A day off

When I sometimes complain about the corporate style work environment in a research institute compared to universities I tend to forget that this job also comes with it's perks. As much as I loathe the punching in and out and the lack of spontaneous flexibility, the fact that we are actually counting overtime and being encouraged to take it off is no bad treat. We count all hours we are at work and no hours for work done at home. This system sucks in many ways, I think, as it encourages people to stay inside the building even if they are not doing anything or are tired and unproductive and would get more done by moving to a coffee-shop or going home to take a nap and continue later. BUT we also count all hours away on job related travel, and for field work people this means that we rack up loads and loads of hours each year. One reason we often don't get around to taking all this time off is of course that we wouldn't be able to get all the work done if we were away on vacation for half of the year, and many people end up never getting this extra time. But for someone like me, who is generally longing for more flexible days and possibilities to work at home or basically anywhere outside my office, this system is actually great.

So I'm taking Thursdays off work. I'm taking out overtime hours to stay at home and since I'm officially not working I can do whatever I please. I might work some, but from home, or I might sleep the whole day and work some other evening or Sunday or whenever it fits. It gives me some of the freedom I have been dreaming about, it cuts my week in two and I don't need to feel bad about it, because I did officially earn the right to take this time off. It also has the added benefit of seeming extremely enthusiastic and hard-working if I do decide to reply to a work email or pop by at work on a home day.

So what did I do with this lovely day of freedom. Well, first I went to a day-time yoga class (strangely exotic to me by know to do anything in the city during the day), then I met with a friend for lunch and dress shopping*, spent the afternoon watching some lame TV (also become increasingly exotic to me these days) while browsing blogs, cooked a nice dinner, spent a lot of time searching for the perfect laptop backpack online and attended a bit to this poor too-often- neglected blog of mine. I didn't do a thing work related, except getting involved in a weird email conversation with a future senior colleague at New University who sent me a rude email and has apparently decided to dislike me, although he has never met me.

* The dress-shopping was a long-planned event and I bought this gorgeous latino-inspired dress, that fits me perfectly. The photo doesn't really show it's true beauty, but I almost didn't want to take it off in the shop. Now I can't wait for the upcoming christmas party season.

On a whiney note

I sometimes see other bloggers talk about how they don't blog much when things are going well and there are no problems to discuss on the blog. For me it seems to be the other way around. When things are going well and I am coasting along at work I have lots of ideas for blogging and the energy to write it down. Lately I been feeling so exhausted that I could barely string two sentences together in my free time, let alone think of anything to say. Quite ironically I'm not even exhausted from working too much, but rather from taking too much time off work to do other things. First my mom and sister were visiting for ten days, including two weekends. Absolutely wonderful to have them around for so long and I genuinely enjoyed it and wished they could have stayed longer, but weekends are my time to catch up on sleep, work, household chores and general me-time, so missing two in a row is noticeable. Last weekend I went to a family event in home country and once again everything here was left to its own devices. I got to spend time with my parents, siblings and baby nephews. It was wonderful to be home and I am glad I came and participated and I made my family happy, but I was so not ready for a new week when I came back on Monday.

I have been working during and in between all this family activity, but I have had NO energy at all for anything beyond work. I have skipped the gym for weeks, I cooked while I had visitors, but this past week I have been really sloppy an taken to lots of ready-made crap food, I left work early because I couldn't stand being there, but did nothing but watch TV once I came home and fantasised every morning about staying home/ calling in sick/ getting another job. I don't hate my job, but I feel a bit burned out right now. It is such a thin line between success and failure all the time and it takes such care and concentration to walk this line for weeks and months on end. It works if I go to bed at a reasonable time every night and have weekends off to pick up the slack at home, but as soon as something happens that throws me off the regular schedule everything slips. Apparently I don't function properly if I don't have two days a week to do nothing but stay at home and be good to myself. I wonder how I'd survived if I'd lived, say fifty years ago, where I don't think I could have expected anything of that sort.

So how is it going?

