...And the Livin' is Easy

This is a sago palm, which sat in its
pot for more than year doing absolutely
nothing. Then suddenly, I swear in a
single day, this!

It's not truly summer yet, but it sure feels like it. We're in a bad drought - the spring rains haven't come, and it will hurt us - but we're having one golden day after another. Even when it's not actually hot out, the sun is creating a high summer vibe. My days involve a lot of time outside, whether working on something or just reading. Or watching my plants respond to the spring. I'm busy enough, with projects, gardening, and seeing the neighbors. I've mowed the grass once (even more summer feeling evoked) and planted a few things, but I have to keep cautioning myself not to get ahead of the real cycle - there are still a few cold nights in the forecast.

At the end of the day I feel strongly the longing for a beer, barbecue, and ice cream. One day, I harvested (indoor hydroponic) cherry tomatoes, more than I could ever eat out of hand, and cooked up a fresh tomato sauce by slicing each one in half, tossing with an equal volume of sauteed onions and seasoning with my own hydroponic oregano and basil. I grilled marinated eggplant slices and italian sausages, and it was absolutely perfect!

On another day, the craving for ice cream was so strong I took myself to the store and stocked up. Yum! Sometimes, all it takes is a spoonful of creamy goodness and I can move on. I've also learned that as much as I love a beer after working outside, it is filling me up too quickly right now, and so I'm experimenting with a small growler so I can enjoy one can over two days. For me, one of the things I learned from my fling with IE is to not let myself feel deprived. I don't want to find myself eat things out of habit or impulsively and thoughtlessly, but if I want something, whatever it is, I'm going to have it. And when I do, I'm going to enjoy it. As much as I want of it. But I'm going to constantly check whether I really want it or not. And I still worry about food waste, and portion control because I do love a clean plate.

My girl and I took a trip down to the tip of Southern Maryland, where the Potomac River meets the Chesapeake Bay. We checked out a school there, and while she was on a tour I took a stroll along the water front, including a stop at a replica old ship - the Dove, that helped bring the first English colonizers to Maryland. The sound of the little wavelets in the bay, and the smell of the wind over the salt water, gave me a bit of a Bellport vibe. But the school is tiny and really isolated - miles from even a 7-11 or fast food joint - and probably not a good fit for my mature city girl. We'll be heading  to the far west of our state in another week to check out another school, that at least has a little town with coffee shops and convenience stores.

On the agenda right now, besides many many gardening chores, are prepping for the Kinetic Sculpture Race (Saturday May 6) and getting my boat ready for sailing season. I couldn't keep my mouth shut about structural issues with one part of our Kinetic Sculpture so now of course it's my responsibility. I built a tent frame out of bamboo harvested from a team member's yard, which a colleague will cover with a canvas tent. Our theme is "Happy Campers" so of course we need a tent. However, our tent will have Baltimore icon Divine peeking out from it. It turns out we are more camp than campers. For my costume, they asked if I wanted a feather boa - not my style - but now I have to come up with something else. 

The living really is easy for me right now. I've got little to be anxious about and much to celebrate. My stupid body keeps tensing up my back or shoulder muscles, going into spasm, and I have to just laugh and tell myself I'm fine, nothing is broken, I'm perfectly safe, and if I can't bend over to pick something up, I'll sit down to get it instead. Not going to stop moving. 

Of course, I'm making hex signs to ward off the evil that follows the hubris of announcing everything is fine, more than fine, it's good. But really, the fish are jumpin' and I've got stuff to do. A banana tree to plant. And a new beer to sample. Catch you later.

Language

  "I'm getting used to a slower pace. I have found within myself a deep well of laziness. Or perhaps it's peace. Yes, let's call it that."
-- Louise Penny (a favorite of mine, author of the "Gamache" murder mysteries set in Quebec)

My days have definitely slowed substantially. Just thinking of how I used to go to work, spend the whole day engaged with complex ideas and difficult people, and then take care of two houses and three kids exhausts me, I have to sit down and rest for a bit. I move calmly through my days, with a few routines that rise almost to ritual level at the beginning and end of each day. It is not unusual for me to have a day when I don't talk out loud to anyone else except the dog. (I'm not lonely, I'm in contact and connected as much as I want to be, but that is not the point of this post.)

My house is rarely silent. I almost always have music or a podcast or a book playing, either background or foreground depending on what else I'm doing. I am sometimes very engaged mentally with what I am reading or listening to, sometimes challenged. But I feel that most of my time is not spent on things that mentally challenge me. My focus has been on dealing with physical challenges, working out, walking, home improvement and gardening projects. Got to exercise and tend my mind as well.

I am somewhat involved with a couple of local civic and environmental organizations, and that draws me into using those old skills, of reading, analyzing, synthesizing, and writing / saying what I think about it all. It feels good to get into it! But, I'm not prepared to step up to doing anything like this full time, or even more than the very little I'm doing. 

I've never been a fan of word games and puzzles. I have never clicked with crossword puzzles, or scrabble. I've not jumped on the Wordle craze (though I enjoy how others enjoy it, especially the sharing). I've finally settled on foreign language learning, at least for the present. I do Duolingo every day!

