-
Get ready for winter to return (for at least a day) this weekend.
-
Election dominos have started to fall! Start making your plan to vote on Sunday.
-
Nothing says…February?…like Bradford pear tree smell.
-
Train projects take decades to figure out, and, like a train, once they get moving they’re hard to stop.
-
If you live in Virginia’s 4th Congressional District you’ve got no excuses! Get out there and vote!
-
Alternate Work Schedule
During this season of life, for whatever reason, the days feel too short, and my todo list seems to grow too long—not with work-related tasks, which get checked off regularly, but with household projects, chores, and the random crap of life that I’d like to accomplish. Even with an empty weekend, there’s just not enough time for work, rest, and life. To try and make space for all three, I decided to switch to an “Alternate Work Schedule,” working eight nine-hour days, one eight-hour day, leaving one Monday off every other week. The goal being to tackle projects, chores, and crap I couldn’t find time for elsewhere in the week.
And I felt bad about it! From the outside, it sure seems like everyone else is making it work—even/especially folks with more complicated and full lives. Admitting the need and asking for a whole extra day to do regular-type stuff like laundry and meal planning felt a lot like whining. But then I read Anne Helen Petersen’s recent newsletter, and, not only can she relate, but she perfectly describes what I’m feeling:
Losing a day, an hour, an afternoon — if that was time used to put things in place to keep them rolling through the week, and that time is lost, then you find yourself in a 17-task pile-up. The laundry didn’t get done or put away, which means everyone’s down in the laundry room sorting through piles on the floor, which means there’s more laundry and/or no place to put the next loads of laundry — and pretty soon you’re in laundry apocalypse, and the only thing that’s going to save you is…the next weekend. When your life is this precariously balanced, weekends aren’t for rest or reflection, not really. They’re for cramming in the things you had no time for during the week (whatever semblance of leisure + 17 kids’ birthday parties or sporting events if you’re a parent) then catching up or setting up or meal planning or doing enough laundry in preparation for the week to come.
Petersen’s solution to the cascading lack of time, as a self-employed writer and creator, is to “be vigilant about not taking on more work than I can reconcile with the rest of my life,” which, as a formerly self-employed writer and creator myself, I heartily endorse. Now, though, as a full-time employee with less control over work and how it impacts my life, I find that (still good!) advice hard to apply. So, recognizing the constraints of reality and late-stage capitalism and whatever other dumb stuff, I shifted my work schedule around to give myself time to get some more of life’s basics done. Otherwise, as Petersen concludes, without intentionally creating that space, the things I love doing will be the first and easiest things to jettison to make room for the endless piles of laundry.
Today, on my first scheduled Monday off, I rode my bike to Lowe’s and picked up a couple parts to fix a toilet that’s sat broken for months. It’s a good start!
-
Finished reading: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
I started out with a skeptical face because I thought we were doing another Ready Player One but ended up feeling a lot of real emotions. Some good sentences in here!
📚
-
Lux Æterna, 2019 — ★★★½.  Magic Eye: The movie.
-
Big thumbs up to Richmond’s DPW for paving the bottom section of Brook Road—it’s about a thousand times safer for bikes now.
-
I have no idea where this AI road we’re on leads, but it certainly feels like we’re headed for a period of strange and rapid change.
-
If you didn’t know about wind, you’d be like “Oh shit, the trees are mad again!”
-
I’d probably join a “pick a point on the map and walk to it” club.
-
With the new scooter ordinance, you can ride scooters deep into the night!
-
I’m not wiki enough to fix it, but at some point the entry on the Flag of Richmond lost a picture of the Flag or Richmond? It’s got the super racist 1933 version on there though…
-
Did you know the Virginia Department of Health has a “Long Term Unidentified Coordinator” who investigates unidentified bodies?
-
I’m not against…certain…by-right uses, but I think we could do way better than a single-story building on our biggest street.
-
Your bikelife will get a thousand time better once you ditch the backpack.
-
The Banshees of Inisherin, 2022 — ★★★★½.  I want to live on an island with small donkeys and where 2pm is bar o’ clock.
-
Finished reading: An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green 📚
Lots of good internety thoughts in this book, but I liked the parts that dealt with how we treat each other the best:
It is amazing how disconcerting a single vile, manipulative person can be even if you have never and (hopefully) will never see them. The power that each of us has over complete strangers to make them feel terrible and frightened and weak is amazing. This was not the first time someone had made me feel this way, but it was the first time it had happened through the internet, and it was enough to make me want to withdraw from the whole thing for a moment…
-
Gotta keep ‘em propagating.
-
I live next to: Two bus lines, a protected bike lane, and five miles of single-track. Like, come on!!
-
Richmond should update whatever manual and remove sharrows as an allowable thing to put on our streets.
-
If we wanted to keep people safe on Main Street we would implement cheap, temporary fixes to slow down drivers.
-
Support Richmond’s Climate Equity Action Plan!
-
I’m fascinated by how Cambridge is actually building more public housing!
subscribe via RSS