Category Archives: work

Farm Life

gardening, Life, Nature, work
Corn
Our first planting of corn has been producing for almost a month! Eating fresh and freezing as much as possible.

In Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, about her family farm in southwest Virginia, she describes the extensive preparations they took to protect the garden from weeds and critters before going away for a week. I was away for two weeks at the height of the growing season with no time for preparation, and my gardens, both vegetable and flower, were busy both producing and returning to the wild when I returned. I was able to wrestle back some control from the weeds while also harvesting corn, green beans and tomatoes for consumption and preservation. My freezer is slowly filling up with bags of beans and plastic containers of corn and tomato sauce. It will be a delicious winter.

The Pear Orchard
The pear orchard with six trees and lots of delicious, eat-off-the tree pears.

I have also been canning pear jam with the bounty from our six pear trees, all of which have produced amazing fruit this year. I am using this great recipe from Practical Self Reliance; it makes a beautiful, chunky but spreadable jam. My only hack is that I use my pressure cooker to cook down the pears as it requires less tending than the stove top.

The world of “real” work is calling, and in between gardening and cooking, I got started on a couple projects for the fall semester. I was worried that, after feeling very retired for the first months of 2023 and especially while I was hanging out with my parents and then digging into my part-time farmer life, I wouldn’t have the energy or motivation to deal with timelines and deadlines and other people. Fortunately, my skills at prioritizing and focusing kicked back in but with a better sense of balance. I was able to integrate work without it overwhelming the rest of my life the way it might have in the past. Plus, it has been a great time to learn new tech skills: I am incorporating AI into both my edtech courses and have been having fun learning about and experimenting with ChatGPT. More on that later.

For now, I’ve got pears to prep and tomatoes to pick, and I might even take a bike ride on a Monday morning.

Pears
Pears hanging low on the branches

Wednesday With Friends

blogging, work

Today is the first day of my blogging challenge that I haven’t known what I was going to write about so I just sat down in front of the laptop and opened a blank post.

It was a different kind of day: today is exactly one month since my hip replacement surgery and only my second time away from the farm. I am reasonably mobile although I carry a cane when I’m outside the house. We visited a friend who has had a bumper crop of pecans. The family gifted us a basket for the holidays and then invited us to come over for more. I visited with my friend while my husband used a pretty nifty tool to pick up the pecans. We’ll let them dry before shelling and then I will make a pie and these chewy pecan pie bars. The latter are delicious and do not require dealing with pie crust. Later, after running into my husband in town, the same friend stopped by our house for an afternoon visit. Lovely. We chatted some more and took a walk around the barnyard.

This is a little slice of life that I share as it is a reminder to me that I should take more advantage of the flexibility of my schedule. Knocking off to go visiting would not have been something I did pre-surgery. After all, the world could not live without me. My friend is a real estate agent with a similarly flexible schedule. We may have felt a little guilty for playing hooky, but as professionals, we knew a few hours of rest could actually help us focus better later. Huge rationalization? Maybe…but I think these kind of opportunities to connect with others informally within the confines of “working hours” could be considered a type of mindfulness. My friend and I talked about work and family and podcasts and books and gardening. We weren’t trying to accomplish goals or solve problems: we were just sharing ideas and stories around common interests on a wonderful Wednesday afternoon.

I love my work but my goal for the new year is to make sure I also make time for life.

 

 

 

 

 

Reconsidering How Work and Learning Happen

Education, learning, work

Avatar workingI work hard doing work I love. I am fortunate in that. And, I get to mostly do it from home which takes away a lot of the daily stresses (clean clothes, lunches, commutes). And yet, without the guardrails of regular work hours and employer expectations, it is easy to start to work all the time. Maybe not for hours on end but in bursts and starts that eventually take over the whole day. Work is always the focus.

Checking email is the worst culprit: quick glances throughout the day and following up with minor issues that didn’t need same day responses. (I get lots of “wow, thanks for getting back to me so quickly,” replies by way of example.)