Duolingo is a very popular free/premium app that offers many foreign languages to learn (including English as a foreign language). I downloaded it years ago with the idea of brushing up my French before a trip. I had French classes from fourth grade through college, and then studied it again for several years while my sister was living in a Francophone country. I achieved what felt like basic reading fluency, reading some Jean-Paul Sartre in the original, occasional technical documents at work. For speaking, I needed a few beers in me (always available when visiting my sister overseas) and French seemed to trip lightly off my tongue, and I caught the gist of other's conversations. But Duolingo started at the very beginning, and it quickly became boring to me and I didn't persist.

I tried Duolingo again a few months before a trip to Italy. I was starting Italian from scratch, and for about three months I gamely plowed on, doing just a couple of lessons a day. The result from my trip was I had enhanced my reading vocabulary with a few specific words and phrases that helped a bit in navigating, but I had no listening or speaking ability. 

When I got home from a trip last summer, I was physically beat and was sitting around the house much more than before. I re-downloaded Duolingo and picked up French again - it remembered me, and I picked up where I had stopped years ago. I found the gamification of it very satisfying - the nice little beeps and the characters that pop up to cheer you on. It also had an option to test out of lessons, skipping some of the tedium of things I already knew. I quickly got to levels where I might already know something, but the progression was not mapped to what I knew, so every day there would be something new as well as drills that made me recall old words and grammar learned years ago but not used since. 

Duolingo has both gamification and social aspects, that are not dependent on what language you are studying.You get points, and little beeps and trumpet blasts when you do well - I am amazingly fond of the tiny positive reinforcements, silly as they are. Some friends of mine are using Duolingo daily as well, and I enjoy the casual camaraderie of seeing what milestones they have crossed, and sometimes working together to knock off, say, 50 perfect lessons in just a few days, in a friends quest. In addition, you are automatically put into leagues with competition among the members to earn the most weekly points and advance to a new league. 

The lessons, which I do on the ipad, have written, listening, and spoken aspects. There might be a written sentence in English, for example, and you have to either sort through a gallery of possible French words to translate it, or fill in a blank in an otherwise complete sentence, or, hardest of all, type out the whole complete sentence in French. Did you know that there is a French keyboard, with the letters in a different order that our querty keyboards? Since I'm using a screen (software generated) keyboard on the ipad, when I'm in French lessons in Duolingo, it automatically switches! That slowed me up for a while! Other lessons include translating from English to French, and listening to spoken French and translating to English or replying in spoken French.

Now I've been doing Duolingo for more than 200 days in a row! But I have to caveat that - you can earn or buy a "streak freeze" where it automatically bridges (forgives) a day or two missed. I've missed a few, but not many. I've currently got five days worth of bridging in the bank, which will come in handy when I take my offshore sailing trip, with no cell phone coverage available for as much as two weeks. Lessons can be stored and taken offline, but I don't actually know how that works, since I haven't tried it. 

I discovered back in my youth that a default setting in my brain is to process words as normal (ie English) or foreign. It is very easy to mix up different foreign languages, and so I decided to stick with French at the outset, worried that my brain was too old to distinguish a new foreign language from French. I very briefly tried Greek before going to Greece this fall, and quickly gave up with the extreme foreign-ness of it. It had a completely different alphabet to add challenges. I tried downloading a basic Greek language learning audio lesson, but after several days in my car not getting farther than "Hello" "How are you?" "Thank you very much", repeating over and over, I gave up. 

I think I have audio processing issues, related to my hearing loss. When I was first diagnosed, I was especially bad at distinguishing speech with background noise, exponentially worse when the background was other speech. I even asked my team of peers and subordinates at work to make sure they never whispered in my ear in a meeting - I totally lost the thread of both the main conversation and what they said, and got irritable. My audiologist told me that is classic, including the high level of irritability for what is really a minor annoyance. (I was able to process written notes passed to me during meetings, it was the audio processing that didn't work.)

So my expectations about learning enough French to be fluent in a conversational way is very low. I really enjoy the lessons, but they are more puzzles to me than conversation. I will think about the word order, clues to conjugation from other words in sentences (plural? feminine?) and it feels a bit like coding / decoding, rather than smooth flow of language. But there is a great deal of repetition - so some sentences start to roll off my tongue more smoothly, and perhaps there is hope for me talking "il faut partir a l'aeroport vers quel heure?" (around what time should we head to the airport?). But understanding the answer will be hard!

I've sampled some podcasts labelled "slow French" and they are sometimes understandable. If I really wanted to become more conversational - if I thought I was going to be in a Francophone environment for a while - I think that would be really helpful. I remember once going to a church service at Notre Dame, and understanding the the slow and clear sermon. I could sometimes follow French speech at technical conferences, when the speaker was making an important point and so slowed down and put more weight on the words. I also believe that deliberately exercising my audio processing faculties, rather than retiring them, might be a good idea. So I do very occasionally listen to the slow French news.

But I've added more puzzle challenge by starting up another new language, Norwegian! I have absolutely no illusions of ever becoming even slightly fluent in Norwegian. But it's actually a very easy written language for me to learn, so far. (I'm on Unit 3 in Norwegian, compared to Unit 52 in French. Every unit is many lessons, maybe 50?)  I was intrigued to see the Duolingo characters and personalities they use are the same (Lily is still a violet-haired disgruntled teenager), though of course the voices are different, but the building of the vocabulary and sentences are very different! "Ulven spiser anden" (The wolf is eating the duck) "Bjornen drikker noe" (The bear is drinking something). So funny! I do miss having a reference to look some things up. I learned the difference between "a wolf" and "the wolf" by context ("En ulv" versus "ulven"). But some words use "en", others use "et" or "ei" and I don't know what the difference is, I'm just memorizing which to use when a new word comes up. I will eventually find a way to figure it out, but leaving the app to research it is annoying.

