Heidi

❤️ Had a one on one with the Scrum Master, and I think things will smoothen out organically, since she's not actually a problem person, it's just that our team is a Whole Circus, ellephants to roasted peanuts. I am now fully embracing this week as my Arthur Dent Era, hallmarked by spending days walking around in my dressing gown, holding a cup of tea. Nature is healing.

100% THIS. I absolutely am not here for The Good Parts Version™ of your journey, but for the journey. Not that you need to perform your anxiety or crankiness, but I abosultely think the idea of contaminating us is needle-screech wrong. Sending so much love and adminration as you approach the things you cannot change and acknowledge the adjument and emotional labor costs. Also, if you don't lift this round, all will still be well. If you DO lift this round, I'll cheer every rep. ❤️ And if you lift when you'd like to cuss at the houseguest, that's a stone cold win right there.

Insight: I need to make an appointment at the bank. I need to consolidate my various personal and car loans, and set up a health care savings account. I have no idea how the paperwok for pre-tax deductions works with my current agency, but I do know that I need to have a bank account number to give them when I fill the paperwork out. The insight portion of this is that I my homebody self is resistant to in-person, out-of-the-house appointments. This is suboptimal, and I've let it drag on. The good news is: when I un-quit, I can un-lose. I have an appointment tomorrow afternoon to go in and talk with a loan officer.

Woo hoo! Paperwork progress for the win. Very much stalking around for the updates here, and feeling good about where you are, and where you are headed. I hear you when you say "things at work feel good, but then, they always do at first." I think that having a engineered exit in a few months is ideal for folks like you and me, where the shine of the job wears off only to reveal an unsustainable underbelly. If this job is diffferent, than great. But if it turns out to be More Of The Same, then you're still fine. I beleive in you. ❤️

Yay for pajamas days! Work update: The Team Lead brought in a person from his other team to be our Scrum Master. This makes sense objectively, as the team lead was being buried in day-to-day accountability tasks. The new Scrum Master consistently talks to us as though we don't know our jobs and have been underperforming, two things she's here to help fix. Neither is true, and our team doesn't run like any other team. She ends up saying things that are so out of step that they sound ridiculous, despite the fact that she is an otherwise logical and well-grounded person. All of this would be fine, except that she doesn't seem to be able to listen and absorb what we are telling her and this results in her talking incessantly and us just trying to figure out what planet she's on. It will sort itself out as the rhythm of the team becomes evident. It's tedious. Thanks for listening.

In a bit of rainy day introvert magic, I had the full set of answers at my fingertips as I reviewed the guidelines for the paper that is due for this module. I wrote down what was occurring to me, and lo and behold, friends, I have a copmplete draft. All that remains is to incorporate any feedback that is delivered from last module's paper. Thank you, Universe. Your blessings are working. Thank you ❤️

All of this is true. Agreed. And now I'm sending this idea to a composer friend of mine, asking him to rescore it. Thank you. Tea is proof that God loves us all. Yesterday was solidly blah, and I'm glad I caught up on homework. I did a load of dishes last night, and that's the sum total of the housework that got done, but all is well enough. I wasn't feeling up to anything, especially not food, so I made toast and black lentils for dinner after I woke up from a two hour nap. Along with a glass of milk, this ended up being Just Right for allowing my stomach to settle. I was still worn out, of course, but steady. This morning I woke up with a stabby headache and was casting about looking for my migraine medication when my friend Jimbo called. He has been suffering lately, and we didn't talk yesterday morning, so I was glad to hear from him. Talking about our Spiritual Journey grounded me, and I found the medication while we were on the phone. Thank you Universe for medication, friends, and the time to have the morning I needed. I'm at work in my nightgown again today, and again I am deeply grateful that I work from home. There is no way I would be able to go into an office, even though I'm definitely on the better side of both the sickness and the headache. It's a rainy morning, with thunderstorms predicted before lunchtime, and all of this is fine. I'm looking forward to a quiet day at work, a quiet evening at home, and maybe some reading. As always, tea.

Yep, Snarky sayin the quiet thing out loud.

