Overload

I have that overloaded feeling that means I should take a day off. And by "off" I mean "sitting around reading or doing what I want" and not "doing chores."

I took very little time off work during the holidays, and the holidays come with a huge list of things to do, so that time period wasn't really restful. 

This weekend hasn't been restful, either. I spent yesterday shuttling kids around. We had gymnastics and a birthday party. In between those things, the kids and I went to the pet store and bought an aquarium, some gravel and plants, and several kitschy little things to put in the aquarium. It is set up now, with the walter filtering so that we can get our new "fishy pet" soon. Today, I've mostly done chores. I also spent two solid hours helping Pumpkin clean and organize her room with Mr. Snarky took Petunia to see Star Wars (she begged... but he wasn't really that hard to convince). Pumpkin and I headed into her room and started sorting, storing, and generally organizing. We made progress, but we didn't even get to her desk. We'd really let her room go during the remodel. (This is 100% my karma coming back at me: I had a very messy room as a kid!)

On the bright side, I came across a stack of old clothes that fit Petunia now, so Petunia no longer needs new pants.

Also, Pumpkin found several things she'd thought she had lost. It is unclear if a lesson was learned from that or not. Probably not.

I did at least get to start my day with a pot of tea and some work time. I scheduled my Annorlunda Books and Tungsten Hippo posts for the next couple of days, and also posted my second book introduction guest post on Tungsten Hippo- this one is for a horror novella called The Tale of Sawney Bean. Horror is really not my thing, but it does sound like an interesting story.

Right now I should be working on the slides and text for a workshop I give on Thursday. I'm only about 25% done with those, so I obviously need to get moving on this task. However, for once I recognized the overloaded feeling before the pressure went critical... so I'm sitting in my lovely new office with the door closed, drinking a gin and tonic and doing whatever the heck I want. This can only last until dinner, but I'm hoping it will release enough pressure to allow me to make it through the week. My sister has offered to take the kids for a sleepover next Saturday night, so I have an actual night off to look forward to. 

I might take a half day on Friday, too. The weather does not really allow me to do my old trick of having a margarita with lunch at the local mall, and then spending the afternoon reading in their outdoor chairs. Besides, they tore down the restaurant that used to provide the margarita! But I have a lovely new chair in my office....

Weekend Reading: The Back in the Groove Edition

So, we're all back to work and back to school here. Things are slowly settling back into a routine. I'm energized to tackle my professional goals for 2016, which I wrote about over at my Founding Chaos newsletter. I've also started in on my personal goals for 2016. I'll write about those here, probably next week.

I'm looking for a couple beta testers for a short, focused consulting offering I am developing. The idea is to provide a way to get ideas for tackling specific management problems for a well-defined price. If that sounds interesting to you, click through to the newsletter above for details.

It is also the last days of the Fill Your eReader sale- that ends on Sunday. If you were planning to take advantage of the $0.99 price on one of Annorlunda Books' titles and haven't done so yet, now is the time!

Anyway, here are the links for the week:

I really like Brigid Schulte's latest article, about how we need to get real about how we talk about work and life. My only quibble is that she frames it a bit as a "we should focus on changing the culture and work structures, not individual's actions." I'd rather frame it as a "we should focus on changing the culture and work structures, and while we're doing that, let's also be more aware of our individual actions." For one thing, we all have to live and work while we're changing the culture and structures. Change won't be easy or fast, so someone my age (43) will probably have to handle the current culture for the rest of her career. Furthermore, a lot of us as individuals can actually help make a difference in the culture and structures by changing our individual actions. This is particularly true if we lead a group.

But that's heading towards a full on post about the topic, so let's leave that for another day and move on.

Everyone on Twitter lost their mind when Twitter mentioned they were considering drastically increasing the post length limit. David Roberts has a better idea for how to improve Twitter.

Apparently, some people also lost their mind about Marco Rubio's boots. Here's a smart article about a stupid thing.

The Paiute tribe in Oregon has a perfect response to the extremists occupying the federal wildlife compound near Burns.

I haven't had time to read this Vox article on drugs in supplements yet, but I'll share it anyway because it looks well-researched and it is an important topic.

Do you need a bra that tracks your activity? Cassandra Willyard discusses the limitations of personal data.

These dresses look interesting. I typically like a slightly longer length for work, but I love the idea of making work clothes (with pockets!) out of technical fabrics that will stand up to some actual activity.

My crocheting continues to improve, but I think it will be awhile before I tackle models of hyperbolic space or coral reefs.

Here are some amazing photos developed from 100 year old negatives discovered in Antartica.

