energy and a fountain of new ideas.

Now, I feel I need to explain more about what exactly was happening during the past three months, but at the same time, I want to forget and move forward.

Let’s focus on the past week. Except for a very modest Easter celebration, I was busy working on my opening and closing remarks for the conference, finally looking into my own presentation which was in a miserable state, and a million small conference-related questions, like finalizing logistics for both training and the conference days, finding additional free tickets for students, emailing, confirming, advertizing, etc. My co-workers from the Austin and London offices arrived on Monday, so we tried to work together on things. On Monday night, I finished all my presentations and went to bed thinking that I should have probably saved them on OneDrive, but oh well, I will do it the next day. On Tuesday morning, the first thing I saw on my phone was a message from one of my European friends: Hettie, is the PG Day Chicago site down? I jumped up to check on my computer (not trusting the phone). The site was up. Then I thought that this would be my only opportunity that week to bike in the morning, and went biking, returned later than I planned, and took “the next” train. This train was crowded, and there was no place for me to sit and do any work or what’s not. I was the first one to jump off the train and ran to my office building.

The elevator doors were closing, but the people inside read the sense of urgency on my face and held the door. I thanked them and got in< and then… this elevator got stuck! We were not stuck for very long, but by the time I entered our floor at 8 AM, I already had a day worth of stressful events!

Last Week’s Review

There has been almost no “me” here during the last week, but there has been a lot of “me” on professional social media. We were advertising Prairie Postgres and the training we organized on April 24. If it were all in one event (the conference and the training), my life would be much easier, but unfortunately, I have to do double work organizing two independent events (and driving our caterer crazy). I am overjoyed that we were recognized by the Postgres Core Team before the start of the conference because it gave me some stability and protection.

However, I am ending up not having enough participants, because I lost advertising time in the beginning, and because I didn’t have much support in promoting Pg Day from people who were supposed to help.

If that wasn’t enough, I had to finish a tutorial proposal for ADBIS; that was what Boris wanted me to do last year, and I promised, but then didn’t because there was too much going on. This year, ADBIS is happening later (at the end of September), and it will be in Finland, so there were even more reasons to try to submit. Realizing that it would be even worse that year, I wanted to prepare the proposal in January, when I was in Helsinki, but this didn’t happen. I started slow, and the deadlines were approaching, and I ended up writing these eight pages of a semi-academic paper during the last two weeks, on top of my PG-crisis. I was putting away almost everything, but I couldn’t put aside work, and work was in a full-blown crisis because of Trump’s trade war.

And on top of that, somebody asked me to apply for yet another board. I know, it sounds insane, but if this happens, I will share the details, and then probably people will understand why :). Nevertheless, this application took several additional hours.

Also, I was sending reminders for training and making sure I placed as many students as possible to attend the PG Day for free. The results could be better, but they are not hopeless.

I have one more week to survive. It would be much better if Boris were here, but I will manage.

One more reblog

And one more – for visibility:). Most of my life in the past two weeks has been on LinkedIn 🙂

In 2025, I am doing…

Busyness

I didn’t comment on one of my recent listens: Oliver Burkeman’s “Epidemics of Modern Life”

I listened to this radio collection, but he has separate books about at least two of the epidemic: Business and Angryness. The radio collection consists of four parts: Addicted to Busy, The Power of Negative Thinking, Why Are We So Angry? and The Death of Nuance. All of them touch on important topics, but I was especially interested in the first part. According to sociologists, it’s not like we are busier these days than in the past, but society’s expectations and standards have changed. For example, it’s a well-known fact that despite many devices that make cleaning the house and other household chores easier, people don’t spend less time on house cleaning than previously. And there is an explanation for that: the standards of cleanliness have changed. As Burkeman states, “Now the floor shouldn’t be just clean, but clean enough to perform an open-heart surgery on it.”

Another interesting observation is that people started viewing things that they do for themselves (like attending a meditation session) as “projects,” which also increases business.

As a side topic, there was an interesting discussion about “paid” and “unpaid” work. I never thought about it the way Burkeman approaches it, but it does make sense: if you can pay somebody to do this, and you will still get the same result, it’s work, paid or unpaid; otherwise, it’s not. For example, you can pay somebody to bake a cake for you, and you will still get a cake without baking it, so baking a cake is work. On the other hand, you can’t pay somebody to go to the theater to see the play instead of you, it will defeat the whole purpose of going to the theater. Incidentally, that perfectly illustrates what I always say about my baking: I love the process. I am fine eating out and I am glad that they feed us at work, but I will never delegate my baking to somebody (yes, I love Vanille desserts, but I am not trying to reproduce them!).

And at the end of this episode, Burkeman talks about the necessity of idleness. That is something many researchers are talking about: to innovate, our brain needs some idleness (I always generate great ideas when I am on vacation!) It is also related to the state, which I am trying to achieve with not much luck – not to have a super-packed schedule with no wiggling room. With all seriousness, I know it’s not good, and I know that there is a physical limit to what I can do. My only success in this area is that I learned not to be upset when my plans collapse.

