COVID 19 Learnings

Bucket List Jar

It has been over a year since I wrote a blog post since most of my "ramblings" are now on Facebook. However, these times call for extreme measures.

Someone said to keep a journal during this time to show your future self what you went through and what you were thinking.  My beloved said "Tell them to go to your Facebook".

THINGS THAT ARE GREAT ABOUT THIS TIME:

• A daily 7 pm phone call with family.  2 of my siblings' families and both of our progeny and their family are regular attendants and we invite special guests.
• Connecting with other family in Austria - we visited them in September 2019 and Zoom calls are bringing us closer to them that was thought possible
• We are in the germ pool with our son daughter-in-law and granddaughter so we have her at least once a week
• After that Zoom call we go for a walk and have a streak going of over a month.  Burlington has so many wonderful neighborhoods that we are taking the time to explore
• We are now not eating take-out at all.  For a while we were supporting our local restaurants AND once it gets safer out there we will continue to eat out way more than we eat in
• In our 978 sq feet of condo living, we have not killed each other and have a regular belly laugh daily.  The latest was Murg thinking I had gone to the dark side creating a shopping list which was actually from Rise and Shine Dairy.  I don't even have a grocery shopping list in normal times.
• Connections to our communities:  Our UU Church has regular opportunities to Zoom with other congregants, our YMCA swimming group meets for coffee once a week, Our Star Island conference meets once a week for social hour, and the family ZOOM
• The longer the isolation goes on the more I realize what I can do without and what I crave.  We have a bucket list jar of things we cannot do now that we will do when this is over.  Our granddaughter put "Get Ice Cream" into the jar.  I put go on our trip schedule in February 2021 to Israel

Map of Burlington and the Yellow is where we have walked

Rodney and Rudolf in Austria

AND THINGS THAT SUCK:

• I have been bracing myself to lose someone I knew pretty well and last Saturday night a member of our UU Congregation died.  This was the first time I cried uncontrollably.  It takes a lot of energy to hold it together and not feel what is going on.  
• No hugs except from my Beloved.  I now realize how many hugs I give and receive during my day.  
• The word uncertainty has become such a part of our language.  A member of our family's teen age son asks his Mom, "When will this be over?" and she has to say "I don't know, nobody knows"
• Realizing what we have done to our environment.  This is a curse and a blessing.  We can see what we have done, and with any luck we will not go back to some of that and will be sane in how we treat Mother Earth.  Do we have the resolve to do this?  I am not hopeful.
• The USA's reputation - on our Austrian call, one very honest woman does not hold anything back and just asks "Why do you still have him in charge?"  I cannot answer that question and am totally embarrassed by #45.  What are we doing to our reputation and to the world we are leaving our grandchildren?
• On our evening walks, we walk by small businesses, and I say "They won't survive, they won't survive!"  I fear this is sending us into a very deep depression not experienced since 1929.  We will be OK but my heart breaks for those who were struggling before COVID19 and will exponentially be worse off now
• Distraction and lack of focus - sometimes in a manic way I get things done AND some days I wonder what I did all day.  We have a monthly small group and for preparation we read 8 pages of content.  I have read 1/2 a page for our meeting tomorrow.  I cannot concentrate on it.  Nothing sinks in when I read the words.  It has taken me 10 days to read a very engaging mystery novel by Louise Penny.

Those are Sarah's initial ramblings about this strange time.  Feel free to correct me in grammar son Chris and his friend Augie ....................

Murg thought I had gone to the dark side

I gotta be more careful

I come by it honestly, I am impulsive and prone to falls just like my Mom.  We both move quickly, and often are in conversation or have our head in the clouds.  We don't see the pot holes and we step in them.

The Friday before I left for Star, I tripped on the hammock stand.  My left foot stayed put and the entire force of my body went down on the right knee.  I have bad knees and until my surgery a few years ago, my right knee would occasionally give out.  The arthroscopic surgery fixed it, and honestly, I think my yoga practice has kept my knees and back healthy.  This was not the same kind of fall.

