Week 48/2021: the heat is on

Week of 29 November 2021

The heat is on

I think it’s fair to say that I found this week hard.

I was in my workplace for four days, which is the most time in a row I’ve been in there since we moved to working from home in March 2020. It’s no great secret that I find being there difficult, physically and mentally, so before anything else happened, I felt like I was already on the back foot.

Then we had a couple of hot days, which made many people celebrate summer being here, and turned me into a melted, bedraggled hedgewitch. Heat is not my friend. Sadly, it was too much for Tess the chicken, who hadn’t been well but who had been still eating and running around up until then. Kramstable returned home from school on Wednesday to find she’d died.

She was one of a kind, perhaps the most quirky chicken we’d had, and certainly the most beautiful. I will miss her terribly.

Alongside that has been the thought of the Tasmanian borders opening up in a couple of weeks. It’s also no secret that I’m feeling very nervous about it. After so many months of keeping covid out, we’re now told we have to live with it, which I know was going to happen eventually, but that doesn’t mean this is a simple thing to come to terms with. Working in a large open-plan office located in a popular tourist precinct scares me, as does going on buses. And, well, being anywhere around people, really.

Talk of anticipated numbers of cases and hospitalisations and deaths is scary. We’re talking about people here, aren’t we? They aren’t numbers. They’re people with lives and with families and friends who love them.

I’m struggling to find a balance between keeping myself informed and overwhelming myself with news stories that might dwell a little too much on the negative angles. Kramstable suggested that I don’t read anything. He’s probably right. There isn’t too much more I actually need to know right now and if anything changed within the next two weeks, I’m sure I’d find out about it some other way.

He’s a wise one.

21 for 2021 update

Kramstable’s videos (thing 8)

My heart really wasn’t in video work this week. I tidied up a few of the mistakes that Kramstable had found but I just couldn’t get it together to sit down and make the cuts he wanted. That can wait.

My mother’s story (thing 9)

Mum and I talked about the chickens we used to have as kids. That was a very different chicken experience to mine now, where the chooks all have names and they get a dignified burial when they die. My childhood chickens definitely did not have names and very few, if any, of them ended their lives as a result of natural causes.

21 for 2021 summary

• Things completed this week: 0
• Things completed to date: 4 (1, 11, 18, 20)
• Things I progressed: 2 (8, 9)
• Things in progress I didn’t progress: 9 (2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 13, 14, 16, 17)
• Things not started: 5 (3, 12, 15, 19, 21)

And the rest of the week

What was the best thing about this week?

Kramstable was in his school’s musical production this week. They’ve been working on it all year and this last month has been full-on in terms of rehearsals. It was wonderful to finally see everyone’s hard work up  on the stage.

I loved it so much I went twice. I was super proud of him!

What didn’t go so well / What do I want to do better next week?

After last week’s post, I had grand plans to start using the timeblocking process to plan my week and make sure I was devoting enough—but not too much—time to my “deep work” projects, the stuff I really needed to focus on to move my work forward. I had recognised that one of my work environments was more conducive to this type of work than the others and I wanted to make use of the time I was there.

It didn’t quite work out that way. As I said, I ended up being in the office for four days. I had several meetings and activities to take part in and got allocated work that involved running round chasing things up for other people. So the unbroken focus time I thought I’d have didn’t happen this week. The one day that I did try to block out my day, I got as far as blocking out one appointment and before I’d had a chance to think any more I had to jump onto another task.

Clearly this is a skill that requires practise to make it a habit.

What I’m reading this week

• Wrest Point: The Life, The Times and The People of Tasmania’s Hotel by Graeme Tonks and Mark Dibben
• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Habit tracker

• Days I went for a walk in the morning (Goal = 7): 7
• Days I did my morning planning routine at work (Goal = 4): 0
• Days I did my post-work pack up routine (Goal = 4): 0
• Days I worked on my art (Goal = 2): 3
• Days I read a book (Goal = 7): 7
• Days I did yoga stretches (Goal = 7): 0
• Days I had a lunch break away from my desk (Goal = 5 work days): 5
• Days I went for a walk or did other physical activity in the afternoon (Goal = 5): 5
• Days I shut my computer down before 9.30 (Goal = 6): 5