No, I was not abducted by aliens and I did not stop blogging, but it has been a while and longer than I intended. Life has been busy in these parts. First a week of very intensive work and some evening meet-ups with friends visiting from out of town and second, my mom and sister were visiting for ten days. In other words time for free time activities on the Internet has been scarce and time for blogging non-existent. So to catch up:

Life

is good. A while ago I posted a list of things I wanted to change in my life and I am doing better at this than I dared hope. I do lead a more active life than I did last semester (even if going to the gym has not become quite a regular habit yet) and I do cook good food with lots of vegetables most days. This weekend I even went skiing, twice, and it was exactly as amazing as I remembered it. We did redecorate the house to some extent and I do feel very much at home here now. Now one year into proper grown-up working life I've had a promotion and a pay rise and for the first time in my life, I believe, been able to open a savings account.


Research

is falling scarily behind on my day to day schedule. Or this is not entirely true as I do spend time on research related work but not nearly enough on publications and I'm afraid the time I do spend on publications is not spent right. I am juggling two big active research projects with all the associated planning, logistics and networking, one small start up project and a backlog of four manuscripts which should really just be finished, polished and submitted asap. In reality I am obviously not very good at juggling and I end up spending a lot of time on the planning, logistics and networking and not enough on slogging through old manuscripts. I do make writing a priority and for short bursts this also translates into productivity (exactly the reason for the first week of my blogging absence), but then again something happens that I need to take care of and I'm back to square one. The lack of papers-ready-for submission is beginning to haunt me now. For the first year of my postdoc I tended to think that this will come with time and the number of papers submitted during the first year need not be a problem four years down the line, but now that time is approaching faster and I know it cannot wait forever.

department heading

is going surprisingly well. Who would have known? I have never held any paid administrative position before and did not know whether I'd like it or hate it or whether I'd be horrible at it. I'm sure it can be a very difficult job, but so far it hasn't, really. I have learned that I like this "being behind the scenes" kind of work. I like the responsibility that comes with it, the possibility of influencing decisions, the daily contact with everybody in the department and the role of being someone who encourages others and can make things happen. I have gotten nothing but positive response and feel much more at ease with the position than a month ago. Some days, however, I do feel my administration is happening a bit haphazardly like the other day when someone gave me some information and for the rest of the day I couldn't for the life of me remember what she had told me. I have developed a very extensive post-it note system because everybody gives me so much information, much of which I have no immediate use for (and maybe never will) and somehow I feel it just seems more serious if I write it down (like I will at least try to remember what I've been told).

Time out

One of my main priorities this year is finding a better balance between life and work. In a way this goal is completely and utterly against every other goal I might have about being more productive, but I seriously need to take better care of myself and get a life in this city. One thing I have been doing lately is make exercise a priority. I am not an athletic type and though I like some kinds of exercise it typically ends up last on my to-do list and at the end of the day it's the first thing to go. Instead of pushing it in at the end of the day I have tried to listen more to myself this time around. I have picked three classes at the gym I think might be fun (not sure I will keep it up with all of them, but at least I have a choice then) and chosen evening schedules so I can get home to unwind and cook dinner before I'm heading out again. So far it's works. I have more energy, I cook more often, eat better and feel better in general. Today I took this one step further. As I have talked about before, the time registration system we have at work does not suit me at all. But it has one loophole that I might actually enjoy if I could just make myself use it. We can take a set amount of time out each day for exercise. I have never used it before, because as I've said I am pretty lazy, but today I did. I left the computer, the piles, the articles, the manuscripts, the phone and everything behind for half an hour and went for a walk with my camera in my pocket. Just a short walk around the neighborhood, but what a difference it made. Now if I can only convince myself to make this a priority.

This is what I've been missing

All the time during the fall semester when I was professing in Arctic outpost, worked all the time on extremely time consuming courses and lived in a university apartment with very few personal belongings I missed having a real life. I am not sure why I never got a better after-work life there. I love the place so that's not it, but there was something about being away only for a few months and being so extremely busy , that made me not bother with anything besides eating, sleeping, reading the occasional novel and watching endless episodes of Gilmore Girls on DVD.

Since I got back getting a life at home and separate between the professional me and the private me has been a major priority. I go to the gym, I cook, I do spend time at home and I don't stay in the office until midnight, but often I am so exhausted when I get home that i don't really enjoy my downtime anyway.