My family thought this was a knee give-out fall, since they have lived with me for over 20 years.  I ordered them around, asking for ice, refusing help to get up etc.  Following the advice of everyone, I iced it and kept it elevated for much of the first 24 hours at Star.  I also wore a "sock" on my knee for compression.  At Star there was a friend who is a PT, who gave me great advice on how to treat the knee.

Unfortunately, on Wednesday, I re injured it, tripping up the front stairs of the hotel at Star.  I was carrying too many things, and was not holding the railing.  I currently have a really colorful bruise from the around my knee cap down the front of my leg.

What have a I learned from this injury:  1)  Use the railings (my women's group today helped remind me of that one.  2)  Slow down.  Since the injury I have actually been approached stairs differently and rather than running of them, I have been walking on my heels up them  3)  To be safe I am going to get some assisted devices.  I ordered hiking sticks for my Mom and myself and I am going to try to start using them. 

Funny story, I have a cane and tried using that yesterday around the house to experience what the walking sticks will be like.  I left it lying around and tripped over it.  This is going to be a journey to learn to slow down and walk more deliberately.

This is not the first post I have made about accidents, and probably won't be the last.  Oh well......

Slips, trips and falls

Our bike path has been cleared by a private contractor this winter. paid for by the "Friends of the Lexington Bikeways". It is so wonderful to be able to walk especially with the winter we have had.  Unfortunately a half dozen times this winter I have been a mall walker because of the outside conditions.
When I worked in a manufacturing plant at Polaroid, safety was very important since there was dangerous equipment all around.  One motto we had for safety training was "Watch for Slips, trips and falls!"  A slip or a trip was a warning that something was not safe and often happened before a fall.  If you paid attention to a slip, it might prevent a more severe incident like a fall.  In fact, we reported all slips, trips and falls to rectify an unsafe condition.
 
I think about this a lot and especially when I am walking on the bike path.  Today, while in a trance/zone as I powered along, I slid gently on a patch of ice.  It was a nice warning to slip rather than fall. My zone however, was interrupted and my full attention was on my feet, and where they were planted.  I thought about all the near misses on the ice this winter, and I also thought about the people I know who have really hurt themselves falling.

I was much more alert after that quick slide, but still would rather be out on a beautiful sunny day on the bike path, than in the mall.

Time Management - Leadership series

When I teach time management I always say that you need to find the system that works for you. Franklin planners will never work for me, they are too structured and too much organization.

As a true ENFP, I am constantly refining how I organize my time in order to stay sane. I now carry a small notebook every where with me and take notes. SOMETIMES, I put a check box besides a TODO item so I can glance quickly back through my notebook and find TODOs.

This week I am trying something different. I bought myself some new colored pens, and each day I am switching the color of pen I use, in order to track which day was which.

Just now I was cleaning up my hard drive, and found a file named "Talent Plans" that would have been really helpful to find earlier this week, so I put it back where I naturally was looking for it. It will easier to work on my deliverable if it is there, but when I made that folder on my desktop, I thought it would simplify things. It DID NOT.

Another thing I tried this week with mild success is to write on my whiteboard, in RED, the strategic tasks and in BLUE the tactical tasks. My role requires me to work on more strategic things YEAH, so this helps me determine if I am working a majority of the time on the right things. It is helping with that measurement.

Time management is a constantly iterating process for me which matching my MBTI type. What I have put in place helps me order my life and somewhat fits into my preferences, but sometimes like with the Talent Plans folder, it trips me up.

Advice, find your system that fits your personality and stick with it, or in my case keep iterating and improving the one you have. Back to the RED items on my board.

Distracted again

In conversations with a colleague yesterday, we talked about reading business books. His point of view, is that when he had kids, he stopped reading business books. He met 2 weeks ago and in a co-interview with another manager the other manager asked "What business book have you read lately?"

A few years ago, after looking at my bookshelf, I said "NO MORE BOOKS"! I will get them from the library if I am going to read them. Yesterday we were talking about the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team

I read this book 3-4 years ago and it is getting some traction inside my company, so I figured I should go back and read it again to reacquaint myself with the content.