It's a good day for this, no other reason needed. Hi, Friends. We're halfway through eclipse season (midway between the lunar eclipse of March 25 and the solar eclipse on April 8), and I don't know about you, but the cosmic weather feels excited and a little chaotic. The planetary weather is following suit as well, with tornado and flooding and hail warnings all lighting up my phone courtesy of the University of Kentucky. Outsided my window today, the sky is dark and damp, reminiscent of Oz four minutes before a storm, a little window into the more extreme weather happenings to the West. It's as though the weather is inviting us to take stock of all that is swirling about and make adjustments as needed, an invitation I plan to heed. Certainly, the homework needed to be caught up on, and I'm glad I spent the energy yesterday on the paper and this morning on the overdue discussion post. This week's homework looks like readings and annotations and a video post, all of which can be handled with grace if I make time for them earlier than later. I need to do some shoring up for the Women's Pinball League launch, and I'd like to get some ink on that by the end of the week. Despite still having a sour stomach and fatigue, I imagine I'll be feeling more myself by the evening, and it's a good evening to stay home and rest and read. Lots of tea and project time is what's in store for me today.

March numbers are in, and my daily pace was 2.5 miles, a real step up (see what I did there?) from 2023. I'm 98.6 miles from Lothlórien, and would need to kick it up to over 3 miles a day to get there by the next challenge. It's a long shot, but I've got my eye on it.

I felt a lot better yesterday afternoon, and I may have pushed too hard. I did some Beat Saber after work (I was missing it) and then Nic dropped by and we hung out on the rooftop terrace to watch the sun set. By then he was hungry, and I was still feeling pretty good, and so I said yes when he invited me to go to a diner and check it out. It was very basic but great, and the decor and funrnings haven't been updated since the place was built in the 50s. We hit the hot tub after dinner, and I slept like a baby almost immediately on being dropped back home. I woke up around 3 with a massive headache and bedspins, and it all just went downhill from there. I leveled out around 7, made tea, and cleaned up from several rounds of being sick, grateful once again that I work from home. I am still in my nightgown, and I look like death warmed over, but none of that matters. I truly want nothing more than to curl up under the covers and have someone tell me stories. I made a video reply post for class before logging in, which is hilarious since I look as sick as I feel, but I've put off the requistie video posts (because I hate them), so here we are. There are a lot of Very Important Meetings at work today, so I've shown up mostly to attend and offer what's needed from me. Other than that, I'm sort of useless, which is perfectly fine. More tea is the only answer.

Congratulations!! Hell yes, you rock. LET'S GO!

Thank you all for the well-wishes. I made a pomengrate-ginger-lemon tonic, because there's something about pomegranate that always gives me a lift, though it's temporary and often leaves me mellow afterwards, so it's always best I plan for the Pom-drop, which I did. The meeting with Philosopher James went very well. We were in the middle of talking about what was useful in this chapter for my investigation, and how just reading about data collection, sources, and domains resulted in a more robust understanding of my own research (for which I am eternally grateful) when he got called away. I was happy to be gracious about it and very glad I hadn't asked to reschedule. After the meeting ended, I sent him a note that I was glad we had met and I felt we could carry on with the schedule as planned and fold any further reflections for Chapter 3 into the discussion for Chapter 4 and see where that gets us. If I have the energy later today, I might transcribe some of my notes from Chapter 3, since they are material to the setup and framework of my own Part 3. I liked this reading very much and hope that it continues to be relevent and revelatory. Earlier this morning I posted half the annotations that are needed for M7 for the research class, and I was able to turn the draft into a final for the M6 paper and submit it. I still have a response video to turn in for M6, but it felt good and solid to have the paper behind me and get a little of the work of this week complete. I hate being behind becuase it seems like everything snowballs, which of course it does. All steps matter when they're pointed in the right direction. I've been tracking H5N1 since 1997 or so, and news that it jumped to cattle in Texas was disturbing. This morning, there's news that it has jumped (very predictably) to humans from cattle. This is something I'm keeping a close eye on. Time for more tea. ❤️

I love this for you!!!! Same, and I did a needle-screech double take, thinking "Man, I've missed a thing or two it seems." I would feel the same way, to be honest, and I think you are doing great Compassion testimony here. Hospitality is emotional labor. Hi, Friend. Philosopher James had to jet early from our meeting today, and I am very glad I had the opportunity to catch up with you. Much love from Virginia. I think you're doing just grand. ❤️