But I am learning, stretching my mind and my memory so that I didn't need to look up those Norwegian sentences above! Hopefully, I'll never need to say those particular sentences, but I have the words in my mind. I know what an enormous luxury it is to have the time to do this, from five to fifty minutes a day, averaging around 15 minutes. It makes me feel I'm doing something. Let's call it peace.

Avoiding Blursday

 There was a note in (I think) the NY Times about how staying at home through the pandemic leads to "Blursday". It can feel like we are sleepwalking through our days, every day Groundhog's Day. I think this was already sort of true for me when I retired, but the pandemic really accelerated it. How do I tell one day from another? What did I do yesterday, much less last week? And, how did I get through a week without doing anything? Anything useful, or productive, or compassionate, or anything other than basic eating and flopping on the couch with a book or tv? I first wrote about this problem just a couple of months after I retired, and again in 2020. It's remained a problem, more or less, as time moves on. The "less" is generally when I have actual deadlines coming, things like leaving on a trip. This winter, with an increased need (again) to stay home, it feels necessary to grasp my days and make something of them. But how?

You've seen my report card, where I record the statistics kept automatically for me by my various devices and automations. Sometimes, that simple record is all I have, and even some of the line items are hard to recreate: did I actually go downtown this month? Let's look back at my calendar or emails to see... And, with so few items on my calendar, I don't look at it, and so forget the few things I have.

I have to-do lists, and that is not the problem. Actually getting up off the couch to do things, when I think "but I just did something on that, that's enough for now" and "I'll do something about that tomorrow". But I need the record, to keep me honest. My memory will always round up, way way up, assuring me things have been better than they actually have been. I have tried various things, but I've got a couple methods that I've stuck with for a while, and they help.

One of the practices I've long but intermittently engaged in, is tracking my food, for diet purposes. For the past couple of years, I've done some daily worksheets more than half the days, that ask me to plan food in advance, and track what I've eaten yesterday. But in addition, these worksheets (which have varied over time) have spaces for things like "What am I grateful for today?" and "What did I do right?".

So I've decided to quit this pricey diet group, and make my own worksheets. I freely plagiarized from several different sources to create something new for this year, a daily worksheet. Food remains prominent, as I work to both plan better and record what I actually eat. (I am motivated to plan in order to use the food I have in the house with less waste, to ensure I am getting some vegetables in especially, and to also look at the calendar, make plans for the day, and ensure I will have time and energy to cook and eat according to plan. I'm recording afterwards because I want to focus on how I feel before, during, and after eating.)  So far, this one-page a day is working for me. I generally do this in the morning, after that first cup of coffee.

I'm also recording a much wider set of things about my days. I set up a matrix of many dimensions of where my time goes: exercise, chores, projects, being social, entertainment, etc. I have the dimensions down the rows and a column for each day. I simply put a dot in a box if I did this thing this day. Nothing about how much, how well, any of that. Did I do it, or not? Over time, I'm trying for a balance across the things. 

I'm using these worksheets on the ipad - I built them on the computer in excel and powerpoint, and then turned them into pdfs I pull into my note-taking app on the ipad. So with my apple pencil, I write on the ipad as if it were paper, but it's not paper. That way, should I want to go back and look, I've got it near at hand, without cluttering up things. And, I can modify and adapt the worksheets at any time. Also, the colors mean nothing, I just switch up colors in the app every day because I can.

Again, I see this as keeping me honest about what I am actually doing. I am very self-indulgent, in how I spend my time, and also how I eat. But I am striving for balance, and that requires a clear-eyed understanding of what I am doing. This is daily a minimal effort, and it feels worth it for now.

2020 Wrapup: Books

 I've been challenged to name my best book of 2020. I had already been working on this post, recapping what I read, and so I'm going to work it in here. But you have to read to the bottom.

It was a very wordy year! I read in the neighborhood of 171 books - that is an awful lot. Or a wonderful lot, I guess. The library was an incredible lifeline to me. A rough count shows about 80% of these I got from the library. It is so easy, when I see something I want, to just click over and check if the library has it. Then a couple more clicks, and it's either borrowed or on hold. As I have a tendency to really like to read a whole series by an author, this works well. In my experience, the library is likely to have either everything or nothing from a given series. And the kindle is my preferred format for books that are primarily text. I only prefer hard copies when they are gorgeous big books, like gardening or cooking books.

Also, about a third of my books this year were listened to. I have had an Audible subscription for years, and had settled on mostly non-fiction, or literary or challenging fiction, as my preferred listening books. I read about three times faster than a typical read-out-loud pace, and I found certain types of books actually benefit from my having to slow down and take in every single word. Until this year, I never sat still to listen - I'd put on the headset for a walk or to do chores, inside or out. And a problem with listening to more exciting easy fiction is that typically, you stop listening when time for the chore or walk has run out. That's not always convenient of our hero is left hanging on a cliff. But this year, I learned sometimes the recorded form of popular books was much more available from the library than the ebook version. So I started listening to mystery and science fiction books and sometimes, in the evening with all but bedtime chores done, I would even sit down in the living room to listen, in preference to TV or visually reading. I couldn't just sit there, however, so I do some idle easy games on the ipad, or color in ipad coloring books (using the apple pencil), or, I just started this week, do jigsaw puzzles on the ipad, while listening through a speaker in the living room. Something occupying a corner of my brain while I also follow the story.

