Or, really, the title of this post should probably be ‘Stop Expecting to be Creative When You’re Sick, Anna’. I’ve been sick for the past two weeks. I think I’m starting to get better, or at least I can now sometimes go a half-hour at a stretch without coughing, versus the two-minute stretches that were the best I was managing half-a-week ago. Huzza for progress! So, mostly for the past two weeks I’ve been working a little bit, sleeping a…
Sometimes my daughters get very exasperated when I forget something they’ve told me, like whether they talked to their teacher about turning that homework assignment in late, or that they have a planned social engagement this week, or that they already took the test on The Great Gatsby and don’t need to think about it anymore. I try to tell them that it is hard to remember everything everybody is up to, and that furthermore, being older, my memory banks…
Another year, another blog look-back (here are the look-backs from the previous years: 2024, 2023). This year things have been a bit thin around here on daymooncrowmoon.com (which is particularly too bad, considering that this year’s Serial Steam-of-Consciousness Story, ‘Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About’ is my favorite of the SSCSs posted so far, and then I wasn’t around much with proper posts to give it much company, alas, alack!). This thinness would be easy to blame on the fact…
Hello, whoever’s out there. I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve put up a proper post. This spring, and the lead-up to this spring, has been rather a lot. And there’s a good chance there will be another long gap between this post and whatever goes up after it. To paint a general picture, I will just say that between last November and now I have: 1) Surmounted the hurdles of two very large projects, one for work and…
(I wanted to draw you a picture of a goat hiding up in a tree (in order to escape piranhas), but it seems that even that is outside my capabilities at this present time.)
Although I’d like to and intend to post something new and regular-blog-post-like to this blog on a semi-regular basis, sometimes I go for stretches where I seem to have lost access to any extra brain cells, especially the ones needed for coming up with anything even vaguely resembling ‘new.’ In fact, lately, I’ve been hovering near the borders of just such a state. And so, I’ve come up with an idea! What sort of prompt might require not very many…
My brain is like a bureaucracy. Sometimes it can take a very long time for new or unexpected inputs to work their way through the system. Not because they’re not important, but because there may be bureaucratic structural reorganization that needs to happen before movement can occur. And then ditto if you want some action output.
Guess what amazing and rare thing I did today? I properly indexed and labeled the lab book I finished with a few days ago. This is a task I haven’t managed in over 2 years (and I’ve finished with 8 lab books in that time period). Feeling hopeful there really is a Light at the end of the Burnout.
So, here’s a crazy thing. I’m writing this on a Wednesday, and as I left work today I was actually feeling a little excited about my job. This shouldn’t be a crazy thing. I work in Astronomy, as a Scientific Programmer, which is a combination of two things I really, really like and am good at. However, for a variety of reasons, not all of them to do directly with my job (you can probably guess one or two), the…
(*) Well, dang. It looks like mental fatigue is a beast I still haven’t licked yet. That’s the thought that crossed my mind last year after I’d been hammering away at assembling a formal code update and found myself (once again) feeling extremely mentally rundown. Except that ‘mental fatigue’ and ‘run down’ really don’t cover what it feels like, and, taking another look at that sentiment from this perspective of a year later, there’s also this whole extra layer of…