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 🙂
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.
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 🙂
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!
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!
I found one more biking opportunity – after the evening rush hour. Now, and for the next two months, there will be enough daylight to bike after 6 PM. Yesterday, I left the house at 6-15, and the traffic was much better than it is between 4 and 6, and probably even better than during lunchtime.
And today in the morning – the sunrise from the same place 🙂
I am almost sad that I have breakfast and lunch at work and do not have an opportunity to eat breakfast outside. The closest I can get to it – sit by the window at the cafeteria:
The weather is amazing, and the whole city seems to be outside. I took a stroll after lunch, and everywhere on the Riverwalk, there is people ]sitting, eating their lunches, and enjoying the weather.
And there are so many things I need and what to do that they hopelessly do not fit anywhere, and I do not even have time to write down my to-do lists :). So instead of blogging about what I didn’t do or do not have time to do, I should better tell what I’ve actually done!
And it was this beautiful morning bike ride, and an exceptionally productive day at work, and a walk along the river, and dinner at the ODS (only a partial success since most residents were somewhere outside :)).
It’s ten days after the conference is over, and I finally started to get used to the situation when I do not need to run around and worry about twenty things. I think I still didn’t explain why it was “many.” First, I was a part of the Program Committee, with many responsibilities, including organizing the pre-party and managing volunteers. Second, I talked my company into Platinum sponsorship and was anxiously waiting for all legal details to be settled, nudging people who were not fast enough. Third, I was a community sponsor as a local organizer of the Chicago PostgreSQL User Group and had to design and order stickers and flyers. And most importantly, I was advertising the event, especially among local users, women, and students. There were some last-minute vouchers from the sponsors, and I tried to place them.
After all of the above was over, it took me a while to calm down, but finally, it was there. Although I have a lot of other things going on (it’s never just my work, always ten other activities), I am in a happy and worry-free state of mind.
Here is what I have lined up for May and June/
Work: Four projects which were “coming” for a while, and now I need to work on all four of them at the same time. I love them all, and I want to do them all, but I am hitting the limits of how one can stretch the time.
Health I finally started to meet with a therapist about how I should efficiently communicate with mom and, most importantly, what communication style would help her. Boris told me that I am getting visibly upset and frustrated when she says something that indicates that she does not remember things. I talked about this with my physician, and she recommended doing therapy for myself to help mom. Works for me 🙂
Mom. Finally started physical therapy for her. It was quite a project with lots of hours on the phone, but finally, she finally sees the same PT specialist as me. Although this office is close to both our homes, she still can’t go there by herself, so every week, it’s two hours of my life during work hours. Second, I went through the quest of setting up her online SSN portal, and next week, we will have a phone interview to apply for SSI for her. And yes, it’s again a lot of hours on the phone during work hours, and she has to be present, so I need to go to her place, which results in even more hours. And finally, her citizenship interview is on May 23. I sent a request on her behalf to make adjustments for her hearing loss, and we got a response that she could have somebody with her, and they would let her use a sound amplifier and many other accommodations. She is scared about each official paper that comes to her mailbox, and calls me…
My other professional activities. I signed a contract for the second edition of our optimization book, and the schedule is very aggressive. I agreed to run 8-hour optimization class for one of the local companies migrating from Oracle. Several smaller consulting requests. I plan to submit several proposals for PG Conf NYC and PG Conf EU. At list three blog posts and one article are overdue.
Volunteering I already described the situation in the youth shelter. I am often unable to do escorting, and I feel horrible about that. It might sound crazy, but I am thinking about returning to OMD.
Fun stuff. Vlad’s wedding is less than four weeks away! I am organizing a friends and family lunch the day before. And Anna’s family trip to Finland is coming in June!
Four days before the conference. I am in full panic because I feel that I still do not have enough volunteers, not enough room hosts, some sponsors didn’t use their vouchers, and there are other people who could use them, but I am failing to connect people and vouchers. Speakers asked me why I didn’t advertise the conference in NYC, and others asked for a microbrewery tour in Chicago. My co-worker from our Austin office is coming for the whole week, so I need to allocate ask much time as possible to work with him while he is in Chicago in person. I promised to show the best of Chicago to my international guests, which created an apparent conflict of interest.
CTA and Metra decided that today was the best day for all sorts of delays and road closers, and Uber takes forever because everybody is on the road, so I spent two hours unproductively while I was already not keeping up with my to-do list. The person I am trying to hire for several small repairs in my house could not find my building for forty minutes, which I spent staying by the window and texting: I still do not see you. Mom completely does not understand the deepness of my crisis.
One bright spot in today’s day (which was, BTW, splendid – sunny and warm!). When I came home an hour later than my adjusted plan was, I thought that I did not want to spend time making coffee. Remembering how jealous I was of the people who had breakfast at Charmer’s Cafe across, and recalling that they are open until 6 PM and they have coffee and ice cream, I broke my promise not to have a cappuccino after 11 AM! I asked them for cappuccino and coffee ice cream and mango sorbet and said that the world was against me. Five minutes later, a barista brought my cappuccino and two bowls of ice cream, saying that she gave me more “because I had such a tough day!. I thanked her but thought I would never be able to eat that much ice cream… and I ate it all!
I had two almost identical conversations recently: one in London and one in Chicago. In London, I was chatting with the driver on my way to Heathrow, which, as I mentioned before, took two and a half hours. It started with me replying to the question of whether I had visited London before; I started with “when my younger son turned twenty-five,” and then it took a different turn. As often happens, the driver was shocked to hear that I have an adult son, especially when I said that that’s my younger son, and it has been a while since he was twenty-five. Then I had to spell out how old I was, and after that, he was not interested in my prior visits to London. Instead, he asked me, “how am I doing that,” why I look so much younger, and whether I exercise, and so on :), which was rather funny.
I told him that I loved want I am doing. I keep telling the same thing to people, especially since I started my current job. Not only do I love my line of work in general, but at this job, I love what and how I am doing, and I love the people I work with. It brings me joy to see that my expertise and skills are needed, and honestly, I even feel physically better recently. I am very busy at work, and some days are crazy, but this is a different kind of busyness, not exhausting. I am busy doing my job, and I am happy I can do it well.
I shared all of the above with my driver. He said: but it is not always possible. Then he started to talk about his life, how he had to quit attending college at some point to provide for his family, and how his wife graduated and now works in the medical field. He mentioned that he is returning to college, and we talked about what he wants to do next.
At the end of our trip (he went above and beyond getting me to the airport on time in the midst of the transportation strike), he thanked me for the talk and said that I gave him directions in life (and yes, we also talked about parenting, exercise and (un)healthy eating habits :)).
The second conversation happened in the BMO Harris local branch, where I stopped to deposit a check. This time, I do not even remember what started the conversation (the bank branch was empty, so the specialists were happy to converse with somebody). I do not remember how it jumped from me being a perfect customer to “what do I do,” and I do not even recall whether my age came up, but in five minutes, it was the same “tell me your secret,” and “how I can become like you.” And I told him the same thing I told the driver in London, and his reaction was very similar (“I am writing it right here, on my hand, and I am not going to do anything with this hand, and I won’t wash it, and I will always remember it”)
It was so funny and sweet that I smiled all the way while I was walking back to the office.
I thought again about how fortunate I am that I have a job I love and how unhappy I was each time it was not the case. And although I can believe that people may be happy and content without loving their job… I sort of don’t believe it 🙂
Hettie's Reflections 