I'll leave you with a beautiful picture instead of a laugh this week:

The Porcupine Islands pic.twitter.com/D3sUXmtIrt

— Karen James (@kejames) January 6, 2016

Family Fun List 2016

It is time for my annual look back at how we did on our fun list last year, and look ahead to what fun things we say we're going to do this year. Last year's post has some of the history of this tradition, if you're curious. (Short version: I suggested the idea a few years ago and we all liked it so we've made it a tradition.)

Last year wasn't a very good year for our list. I think that is because we spent a lot of weekends working on house things, in support of our remodeling project. I should post some pictures of that sometime- basically, we expanded our living room by connecting our house to our garage, and we added on a new office. We also moved Petunia to our old office/guest room and turned Petunia's old room (the smallest in the house) into a guest room/music room.

So, that was a lot of work. There was a lot of boxing and unboxing, and we did the interior painting ourselves. We are still not done- our garage is a mess, and we haven't painted the skirting boards in the hallway. But my office is set up (finally! I just finished putting things in place last week) and things are mostly sorted into their final locations, even if their storage there is not yet optimal.

Anyway, we were busy, and didn't have as much family fun as we'd have liked.

Here's the list from last year:

1. Go buy a doughnut at a doughnut shop (Petunia) DONE
2. Got to a candy shop and buy candy (Pumpkin) DONE (This was done on our Labor Day visit to Old Town)
3. Go on an Amtrak or Coaster train (Mr. Snarky) NOT DONE
4. Go to an art museum (me) DONE (We visited the Timkin Museum in Balboa Park- perfect size for little kids!)
5. Have a beach day with friends (Petunia) DONE (We did this more than once, in fact.)
6. Make a LEGO town in the living room (Pumpkin) DONE (It was done before I posted the list last year!)
7. Go to the Safari Park and see the tigers (Mr. Snarky) DONE (Their new habitat is cool, and we were lucky enough to see one up close.)
8. Explore a new neighborhood (me) DONE (I'm calling our after-Christmas visit to the Living Coast Discovery Center and the Chula Vista Third Avenue Village area an exploration.)
9. Visit the old mission in Mission Valley (Petunia- with some prompting from Mr. Snarky) DONE (The kids liked it)
10. Walk around our neighborhood and look at holiday decorations (Pumpkin- to be done either at Halloween or Christmas time) DONE (at Christmas time)
11. Visit the Friendship Park at the border (Mr. Snarky) NOT DONE - turns out, you need to do this in not-rainy season because the access road floods.
12. Ride a surrey bike (me- I'm telling you, it will be on the list for as long as everyone else lets me put it there)  NOT DONE. Boo. We just didn't get to it.

Here is a picture of Pumpkin taking a picture of a turtle during our visit to the Living Coast Discovery Center:

She got the camera for Christmas and loves taking pictures. She takes some surprisingly great ones of Petunia.

And here are the plans for this year. You'll notice a lot of repeats, but also a few new ones:

1. Make a LEGO city in our living room (Petunia)
2. Walk around the neighborhood looking at Christmas decorations (Pumpkin)
3. Visit the Friendship Park at the border (Mr. Snarky)
4. Ride a surrey bike (me)
5. Get ice cream from an ice cream truck (Petunia)
6. Go climbing at Solid Rock (Pumpkin)
7. Go on a real train ride (Mr. Snarky)
8. Go out to brunch (me)
9. Go the train restaurant (Petunia- this is The Station, in South Park)
10. Have a picnic at a park (Pumpkin)
11. Go get a doughnut at a dougnut shop that isn't Krispy Kreme (Mr. Snarky wants us to try some new doughnuts, apparently)
12. Visit a botanical garden (me)

Bonus: Go to Boomers 

I allowed the bonus to avoid a meltdown when Pumpkin remembered she wanted to do that, but didn't want to drop any of her other items. We all agreed on the bonus.

Here's to a fun 2016!

The End of the Holidays Hodge-Podge

My kids go back to school tomorrow, so even though I worked through the holiday period, today very much feels like the last day of vacation. Tomorrow, we're back to our less leisurely morning routine.

It is also supposed to start raining tomorrow, and then it is forecast to rain for the next seven days or so. That is extremely unusual here (hello, El Niño!) and will make my movie-hating eight year old very sad, because her school's solution to lunch recess on rainy days is a movie.

But there is nothing we can do about the weather, so we'll just smile and soldier through.

It is looking like a beautiful day here today, so perhaps we can come up with something fun to do to enjoy this last day of sun and last day of vacation. We wrote our 2016 family fun list on New Year's Eve—it is a bona fide family tradition now. So we have a list of 12 fun things we could choose to do. We'll see.

I'll do my annual family fun list and personal goals list posts soon. They didn't feel "right" for today. Today felt more like a hodge-podge post.

