Rachel Coleman

I'm playing an ice hockey game tonight in Cambridge, a charity fundraiser between Warbirds and Tri-Base Lightning. But until then I have a strangely unscheduled day. I might sleep or read or something.

I could post about what I've been up to lately!

Work:

• spoke on a panel about effective 1:1s, it seemed to go well
• played my usual Senior Tech Woman role for a colleague's recruitment panel, and am happy that our preferred candidate has apparently just accepted. (a frustrating number of timewasting applicants more or less obviously using LLMs to write their applications and generate their free-text statements on suitability for the role; I really resent having to wade through paragraphs of verbose buzzword bilge to ... fail to find any evidence they actually know how to do the job)

Hockey:

• KODIAKS WON PLAYOFFS on the bank holiday weekend oh yes they did. So proud of the players, and definitely earned my share of reflected glory managing the team this season and running around half the weekend. League winners, Cup winners, Playoff winners, promotion to Division 1 next season, utter delight.
• Very much an Insufficient Sleep weekend, we topped off the playoff win with a night out in Sheffield, I got back to my hotel as the sky was getting light, good times.
• Kodiaks awards evening last night: lots of celebration of the hard work and lovely camaraderie of this group of players, A and B teams both. I got to announce and hand out the B team awards, and I received a really nice pair of gifts for me as manager: a canvas print of a post-final winners photo, and a personalised insulated travel mug (club logo and MANAGER on it). I love this team.
• I'm still enjoying also playing with Warbirds, and have now been to a few summer Friday scrimmages run by Tri-Base. I went to a couple of Friday scrims at the end of last summer and felt everyone was very kind but I was pretty outclassed. I'm pleased to feel like I'm keeping up a bit better now after training a lot harder this last season.
• I trained three days in a row this week (Warbirds Monday, Haringey Greyhounds tryouts in Alexandra Palace on Tuesday, Kodiaks Wednesday) and that was Too Much and I was pretty sore Wednesday evening and Thursday. Rest days are important even if I am much improved in fitness compared to this time last year.

Other:

• I did a formal hall at my old College! Using my alumna rights and having a nice evening hanging out with old friends (who were the ones to suggest the plan). Good times, will do again but probably not this term.
• I had an excessive number of books out from Suffolk libraries that needed returning, so I did a flying visit to Newmarket by bus last Saturday, this turned out to be the cheapest/quickest way across the county border. I managed to stick to my resolution not to borrow any more physical books but slipped and fell on the "withdrawn books for sale" stand. Managed to only come home with four.
• I did a little indoor cricket the Friday before playoffs (it's now finished due to exam period), and some nets practice last Sunday, but I keep being too busy to actually play any of my team's games. I'd like to do more nets practice though, that was intense but also felt like I was beginning to improve.
• I did a little table tennis with Active Staff but that's also now suspended for exams. I'm considering getting a cheap set of bats and balls for me and the family to go use at the local rec ground, or in the free indoor tables at the Grafton Centre.

Coming up: my summer is full of ice hockey camps and tournaments (Prague, Hull, Sheffield, Biarritz) and my old club Streatham have just announced all their summer training sessions will be "Summer Skills Camps" open to all interested WNIHL players, so I'm looking at going to London regularly again in July and August.

I have grumpily conceded this morning that I am not up to going to the mini-convention in Huntingdon today, because I am committed to deputising for the Kodiaks team manager this evening, and I have to find out where in the house my Cambridge degree certificates(*) are hiding by the end of the weekend. (The OU one was roughly where I thought it was, at least.)

(*) the original BA and the fake-MA

Yes, for those who are counting, this is the third time in about six months I have found myself unable to lay hands on an important document, and I am increasing sure all three of them are in the same pit of chaos otherwise known as the study. The challenge is to check it thoroughly and systematically, without getting sucked into the kind of decluttering phase where I am surrounded by piles of paper and have no brain left, which means being very boring and pacing myself, and not spending the entirety of today gadding about Huntingdon and Cambridge and buses between.

