Slump

The kids are back and settled back into their usual summer routine. I, on the other hand, am in a productivity slump. I'm meeting my deadlines and goals for my client work, but am struggling to motivate myself to do the other work I have planned. I'm not sure what is going on: none of the work is unpleasant, and I'm not over-clocked. Maybe it is just an end of summer slump?

Regardless, I've been using my "stay somewhat productive through a slump" tricks: breaking goals down into smaller tasks on my daily to do list (yesterday's list actually had specific emails I needed to send, not just the usual "catch up on email" item), setting myself short term goals and giving myself small rewards when I hit them (sort of a modified pomodoro method), and trying to pick tasks most appropriate for my mood. One of my goals for the week is to pick the stories for my next taster flight. It is going to be released in October, and has a spooky theme—ghost stories with kids in them. I have five stories picked, but a couple of them are quite short, so I'd like to find at least one more. Last night my time log told me I needed to do some more work, but the other items on the list didn't appeal. So I downloaded an old book from Project Gutenberg and started reading stories. I didn't find any that will work, but it was a nice way to spend the evening. And it lead me to read this wikipedia biography of Lafcadio Hearn, who had an interesting life, to say the least.

So, my productivity tricks are working, to an extent, but it still feels like a struggle. I don't like it when work feels like a struggle.

I'm taking tomorrow off for a long-promised end of summer play day with my kids. They go back to school on Monday. Maybe a day off to play will help!

Sunday Morning Thoughts on Imperfection and Impatience

My kids are on their way home now. They should get here within the next couple of hours. I had thought I'd have my weekly grocery shopping done before they got here, so that we could spend the rest of the day just goofing off. That probably won't happen, because I'm stuck on the menu planning step.

This is unusual. I have a meal schedule I follow that usually makes menu planning pretty quick. The schedule is still essentially the same as the one I posted in 2013, except leftovers night has switched with pasta night, and sometimes I make something on leftovers night, either because I don't like the sound of any of the leftovers in our freezer or because we're out of leftovers.

But I've been trying to get back in shape, and part of living the healthiest life I'll enjoy is cooking with a little more care towards calories. So, I'm trying to figure out what to do for pasta night, and contemplating a salad with a little meat instead of the cheese and sausage laden leftover pasta dish we have in our freezer. (That dish started out as a Cooking Light dish, but my husband tends to double the cheese and meat in recipes, which then makes them not quite so light.) Also, I wonder if homemade pizza dough would be healthier than the Boboli crusts we usually use. It would definitely taste better. So I'm searching for a make-ahead dough recipe, while debating whether or not to use it.

Meanwhile, one of the things we did this week was take the opportunity provided by a long evening uninterrupted by kid bedtimes to do a full audit of our finances and talk about what we should perhaps do differently. We ran some "what if" calculations on our mortgage and debated whether we should put a little extra pre-payment on that so that our house might be paid off before we retire or whether we should focus on increasing my retirement savings again. We settled on the mushy middle, as we often do when we're not really sure which financial option is the best. I got a retirement plan set up for my company and have a plan for a schedule of contributions, and we'll increase our pre-payment a bit.

But... I can't help but think that maybe I should be a little more cost-conscious in my grocery shopping. A recent post over at the Grumpies made me realize that I no longer think about cost at all when I do the menu plan and grocery shopping and that maybe I should change that, both to help our bottom line right now and to start teaching my kids how to do that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, we want to get moving on a plan to do up our backyard. The home remodel finished more than nine months ago, and we miss having a backyard that makes us feel relaxed. So we've been talking about our long term plans, and how we might start in on them, and how much we should do ourselves vs. pay someone to do... and there's a lot to do there. Mr. Snarky is working on the first step in the plan (getting our retractable clothesline back up) right this minute, in fact.

Meanwhile, school starts a week from tomorrow, and I have no idea what, if anything, we need to buy for the kids. They'll probably want at least one new outfit whether they actually need it or not, and I remember the back to school jitters so I'm inclined to make that happen. When will we go shopping? I don't know.

So, there's a lot that I want to do, and the usual amount of time in which to do it. Plus, we're coming up on one of my favorite times of year here: September and early October, when it is still beach weather but the tourists have mostly gone home. I am looking forward to a less crowded sidewalk for my rollerblading excursions, and I want to get a least a couple of good beach trips in with the kids.