Because I log my books in Goodreads, I was able to export them into a spreadsheet, which allowed me to summarize and categorize them. The list isn't perfect, but me being me, I had to make a chart! So here is a visual summary, by genre:

The blue books are non-fiction - I only read 13 of those. They were gardening and natural history, and civics (my term for items of topical or political or social import) and history. Self-improvement and sailing each popped up with just a couple.

The brown ones are fiction, and you can see the big enchiladas labeled clearly. I went big time for escapism, and many of these were series. The smaller slices represent (in descending order) plain novels (no other category), romance ( a new escapist genre for me), young adult novels, historical novels, and spy novels. 

So, what were the best books?  So hard to pick, and January seems so very long ago! I found as I became voracious, I also became a harsher critic. It takes something special to earn four stars from me, and only the very very best get five (unless it's written by a friend of mine, in which case it automatically gets the five to boost it).

One individual novel stuck with me, read back in January: When We Were Vikings, by Andrew MacDonald. I think it was a debut. It's narrator is a damaged young woman, born with fetal alcohol syndrome, and further abused, and living a precarious and dangerous life. But it's uplifting! She chooses to live her life like a Viking, and it's wonderful.

The best non-fiction book I read was How to be an Anti-Racist, by Ibram X. Kendi. I listened to it, because it falls into the type that needs slowing down. Kendi reads it himself, and it changed my thinking almost from the first page. Well worth it.

Far and away the best series is Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache series, beginning with Still Life. He is head of homicide for the Surete de Quebec and the characters, the plots, and the settings are all terrific. I listened to them all, the whole sixteen of them. Some I liked better than others, but the worst was still good. After a while, the characters seem like friends, the same way you can feel when binge-watching a TV series. It would be good to read in order, as people evolve and change. (I went with what I could get quickly from the library, and sometimes found myself saying "oh that's why he is like that".)

And, for those who stuck with me this far, a bit of fluff and sugar for you: One to Watch, by Kate Stayman-London. A feminist plus-sized contestant on a Bachelor-type show. Goes down easy!

Family Archives

My mother in high school

I am the family archivist. This comes to me naturally. I was the family photographer, starting in the 1980s. I physically inherited boxes of documents and photos from my father and my mother. I had a brief engagement with family genealogy in the 1990s, and have some partial family trees from that era. I missed an opportunity to review old family photos with my mother, and so a lot of that knowledge is lost forever. Who are these old people in these stiff and faded photos? I just remember old Hester Anne, with her clay pipe, born in 1830. But where on the family tree is she?

I'm paying for a storage unit, where I put some furniture and many boxes after my mother died. I finally decided I needed to make a start on the boxes. I stopped by, and brought a few home and tossed them in the spare room. But before I tackled them, I though I spend a few minutes on the stuff already at my house.

My father in 1952,
when he got his PhD

I was quickly overwhelmed. There is simply too much, it's too diverse, I couldn't decide how to handle it. My initial thought had been to sort and scan as I went, tossing some things outright, others after a scan, and saving few physical items. Though my desktop scanner is of decent quality, it is very slow, and I realized Plan A was simply not going to work. So I stepped back, and spent some time thinking and researching how to organize the project. I didn't want to get too far into it before having to re-do everything I'd already done.

I'm a natural librarian, and I have professional librarian friends. I also have friends in similar situations wanting to tackle similar projects. So I got some sage advice, from physically how to handle the materials to digitally how to set up a filing system. One of the main points is to do a physical sort first, without engaging with any of the materials in depth. Sorting by family branch / family member, and/or by year, seem to be the leading alternatives. And, toss stuff in this first sort. Be realistic. My parents traveled a lot, but does anyone need pictures they took of European buildings, with no recognizable people? Of course not. Keep a trash bag nearby.

It's hard to stick to the guideline of "don't engage" when dealing with documents (as opposed to photos). I have to review them enough to know what I'm looking at. And then it can be hard not to get sucked in. For example, I found a stack of sympathy cards I had received after my sister died. My memories of that time are extremely hazy. I sat down and looked at all the cards, and put them into an archival envelope to keep. They won't be scanned, but maybe I'll look at them again in a few years.

At that point, I realized why the advice is not to engage with the material as you move through it. I was a little bit comforted and also a little bit blue after going through those little bits of thoughtfulness that had come at my most bleak time ever. I needed another break before getting back to it.

So today, with two inches of rain forecast, I dove back in. There was necessarily some spool-up time, as I needed to remind myself how I was doing the physical sort. I know I've decided many photos need to be scanned by a service as doing it myself isn't physically possible. But each service has its rules for how to sort and label batches, so for the time being I'm just grouping by rough family group and date. So all of those will need to be handled again, when I review detailed instructions from a scanning service. Documents can also follow the same rough sort, with another distinction between records (diplomas, birth certificates) and more personal stuff. Probably, documents that get scanned will be scanned by me.

Hester Anne. Note clay pipe.
One of the girls is probably my grandmother

I pulled out a bag - roughly a plastic grocery bag sized bag, and dove in. As it turned out, this bag held stuff from my father's mother, Haila Yvonne Miller Shellabarger. It appears she saved every letter or photograph my father ever sent her. The big surprise - and a treasure trove - is that he wrote to her a lot.  In 1957, the year my family first lived in London, he typed out a tissue-thin blue air letter nearly every week to her. Mundane doings of our young naive American family having an adventure abroad. But there are letters before and after that time as well - somewhere between 50 and 100 in total, I guess. So I sorted out the letters by year, and put them in envelopes for dealing with later. I'm really looking forward to working my way through them. But for now, they are all in a box labelled "Shellabarger - to be scanned."

