Scientific Ink

Author: Dunrie

  • Carless -> Careless?

    Car-free for a week now. Not going too badly.

    Getting to the “distant” yoga studio has been easy. Once, I used my Go! Pass and made it to my yoga studio from work faster than it would have taken me to walk home, get my car, drive, and then park. Another day, I walked the 2 miles to the studio for a dance class and then got a ride home from a friend.

    The weekend was super easy, as I was in New York and New Jersey, and everywhere I needed to go was accessible by train or subway.

    This week has been a bit more challenging, husband is travelling and insisted on driving to the airport, leaving me without a backup vehicle. Groceries were easy: our CSA share from Tantre Farm arrived, and then I made a quick walking trip to the People’s Food Co-op for the rest of last night’s dinner of potatoes, chick peas, and rapini. Rushing off to the yoga studio seemed secondary to enjoying the fresh organic food in my own fridge.

    I’ll have to wait until the weekend to pick up my prescription from Target (why are there no pharmacies downtown?), but my allergy pills will last me until then. And, if not, I’ll only sneeze and rub my eyes, nothing horrible.

    It’s been interesting, having things a little bit harder to get around means I’m more careful with my time and schedule. This no-car thing might actually make me kinder to myself.

  • Gratitude and Giving

    Last fall, Susan invited me to consider taking on Seva as the Dakshina coordinator for my local meditation center. This means that I am the point person for giving to our center and SYDA, the foundation that supports the global mission.

    Now, this made me deeply uncomfortable for several reasons: I tend to avoid sharing about my spiritual path and I tend to avoid talking about money. My urge to spiritual secrecy is relaxing, though I am still uncomfortable talking about it with folks whom I’m not sure will be open-minded and supportive (that is, pretty much anyone outside the community). And as for money, my family lived in a wealthy area, but we had some hard times, and if I can, I hide both the lack and abundance of money reflexively. I think I’m also opening up here, learning to trust and share more.

    So, after the usual fear and anxiety responses, I decided it was a perfect assignment to work on my “issues”.

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  • Twitter is like stand-up all day long (this is good)

    Stand-up may be the highlight of my workday. There’s something about it–quick status updates, celebrating achievements, sharing milestones, the rhythm of it, team bonding, flagging confusion or misunderstandings, in-jokes (ending of course with “let’s be careful out there”), the ritual…

    We briefly tried chat standup, but it was annoying and boring, so we went back to verbal standup. We briefly considered using Campfire within Basecamp as a chat stand-up. It seemed like a good idea, there’d be a record associated with each project, but it seemed to be organized by project and therefore over compartmentalized. We didn’t try it and have stuck with verbal stand-up at 10:30AM.

    Recently, I’ve been twittering status messages. Twitter is like standup all day long, in a good way. Earlier this week, I was invited to a 10AM client conference call in an email I read at 8AM. I twittered that I had a surprise client meeting. A remote team member saw my twitter, IM’d me and asked if he needed to chime in on it. I might not have thought to ask him given the turnaround time, but he contributed.

    Yay standup, yay twitter, go team.

  • Gone modular

    So, I apparently am a sucker for modular floorcovering. I didn’t know this until I received the FLOR catalog in the mail. Flor offers lots of color, pattern, and texture options. I like the quilt-esque ones, but they were vetoed by the house’s other occupant. The compromise choice was a mixture of two color variants of “Thick and Thin”.

    Modular rug, pre-assembly

    Rug complete.

    I think I might be addicted. This room (the upstairs guestroom/tv room) is now the funkiest and most fun one in the house.

  • Our food comes from: Tantre Farm

    We are what we eat, and the choices we make about food matter in terms of our personal health, the health of the soil, and energy consumption. So, to act on our good environmental intentions, and to connect ourselves more deeply with our local community, we joined with another couple to purchase a Community Supported Agriculture Share. Together with our friends, we will share in whatever a local organic farm, Tantre Farm, has on offer. Each week we’ll pick up our locally grown organic vegetable goodness from the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market. I’m excited about this.

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  • Letting go II

    While I’m still playing with the idea of ridding myself of my automobile, more angst is coming from wrestling with whether I need to leave my job, or how I can change it so that I can stay.

    It’s funny. I have been reading Go Put Your Strengths to Work, and after the exercises in which the reader diagnoses what is and isn’t working in a week’s worth of work activities, Marcus Buckingham includes a long section counseling the reader not to dump her/his job and rush off in search of the next one. He writes that while the “eject” button is the dramatic solution (a leap into the dark to the next situation, which may or may not be a better fit), we can iteratively move our current job closer to our perfect job through attention and goal-setting. Certainly I have the most negotiating power with the folks who already respect me and depend on me (that is, my current team and employer). It’s annoying to be right where Marcus Buckingham predicts I would be. I’d prefer to be unique.

    So, it is listmaking time for me, figuring out what it is I can’t do without, what I can trade for other things, what it is I can no longer do, what I have to ask others for…

    Things I need: team, writing, collaboration, clients, change, variety, action. I want to have different problems than we did last year, than we did last quarter. I want to be making different mistakes.

    Things that concern me: I don’t want to be the single point of failure or hero. I want to build or participate in a system where I and our clients are supported by a team with overlapping interests and responsibilities. I’d like to be replaceable. I’d like a little slack in the system, a little redundancy. I don’t know how to do that in a small team. I think we simply need to be bigger.

    But, there is an upside. I have shed some tasks and responsibilities that were mine that weren’t right. I removed myself from some email lists (like Perry Marshall’s), re-examined some of my work habits (yes, there are ways I have participated in creating my own angst), and essentially spring cleaned my office and my job description. Yes, whether I’m happy at work really is up to me. Whatever the outcome, this realization is a good, if painful, thing.