One of the things I'm really good at is making a realistic plan based on the available time. Perhaps it is my personality, perhaps it is the years of being a project manager. Probably, it is a combination of both. Either way, I can look at that list I typed above and recognize that something is going to have to give.

I keep coming back to the ideas in the Brene Brown book I read about imperfection. I am not a perfectionist, but I do tend to expect myself to do anything I set out to do as well as I possibly can. I am starting to think, though, that the secret to making this phase of my life work is to allow myself to aim for "good enough" instead of my best. I think that the "take the fuzzy middle" road we settled on in our financial discussion might be the best answer for the larger question, too. Do it all, but aim a little lower on all of it.

But I'm impatient. I want the yard done now, and I want to lose ten pounds now, and I want to see more progress toward our long term financial (and life!) goals now.

Life goal: more sunsets like this.

So really, I need to work on being patient as well as embracing imperfection. But first, I need to finish this damn menu plan.

Weekend Reading: The Week Goes Fast Edition

Our week without kids is almost over. It has been really nice, but I am looking forward to seeing my kids on Sunday. There have been many meals out without a single thought as to whether or not the restaurant has any menu items my children will eat, and that alone has been great. There was also some kayaking time and some lazy around the house time, and those were both great, too.

What was not so great was the visual migraine I got yesterday that screwed up my plans for the day, and made us decide to cancel the planned rollerblade today. Probably, the rollerblade would have been fine. Oh well.

Between the visual migraine (which makes it essentially impossible to look at a screen) and a general focus on spending time with Mr. Snarky, I don't have all that many links this week. But, as always, I think what I do have is good.

Here's an interesting but somewhat superficial piece about racism and mental health. I guess superficial is a bit unfair. It is good for what it is, but I wanted it to go deeper. I've long been curious about the impact of experiencing bias on mental health. I've also wondered if there are mental health providers out there who specialize in helping professionals who have cracked or are starting to crack under the pressure of bias.

Speaking of bias... this open letter to managers of women hits very, very close to home.

Think about bias as pollution... that will destroy your company.

I'm late to this one, but Michelle A'Court's open letter to Saatchi's Kevin Roberts is really good.

Sara Benincasa's answer to a reader who wrote to ask why she is fat is also really good. I think I should perhaps read her book.

This article from Emily Deruy about racism on campus is unusually good.  Here's the take home quote, which appears to be a paraphrase of something Tressie McMillan Cottom said when interviewed for the piece: "being safely uncomfortable in class is entirely different from being safely uncomfortable on campus."

I think that quote speaks to a lot of contexts away from higher ed, too.

Josh Marshall's thoughts on the ads and the demise of Gawker and the importance of independent media are really worth your time.

Timothy Lee manages to make the roomba vs. dog poo story about something more than schadenfreude.

Could we make affordable housing vouchers more like food stamps? And here's a look at the failure of Section 8 in San Diego.

This conversation between Dan Pink and Amy Herman about the art of observation was really interesting. Plus there are pictures of some cool art.

Ann Friedman on female olympians is very good. I have noticed that all of the people who are snarking about the story of the two runners who fell are men, and this is making me think that perhaps some men don't realize that there is more to sport than pure competition, or at least that there can be.  It has also given me some ideas about how to frame events that involve an aspect of competition for competition-adverse Pumpkin. If it is about something more than winning and losing, maybe that will help. My thoughts are still coalescing on this one.

I am absolutely going to try Smitten Kitchen's quick zucchini saute.

I don't have a funny to end on! But I do have this:

Favourite #Bristol street name. pic.twitter.com/EOeOH1dkVs

— Gareth L Powell (@garethlpowell) August 15, 2016

Thinking Long Term

My kids are visting my parents this week, and are no doubt have a blast. They always do. Mr. Snarky and I are having fun, too. Last night, we went and bought curtains! Woo hoo!

Seriously, we miss our kids but really enjoy a week of adult time. One of the nice things that having an entire week of adult time gives us is time to slow down and really talk about things other than what we need to do this weekend or who is going to take the kids to the next birthday party. We try to do this with occasional nights out and our Friday night beers tradition, but life gets busy and the immediate squeezes out time for the long term.

