[1 week] Ice and idleness
Feb. 22nd, 2025 05:58 pmVacation has been uneventful and pleasant -- it isn't quite over but I'll write about it now. I started by doing some things (for my person and for the house) that had been annoying me for a while: hair trim, and re-papering a door that we keep covered in paper for video background reasons.
There were a couple of extra athletic adventures... ice skating on Monday and a trampoline park on Friday, both with the baby squirrel as it turns out. I still have my old custom-fit figure skates from my college days, when I trained for real, and I should get those things sharpened; skating at this local rink is only $5 and I still remember how to use all my edges, but my left inside edge has gone dull. Bad for back crossovers. As for the trampolines -- the adult squirrel-boyfriend is away at a con this weekend, so I took the rest of his family to SkyZone, and how nice is it that we like hanging out? Extremely. I don't have the ballerina's pretty leg lines in my straddle jumps, but I did fly high! Click for bigger:
I finished some cozy reading, hung out with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
apfelsingail twice (helped her hang up a bunch of art, and got to be there when a long-awaited house sale went through) and cooked avgolemono soup from this recipe -- my first time attempting it. I moved forward by one lesson in my online drawing class. Caught up on personal email. Had a smoothie with my ex gym buddy, who isn't entirely okay, but then she's never ever okay.
Oh, and I met with the arborist about hanging up my squirrel nesting box and maybe trimming some trees that are beside the house; it was fun to meet someone who does trees for a living, and who didn't even blink when I told him I'd been studying squirrels lately. It's like there's a whole world beyond tech and beyond large corporations. I forwarded his quotes along to my fellow owners, and ordered a book called North American Tree Squirrels, to make my claims of study just a little bit more true.
In the middle of the week I started feeling some real resistance to having scheduled things and constraints on my time, which is not itself an unpleasant feeling but one I associate pretty strongly with my nervous breakdown in 2021. So I chilled out more than I was originally intending to, after the two work meetings I actually attended from vacation, and the feeling also chilled out.
I am feeling something different and new that's hard to describe. It's partly "as if this week were normal and working would have been strange". But also as if it's okay and... permitted... to just keep myself going and do my own things, for the most part. I'm not sure how much of this is exhaustion, how much is being influenced by Oliver Burkeman and his ilk, and how much is that continuing to participate heavily in big tech now feels at least as ethically questionable as idleness.
Anyway, this upcoming week has a whole lot of unusual summit-type meetings and I hope I manage to dive into it, at least enough to make the time pass. Probably ought to cast on for the knitting project I've been thinking of, in order to have something to do with my hands.
There were a couple of extra athletic adventures... ice skating on Monday and a trampoline park on Friday, both with the baby squirrel as it turns out. I still have my old custom-fit figure skates from my college days, when I trained for real, and I should get those things sharpened; skating at this local rink is only $5 and I still remember how to use all my edges, but my left inside edge has gone dull. Bad for back crossovers. As for the trampolines -- the adult squirrel-boyfriend is away at a con this weekend, so I took the rest of his family to SkyZone, and how nice is it that we like hanging out? Extremely. I don't have the ballerina's pretty leg lines in my straddle jumps, but I did fly high! Click for bigger:
I finished some cozy reading, hung out with
apfelsingail twice (helped her hang up a bunch of art, and got to be there when a long-awaited house sale went through) and cooked avgolemono soup from this recipe -- my first time attempting it. I moved forward by one lesson in my online drawing class. Caught up on personal email. Had a smoothie with my ex gym buddy, who isn't entirely okay, but then she's never ever okay. Oh, and I met with the arborist about hanging up my squirrel nesting box and maybe trimming some trees that are beside the house; it was fun to meet someone who does trees for a living, and who didn't even blink when I told him I'd been studying squirrels lately. It's like there's a whole world beyond tech and beyond large corporations. I forwarded his quotes along to my fellow owners, and ordered a book called North American Tree Squirrels, to make my claims of study just a little bit more true.
In the middle of the week I started feeling some real resistance to having scheduled things and constraints on my time, which is not itself an unpleasant feeling but one I associate pretty strongly with my nervous breakdown in 2021. So I chilled out more than I was originally intending to, after the two work meetings I actually attended from vacation, and the feeling also chilled out.
I am feeling something different and new that's hard to describe. It's partly "as if this week were normal and working would have been strange". But also as if it's okay and... permitted... to just keep myself going and do my own things, for the most part. I'm not sure how much of this is exhaustion, how much is being influenced by Oliver Burkeman and his ilk, and how much is that continuing to participate heavily in big tech now feels at least as ethically questionable as idleness.
Anyway, this upcoming week has a whole lot of unusual summit-type meetings and I hope I manage to dive into it, at least enough to make the time pass. Probably ought to cast on for the knitting project I've been thinking of, in order to have something to do with my hands.
