Tag: work-life balance

What People Do When They Retire

While waiting for a morning train, I overheard the conversation on the platform. The conversation was about when each person planned to retire, whether they wanted to retire at all, and what they would do when they retired. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Still, I was surprised that people who participated in the conversation talked only about leisure, whether they will do cruises, golfing, or something else, and how the years of retirement should be the years of having fun.

Then, one of them commented on someone he knew who “didn’t want to retire because he would have to spend all the time with his wife at home.”

I can relate to that:). With all my love and everything, you need to be out of the house doing something else for a good part of the day. And you need to do something. I am sure I will have lots of fun traveling, doing cultural things, and such, but I am also anticipating all the possibilities of doing more volunteering, such as escorting on the weekdays and going to ODS at least once a week. Too often, I feel like I can’t drop any activity I am participating in (or want to participate in), and then I am not doing any of them well enough. So, I often think that I should limit the things I do even more and then return to them when I retire. 

Possibly the reason others don’t believe me when I say that I will retire at 67 is that they can’t imagine me not doing something. But I have plans!

This Weekend

it was, in some sense, a “getting my life back” weekend, although I guess one weekend is not enough at the moment. I had a chance to have breakfast outside, which didn’t happen much this summer.

I biked a lot, although since the sun is not out until 6-45AM, I could not do a really long bike ride.

I went to the CSO Symphony Ball for the first time in my life. It’s not like I do not go to fundraising events, but if I go, it’s for more socially-oriented events. I think there are enough well-off people who would be happy to fundraise for CSO and other cultural institutions.

This year, I received two free tickets to the Symphony Ball for participating in the CSO for Kids Ambassadors program. I didn’t expect it :), and I am not going to lie, it was nice! I took my mom there, and because of that, I skipped a pre-concert champagne toast: I knew that mom wouldn’t be comfortable there, and also, I also wanted to make sure she ate something before we went.

The concert was amazing, and also it was a spectacular view of women in evening gowns and men in tails and white ties.

Other than that, it was mostly finishing writing multiple things I had to write or promised to write and planning my cultural activities for the next two months. Also, I baked an experimental version of my favorite blueberry pie, using strained skyr on place of rahka, and this is much better than using ricotta)

And now – diving into the new work week.

How This Week Goes

Monday: Work + taking mom to the DHS

Tuesday: Work + hosting Chicago PostgreSQL User Group after work

Wednesday: Work + discussion on our book + recording a session for P99 conference + dinner with a co-worker visiting from Texas + three-and-a-half hours long show, not especially interesting, and a very cold venue, but it was a part of the subscription, and I was there with my neighbor, so no way out

Thursday: Work + volunteering in the youth shelter

Friday (projected): Work + dinner with the same co-worker.

And “work” this week is twice as intense as usual; not like I have it light any other week. But this week, we want to do as much as possible with my visiting co-worker, so we discuss things and work on documentation. Also, this week happens to be high on customer communications and explaining what I am doing :), and convincing them that I am not their enemy :).
And our dinners are also full of work discussions because we do not have enough time at work to discuss everything we want to discuss.

Small Things

Several small “fixes” in different parts of my life, nothing special, but feel nice.

  • Installed a new light fixture in the living room using the same electric company. That was the only one that I didn’t replace when I was replacing “everything.” The usual effect: OMG, how much better it feels now!
  • Renewed Siskel membership. I forgot to renew it almost a year ago, and they changed the system and everything, so I could not even renew online. I went there just before I got COVID, and now I have an online account and everything, and I can even put my tickets into my Apple wallet. Hurray! And I already started using this membership again!
  • Emailed OMD and told them I decided against participation this year. I told them I realized I did not have time, but the real reason was that I sat through the orientation and realized that nothing changed. All the issues I observed several years ago, the ones which prompted me to leave, are still there.
  • It looks like two other mentoring organizations that I applied for and was accepted to are going to do better and more meaningful jobs. I am giving it a try, and we’ll see.

It is going to be a very intense week. I was planning for Labor Day to be a fresh start, but the Universe decided differently. Well, I guess Rosh Hashanah is an even better start :).

When You Stay At Home…

There are not that many things happening in your life.

COVID updates: My mom got it light; I’d say she didn’t have any symptoms, or they were so mild we didn’t register them. However, both she and I are still positive, and while I would expect it with her, I am really annoyed that nothing changes with me. I feel 100% fine; I go biking long distances, and I am not getting tired through the workday. But I really have to have this negative test! There are things happening next week for which I absolutely need to be in the office, not to mention a lot of other activities that are on hold at the moment. I am trying really hard not to be depressed by that.