Most of the photographs are copies my parents sent them. Everything peters out in the mid-1960s. Did long distance become affordable then? Or maybe, more recent things are in another box!

So I packed everything up again, and I'll do more sorting and organizing when next it rains or snows - that will be Wednesday, most likely!

Blursday

 I read the term “Blursday” in The NY Times, I think. I don’t remember the whole article, but the term struck me as just exactly right. This is the time period in which I am living. There is little to distinguish the days, except if I zoom in and grab it, write it down for posterity.

I try various things to track my days, to try to pin down where my time goes. This is so hard: I can’t really remember. I went grocery shopping, was that Thursday or Friday? When did I last go through my mail and pay all the bills? Don’t I have some deadline coming up on one of the few things I am actually responsible for? When last did I speak to someone? To my family?

It’s so easy to just drift. I am doing things, sure enough. I’m working in the garden, I’m walking, reading books, laundry piles up and then gets done. I’m pretty much on an island most days, but things are getting done.

I’m keeping a log of when I do what in the garden, when I remember to do it. I started this after I planted some grass seeds, and then after a period of time, they came up. How long was that after planting? Because I was planting more seeds, I really wanted to know how long to wait before declaring failure. (Because my mind always assumes a catastrophic failure, but that’s a discussion for another time.) I had to go back and look at my pictures, and read the date taken, to be able to figure that out. Hooray for taking the pictures at the right time!

I’ve taken to actually keeping a calendar to see where my time goes. There is little on the calendar to begin with, but I go back, not every day, but every couple-few days, and try to reconstruct what I did. I don’t have goals here, just curiosity. But I do want to minimize the aimless puttering, the aimless TV (as opposed to purposeful TV!), and the aimless iPad surfing. It bothers me when I have hours accounted for. I want my time to count for something, even if it’s just growing my mind. 

So I look for clues, in the electronic signatures I leave around various places. My fitbit tells me when I woke up and went to bed, and by the number of steps I can often figure out when I did various physical tasks. My phone knows where I am in space, sort of (it’s buggy) and so I can use that to verify what day I went to the Giant supermarket. The iPad tracks screen time, even down to which app I am using, so I fill in details with that. Reading books or watching TV have no electronic signature, except when I finish a book (if it’s on the kindle and I have it connected), or what I can deduce from lack of activity tracked by the fitbit.

Why does this matter? No idea. But I’m doing it, at least for now.

Walk Towards the Light

"Walk towards the light" is a design principle used by an architect who published a series of books I gobbled up over the past few years: Sarah Susanka, with the Not So Big House series. She has a series of principles and practical suggestions, many of which I've incorporated into my own small house. The "walk towards the light" idea is that people are naturally drawn towards the light, so use that concept in placing windows, hallways, lighting, and lighted art works, to make it comfortable and natural to move around your home. One specific example is my newly renovated basement - I had one additional window excavated to a large size in the big, main room down there, not required for "legal bedroom exit" status, but because it's at the foot of the stairway and faces west. In the afternoon, light streams in from outside, and it draws you down the stairs to the otherwise underground space.

Light is very important to me. I'm convinced the gloom of my middle school years, spent in Ann Arbor and England, was influenced by the gloom over the winters. By contrast, the South Shore of Long Island, heavily influenced by the Atlantic Ocean, is one of the sunniest places in the country during the winter months. Moving back there for my high school years was a life saver. Back to Ann Arbor for college and grad school, we once went 45 days without enough sun to cast a shadow. I remember hunkering down into vegetative status in the winters. Chicago, on the west side of the Great Lakes, was significantly less gloomy in winter than Michigan. But I'm convinced I never would have gotten the gumption to apply for the job in DC if we hadn't had a glorious, stationary, high-pressure system sitting over Chicago for four weeks at just exactly the right time. It was frigid - during that time it never climbed above 5 degrees! But it was light, all day, every (short) day, and I soaked it up, through windows at work and bundling up to go cross-country skiing on weekends.

When I moved to DC, my first office at my new job was an interior one, with no glimpse of the outside. I read a book on Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and I was afraid of what the dark would do to me. I had started The Big Weight-loss, and key to that was nordic tracking for a time every single morning. I bought a specialty florescent sunlight lamp on a mounting pole that allowed it to shine in my face as I exercised. This is reckoned to be the absolute best method for use of a lamp to ward off SAD - in your face, first thing upon rising, while exercising. No doubt the energy from the light helped in the weight-loss.

I bought my current house primarily for its windows, secondarily for its lot and the gardening possibilities. (Of course, location came first!) Built in 1950 when tract housing was shooting up all over the U.S., it has several detectable Prairie School influences (in the pitch of the roof and overhangs) and mid-Century modern as well (in the large combination living/dining room, and several modernist touches in materials and trim), rescuing it from the dark, chopped up standards at the time. Shaped like an "L", with the two bedrooms on the base of the "L" and the public rooms along the upright, it's oriented close to north-south, with the bedrooms being the north wing. Every room has big windows, and from almost every spot in the house you can see outdoors on at least two different sides (if doors and blinds are open). But as I've recently spent more days in the house at all hours, I've noticed subleties in the light patterns in these most dark days of the year.