It feels like I am almost entirely recovered from my concussion, and I've been using my returning capacity to make a push towards finishing sorting out my mother's estate. It still feels like a series of quests with side-quests, but maybe, just maybe I'm getting towards the end. (It didn't help that I basically ignored everything from about September to January, did a tiny bit in February, and then banged my head.)

( death, remains, and money )

Ice hockey is probably the most intense physical activity I've done in my life, and I'm stepping it up with the uni team right when I'm also managing a long-term chronic illness triggered (among other things) by over-exertion, and a more recent but apparently persistent issue with fatigue following Covid earlier this year. So how can I do it?

( content notes: sleep, money, diet, weight with numbers, fomo )

Is it worth it? It is to me. I don't know how many years I have left to play hockey. I wish I'd found it 30 years ago, but I have it now and I'm grabbing it with both hands, until I get too ill or too old or something else happens to take it away.

house admin and bereavement bureaucracy achieved today

( Read more... )

"Ah yes, you work a four-day week," said my colleague. "It must be nice, spending more time with your children."

I laughed, and then explained that really it's more time with my ice skates: weekday morning public skates are a good time for my private lesson as it's not too busy, and I tend to stay on for an extra session if I can, before heading off for the afternoon school run.

The main driver for cutting my hours was to give me more of a weekend by getting more stuff done around the house during the week, with the bonus of an obvious day on which to get things done that needed to be in "office hours" e.g. school meetings. I definitely still do those meetings sometimes instead of extra skating. And so it's worked out that I still do most of my housework at the weekend, but in return I get a leisure day most weeks, which is continuing to make me very content.

I went for my Last Oncology Blood Tests on Friday morning, and by Friday afternoon the official discharge letter was in MyChart for me to read. So I am All Done, apart from 5-yearly echocardiograms and maybe some re-vaccinations (those results will take a few weeks).

There was some faff getting the tests done, as for whatever reason, I wasn't down on their list for the day. I briefly feared they were going to send me away again but instead they gave me a number and told me to wait and I'd get squeezed in between the pre-booked tests. I took the number, looked at the current number on the counter and the number of people already in the waiting room, and opted to wait outdoors. I was able to find a spot where I could check the counter through the window and was grateful I had remembered to bring my ereader. I was seen in less than an hour, and the staff doing the blood draw were lovely as always. (I asked them to check that the functional antibody tests were on the order because "in the nicest possible way, I don't want to come back here", and they laughed and they did and they were.) The weather extremely obligingly held off on raining on me until I was on my way home again.

Also this weekend we managed to get 3/4 of the household vaccinated against flu, and the fourth should get done this coming week at school.

( much blather about flu jabs )

Afterwards I dragged C home on a long detour via Eddington to pick up curry, including really more time than either of us liked riding west into a headwind. At least it blew us home after the curry pickup.

Otherwise this weekend I have mostly been Tackling My Todo List. I was a bit annoyed Friday evening when my allegedly live SDHL stream of Linköping v Brynäs kept failing to actually stream, so I suppose I should try to squeeze in seeing if the recording will play properly.

It has been A Week: this household is now entirely WFH and homeschooling until further notice. I've come up with a trial timetable for the next week, and we'll no doubt iterate and improve it. But whatever happens I'm going to have far less leisure time than Before.

Each child's school has provided assigned work and we'll do our best to support them through it. There's also oodles of resources for homeschooling being circulated, but I'm currently too overwhelmed to sort through it all.

What I could really do with right now are recs for:

1. Maths games, for school years/grades 3 through 6, with no competitive element - no racing the timer or leaderboards or anything that stresses a demand-avoidant person at the best of times. Can be browser or Android app, could be Steam at a push, but PC time is at a premium around here.

2. Exercise videos, suitable for children and/or those with short attention spans, which can be done in a smallish space (2x3m). We have an exercise trampoline, which is doing sterling service, and we can (currently) go for long walks, but we could do with some variety.