And yet, we both know that good things come from making space to have long, rambling conversations. It was on a long, rambling conversation as we walked down the beach one day that we hatched our plan to take time off and make what we still call our "big trip," which is one of our favorite things we have ever done. We both wanted to do some serious travel but had never thought we could... until we talked about it that day.

So Saturday, over beers at our nearest brewery tasting room, we talked long term. We talked about crazy ideas for what our life might look like, and decided we liked it just the way it is... for now. San Diego is a pretty great place to live. But we are both drawn to the idea of splitting time between the US, New Zealand, and travel when we retire, and we talked about what we'd need to do financially to make that happen.

This is not news, but it is the most specific we've gotten about that idea.

And we talked about how we might take longer vacations again. I miss three week vacations, and it seems like we should be able to make them come back.

We also talked a lot about what we want to do with our backyard. So, you know, our transformation into boring middle age is now complete.

But eventually, we're going to have a really awesome backyard.

Weekend Reading: The More Than a Bit Verbose Edition

Alternative title for this post: I'm tired of talking about literal headaches, so let's talk about some figurative headaches instead! But that seemed too verbose even for a links post that is more verbose than most, so I decided against it.

I've got a couple of sets of links that I want to talk a bit about, and then the usual garden variety links... so let's just get to it.

First up, I forgot to link to Jess Zimmerman's wonderful essay Hunger Makes Me earlier. In a way, that's fortuitous, because I think that reading it in conjunction with Kristi Coulter's essay Enjoli is particularly useful. The common thread I noticed in these two essays is how much this world makes us women learn to hide our desires and even our own identities, and how much damage that does. I've written before about how unmooring I found it to realize that I'd changed myself so much to fit in to my male-dominated work environment that I didn't even really know who the real me was anymore. One of the things I've been doing since going out on my own is trying to reconnect with who I am and what I want. This has been surprisingly hard.

I'm not sure what, if anything, I'd do differently from my earlier career. I was just doing what I needed to do to build a career in my chosen field. One thing I would perhaps try to differently, though, would be to be more aware of the compromises I was making. I think those compromises were worth making, but I wish I'd noticed them more at the time. Maybe that would have helped me build a stronger core, that could have carried me through the tough times better, and left me still feeling like "me."

The more I think about it, the more I think I'd have to go back earlier, though. I'd need to go back to the little girl who first starting getting the messages that our culture sends about what is worthy of respect, what makes you smart, what makes you "cool," and all that. I can see some of those messages more clearly now, and I see my own daughters receiving them. I am starting to think that the most important, useful thing I can do for them is to teach them how to recognize their own wishes, and help them learn to be aware of when they're compromising one of those wishes. I want to help them see the obstacles they face more clearly both so that they can develop strategies for overcoming them and so that perhaps the process of overcoming them won't come with such a high cost.

Also, it would be nice to spare them some of the angst I went through.

I think that figuring out what you really want from life and who you really are is work everyone has to do. But I also think that our culture teaches girls from a very early age that these aren't even questions they have a right to ask themselves, and that this makes it harder for women to eventually find their answers. THAT is what I want to help my girls avoid. I don't know how to go about doing that, but I'm going to try.

OK, moving on....

Next, we have politics. This Brian Beutler piece about the structural issues the GOP would be facing in this election, regardless of who they had nominated, is a good.

But my Twitter feed was mostly full of people talking about this story from the Washington Post about what a new poll says about Trump voters.

Ross Douthat makes a good case for why this doesn't mean that there is economic uncertainty involved in the rise of Trump. Start with this tweet and read his whole thread:

1. New study shows Trump voters concentrated in distressed blue collar areas but better off than their neighbors:https://t.co/f3nLyjwd06

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) August 12, 2016

BUT... he doesn't address why not all working class white people feeling this uncertainty are going for Trump. Even the relative he mentions is probably voting Democrat.

And here is a thread from Matt Yglesias expressing the counterpoint:

1. One reason I mock "economic anxiety" theories of Trumpism is I think we should interpret voter behavior as making some kind of sense.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 12, 2016

I don't think we should ignore the economic stress a lot of Trump voters are experiencing. But I also don't think that gives them a pass for the ugly, racist way in which they are expressing that stress, or at least are comfortable with other people expressing it.

