State of the Liv

The major good thing in my life at the moment is long conversations with friends. I've managed to speak on the phone to darcydodo for the first time since the wedding, and to hatam_soferet this week. At the weekend I went to London purely for the purpose of spending time with khalinche and doseybat; I didn't have any plans and I wasn't bothered when the weather was too miserable for much sight-seeing, I just enjoyed some really good conversations and catching up.

I introduced khalinche to the ever-wonderful Diwana, since she was kind enough to meet me at the station and it was lunchtime and raining. But then we went back to her place and just talked and drank tea for the entire afternoon. At that point I joined up with doseybat who had been gaming with khalinche's housemate timeplease, and went out for some nice Thai food and more conversation with her and as bonus, pfy and fluffymark. Then I spent basically the entire day on Sunday chatting to doseybat and pplfichi and drinking even more tea. That was a seriously wonderful weekend, I should do that kind of thing more often.

The mixed but generally positive thing in my life at the moment is work. I'm very busy, I'm doing lots and lots of interesting and enjoyable things. Interesting teaching, interesting pastoral work, interesting organizing and running stuff (primarily the disability bits of the course and my mentoring programme), and very interesting scientific project with my ever-wonderful minion.

The biggest problem in my life at the moment is that it has more good things in it than there are hours in the week. I want to have more conversations with friends, I owe dozens of emails including some that involve making arrangements to meet up or speak on the phone. And I would like to get deeper into various DW and LJ conversations, and just, it's a little overwhelming. And work too, I'm at that stage where pretty much everything is urgent or high priority, but I can't actually do all of it. The thing that's tending to slip is handling email, I have about 150 mails in my work inbox (having already triaged out the ones that don't need any replies or actions). This isn't actually a clever strategy because it means that my to-do list, while over-full, is also incomplete and unreliable.

I've never been quite this type of busy before, because I've never had the kind of job that requires me to juggle this many different things and people who need stuff from me. I think what I'm experiencing is making the transition to a new skill level, rather than things being imminently about to fall apart, but still, I have a bit of a sense that I'm running to stay in place. Two more teaching weeks before the Xmas break, though.