December days: Work / family / social life balance

falena gave me a very thinky prompt of:

Work/family/social life balance? You seem to be doing it right, despite all geographical limitations and full-time work.

Honestly, I'm not sure I do get it right, but let me try and talk about this a bit.

( work is part of life )

I hope that isn't depressing, falena! To give an example, and because I'm doing daily posting and therefore not having much time for typical journalling, last weekend jack's parents visited, and I spent some of the time hanging out with them and some of it working on the lecture that needed to be done by Monday. And managed to fit in playing board games and drinking tea with cjwatson and ghoti and their children for a couple of hours. And this weekend I've spent quite a lot of the mornings asleep, and managed more gaming with cjwatson and ghoti and family, and dinner with ceb and IWJ one evening and with H WINODW another. And I've been working from home today, which meant I had time for lunch with cjwatson and time for a longish tea-break writing this post, and tonight I'm going for dinner with ghoti. At the same time I worked late several evenings last week because immediate student welfare crises came up when I didn't have any slack in my schedule to deal with them. And it's nearly chanukah which is needing a bit of organizing, on top of my normal Friday night services and Hebrew teaching, so that's taken up a lot of the remaining evenings.

I really admire people who manage to balance serious caring responsibilities plus a full-time job, or have a work-life balance in spite of chronic illness or disability which may well be hard to plan for and schedule round. But from my relatively comfortable and easy position, this is about how I manage, or don't.

[December Days masterpost]