There should be more weekends, or maybe just longer ones. There’s nothing quite like a weekend — even one that involves work — to reset your perspective on things.
I’ve been juggling furniture all weekend long. My son’s new “big boy” bedroom furniture arrived on Friday, requiring a complete clear-out of his old furniture (given away to a new mother-to-be) and arranging of his new stuff. Add to that my decision to finally abandon my attempts to completely overhaul my home office in favor of rearranging the existing furniture and adding two file cabinets. It’s no less work, but it’s a lot less money.
I went to Pilates on Saturday, as usual. I know how silly it seems to get up early on a Saturday morning and drive all the way to Milpitas for it, but I think that effort underscores how good it makes me feel. It’s worth every minute, and the back-to-back Pilates and farmer’s market makes for a good, healthy start to the weekend.
On Sunday afternoon, I broke my weekend work rule for a good cause: to be a guest on Freelancer Forum on Blog Talk Radio. I joined Dyana Valentine and Ilise Benun to discuss the 2010 Creative Freelancer Conference. Dyana helped to save me from a technical glitch that left me able to hear the others but mute to the world. Hopefully my heightened stress level didn’t reveal itself when I finally went live. You can listen to the rebroadcast here.
Today has been one of those days where I’m trying to cram a week’s worth of work into two short days. I head to Chicago on Wednesday for the PRSA Health Academy conference. I love all of the things that I learn at conferences, but there’s always the tradeoff of client availability and early morning/late night calls to compensate for the time out of the office.
In spite of how busy I am, today has been a day to put things in perspective. I delivered a dinner to a friend whose husband — barely 40 — is in the hospice phase of his lymphoma battle (and while I typically hate the use of “battle” in the context of cancer, I can’t think of any two people who have fought harder and with more hope and humor than the two of them). Dinner seems like such a small effort in the face of something so enormous, but the least I could do was make sure that the kids were fed tonight. I hope they like flank steak and homemade bread.