Welcome to September! This week we'll set session goals. What do you hope to achieve by mid-December, a bit over three months from now?
You can also set an intention for the session, if that's something you find helpful.
Goals for the week ahead are also welcome, but if you want to sit with your session goals this week and think about how to make them actionable in weekly increments, that's fine too.
And the creative part: You receive a fat envelope by registered mail, full of assorted documents and a cover letter from a lawyer informing you that you have inherited a house! This is quite unexpected, and indeed, overwhelming! You'll need awhile to absorb the implications. For now, just tell us a couple of things: (1) where is the house, and (2) who left it to you?
Some things you might consider: did you know the person well, a little, not at all? Are they related to you, or to someone else in your family (yes, the trope of leaving something to the daughter/ granddaughter/ niece of the beloved)? Have you ever been to the house, or the region where it is, and if so, when, and in what circumstances? What appeals to you about the region (or neighborhood, if you prefer a house that's closer to where you are now)?
Hi everyone! Prompt: I'm still not sure whether to go fantasy or allegory, but either way, I'm going for the traditional "previously unknown Great Aunt who lived a long, happy and productive life and passed away calmly and easily at a great age" as the donor, and the house is on the edge of a village somewhere in the north, with a view of hills and the sea (so I geuss we've gone fantasy because much as I like it the sea currently gives me Anxiety because, sea level rise and scary scary climate summer, so looking at seaside views leads to "how much will be drowned" images randomly popping into my over-active brain). In which case, I reckon the house is in the Working World (one of the three worlds I've established so far in the nascent fiction about a University Department of Applied Thaumatergy, which exists as a large pile of words which are probably the seeds of three incomplete novels = ours is the Making World), and requires a portal to get there which I'll find out about when I get there. And I left the envelope unopened for several days at least because, fat envelope in post looks like something that I need to do something about!
ReplyDeleteSESSION GOALS:
The usual four sections, and I want to carry kintsugi over as a word, I really like it:
SELF CARE:
* keeping up an intentional movement habit
* saying "let me think about it" whenever I want to say yes. Even for good things.
* doing non-work things every week - reading, 1-2 creative things, 1-2 social things which can be online/a call
LIFE ADMIN/ENVIRONMENT
* financial stuff - end session with a clear path to a decision about the next few years
* finish the Living Room Project, maybe start the Flooring Project
TEACHING/WORK ADMIN:
* be two weeks ahead of ViLE/teaching prep for as long as possible, and never less than one week.
* have the basics in place (e.g. ViLE, weekly outline) for next semester by the end of this session
* as part of new admin role, have the same sort of level of understanding of all the programmes in the School as I currently have for my home cluster
* get through all the new appraisal system nonsense (I now have more "devolved responsibilities", and the new online system is annoying, slow, and not really compatible with an academic's work - one size fits no-one in administrative software form).
RESEARCH:
* complete all the modelling and have a first draft for the modelling based project
* get the darn collaborative paper revised again and resubmitted (and I really hope accepted!)
* be realistic about what I can contribute to the policy reviews and to the big annoying project
* progress at least two other research related projects (I'll make a list for myself this week of where everything I have now is at for checking at the end of the session).
COMING WEEK:
DeleteNot sure if I mentioned last week that the back porch had begun to leak in the very heavy cloudbursts we had at the end of the last lot of heatwaves? Well it did, and Mr Shoutypants enjoyed playing in the drips (and knocked over the bucket of water caught from the worst drips in order to drink from it). So I had a lot of worker-chasing, and managed to get someone in to replace it on Friday (they fitted it in). Nice efficient workers, and so far all good although the finished look isn't as good as I'd hoped - they did leave the yard very tidy though, and I guess we'll find out in the next cloudburst if it's a good job! Work ate a lot of time and mostly felt unproductive. But the two papers that had the really annoying reviews were both accepted, so that was a win! So, for goals:
SELF CARE:
* 3x20 minutes of movement
* reading, 1-2 creative things, 1-2 social things
LIFE ADMIN/ENVIRONMENT
* the declutterer is booked for Friday to help me move everything around following the storage units being installed and start filling the shelves. Can't finish it because the electrician still needs to come to help me sort out the Extension Cord Chaos that was revealed when things were moved that I'd just forgotten about, she's booked for a week tomorrow to at least give advice/a quote. So I need to make a list for her visit and make the most of it.
* on the financial side, this month is going to be SPENDY - the porch roof repair is pearl-clutchingly expensive, then there's the decluttering and electrical work and some birthdays... I'll be OK, but I need to not do the thing I sometimes do where my brain is like "oh, I already spent SO much, might as well just get take out and buy three new novels in the expensive editions and whilst I'm at it, that looks like an exciting new craft, lets buy a beginners kit and some extra odds and ends and whilst I'm on the craft site, let's just look at the yarn... oooh and those special shoe inserts on facebook might be helpful" and then I turn around and I have lots more STUFF and its past the return date..
TEACHING/WORK ADMIN:
* sort out ViLE sites and assessments for first semester classes
* do all the follow ups to the resit programme results
* get details of new system and start to set up my objectives if I can work out how
RESEARCH:
* process model output and set next model running for modelling based project
* make list of all the other "ongoing stuff"