Clearly, the axis of the house is skewed from true north/south, so that east-facing windows get less morning light than west-facing windows get in the afternoon. I move consciously through the house, following the light. I have a "morning chair" in my office with east windows. I usually get up before full light, so the chair has a nice reading spotlight. I sit with my ipad and coffee, catching up on blogs, social media, and the news. The sun is rising behind me - if I turn I can watch it, but as I sit I can see rays in the room, and through to the next room to watch the sun cast light on the trees outside on the west side. I recently also bought a small sunlight lamp, because I found grey days seemed to sap my energy even with consciously trying to get outdoors more. It's a small thing, relatively inexpensive, and I set it up right next to my face as I read, for 15-20 minutes. Maybe it helps - so hard to tell.

My sunny kitchen

By the time it's full light, the kitchen with east and south windows is lovely. That's when I clean up from the night before (yes I go to bed with the dishes undone) and plan the day's activities and meals. Somewhere in there I go to the basement where my workout room gets some natural light from the north, but is very very well lit.

I generally eat breakfast and hang out in my sunroom if I'm home and reading or writing for the morning. This room, known also as the TV room and the dog's room, started life as a screen porch and then was winterized. It has giant windows on the east, south, and west! This makes it a poor TV room in the summer when glare affects the screen most of the time, but it is a lovely place to spend a portion of my day these days. (It's very doggy, and a deep cleaning of furniture and new floor coverings will happen between dogs, whenever that is. For the time being, it works for me and my four-legged guy better than for guests.)

The sunroom in the afternoon.

By the early afternoon, my big room is getting the light. This is where I'll finish out my day. I use my dining room table as working desk when I plunge into finances and paperwork. I flop on the living room couch with books or the ipad. My bedroom faces west and north, and any cleaning, organizing, or decorating projects in there are likely to be kicked off in the late afternoon during its brief time of streaming light.

During these dark days, I also pay attention to the spectrum and intensity of my interior lighting. In both my bedroom and my living room I have intense daylight spectrum lightbulbs I use in the daytime, but I try to avoid them in the evening. My bedside reading light is specifically a red-spectrum evening light, and I invested in a fancy alarm clock that gradually runs through the spectrum from red to blue light as the way to wake up. (I'm not using the alarm clock most days these days. Don't hate me for being retired.)

This pattern of moving around the house with the sun actually started unconsciously. Now that I've noticed it, I've decided to adopt it as a default routine. I'm like a photophillic phototropic plant. I like the light and I follow it!

Report Card

I made myself a report card. To some extent, the report card simply reflects what I can measure, not what is most important to me. But, because I can't control every outcome in my life, the report card also reflects what I am focusing on in the process. I can control what I do, and how that turns into important stuff is related, but outside my control.

The way to read this table is to not actually look at the specific numbers. I deliberately shrank the column size to obscure some numbers, and to make sure all twelve months will fit on a row. But I'm using the darkness of the color to reflect relative goodness. In some cases, a bigger number is better (eg, number of calories expended each day). In other cases, a smaller number is better (eg, expenditures). But I set the tones so darker is better in all things. The darker the column, the better the month was.

So first, fitness activities.  Calories and steps are from the fitbit. Averages can obscure extremes, so I also pull out active days (calories for the day were more than 2,000) and sedentary days (steps were less than 5,000 for the day). I use the Garmin for biking, walking, and running (only deliberate walks, not incidental steps during the day are counted). So as expected, August was pretty good in all measures. The surprise to me was May - as I recall, I started cutting back at work pretty heavily towards the end, and tried to get a jump start on fitness (and gardening projects). July suffered from the heat, but also possible from trying to do too much too soon in June, because I had some migraines and other bad days there.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Avg Calories Exp	####	####	####	####	####	####	####	####
Days >2,000 cal	6	7	7	10	16	14	12	13
Avg Daily Steps	####	####	####	####	####	####	####	####
Days <5 steps="" td="">	5	4	5	3	1	2	4	3
Miles Biked	-	-	-	-	-	-	5	9
Miles Walked	26	16	8	17	15	38	28	48
Miles Run	-	-	6	3	5	11	6	1

 The next group is about my weight. I can't control my weight, only what I eat. One of the proven techniques for weight loss is to track, so I'm reporting how many days I tracked. Lack of tracking in many ways reflects lack of effort or focus on weight loss. It's clear my weight has gone up since the first of the year. Not my main focus, but big sigh anyway. Besides tracking, I vowed to enjoy more, and waste less. I don't have a report on that, but I'm feeling like I'm getting there on both fronts.
  