This has been on my todo list since November and my cleaner slipped a reminder as a PS on a message about logistics at the weekend. So between that and ceb having a making-and-fixing-things party, I felt inspired to sort it out. I sat myself down with the machine and the troubleshooting website and ruled out all the easy reasons it wasn't working, and got directed to ring the helpline. So I braced myself and made the phonecall and got myself an engineer visit booked for Wednesday afternoon.

(I couldn't remember offhand when the thing was bought; the call handler did a search on his system based on the serial number, and I did a search in my email on the phone I wasn't using, and amusingly we both hit the same answer at the same time, which was 4 years 11 months ago, and the warranty covering engineer visits is 5 years. So I'm really glad my cleaner prompted me out of my procrastination when she did.)

For reasons, I was doing the school run and working-from-home afterwards today, which is not my normal day. On my way to school I got a call from an engineer saying he was in Girton and had just had a cancellation and could he fit me in now. So I said, sure, I'll be there in 20 minutes, and he very rapidly diagnosed the problem, brought in a spare part and had it all working in another 20 minutes. I texted my cleaner the news and she's really happy. I'm really glad the logistics worked out that easily and now Wednesday is less complicated again. Hurrah for defeating procrastination!

Looking back at November's goals:

• continue October's attempt at meditating once a day
• for November, do one overdue-in-the-red Regularly task a day

Good news: I am 99% sure I ticked off at least one overdue task a day (but I didn't keep a ticklist so I'm not completely sure). I still have overdue tasks, but it doesn't feel quite so overwhelming.

Less good news: I'm still struggling to find a routine time of the day where I sit down and do meditation, and I don't think it's because I secretly hate it and am self-sabotaging. I think it's the same overall problem that I have too much to do, and a lot of interruptions, and I find it very hard to do "fun" things unless I book them in my calendar and/or put them on a to-do list. Usually I remember they are fun when I'm doing them, but the failure mode of this approach to life is that everything becomes a Chore.

Given this, a lot of the resolution-y ideas I have (review everything I read! post a sentence in Irish every day! watch at least ten DVDs from my to-watch pile!) just make me feel exhausted right now. So instead I'm going to try a bit of incremental improvement, and make December's goal:

post every day, even if it's just accountability

Tick: I meditated today (and also on the 1st)
Tick: I did at least one overdue-red task today (and also on the 1st)

Also I did finally list some stuff on Freecycle so that's a second thing off the Five Todos For Strike Afternoons List.

October's goal was: re-establish a daily meditation habit and get through the Headspace "Pro" 30-day course

I struggled with this. While I did meditate a lot more often than I had in months prior, it was certainly not daily. I had the realisation a bit over a week ago that it was the "Pro" course specifically that I wasn't getting on with, rather than meditation in general. "Pro" is all about "getting comfortable with silence" and I just wasn't. I'm trying out a bunch of different one-off meditations, and intermittently working through the 10-session "Kindness" course, and my conclusion is that I prefer more guidance in my guided meditation. So in the last week of the month I have managed a daily meditation and I'm going to continue this into November and review again after another month.

The new goal for November comes in response to how busy September and October have been for me. Both at work and outside it, there has been a lot going on. There were several weeks where I went to work, ensured the children were fed, and did very little else. As a result, I have a lot of recurring tasks in Regularly that are in the red, and the thought of catching up is overwhelming. (These are a mix of housework, life maintenance, and 'fun stuff'/self-care for me that will never happen if I don't explicitly make it a todo.)

November goal: each day do one Regularly task that is currently red (more is ok, but one is enough).

Borrowing an idea from falena, I keep not having time to blog, so here's what I can type up in 15 minutes.