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As I've mentioned a couple of times, I'm running a sale at Annorlunda Books. It is going well, and I'm glad I tried it. I won't really know how successful it was until after the sale is over, though. That is when I find out if the boost in sales during the promotional period translates into higher baseline sales after the promo is over.

I wrote about the constraints that still hamper readers and publishers of short ebooks over at Tungsten Hippo. That post also talks a bit about what I hope to do with Tungsten Hippo this year, and ends with a quick look back at some of my favorite books of 2015.

One of the things I will be doing with Tungsten Hippo this year is making better use of my archives. I plan to start tweeting out archive links and quotes, and will probably post them to the Tungsten Hippo facebook page, too.

I've also started implementing my plans for my Annorlunda social media accounts. My new tag line is "learn things you'll feel good about knowing," and I'll be supporting that by posting at least one interesting fact (or word! I love cool words) ever day at both the Annorlunda Books facebook page and the @AnnorlundaInc twitter account.

In other news, 2016 will be the year in which I finally embrace scheduled social media posts.

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Yesterday, the kids and I went to the pet store to do some information gathering about fish and aquariums. Back in May (I think), I promised Petunia a "fishy pet." But I told her it had to wait until we had space for the aquarium. Now that our renovations are complete, we have the space. The fish will live in our new office, near the door to the living room. It is a big barn door, which is almost always open, so Petunia will have easy access to her pet. We don't yet have the shelves to put the aquarium on, though. I needed to see how big the aquarium would be so that I could figure out what shelves to get. We accomplished that yesterday, but don't yet have the shelves. Getting those will require yet another trip to Ikea. I had hoped to do that today, but I don't think Mr. Snarky is on board with that plan, so we'll see.

Petunia has been very patient waiting this long, though, and both kids are VERY excited about the aquarium, so I'll try to get this done soon.

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I've started learning to crochet. I decided I wanted to learn as something to keep my hands busy when I'm watching the kids' gymnastics classes. I also thought it might be relaxing. I think it will be, as long as I keep my expectations of my abilities realistic.

Here is my first piece, so far.

People keep asking me what it is going to be, and my answer of "a chance to practice my stitches" doesn't really satisfy them, so I've started saying it will be a Barbie blanket. Petunia is excited by that. I figure her Barbies won't care that the stitches are uneven.

Weekend Reading: The New Year Edition

Happy New Year, everyone!

Since I skipped my links post last week, I thought I should do one this week to catch up. But somehow it is already after 5, and I need to go make dinner soon... so we'll just see how this goes. You may get more catch up links next week.

First of all, if you missed me tweeting and writing about the fact that Annorlunda Books is having a "Fill Your eReader" sale in which the ebook versions of all titles are just $0.99- go read about it now. That sale includes the job search book I wrote, so if a non-academic job search is in your plans for 2016, now is a great time to grab a copy of that book.

Let's start the new year on a happy note with a few things I loved:

The 2015 White House photo wrap up.

Aretha Franklin singing for Carole King at The Kennedy Center Honors concert.

Gina Rodriguez speaking to Rita Moreno at the same event.

Let's  move on to things people wrote that I really liked, and that made me think:

This post from Sady Doyle about liking Hillary Clinton. My feelings about Clinton are more mixed, but I found myself nodding along to a lot of things in that post.

This piece from Jess Zimmerman about parody Twitter accounts. I follow @SwiftonSecurity at my real name account and her tweets are great.

The Language: A Feminist Guide blog  had a great year end wrap up of sexism in language/speaking.

This piece from Josh Bernstein about how the GamerGate/4chan/MRA stuff is forming into a counterculture. Sticking with the geek culture bit of that for a minute, Laurie Penny and Damien Walter both have some really good things to say on the subject.

The decision by the grand jury not to indict the officer who shot Tamir Rice led to two very good pieces about what this is doing to our justice system. Jamelle Bouie writes about requiring police to accept risk. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about how it is delegitimizing policing. Conor Friedersdorf writes about how it makes him hesitant to call 911.

I've got more links people sent to me and that I bookmarked, but I'm running out of time. And I still need something happy to end on. Let's end with some StarWars: Carrie Fisher is awesome.

I agree:

I never really wanted to be Princess Leia growing up. But damn, I sure hope to be like @carrieffisher as I grow old <3

— Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) December 31, 2015

Daisy Ridley has big shoes to fill. Luckily, it seems she is up to it. (Click all the way through to the Instagram)

And people have argued she doesn't "look" badass. Gentlemen, adjust your expectations of what badass looks like. https://t.co/RoEYOT7KWD

— Wandering Scientist (@wandsci) December 30, 2015

And now, it is time to go make dinner....