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug
End Weight (week)	####	####	####	####	####	####	####	####
Days Food Tracked	0	10	0	0	0	0	0	16

 The next set of measures is meditation. This is measured because I use a meditation app, for guided meditations and as a timer. More meditation is an aspiration, and the coloring reflects that. The truth is, however, that January was so heavy on meditation because I was still in a great deal of pain from my knee surgery, and because I was upset a lot during the government shutdown. Meditation is a coping mechanism, so more might mean other things are off track. Also, recently, I'm feeling that I'm more mindful in transient ways throughout the day. Pausing to breathe a few times, feel my feet grounded, check in with my body. A good thing, and not captured anywhere but in my head.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug
# Min Meditate	439	235	178	81	143	295	215	333
# Times Meditate	42	22	20	11	15	23	21	29

I'm tracking my money, in total, and by categories. I'm showing food expenditures (as a proxy for reduced waste and more cooking at home) and money spent on gas, as a proxy for miles driven. Less is more! Fewer dollars are a darker, good, color.  June food reflects house guests, including liquor purchases. How nice to see the reduced driving reflected in the lower fuel bills. I only bought gas once during each of July and August. Total spending is fluctuating, as I figure out the periodic bills like taxes and insurance, formerly paid either through a mortgage payment or deducted from my paycheck.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Total Spend	####	####	####	####	####	####	####	####
Food Spend	####	####	####	####	####	####	####	####
Gas Spend	$72	$59	####	$87	$83	$84	$29	$26

Lastly are some miscellaneous things I can count, that maybe reflect some larger picture about my state of mind and energy. I track my books through Goodreader. Blog posts are obvious. "Trips downtown" show engagement with my peeps from work, and engagement on the culture front (museums, performances, etc.). And, being at the boat, as was explained recently, is my happy place.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug
# Books Read	8	7	4	1	0	12	11	9
# Blog Posts	6	8	7	6	3	6	8	7
# Trips downtown	--	--	--	--	--	1	5	2
# Days Boat	--	--	--	1	2	3	2	7

 So there you have my overview. If you step back and squint, more and darker green is a good thing, and in general, things are looking up!

Query: How Do You Incorporate Movement Through the Day?

I blew up every habit I have when I retired, and now I'm trying to build in new, good, habits. Of course there is a book I'm reading - Atomic Habits by James Clear. It's a fairly typical self-help book - rules to follow to build consistent habits. Useful.

I'm being very consistent (this month) with exercise. For August, I'm near 100% on exceeding my daily minimum baselines: (1) out the door, in my workout clothes, for at least 10 minutes of walking, and (2) down to my home gym for at least 10 minutes of functional exercise and stretching. I'm working on other areas of my life as well, but what is occupying my thoughts at this moment is understanding what I need to do after my morning workouts to make sure I don't spend the rest of the day sinking into the couch.

When I worked, there was a fair amount of movement in the course of the day. Just to go to the bathroom was about 250 steps round trip. My normal course of the day involved walking around the building to meetings, out to the food trucks, and so on. On my weekends, housework and chores kept me from freezing in place. Even without any conscious walking involved, a normal day at work or home was more than 5,000 steps. (Thanks, fitbit, for the stats.) Now, if I don't consciously go for a walk, it's easy to stay below that level. Even on a day when I'm social or shopping, I'm driving or riding metro, and I don't automatically keep moving.

I'm happy I'm exercising, but I need to get up and move more during the day. So since I know people who either have or were working primarily at home, here is my query: how do you keep from freezing in your chair for hours at a time? What tips for incorporating incidental movement can you share? Or does it need to be more conscious - should I get up every hour and do some jumping jacks?

As I write this, I've been in my chair for slightly more than an hour and I ought to move.

Need Some Focus

I was puttering around this morning... Read the news on the ipad, put away a couple of things lying out in the kitchen, went out in the yard with the dog and pulled a few weeds, came in and decided that my mental lists need to be written down. I poured a new cup of coffee and started moving purposefully towards the computer, to crank it up and get things written down. I thought of the top priority item on the list. As if taken over by an alien source, I put down the coffee and started moving in the direction of the tape measure to start the first project.

Wait! What am I doing? Am I going to sit down and commit to making a list, or am I just going to plunge into the next top-of-mind project? This is how my days have gone, drifting from thing to thing. I am not frittering away all my time - things are getting done. Often, there is no question what is the most important thing to be doing (eg, installing the new smoke detector). But I'm not prioritizing or being terribly efficient in how I go about this. There is no doubt that some very important things are NOT getting done. The mental list is too long, and some things have to be in order, or at certain times (eg calling to schedule appointments, trips to a certain store).

Y'all know I'm a big fan of self-help books. I read Getting Things Done by David Allen a number of years ago, and a couple of years ago took a training class in how to apply the principles. The big thrust of this is to reduce mental drag and boost productivity by mastering the to-do list. Having mental lists creates mental drag, as the mind constantly says "I have to do this thing!", but says it at a moment you can't actually do it, so you make a mental note and have to put mental resources in remembering it later. If it's on a list, and you can be certain that list will be reviewed at some time in the future, then you can forget completely about it for now. Hence, peace of mind.

So the rest of the book and the training class are all about how to do this, full of practical techniques for capturing the list and working down the list. This is not project management so much as life management. But it's also not time management, or scheduling. Key points: Capture Everything that needs to be done in a limited number of input devices throughout your day (eg, email in-box and pocket notebook, don't also have sticky notes and phone notes and voicemails and other things floating around to remember); have set times during the week you take all the input and either do the thing right then (works for email replies, appointment scheduling, other things that take less than five minutes) or write it down in your single master to-do list. A major tenant is Do Not Maintain Multiple To-Do Lists, because then you have the mental drag of finding and looking at all your to-do lists. Many nuances about then working down the to-do list, what tool to use as the to-do list, how to code the to-do list. This group is not a fan of prioritizing a to-do list from top to bottom (because just by looking at the list you know what is urgent), but of using tags to group related items both by subject (home maintenance, gardening..., and by aspects of the task (phone call, email, trip to store, wear dirty clothes, how long will it take) which they call "context".