To argue that the Trump phenomenon is solely down to economics is to do a huge disservice to the many economically stressed people who have looked at the hatred and racism Trump is spewing and decided that is NOT the answer.

It feels like this election is setting us up to finally reckon with the fall out from the Civil Rights era. The Republican's "Southern strategy" has been faltering for awhile, but Republicans continued to subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) use race-based scaremongering to get the votes they needed to win. Trump has gone all in on this approach. As Josh Marshall points out, "mainstream" Republicans' unwillingness to distance themselves from him indicates that at a minimum, they believe that maintaining the support of these racially motivated voters is essential to win.

If this is true, then I'm afraid we're about to start having a lot of elections about white nationalism, and I'm afraid it is going to get even uglier than it already has.

This country does not have a good track record of being able to make progress on racial equality peacefully.  Whether or not we break that bad record is going to be determined by what all of us do next. Do the Republicans finally learn that they need to build a different sort of coalition if they want to win? Or do the double down on the racial scaremongering? And how do the rest of us respond?

I've tried several times to express my thoughts on what the rest of us can do, and I don't think I have succeeded. Luckily for me, Anand Giridharadas put together a series of tweets that captures a lot of what I have been trying to say.

In the end, it doesn't matter how much I think that our current mess is the result of a narrow-minded, short-sighted political strategy used by the Republicans after the Civil Rights Act. I could be right, I could be wrong. Either way, I've got to live with what is happening now. This country isn't some trinket in a shop with a "you break it, you bought it" sign. It doesn't matter who broke it, we all own it now.

Sometimes, being an adult is cleaning up a mess you didn't make. I think we all benefit from cleaning up this mess. I'll be a lot happier if the Republican party decides to help clean up this mess. Hell, I'd be happy if they'd just stop making more of the damn mess. But I'm not going to sit here and stew in the mess just to prove a point. There is too much to lose from letting this fester, and too much to gain from cleaning it up. So I say, let's all get to work.

I think Giridharadas is right that those of us who are happy with the diversity in our country need to try to help the people made anxious by it see that there will be a place for them in the more diverse America. I think that white people who are happy with the diversity in our country in particular need to work on this. We take on less risk in doing so, and we've benefited from the privilege whose decline is making our fellow white people anxious.

How do we go about showing the anxious people that they'll be OK in future America? I don't really know. It probably starts by not referring derisively to "flyover country" and not sneering at "red states." It would help to visit some of those states and try to really understand how life there differs from life in our coastal cities. Here's one small example: I have exactly zero desire to own a gun living where I live now, but when we drove across southern Colorado on our vacation two years ago, I found myself thinking that I'd want a gun if I lived out there. It is empty, empty country, and that sort of country forces a certain self-reliance on you.

We could question why the "good jobs" have to cluster so fiercely. Why can't companies whose product is a bunch of code open some offices in places outside of the usual locales? Why can't venture capital fund a software start up in West Virginia? The honest answers to those questions would not reflect well on us.

I certainly don't have the answers. But I want to try to find them. I want to try to bring more white people over to my way of viewing our future.

OK, so that's the verbose part. Here are the garden variety links:

Another judge worried more about the effect of punishment on a rapist than the effect of the rape on the victim, and another powerful victim statement.

Palo Alto has an affordable housing problem. And here's some more analysis of it, which is relevant to all of us who live in expensive places.

Here's some really good news about peanut allergies in children.

Programs that provide cash to people facing imminent homelessness are very effective.

I meant to link to this NYT piece about the history of home pregnancy tests last week, but forgot because: MIGRAINE. (h/t to Bad Mom Good Mom for that one)

Reminder! I'm running a GoodReads giveaway for The Lilies of Dawn and it ends TODAY.

And here's your funny thing at the end (click through and read the full thread and don't miss the pictures):

Having a good laugh at Eugene Spreicher, who went to art school with Georgia O'Keeffe. He kept bugging her to pose for him.

— Captain Awkward (@CAwkward) August 11, 2016

Happy weekend, everyone!