Looking back

This past week, I:

• had a seven-day working week, because I had to go to work Sunday to Saturday.
• attended six meetings. Thursday was a particularly crazy day because I had to run from meeting to faculty morning tea to seminar to teleconference. All before I had lunch.
• celebrated five birthdays. One was M’s, which isn’t actually until this Thursday.
• helped more students than I can count, with various problems, ranging from finding enough material to write an essay due in six hours, setting up an RSS reader, through to listening to a doctoral student’s problems with his family.
• cooked breakfast for 12 people.
• took photos of my colleagues while they taught seminars. The photos are for our newsletter.

Things I didn’t get around to doing:

• writing a letter I have been meaning to write for a fortnight now.
• finish the novel I am reading (Iron sunrise by Charles Stross). This slowness is not because I am not enjoying the book – I am – but because the only time I have had to read lately is just before I go to sleep, and this week I have been so tired that I have only been able to read for about ten minutes before my eyes start to close, midpage.
• writing to the Town Council to tell them to change my name on their records. Changing your name on official records is a time-consuming process. Just when you think you have informed every possible organisation, you realise you have left another one out.
• playing with the Tablet PC (much). I wonder if I will ever learn to use the ‘nipple’ mouse doohickey. I have so little patience with it (and touchpads) that I usually attach a ‘real’ mouse to the device instead (am using a mouse now). Must install Firefox too. Don’t much like IE.
• writing. Lots of things. For work, for this blog, for the sake of it. Decided that I was getting way too hung up about writing and decided to just move on rather than bemoaning the fact that I haven’t written, or been writing, what I would have liked to. It doesn’t matter.

This week will be different because M and I have taken Thursday and Friday off. I am going to have to resist the urge to cram all this week’s work into three days.

Categories: work-life-balance