What a week
Mar. 20th, 2016 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjThere's something oddly pleasant about working in the yard when it's just barely drizzling down (as long as it's not too cold). I wasn't sure I was going to have time to get the green can filled this week. I've had this intense, time-critical project at work that got dumped on me just before FogCon and has resulted in working until 7 or 8 every evening for the past week. This includes Friday, when I technically had the day off as a volunteer day, and drove down to San Jose for a student literary conference, then finished off the day at work, late into the evening. Saturday, although I didn't put in any job time, involved a family party also in San Jose. So the day was fairly solidly filled up.
Today I put in about 6 hours at work then determined I'd run out of useful tasks I could do with the amount of brain available. So I e-mailed off the current-draft-of-project to various parties and came home to vegetate. Vegetating involved vegetation, and I removed one green can's worth of weeds from the parking strip. (Largely focusing on the green burr clover and other spreading weeds that will be spewing seeds as soon as it stops raining.) Oddly, physical labor makes up for mental exhaustion for me. Or at least it doesn't make the mental exhaustion worse.
The roses have performed their turn-around from the winter pruning and the boldest couple of them are putting out blooms. I cut a Double Delight and a couple Souvenier de la Malmaison as a birthday present for my aunt yesterday and took a Double Delight in to work this morning for a Desk Rose. So I should be able to manage weekly desk roses from now until maybe next January, with a little attention to dead-heading.
When I'm putting in long hours at work, it can be tricky to figure out self-care that isn't self-sabotaging. Sometimes it's very important to me to get my gym workouts in; sometimes it's more important to let go of that. Sometimes a few carefully chosen culinary self-indulgences are important. I'm currently enjoying a nice little rib-eye steak with sautéed mushrooms and asparagus tips and fresh sliced tomatoes. Sometimes self-care means plunging into something unhealthy (like Friday when dinner consisted of a glass of cognac and some raw chocolate chip cookie dough).
And there's always writing/editing time to wedge in. One more chapter gets me caught up on the current red-lines (bringing me up to about the half-way mark), then I might be able to get a couple more chapters marked up. I think Tuesday's Alpennia blog will be about how each editing round has a different focus and why that's ok.
Today I put in about 6 hours at work then determined I'd run out of useful tasks I could do with the amount of brain available. So I e-mailed off the current-draft-of-project to various parties and came home to vegetate. Vegetating involved vegetation, and I removed one green can's worth of weeds from the parking strip. (Largely focusing on the green burr clover and other spreading weeds that will be spewing seeds as soon as it stops raining.) Oddly, physical labor makes up for mental exhaustion for me. Or at least it doesn't make the mental exhaustion worse.
The roses have performed their turn-around from the winter pruning and the boldest couple of them are putting out blooms. I cut a Double Delight and a couple Souvenier de la Malmaison as a birthday present for my aunt yesterday and took a Double Delight in to work this morning for a Desk Rose. So I should be able to manage weekly desk roses from now until maybe next January, with a little attention to dead-heading.
When I'm putting in long hours at work, it can be tricky to figure out self-care that isn't self-sabotaging. Sometimes it's very important to me to get my gym workouts in; sometimes it's more important to let go of that. Sometimes a few carefully chosen culinary self-indulgences are important. I'm currently enjoying a nice little rib-eye steak with sautéed mushrooms and asparagus tips and fresh sliced tomatoes. Sometimes self-care means plunging into something unhealthy (like Friday when dinner consisted of a glass of cognac and some raw chocolate chip cookie dough).
And there's always writing/editing time to wedge in. One more chapter gets me caught up on the current red-lines (bringing me up to about the half-way mark), then I might be able to get a couple more chapters marked up. I think Tuesday's Alpennia blog will be about how each editing round has a different focus and why that's ok.