As it always happens these days, a bulk of my emotions are work-related, and as always, I can say exactly zero about what’s going on. I did a couple of cool things I had never done before, which brought me aesthetic pleasure. Also, I happily resolved one personal conflict at work in the best possible way. Two more are in progress :). OK, I should stop even trying to talk about work here – it’s not much I can tell!

There was a ginormous effort with the book, and now submitting all the chapters by October 2 looks like a possibility.

And the last thing I wanted to mention is my volunteering activities. After long hesitations, I decided against returning to OMD and to try another mentoring program. Actually, two of them :). I will tell more about these programs when I actually start them, but I think both are better in terms I will be able to do more good.

Meanwhile – it smells like fall, the sunrise is later in the day, and I can barely catch it when I bike in the morning:

More Updates

I tried to stop by my mom today, explaining here in advance that I am just stopping by for five minutes (she is on day three of isolation). I have no idea whether reinfection may or may not happen, and I have no desire to experiment. She previously asked for Russian Rye bread, which meant that I had to wait until today to be able to go to the actual store. I didn’t find any Russian Rye, but I found a German Rye and some marmalade. When I came to her, I realized that she didn’t get the concept of “for a couple of minutes” and wanted me to look at what was not working on her phone and at the blood pressure monitor, and change the printer cartridge, and whatever else.

I yelled at her that this could wait until she was out of isolation, and she started to ask whether she would need a mask if she decided to go for a walk tomorrow morning. And she asked me at least twenty times whether she could use a KN95 mask more than once…

Also, it’s close to impossible to make her track her symptoms, and I am going to stop now because my rants won’t change anything.

The good part of today: I biked to the Mill and back. And there are going to be a couple more warm days. And I finished Chapter 13 🙂

Weekend Plans

The long weekend has started, and I have a lot of plans for it! I am finally not three weeks behind on everything, and I want to make the most out of it.

In some sense, it feels like the beginning of the new year: one more time, I want to make an effort and be more assertive about which things are really important to me and make sure I have time for them. And not to let things drop.

At The End Of The Week

I do not think I have ever had a work week as challenging as this one since I joined my current company. There was a lot of everything.

Nothing bad, just the discussions, which I had been trying to facilitate for a long time, finally started to happen. Several people came to me with problems that I could solve and at the same time, teach them some good practices. Nobody dumped extra work on me – I took it over myself:).

The backlog of outside-work items kept growing at an alarming speed, and that’s what worried me the most – I hate to be non-responsive, and I knew that most of the responses would take from five to ten minutes, not more, but there were dozens of them.

On Thursday, i pulled all my willpower and said to myself that I needed to finish as much work as possible because I will have several hours on the train to visit Lena, and I could catch up on almost all of my non-work items then. My “work-life integration” didn’t work this week at all – on most days, I didn’t take time even to pull out my personal laptop.

Now, being on the train, I believe, it was a good decision – knowing that I am detached form work until Monday afternoon, allowed me to focus on other overdue non-personal things: the book, conference submissions, Postgres User Goup, PG Day Chicago, LinkedIn, and so on. And to drop a couple of paragraphs here 🙂

My Updates

We are leaving for Finland – finally for an actual vacation, which means, I am working like crazy to complete a couple of important projects before I leave. Otherwise, these projects won’t materialize at all. This leaves zero room for anything else during work hours, including book writing, professional blogs and other educational materials, PUG activities, and PG Day Chicago ongoing things, and I am not even mentioning my own conference submissions and life in general.

Nothing is packed for the trip; my emails remain unanswered for days and weeks, but I go for bike rides every morning and go to the beach at least three times a week. I guess, my priorities are clear!

Book Writing

I finally stopped procrastinating and started to work on the second edition of our optimization book. Before today, I struggled to update two paragraphs from the intro (and I am still unhappy with how they look, but I pushed myself to move forward with the promise to return to the intro later.

Only after I started I realized how much it bothered me that I was not moving! In my defense, all of mom’s immigration stuff which we dealt with this week, was more than enough to completely abandoned other activities. Hopefully, everything will be over tomorrow, and then I will write a complete report.

Another good thing about today was that I finally went to the beach in the evening and dipped myself into the lake, officially opening the swimming season. The water is cold! The way spring was this year, I think it will take a while for a lake to warm up. It’s still such a joy to be by the body of water, that I can’t complain!