Shining the light of God's word into our confused world.

Month: August 2009

Understanding what it means to work for myself

[Cross-posted #]

It’s been an awesomely busy and productive week, with no shortage of paying work waiting for me each day. I’ve been trying out a new work schedule all week — not starting until 3 and working as late as I need to — and so far it’s going great. 3 PM is early enough that I can still handle East Coast business calls if I need to, and late enough that my brain fog has completely lifted and I’m able to get focused and stay that way for many hours. Because it doesn’t matter how early or late I get up, I’m never fully awake until around 3:00, and evening has always been when I’m most energetic and able to concentrate. I am and have always been a night owl, and after a couple of decades of conditioning to conform to a day person schedule, I’m finally realizing that I have the freedom to keep night owl hours.

I don’t know why that realization has taken so long to sink in. I think it’s partly because I’ve also had a hard time understanding that I’m my own boss and it’s okay to keep my own hours. I started out viewing my clients more as supervisors, because that’s what I was used to, and thinking that I had to keep the same hours they did and be available during their office hours — never mind that they’re spread out over four time zones. I was really not enjoying myself.

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Late-night goal setting

[Cross-posted from Daydream Believer]

It’s Sunday night. I’m blogging my goals for the week now because I have a lot of work scheduled for the next couple of days and I need to get the extraneous (read: unpaid) stuff out of the way.

Last week started really well, but the end of the week saw plenty of fail. This is mainly due to staying up too late several nights in a row and not getting enough sleep, which left me struggling really hard to find focus and enough brain power to concentrate on my work the last half of the week. I managed, but it was far from a good time.

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Geek Video of the Week

(Cross-posted from Daydream Believer)

Don’t you like how I added “of the Week” as though this is a regular feature here or something? Well, maybe now it is! Goodness knows I sure see enough geeky vids to make it a weekly feature. Daily, even, but I don’t have that kind of time.

This isn’t just your average fan vid, though. Geek worlds and girl-crushes collide as Jed Whedon produces and directs this music video promoting The Guild, starring the lovely Felicia Day and the rest of the Guild cast, with a cameo by Maurissa Tancharoen (a.k.a. The Asian Whedon). You will never look at Vi the Vampire Slayer the same way again.

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Productive Daydreaming

(Cross-posted from Daydream Believer)

You might have guessed from the title of this blog that I do a lot of daydreaming. Or not–I guess you might have just thought I was a Monkees fan. Or a Neil Diamond fan. Or just a fan of that one song. I do quite like the song, actually. Not only is it probably the most widely-known of the very small handful of songs with my name in them, but I identify even more with it because I do tend to be sleepy quite often, and to need cheering up on occasion. The part about the homecoming queen, however, couldn’t be LESS about me. I mean, I was once crowned the 8th grade Autumn Carnival Queen for selling the most prize drawing chances, but that was more about nerd achievement than popularity. Digression, you are an unwieldy muse.

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Friday Goal Report

(Cross-posted from Daydream Believer)

I’m generally pleased with my progress this week. I had some pretty major distractions going on, but I managed to stay the course and meet all of my goals. Today I was really tempted to stay in my PJs since I had no plans to leave the house or see anyone other than Husband. I sucked it up, though, and got dressed by 10 which, except for Tuesday’s minor exception, I’ve managed to do all week. Go team me!

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And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest

(Cross-posted from Daydream Believer, since y’all said you’re cool with it. And now with more LJ-cut tags!)

I have this scar on my right hand. It’s not a huge scar–it’s about a half-inch long, nestled between my second and third knuckles–but it’s a memorable one. I got it when I was sixteen, on a sunny Friday morning in the fall. School was out that day, for a teacher’s meeting or something along those lines. My friends and I, being teenage girls of driving age, decided to take ourselves to the mall.

That morning, my friend Stacey picked me up in her car. I’m not sure why she ended up being the designated driver for that day. I had my license, but I wasn’t yet allowed to drive as far as Tulsa. I’m not sure what kind of insane troll logic convinced my parents that it was okay for another newly licensed sixteen year old to drive me that far instead, but they let me go. I’m not sure why Tess, the third member of our little party, didn’t drive, but I suspect it was because we were too far out of her way, and it made more sense for us to pick her up on the way into town.

So there we were, Stacey in the driver’s seat, me riding shotgun, traveling back country roads on the way to pick up Tess. We were about a quarter of a mile down a slippery gravel road when Stacey announced her famous last words, “Watch this!”

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