Week 37: Rosh Hashanah
- Cooler temperatures! After the hottest week I’ve experienced in months, things were back to comfortable Summer weather. By the time I’m writing this the sky is gray and it’s raining, but this week’s weather was cheerful and moderate.
- On Tuesday and Wednesday I gave two big UX workshops at week to help coworkers understand how they can use UX in their daily work. I’ve been giving workshops for well over a decade, always trusting my instinct to figure out what a particular group or context required. At work, though, we have two wonderful scrum masters who are well-versed in the art of facilitation. I learned a lot from their feedback, and saw a hugh jump between the quality of the first day and of the second day.
- I caught up with a special friend on Wednesday, a young woman I met because we were treated for the same health condition. Her life as a Psych major couldn’t be more different from mine, and yet the red threads our lives resemble one another. I’m fortunate to call her my friend.
- I had missed a few weeks in my RSS reader, but I was pleased to see Manuel Moreale’s People & Blogs is off to a good start. To hell with Anja calling me a geek for being into the IndieWeb, I love visiting other people’s websites. I suspect I love reading what they have to say about those websites even more.
- Last week, I had met an amazing couple of lesbians who invited me over for a casual dinner party on Friday. After a particularly challenging week, it was comforting to hear their experiences as people of color in the world today. I’m already looking forward to inviting them to our place.
- On Saturday, Anja and I kicked off the weekend with a spontaneous redesign of our living room. We finally got rid of my desk, which was a Covid-era purchase used for our home office. What remains now is Anja’s bigger desk, which functions as a dining room table that she hates more than I do. The removal of our home office allowed us to place our sofa there, which has giving the living room a significant amount of extra space. The dining room table continues to double as an office whenever we put our ultrawide monitor there. I like modular living, and I’m feeling less and less awkward about the way we’re going about it in our house.
- At the end of our cleaning sprint Anja mentioned it was a beautiful day for this accomplishment, since it was Rosh Hashanah. New living room, new beginnings.
- After visiting Anja’s mom in the afternoon, we biked to Kriterion to Watch Oppenheimer (2023).
- Much like the last few days, I’m not in the best of states. There’s an old sadness that keeps saying hello, and I’m slowly beginning to think it might be time to get some help with it.
- I’m nearing the end of my journal, and I’m surprised by how unnervous I am by the few pages I have left. In this past, like the rest of the world, as it appears, I had trouble finishing a journal in a relaxed manner. Looking at the first entry, I see I have 29 days left until it’ll have been one year exactly. Hello nerves.