And then, I had my hip replaced on December 11, 2019, and made a promise mostly to myself to just let it all go. Put up an out of office and go on leave. And, miracle of miracles, I did it. At first, it was because I really was in recovery, but after ten days, I was doing well both physically and mentally and would have been easily able to dive in. Yet, I didn’t even as I saw the number of messages ticking upwards in the app. Life could and would go on without me.

What did I do instead? First, I didn’t go offline completely. But, I did redirect my time. I tried to get engaged in Twitter more deeply than just retweeting and liking. I had a little success with some conversations. I also got more involved in LibraryThing and continue to make that community my priority for online interactions.

Offline, I read, played the piano, and crocheted, finishing up some of my Christmas gifts and then diving into my first piece of crocheted clothing: a sweater vest for my dad. It took a couple tries to get going but it is coming together nicely. I am a little worried that it is going to be too big but I guess that is better than too small.

So, as with many of you out there, this morning was something of a shock to the system. Honestly, the email was easily dealt with (mostly spam and promotions and updates), but after 90 minutes of reading and adding to the task list, I was tired, longing for the freedom of the past three weeks. And, I thought, there wasn’t any reason not to close out and take a break. So, that’s what I did. Took a break. Read a book. Wrote this blog post. Had lunch with my husband.

And, tried hard not to feel guilty that I hadn’t immediately put my shoulder to the proverbial grindstone the way most of my colleagues are doing at this very moment. From break to work without any kind of real transition. It’s tough for adults and probably tougher for the kids. Learning to put work in perspective, learning how to create a humane schedule, learning when you work best or when you need a break. All of those are lessons that, evidently have taken me 20 years and a new hip to learn. I wonder how we might help our children learn them along the way?

 

More Play Than Work

Making, work

I am of a certain age, I think, where one starts considering retirement. And, this week, my Dad turned 84:

I have been so fortunate to find work that intersects with my passion and the line between work and play is often blurred. Consider it a continuum: the work includes things like balancing the books where there is little or no room for play while the play end includes things like making a game console to play our Scratch games and  sample Valentine’s Day Light-Up Cards for my STEM club meeting on Tuesday. It’s called volunteer “work” but it directly connects to my own desire to learn and create…to play!

The game console grew out of our experiments during our last meeting. We had some success with creating buttons and grounding bracelets but didn’t have time to perfect them. I wanted to show them how the engineering process works by taking the ideas we worked with and making a prototype of a console that they can explore.

How does this relate to retirement? My husband says I will never retire. I say I will just move closer to the play end of the continuum. Fewer Quick Books and more circuits and Scratch programming, along with Legos, as one friend suggested:

Lifeskill: Learning To Use Lulls

adult learning, work

I feel like I have been hurtling through 2018. Several personal and business trips kept me on the road more than usual, and then I have been playing catch up when I am back in the office. But, there is some light on the horizon. Just a couple more events that are going to be lots of fun and then a week of vacation to cap off the month.

But even in the midst of all the busy-ness including heading into the overlap between the spring and summer semesters of my online course, I woke up to a lull today. I certainly had a to do list but nothing on it was pressing. I answered a few emails, did two phone meetings in the morning, and then decided everything else could wait until tomorrow or over the weekend. I needed some breathing space and took advantage of a nice day to dig in the garden, moving a few hostas and sweet william and doing some general cleanup.

I call this a lifeskill–the ability to know when to work and when, even though it is a Thursday afternoon, you can put aside work for a bit of a break. I think it’s one that is hard to learn in a classroom or regular job. Working from home as part of the gig economy means tuning into the natural ebb and flow of work rather than following an established number of hours each day, otherwise known as seat time.

You can create a daily routine that matches your preferences for when and where to work. From there, you may find a weekly routine (established events or activities) or identify a yearly pattern (ie, busy in the fall teaching a course with less work in the summer). Why is this important? Because if you don’t identify these moments of “lull,” you will just keep working. At some point, nothing on the to do list is on fire or a live frog or any other kind of emergency so you can put it aside for a few hours or a day. A mental health day or mini-vacation. Even the most passionate person needs time to be away from the work, maybe pursuing some other passion or finding space for relaxation.

Today I enjoyed a lull, and I’ll be better for it tomorrow.