Then I thought about the book Distracted

I talked about this book in a prior blog. Recently I brought the button from that conference into the office and its sits on my computer desk, as a reminder to think about the concepts from the book. So I have read a business book lately, and I am going to reread the 5 dysfunctions as well.

It is important in this day of blogs and twitter and facebook, to do some old fashioned reading, and I do not mean kindle reading.

Change and reflecting

On one of our VERY cold walks yesterday at Burlington, VT first night we had yet another Myers Briggs conversation. I don't like to spend much time alone, in fact in my extreme state of mind I would say NO TIME ALONE. As I sit here on New Year's Day and no one is up yet I thought about this time I often have when no one is up yet. A part of me is waiting for someone to get up to talk to. A part of me cleans up loose ends to start the day and a very little tiny part of me, sits back and enjoys this time alone. Mostly, I wait for someone to stir and get up.

With the New Year, I thought of changing the appearance of my blog, but why change something that works and is recognizable. I added a new quote today but only because the old quote was just that OLD and it is New Years Day after all.

So today I make the resolution to use a mug for coffee and drinks rather than use throw away stuff. I might need a belt clip to put my travel mug on or a camping one that collapses put in my handbag.

Last night was interesting. I needed to connect with our family traveling in Egypt and I did that via text. Rod was late connecting with England 2:45 am their time, CLS called just as he and Meg were going into Grace Potter and Mom called me at 10pm as we were leaving Burlington VT to go home and watch the fireworks from our very warm loft. Lots of extended family were touched in one way or another and some of the rest are helping us continue our First Foot tradition at Coniston. Only Ted and Margaret will need a phone call later today.

I did not write this yet but it is a true Sallyism. Tuesday night as I needed to kill some time before I picked Miss Amy up, I went to the Library. Truth be told, I needed to use their bathroom, but while I was there I decided to browse the recent returned fiction. That is the closest section to the bathroom. In that section was "Death on the Nile" and I grabbed it. What you need to know is that our traveling family got on a cruise of the Nile today their time. Why was that book there? Why did I chose to use the bathroom and browse for 30 seconds the recently returned fiction books? Why did I grab the book and think is some way that someone put that book there for me? I have never read it, so what an opportunity.

Typical blog, typical early morning basking in the recently appearing sun over Camel's Hump. Onto mugs and sub zero winter days in Vermont.

A Day in the Life of ME

I just scanned my Inbox for today and realized that this is my life, although today seemed a bit more extreme than normal. This is only my business email Inbox, to say nothing of my personal email Inbox. I try to keep the 2 separate.

Here Goes my day:

• Because we drove down from Vermont my 9:30am meeting was 1/2 on the phone and 1/2 live. We covered over 10 agenda items at this meetings.
• Our company placed #22 on the Boston Globe Top Places to work so there were details today that I handled around that
• An employee only got 1/10 of his paycheck and I had to help him trace that down
• 3 VPs are visiting from Mountain View this week, so those logistics were discussed
• We organized an ice cream social to celebrate the Boston Globe award, and we needed to make sure that did not collide with the 3 VP meetings
• We ordered prizes for the Christmas party
• I was on a phone call for 90 minutes with all the other HR people who support Marketing
• I checked to make sure our quarter mobility data was correct
• An employee stopped by dissatisfied with his role
• We checked and some of the organizational data for our Annual Employee Survey, which started today, could have been confusing, so we try to sort that out
• blah, blah, blah

My point is that some days are very predictable and steady and I can actually tell you what I will be working on and some are like today where a lot of my day was eaten up my unpredictable stuff.

I should plan for the unpredictable ones, which I guess would not make them unpredictable . . .

It does not help that I could not sleep last night and when the alarm went off at 5am, I said "Well that is not good news!"

I love my job, and thrive on days like today because I can handle this many things at once without letting any of the BIG ONES drop to the floor. I will sleep well tonight.