Scientific Ink

Author: Dunrie

  • Cascade of changes

    It’s been a strange week.

    I’ve learned of several deaths in friends’ and colleagues’ families. Two of my favorite yoga teachers in town are moving to Chicago. My yoga studio ripped out a wall of equipment.

    DTE decided to tear up my front garden again, this time to insert plastic pipes, 6 months after tearing up the exact same spots to do it with metal pipes, and about 2 weeks after I replanted the ripped up sections. They also piled several feet of soil dug out of the lawn between the sidewalk on the road on top of newly seeded grass where we had just fixed up damage done by the people who paved our driveway.

    I went to a new hairdresser for the first time in many years. I had been with Jeanne for the last 12 years or so. And, Friday I had my last formal day at my old job.

    Message to Dunrie: do not get attached.

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  • 15th Reunion

    I spent last weekend in New York and in Princeton. My aunt Christie hosted me in Astoria, Queens on either side of my 15th college reunion at Princeton, just as she hosted me on 4 fall breaks. I vacillated about whether or not to go–the job change had me schedule-flummoxed and decision-challenged, and I am so glad I decided to go. I had a completely wonderful time.

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  • 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.