I have a nasty cold. Yesterday morning I opened the draft of the paper that was due that evening and it made exactly no sense. I emailed the professor, and she told me to take as long as I need. Thank you, Universe, for professors who get it. I spent yesterday doing nothing except watching movies, drinking tea or lemon-ginger tonic, and napping. Nic brought over dinner, which was super sweet of him, and I was feeling better but not in any way recovered, and we had good conversation until it was time for bed. I woke up around 2 and my throat was on fire and my glands felt like hot rocks. Okay, Universe. I gargled and did a neti rinse and made another lemon-ginger tonic, which helped soothe the pain enoungh to sleep again. I woke up at 6 and I still feel crummy, but not suffering. The cold has definitely moved into my chest, and I feel like I'm walking around with a weight on my chest, but I can breathe, which is a real plus. I can't imagine how nasty this would be if I weren't doing All The Things, which includes sleeping. I'm supposed to meet with James over lunch to discuss philosophical methods, and thankfully I've already read the chapter and made notes. Of course, I have no memory of this, but I have a couple hours to skim the notes before we meet. I would cancel, but at our last meeting (or maybe the one before), he was pretty clear that our reading list isn't just a nice exercise. He definitely feels like I need to complete this list-and-discussion plan before I take the Quals. Okay, Universe, here we go. All that is to say that it might be a year or more before I take the quals, which means a year and a half before I start the dissertation. The good news is that I am working on the first parts of the dissertation as their own investigation -- collecting state-level policies that ahve been proposed since 2021 around school libraries and curriculum materials. The first part will be a taxonomy of the proposals, and possibly a dashboard to visualize the data, then the secnod part will be an analysis of the policies themselves, looking at if they are, in fact legal, and what other sorts of socio-legal impact they have on educaiton. The philosophical analysis is the third and final part, and is predicated on having completed the first two parts, so there's plenty to do while I'm meeting with Philosopher James. But I digress. I'm cranky-sick, and at work. I'm reading over my notes for "class," and I'm grateful for them. I didn't walk much this weekend. I'm grateful for Alliances. ❤️

Agreed. I haven't read the book, but I've read some excerpts and I have to think that the book actually has more of a point. I do enjoy the movie as a pastiche, but overall it's just a 3.5 star movie. It is certainly not profound.

Had a pretty good day at work Thursday and again Friday, then around noon I noticed a tickle-ache in my throat. Oof. The cold progressed pretty quickly. I took some homeopathic medicine and texted Kathi to say we should reschedule, and I was disappointed, of course, as was she. We’ll get together in a few weeks. Nic brought over chicken salad sandwiches and a Neti pot since I couldn’t find mine, and was generally a Very Good Guy™ despite my low-key surliness. I pout a lot when I am coming down with something. We watched Perfume, and then I settled in for a good night’s rest. This morning I made tea and did the Clean Sheets Day routine, and then made a tonic with lemon, lime, orange, and ginger. It’s very nice, and I’m listening to the dryer, and I might nap.

I felt the same way, and the best that Google could do was an image spread that includes the Mushroom: Also, I love that Garlic is Strength. ❤️

This is good and helpful. Thank you. You're inspiring me to be more available at work and also to be more available during my breaks. ❤️

Perhaps retool your pre-tax allowable deductions (healthcare savings account, retirement funds, etc.) as well as tweaking the W-4. (I, too, had to do a W-4 edit last year, and congratulations to you!) I would love to see your savings efforts get tax credits.

Glad TimovieSon and everyone else are okay-enough. Sending good vibes for the next leg of your journey! You're inspiring me to step up the steps, even though I have 100 miles to get to Rauros. Looking forward to lembas bread! ❤️

The daily on-purpose activity is really starting to add up. March daily distance is easily going to come in at a half-mile more than earlier months, and all of this is good for me, body mind and soul. Also, massive congrats to @TimovieMan for making it to the next milestone!

100%

We did not watch Ladyhawke over this visit; we did not make bread. We had two amazing days with a lot of Beat Saber and conviviality and introverted resting and reading times. It was a very nice visit, and I am all turned around on what day of the week it is, since it absolutely feels like a Sunday afternoon, but it’s Wednesday, and okay Universe. May you have peace and comfort this day, Friends. ❤️

This spatial upgrade simply comes with a higher monthly cost on everything, and I’m kind of wrapping my head around that. I’m still managing to make larger payments to the car loan, which helps me feel pretty solid, and the furniture spending is practically over, so that’s a relief. Being holed up in my cave was simple; this Out In the World thing takes resources.