As in all these books, there are nuggets that are useful and have helped me out. I violated the One List tenent by always keeping work and home lists separately. My last couple of years at work were more reactive than planned, and we lived on email, so I just used my work email as my master list for work. For home, I've used various things, physical and of course many apps. Again, this is not detailed project management, but rather how to move through and between the myriad of different projects and tasks that make up life. It's not time management, in that it doesn't tell you how to schedule your day. It's simply ensuring that things you want to get can get done, and not slip through the cracks. But without having to expend mental energy always thinking about it.

Right now, I have notes scrawled around in various places, many things are not on the list at all, and I need to make a better list. Which I set out to do an hour or so ago, and immediately distracted myself into a new task. Then I caught myself in the distraction, went "AHA!" and cranked up the computer and instead of capturing tasks I wrote this post.

The good news is I have TIME. I'll get this figured out. I don't have to be phenomenally productive because I'm not juggling a gazillion things with deadlines. Just things I want to do, and sometimes it doesn't matter if they get done right now, but sometimes it does matter. I need a list.

Clearing the Deferred Maintenance Backlog

I'm settling into a very quiet and comfortable routine right now. I have no big plans to travel or take on huge projects or goals, but I have huge list of things I want to do. I call it my "deferred maintenance backlog". It is sadly not an actual physical list, at least not yet, just a mental one. But it's big. It encompasses the house, the garden, the boat, and me, with multiple sub-categories under each big heading. What is not yet getting done is civic engagement, or any kind of study or class. I'm mostly pushing that off until after Labor Day. I'm focusing now on me, physical things, but not social things.

I allowed work to take center stage of my life for the past couple of years, and I used work as my excuse for not doing anything else. As a result, I have neglected a lot of things, and they have piled up. I am taking a lot of satisfaction in doing small things. Some of them are recurrent and will need to be done again sometime, and some of them are one-and-done, over and crossed off. As each gets done, I feel great. I feel productive.

June passed by as a whirlwind, but I did learn a few things. I started strong, going out running the first of June, and keeping it up for a week. The rest of my time was focused on getting the house and yard ready to have a bunch of family come and stay. Cooking, cleaning, shopping, building Ikea furniture. Then, the migraine struck. I was trying to do too much. I went into hibernation for a day, and had a couple of days of slow recovery. I recovered just as seven family members showed up to stay for a week. Lesson learned: slow down a bit. Take breaks.

While the folks were here, I totally loved the experience, but it left me knackered (as the Brits in the book I just finished say). Then another friend showed up, by herself so less tiring, but still preventing me from getting into a rhythm. So it's been only since the last week of June I've been able to build what feels like a solid routine.

After thirty years of having my alarm set for 5:30, I'm still an early riser. The sun is up by 6, and generally so am I. Because it is the brutally hot DC summer, I'm trying to limit myself to only half an hour drinking coffee with the ipad before starting my day. I've joined an on-line running group, and I'm following a training plan that requires running three times a week. I walk on the other mornings, either with or without the dog, depending on how fast I want to go. Then, down to the basement gym, where I do my functional fitness routines for another half hour or so. (I cut my personal training at the sports club to once a week for now, till I see how the money goes.) 

After taking care of me, I try to spend an hour or two in the yard. There is so much to be done there! We had a nice spring, and things are lush and overgrown. Much gardening right now is mostly about taking things out or cutting them back. Some things I've done recently are already starting to pay off. (More at the garden blog, mostly pictures.) 

Then, after a little bit of a sit to catch my breath and cool down, it's time for a shower. It took me a while to figure out when to shower, can you believe that? My weekday routine always included a shower, of course, before off to work. And I pegged a lot of other personal care items to the shower - good tooth care, taking vitamins and medicine, things like that. But I never had a weekend routine and often skipped a shower - I usually sat around in my jammies with coffee and the ipad till I felt like it I was running late, and then I'd pull on clothes and rush out to where ever I needed to be. Now, I want to first get going, and then when I'm done with the dirty and sweaty parts of my day, I'll take the time before lunch to get cleaned up.

The middle, hot, part of the day is for reading, cooking, shopping, indoor chores like laundry or bookkeeping. I confess some naps have snuck in there as well. In the evening, something social (movies or book clubs or hanging with the family) or more reading or TV, and generally after dark an hour or two ambling with my old dog around the neighborhood.

Interspersed with these things is a fair amount of journalling, meditation, and just sitting around. 

I've been up to the boat for sailing and kayaking some, and would like to do more. But my list for home and garden keeps getting longer, and I'm sure my boat maintenance list will likewise grow as I spend more time with her. I'm working on dog-sitting arrangements so I could start staying overnight on her, because a dawn kayaking expedition is one of the great joys of life. To do that, I also need to build my kit, get fresh stove fuel and inspect the coffee stores, among other things. If it doesn't happen this week, it'll be next week.

So it's pretty much vacation now. It feels very selfish (what about smashing the patriarchy and saving the planet?) but I've decided to be selfish for a while.

Because I'm me, I can tell you I've read 14 books since June 1. Some were audio books while walking and gardening, some were YA books that only took a few hours.

More later, as I make lists and plans.

It's Official

So many thoughts and feels. All good, with a tinge of sadness at an ending. But already busy! I think Monday will be where I really feel it.

The party itself was great, with many people saying very nice things about me and I only choked up once when I talked.

That's my current boss, Bailey, and the Administrator giving me the official plaque. I'm wearing a dress with airplanes on it.