• A few weeks ago I semi-spontaneously joined a social bike ride as part of Camcycle's Festival of Cycling (in that I put it into the calendar with a reminder, the reminder popped up, and Nico said "let's go!"). We got interviewed and the playground was pretty impressive.
• Last week, at fairly short notice, some friends offered me a spare ticket to Akram Khan's Giselle at Sadler's Wells, so I spent a happy Saturday afternoon trekking there and back and enjoying really very good ballet from a really very good seat. I had seen the ballet once before, a filmed performance at the cinema (with the same friends!), but I hadn't realised until reading the programme that the awesome industrial themes in it that I had loved came specifically from Akram Khan's choreography, and specifically from Bangladeshi textile factories. (The original is about peasants and aristocrats and evil spirits, rather than immigrant labourers and city dwellers and victims of industrial accidents).
• Sadler's Wells has two other versions of Giselle in the next couple of months and I would really like to see them but I am not sure I can justify the time to go.
• Especially as I am still falling over asleep early most evenings, and only barely keeping on top of my to-do list. I am hoping it's just shaking the bugs out of the new school year routines combined with the entirely expected very-busy time of year at work. I'm still just about only putting out one fire at a time, but there's very little time between fires.
• Although on the equinox it occurred to me that maybe I need to up my vitamin D again as I'm probably not getting topped-up by the sun any more. And also I'd missed a few of my regular doses (see: shaking bugs out of new school year routines). So we'll see if that helps in the next week or two.
• For reasons, I have read aloud all six of Ursula Vernon's Hamster Princess books in about 3 weeks, and am now working through Castle Hangnail and, in parallel, the 11 Dragonbreath books. I have Thoughts about these books ok, if ever I get a chance to write them up. Mostly they are swirling around just how well the Hamster Princess books show human-scale villainy rather than vast epic evil, and how great it is to have clear examples for children of that kind of everyday nastiness, along with examples of how to defeat it. Also she is brilliant at working in references for adults reading the books aloud (or very well-read children): I keep giggling quietly at the memory of a very well-placed "Fly, you fool!".

Today I have mostly spent on the Worldcon schedule, and I have made my final-honestly-that-is-it decisions about what to go to and when to take breaks for eating and sleeping. I am still working through the regret over all the things I'm missing. But hopefully I'll be over all that soon and future-me can just go enjoy the schedule today-me has planned out.

Also today I have bought a new microwave, because our old one has broken and is not immediately obviously repairable. So that was a good couple of hours reading Which? reports and working out what to get and who to buy it from - it will arrive tomorrow. We normally use the microwave multiple times daily so it can't really wait until we get back from Dublin.

I finished work last Friday lunchtime and am not going back for another two weeks. I did indeed finish everything I had to do before I left, which I was a bit worried about four weeks ago. This despite the record-breaking heat of a couple of weeks ago, and TWO evacuations of the office building last week due to a smell of gas. (We are assured there was no actual gas leak.)

Heatwave: yeah, I was too exhausted dealing with it to write about it, but basically I worked a shifted and split schedule so I could avoid the worst of the heat each day and still get enough work done. This required me to be very disciplined about my bedtime, and left me a bit confused about what day it was at least twice. I was quite happy to return to "normal office hours" once the worst of the heatwave was over.

House stuff: we have agreed a date with the gardener! we are awaiting a quote from the carpenter! I finished filing the Giant Pile of Filing! We are without our cleaner for the summer holidays, which means we are totally failing the discipline of clearing the floors once a week so she can vacuum them, but we are not completely squalid yet.

I also managed a bunch of minor administration: cancelling two subscriptions the children no longer read; getting a better contract on my phone; getting a better phone/broadband deal for the house; getting eye tests for me and both children; cancelling our Zipcar membership now they've been booted out of Cambridge by the council (which is a whole mess of its own I haven't had time to look into).

My silly running injury seems entirely healed up now and I can climb stairs as well as I ever did. I've been doing plenty of walking, but I am going to wait until we are back from Dublin before I try taking up running again. I haven't been keeping up my weekly fitness/activity review posts (or for that matter my monthly book buying posts) and although I have all the data, the longer I go without catching up the weekly summaries, the more intimidating it feels. Maybe I should just declare amnesty and start again in September.

For tedious reasons I had to hard-reset my Kindle recently, but this did result in it only having my ten most recent purchases on it. Perhaps relatedly, I have suddenly galloped through several new books in the past week.

