Ways I’m Better on Friday Than I Was on Monday (or on Thursday, for that Matter)

Hopefully, every day a little smarter. Here are things I know now that I didn’t know as recently as a few days ago:

• I learned a lot of work things. I had a video file (audio over PowerPoint) that needed to be made into a string of much smaller video files (I’m doing one video per slide, but it doesn’t really matter how I make it smaller, just that I make it smaller.) This seems to help when people stream it— less buffering, better stability. For reasons too long and boring to get into, the file I had was not problem-free, and I had to separate the audio and video to fix some slides where there were issues. I learned how to do that.

Advertisements

The Things We Keep

Between moving and other things in my life (while listening to a recording I’d edited to be sure that I didn’t accidentally cut something important, I cleaned out a few thousand old emails from an email address), I’m getting a good chance to take a look at the things that I keep, either intentionally or by default.

I Can’t Quite Put My Finger On It

Some coworkers recently told me they were interested in the opera. I typically have season tickets to the opera with mom. So I talked to mom, and she doesn’t want to go to the first show.  I approached my coworkers about whether one or both of them would like to join me. We could all buy season tickets together. They want to go to the first show, but not necessarily the second. I’ll buy season tickets, sell them mom’s seat to the first show (for what I paid for it), and if we need one, we’ll buy an extra.

I suspect that single seats might be a little extra, to cement the benefit of being a season ticket-holder. (I’ve now checked— they’re $10 more than my seats. But if I buy them all at the same time, they’re all the same price. So dilemma effectively resolved, but this is a flag that tells me that the political posturing I think I’ve recently seen from coworker 2, below, is not really in my imagination, and even non-work events are in play.)

Update to Recent Prophecies

When I got home last night, I mentioned my concern about mom being negative in how she talked about the house, and how that could easily turn into a spiral that really keeps things from getting better.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

There are a few things that are just hot-button issues for me. One is “The Point of Diminishing Returns.” I can do quite a lot on that topic. Another is “Self-Fulfilling Prophecies.” I’m a big believer that we build a surprising amount of our reality by what we tell ourselves. It’s not that there’s no such thing as objective reality, it’s that our subjective reality is what we pay attention to. We collect evidence to support the things we say to ourselves, and we disregard the rest.

Restless

I’m finding that I suddenly have a lot of outward energy— I want to go places and make things and do things and meet people and catch up with people. It’s a great feeling, especially compared with hyper-focused box-checking for moving, but it’s one that makes me uneasy, because I tend to take on too much when I feel like this. In the last day, I’ve come up with a three-year career professional certifications plan and a deep-seated conviction I need to start going to Toastmasters again, started mentally planning a calendar of fall theater/music events, and started thinking about where I could build out my social circles, both with friendships and romantic prospects. This totally feeds my soul, but it also leads pretty directly to exhaustion, especially given how much more of my time is given over to domestic responsibility. This fall needs to see me painting the fence and cleaning the gutters, as well as all the fun stuff that is leaping to mind every second.

Two Weeks in the New House: An Update

So we’re closing in on two weeks in the new house. And what have I learned?