I‘m up before sunrise on a Saturday. Morning coffee is on board, as are my vitamins and some ibuprofen for good measure. I even ate breakfast. I’m wearing camouflage workout capris without socks, and it’s 28F outside.
Wish me good skills on my Krav Maga black belt test! 🥋😳
Surprised myself this morning by passing the fitness portion of my Krav Maga black belt test, despite a bad back and a bum knee.
Forearm plank: 2m21s
Push-ups: 27 in 2 mins (!!!)
Body-weight squats: 90+ in 2 mins
Much gratitude to Daniel Turner’s Karate America for pushing me to be my best! 👊🏻
Today was the IT Holiday Party at my work. The main venue was a not-quite-IMAX-sized movie theater, in which we got to enjoy some catered appetizers and light fare and desserts while we waited for the bigwigs to thank us for another year of our valuable work in the trenches of Information Technology.
While we were waiting, the Disney+ series The Santa Clauses played on the big, BIG screen. That brand of comedy really isn’t my jam; in fact, I spent a lot of mental energy trying in vain to ignore it. Never have I been so glad to see a bunch of suits take the stage.
It’s been a weird year, with lots of changes in upper management. Some people retired, some people were coerced into retirement, and some people were straight-up let go with zero fanfare or warning — including one of the suits who normally would have lightened up this sort of gathering with his unique brand of wry humor. Add to that the news that the company is selling off a large portion of our internal customers, and it makes for a kind of omnipresent, low-lying anxiety amongst just about everybody.
The latest news we got today was that most of the IT department will be permanently remote beginning January 1, 2023. The rumor mill is all abuzz about various reasons why, but none of us are particularly surprised, given that we were asked to fill out a survey not too long ago about our preference for hybrid vs. remote work.
Even though I find my in-office days more taxing than my work-from-home days, I still like having some face-to-face time with my co-workers. Things are said in person that would never be typed out over Teams chat, and interactions happen that would be very different if both parties were remote. Even so, if there’s no one else in the office to interact with, then there’s no point in me being in the office, either. It’s bittersweet. It’s one more example of how the paradigm has shifted since the pandemic.
While my co-workers and I sat in the theater and tried to converse over Tim Allen, I had something else to keep my attention: a Rocketbook that I won in a raffle last week. They retail for $35, and I bought five raffle entries for $5 each, so I essentially got a VMWare-branded Rocketbook Core at a discount. (If I’d won the Grand Prize, though, I would have gotten a Very Large monitor for that $25 donation.)
The Rocketbook is basically a notebook with wet-erase reusable pages and an accompanying app that streamlines the process of scanning and uploading your notes and sketches to the cloud service of your choice. I can sketch something, make a mark on a specific icon at the bottom of the page, and when I use the app to scan the page, it will get beamed to my Google Drive. Or my personal email, or my work email, or my personal OneDrive, or any number of other services. I only wish I could take the Smart List feature and beam those items into my Outlook for work or my iOS Reminders.
There have been a non-zero number of times when I’ve wanted to sketch out a diagram or a dashboard layout and get that sketch into my OneNote, and it’s been a timesink of image adjustments to output a decent image. The Rocketbook will definitely make that sort of thing a lot more efficient… even if I don’t need to do it very often.
I have a two-week vacation scheduled for the weeks of Christmas and New Years. I’ve been looking forward to it — I should have taken a breather several weeks ago, honestly — and I’m still looking forward to it, even if it means that I might not be returning to the office after the break is over.
In true ADHD fashion, Connor finished his written assignments last night — yes, the night before they were due. I played the part of office assistant: printing his assignments from his Google Drive, fetching a folder for his essay, showing him how to use a three-hole punch, printing photos for his display board… and I might have done him a solid and fixed some of his typos before printing off his assignments.
Historically, parents have not been permitted in the dojo during the six-hour Black Belt Testing. For some reason, though, the rules were changed for this round of testing, with the caveat that any parent who interferes with the test will be dismissed, along with their student.
I asked Connor after our classes on Thursday if he’d like me to stay and watch, or if he’d rather me drop him off and leave.
He preferred me to just drop him off.
When we arrived at the dojo today just before 8am, the bleachers were packed with parents. I took a “before” picture (see above), gave him a hug, wished him good skills, and left.
It felt weird.
The black belt process is all about Connor discovering what he is capable of accomplishing if he applies himself. It’s not about my parenting; it’s not about me at all. This is all him, and I get not wanting or needing your mom to be there watching. Honestly, it’s better for both of us that I’m not there, since he has a habit of checking the bleachers during his class to see how I’m reacting to what he’s doing, and I have a habit of getting frustrated when he’s unable or unwilling to focus. Better that he’s completely present for his test, and not distracted by my presence.
Plus, I get my morning back.
It’s still weird.
I honestly don’t know if he’ll pass his black belt test today or not. If he doesn’t, it’s not the end of the road — he gets a chance to try again. (Especially since I’ve already paid for the next two years of classes for the both of us to reach second degree black belt.)
I also don’t know for sure if he should pass his black belt test today. Compared with his peers, his technique isn’t very precise, and he’s definitely not high on the list of go-getters as far as practice and preparation are concerned. It’s not my call, though, and if the staff decides that my son is qualified to earn his Junior Black Belt today (or in the near future), then I’ll be proud and thrilled.
We’ll find out soon….
One common trait of ADHD brains is the inability to gauge how long a given task will take to complete. In my case, it didn’t occur to me that tallying up 11 months’ worth of daily gratitude might take more than, say, an hour or so.
I was way, WAY off.
I had hoped to get a quick blog post up for Thanksgiving Day, just mentioning the things I’m always thankful for in my nightly gratitude journal. As it is, I spent some time on the project on Wednesday and Thursday morning, and still only made it through July before I needed to dive headlong into all the necessary preparations and other adulting over the long weekend.
We hosted Thanksgiving again this year, with my brother-in-law and my Mom coming to visit. Sous vide turkey, oyster stuffing, homemade cranberry sauce, roasted root vegetables, cinnamon-honey spread, rolls, and my brother-in-law’s famous green bean casserole comprised the feast, with sugar-free mini pumpkin cheesecakes for dessert.
Since my Mom isn’t keen on driving in the dark, and she would have had to leave our house by mid-afternoon to get home before sunset, she stayed overnight and slept on the pull-out hide-a-bed in the living room. From what she told me the next morning, our cat Baxter got pretty cozy with her at times.
The next morning, before Aaron got up, Connor beat Grammy and me at a game of Sorry, then he went off to play his Switch while I let Grammy beat me in rummy. Once Aaron got up, we all went to lunch before Grammy headed home.
Saturday afternoon, we put up the Christmas tree. At Aaron’s suggestion, we drilled eye-hooks into the baseboards to anchor the tree in hopes of some measure of cat-proofing. We also decided to leave off the delicate and breakable ornaments, like the vintage Baby’s First Christmas or anything that would shatter if it met up with the tile floor in the foyer.
This was actually one of our more successful tree-trimmings, in that no one got irritable or frustrated during the course of the afternoon. Connor even took the initiative to go play with Baxter elsewhere in the house while we were anchoring the tree, to redirect all that nervous kitty energy.
And so begins the holiday season…