Oh, and two days ago went to see Hobbes and Shaw having never seen any of the Fast and Furious films. I got what I went for: ridiculous stunts and a lot of Idris Elba, Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson kicking ass and looking cool. I wasn't expecting the heartwarming family drama, but I enjoyed it.

The first week of school holidays; a big to-do list to get done at both home and work before Helsinki; in particular a big code push early on Tuesday morning.  I had a whole carefully worked-out schedule of when Tony and I would be at work and on leave and working from home and doing childcare runs.

Early on Monday morning, I woke up very suddenly and proceeded to have a very thorough stomach upset for much of the day.  My boss is the best boss, for taking over and sorting out my Tuesday work for me.  I had to reorganise the cleaner, and my routine bone marrow appointment due today (because taking a potential stomach bug into a ward of cancer patients is distinctly antisocial) and completely redo the who-is-home-when plan for the week.

But I was at least able to work today, and (fingers-crossed) I'll be back in the office tomorrow.

The most exciting thing this week has at least gone to plan so far.  My dad made a flying visit today to collect Nicholas for a long weekend at WOMAD. His first time away from home without a parent in tow; not his first time away from both parents though, and it should be a lot of fun for them both.  I look forward to hearing all about it on Monday.

I think my physical fitness is still gradually improving - my cycle and walking commutes are getting a little smoother and faster and less tiring each week, and it's perfectly reasonable to cycle to hospital and then to work.  What I'm finding though is that exercise, work, childcare, study and housework are all drawing from the same pool of energy and that seems to have stopped growing.  "Pushing through", like I did to get the essay in a few weeks back, is like going overdrawn and then having to rest even more to replenish the shortfall.  I'm still going splat at least once or twice a week.

I seriously considered requesting a formal short-term reduction in work hours, to the point of working out how much it would reduce my take-home pay.[1]  That turned out to be quite a lot.[2]  I'm pretty certain we could cut back enough to cover the gap, but that in itself becomes more work and stress, so it's not as helpful an idea as I first thought.

Instead, at least for now, Tony is going to take on rather more than half of the housework, including taking back the weekday evening meals which I've been doing since the start of the year. The pressure to get the children fed as soon as possible after 6pm seems to have eased up, so eating later (which has happened a few times recently when I've been too tired to cook) seems to be fine.  I think we'll still try to keep weekend menu planning / shopping list generation going though.

I am going to use the time Tony is giving me to rest more, and to study more consistently, which will in turn make me happier and less stressed.  I would rather reduce our income than give up studying; one of the things I learned from being ill was that learning matters a lot to me.


[1] It took me a while to find a calculator that could reproduce my current payslip with the various deductions I have going out.

[2] Woe woe, the diamond shoes of my high income are pinching, I know.

I had three piles of paper on my desk, things accumulating mostly for me to Do Something with or file.   These piles were approximately 30cm, 20cm and 10cm deep.  Somewhere in these piles I knew there was a piece of paper I needed to find in order to complete my tax return.  I'd already cost myself £100 by not finding the piece of paper before 31st January, and I was rapidly approaching the point where it was going to cost me £10 a day not to find it.

A while ago I read siderea 's post about filing, and realised her system was not far from what I was trying to do, and that getting things filed was the most useful thing I could do, and so I starting doing short bursts of filing the stacks, nibbles at the elephant, and managed to get rid of the smallest pile, quite a lot of which was no longer relevant and could be filed in the recycling bin.  But then I kept finding more interesting things to do than nibbling the paperwork elephant, and so progress stalled.

On Saturday afternoon I made myself start tidying up the filing again.  And for whatever reason, I found myself getting into the flow of it, and going back to it after interruptions for food and child-bedtimes, and just Not Stopping.   At about 2am, most of the way down the last and biggest stack of paper, I found the vital piece of paper.  And because it was already very late for me, and my sleep was already messed up, I decided to put it on one side and finish the filing job.  And then I was still awake when that was done so I finished and submitted the tax return.  Then I went to bed, leaving one full filing cabinet, one much-emptier desk, and one giant drift of paper on the floor destined for the recycling.