I guess these are very appropriate thoughts on a day when Boris’ flight was delayed for 24 hours. To be precise, there was an emergency landing because they could not start a backup generator and had to wait for repair. So much for trying to have a day off together!

What Else Was Going On

This week was relatively low in activities because work was insane and because I had a lot of conferences-related things (yes, multiple conferences, and me being there in multiple capacities, do not autocorrect me, Grammarly!) However:

  • pre-op medical appointment on Monday
  • Talked to the organizers of one more Chicago Fintech conference, and we mutually agreed that I am not speaking there (a win, actually!) – also on Monday.
  • Got my RealID (the temp for now, but the actual one coming in the mail) – Tuesday
  • CSO concert plus a dinner in the Thomas club to celebrate my neighbor’s birthday—also on Tuesday (a side note—I love Salonen as a conductor, but his own music does not touch me, and I wish he wouldn’t include his pieces in each program he conducts!).
  • ODS dinner on Wednesday. We made meatballs (on the residents’ request), which we hadn’t made for a while, and there was great engagement and very good conversations.
  • Thursday – as described. To answer the passport questions – I couldn’t renew online because my passport is not expiring within the next year, I just ran out of pages. And taking and editing my own photo would take longer than using professional services.
  • Friday – finally, a quiet day, things started to wind down at work.
  • And it looks like a nice weekend coming up!

A Busy Day Of a Busy Week

On top of everything else this week, I had an ear infection, and I had to apply for RealID and for a new passport. An ear infection just happened at the most inconvenient moment; with the RealID was a real thing. I thought about it “eventually, and i have a passport, so what’s the big deal,” but then I realized that I need to renew my passport because I am running out of pages, and now is the longest interval between my travels. And while my passport will be on renewal, I can’t use it for domest travel either.

My Thursday looked like this: a usual early start, two meetings, telemedicine appointment to get antibiotics (yes, I know it’s a horrible practice, and I always try to avoid it, but I didn’t have time even for Minute Clinic, yet alone a proper doctor appointment, and I although I didn’t have fever, I felt sick, and that affected my productivity in all areas of life.

The teledoctor (who saw me for the first time) tols me that it can’t be ear infection because I didn’t have fever, and we should try to unclogg the ear, but still gave me an antibiotic prescription “if nothing else would work.” I asked to sent the prescription to the CVS Target, because this location would work well with all other errands I had. After lunch, I found a USPS envelope in our supply room, taped on the label I printed at home and put inside all my passport documentation. Then, I went to pick up prescription and then crossed the State Street to take a passport picture at Walgreens. There, I had a bad luck – their passport pictures machine was broken, so I Googled the next closest place, which happened to be some scatchy-looking facility in front of the Post Office, which was my next stop anyway. There, I took a passport picture, asked them for a stapler, stapled the photo to my passport form and sealed the envelope. Crossed the street one more time, and dropped the envelope at the post office, and now the package is on the way to it’s destination. I requested a large passport book and expedited service, so I hope the it will be processed on time, and I won’t need to get a new passport three years before the expiration date (that’s what I had to do now).

I have to say, that antibiotics was the right choice – I felt that I am moving into right direction by yesterday’s evening, and this morning I didn’t feel sick (although not completely fine either, but on track to recovery). I was able to close a couple of service tickets during the last hour and a half of my workday, and then stopped by my mom, and then attended an online yoga class in the evening, and managed to go to bed at normal time. The latter one is a huge achievement of mine – so far, I have six hours of sleep almost every night since I returned from Helsinki.

Conferences

It’s a perfect storm of upcoming events.

  • One of my talks was accepted for the SCaLE conference (first week of March in Pasadena). This one is the easiest – I can reuse my September talk, I just need to refresh my memory regarding the examples, and as usual, I need to advertise it on social media
  • I was invited to give a short talk at the Chicago DevOps Day on March 27. They chose my security talk, but I need to create a “Lighting version” of it, which will be extremely challenging
  • I am (maybe) invited to a financial conference in Chicago on March 27, I will talk with them on Monday and hopefully figure out whether I am doing it or not.
  • I am invited to do a podcast on Data Bene. I am talking with them on Tuesday, and we will decide on a date.
  • My security talk was accepted for PG Day Chicago. The last time I gave it was a year ago, and many things have changed since then, so I need to prepare a new version of it
  • On top of that, I need to address all aspects of the conference itself (a list too long to put here) and even a longer list for DevDay, which will precede it.
  • None of my talks for PgCon.dev were accepted, but the Community Summit proposal to which I was last-minute invited was, and now we have a lot of work ahead!

  • And this has been all along with work and other aspects of life!