The oldest bits of paper in the piles were from August 2012, i.e. one month after Nico was born.  So that's how long I've not been keeping up with the paperwork (there were odd runs where I had clearly kept-current for a few months but not caught up the backlog.)  It is such a weight off my mind to not have the teetering piles of doom looking at me any more.   The desk is by no means empty or even tidy, but what's left is things like photo albums and bundles of letters from my grandmothers and Charles's schoolwork from two years ago and so on, not financial paperwork.

It worked, but I can't say I recommend the binge-eating approach.  I was exhausted all of Sunday, got very little done and only got dressed because nassus was arriving.   Today when another Thing arrived in the post, I made a point of reading it and then filing it straight into the relevant folder in the filing cabinet, not onto the newly-clear space on the desk.  Long may this last.

+ back to work after 2 days sick
- lengthy meeting in room with flickering projector triggered a new headache
+ free lunch
- colleagues with assorted troubles taking them away from the office
+ played with new free project-management app
+ which resulted in dumping a lot of stuff I was perseverating over into external memory
+ got a few of those "little non-urgent but useful" tasks done
- missed book club due to headache
+ tony being supportive and children being (mostly) lovely

A to-do list helps me organise my thoughts about things I should get done, and work out what should take priority.

A ta-da list tells me what I've actually done.  Mostly it helps remind me that I have not actually lazed all day doing nothing (er, unless I have).  I find adding an item to a ta-da list has a similarly pleasing effect to crossing something off a to-do list without the nagging reminder of the rest of the list.   I find it especially useful when tired or stressed or otherwise more in need of reminding that I am actually achieving things.

I've copied an idea from ceb  and made a community-of-one rmcf_tada to post my things-done lists daily, to keep from cluttering up this blog.  (A community because then I don't have to switch accounts, which means I'm more likely to post daily, which means it will be more useful to me.)  I don't expect it to be of wide interest, but subscribers are welcome, and will give me an extra incentive to keep posting.

I made the seasonal donations today, because on the 24th I was at my mother's without my laptop. I could have done it on the phone, but decided to wait.

The grand totals were:
Schistosomiasis Control Initiative : £4.25
Practical Action: £5.75
Education For Choice: £3.50

I thought those amounts were a bit small for online donations so doubled them to £8.50, £11.50, £7.00.

(I then spent a bit of time seeing if any of JustGiving, Virgin Money Giving or MyDonate would let me set up a single page which gave donors a choice of charities to donate to - a sort of charity donations wishlist I could set up for birthdays/future Christmasses. But no: one page per charity. Also everything is set up around "an event" such as a race or a single special occasion with a deadline, not ongoing things like a wishlist.)

I've also managed to parcel up the gifts we should have posted before Christmas, but did not manage to get to the post office. Tomorrow I hope (before we head to London to see tla and family).

I'm back to work tomorrow after a week's leave (mostly spent in Wiltshire/Gloucestershire, the tail end in Cambridge) and one of the things that I've been thinking about is my (in)ability to get to work regularly for 8am without external constraint.

When I had to get to childcare by 5pm, I was entirely able to get to work for 8am most days. When I have a release day and have to do code-pushes at 7am, I am entirely able to do so. But on 'normal' days, I find myself doing stuff at home right up until I really really must go to be in at 9am .

I am generally a morning person: long experience tells me that I get noticeably more done at work between 8am & 9am than I do between 4pm & 5pm. It's better for me and it's also better for work if I get in early and knuckle down. It would leave me more time for a walk at lunchtime, or an early departure and some "me" time before nursery finishes. But consistently this year I haven't, and it's probably because there's no immediate external feedback if I don't. The payoff comes later in the day, and primarily to me.

I'm going to try something radical as I go back to work this week: acting as if being in by 8am mattered to someone other than me. Right down to going to bed on time and having clothes ready to put on when I get up. Just for a week, to see if it works.