Tonight has been one of those wonderful, relaxing evenings I remember having many more of years ago - before professing, before the first post doc year, before the dissertation and even before the Masters. I haven't done anything special - just been around the house, watering flowers, lighting candles, watching some TV, written a long email to Fiance on the other side of the globe, reading a bit, hanging out on the Internet, cooking super yummy Indian Puri bread and eggplant dip to bring to work for lunch tomorrow. What makes the difference is that I actually have the energy to take up some of my old hobbies like cooking and have the energy to be creative and think about things to do. I know, it hasn't really been ten years since I had an evening like this on a week day, but there is no doubt that things have change since last year when I collapsed on the couch after work practically every single day.

I'm not cut out for working 9-5

When I embarked on the PhD journey six years ago I had one resolution. I didn't want studies or work to take over my life. Ha! I am thinking today, how could I ever believe in that, but I did, and do you know what - it actually worked out just fine for at least the first two years. I don't think my advisor would have supported my strategy, since he is of the work till you drop school, but for the first couple of years I did actually leave the office at the end of the day and I didn't work evenings or weekends. It was such a relief after three years in a master's program where I worked most evenings and always during weekends and I know there is no way I would have continued for the PhD without a change of pace.

Somewhere during the second or third year of the PhD the first signs of will-I-ever-finish panic made me put in more hours including staying at the office long after regular working hours. But I still rarely worked at home or during weekends. Maybe I am lazy, maybe I am not serious enough, but I just couldn't make myself do it. I don't think I started working regularly around the clock including weekends until the last year when I was writing up. At that point I had moved most of my work stuff home and rarely went into the office. I did very few things besides working on the dissertation and only had to leave the apartment for grocery shopping and the occasional errand. While this was in many ways the most stressful period in all my grad school years it was also in many ways the best. I didn't have to go anywhere, so I work all the time if I wanted or not if I didn't. I could work in the morning or in the evening or whenever it suited me and take breaks and do errands whenever I felt for it. Not only did I get much more productive from staying at home, I also tended to work much more at odd hours.

I also got a tiny bit crazy and annoying and ignorant of other people's needs from living in this work-isolation....and it would not have been unreasonable for the people in my life to want the madness to stop. It did. Eventually. After getting the degree and moving here the set working hours at my current job seemed like the promised land. To leave work after eight hours knowing you have done what you had to do - what a bliss. But it didn't take long to realize that though we might have a time registration system of the kind invented for factory workers, eight hours a day is not enough - especially not now when all sorts of other obligations come on top of the research. At the moment I am dealing with all the administration, exams, new grad students, day to day things - all of which pretty much takes up my time ....and then, the research on top of this.

I do need to write and publish papers. There is no other way to succeed in the system, and though I've been fairly lucky so far and gotten some good opportunities they simply don't count if I don't publish. I realize that I need to put in more time on evenings or during weekends and every Monday that sounds doable. I dream about going back to this work-isolation life style and get a lot of work done at my own pace one or two days a week. But what I completely forget until another weekend comes around is that I can't do that. There is always grocery shopping and things around the house to be done and maybe most importantly I need to catch up on sleep and me-time or us-time, and it turns out I don't want to live without a significant amount of that. I get so exhausted from spending every day in the office and then still finding the energy to keep working when I am home. I wish my work place had a more positive attitude towards working from home. I wish I could spend one or more days away from the office where there are always someone else demanding my time, but I don't think this is going to happen anytime soon. I guess I need to figure out how to trick myself into considering working at home during weekends sort of a spare time activity.

Years on grad school budget ruined my spending gene

I went shopping today....Not such an unusual pastime, I know, but I so rarely do this that I hardly know how to go about it anymore. Sure, I buy groceries, occasional clothing, gifts, books, items for the home or anything else I need or want for a relatively comfortable life style, but I almost never go shopping in the sense of just walking around visiting random shops, buying random things just for the sake of it. I used to go shopping like that with my girl friends when I was a teenager and we'd rather spend a day together in town out of the reach of our parents than at home, but like other activities from that period of my life (sneaking into clubs - or going to clubs altogether, drinking till you get sick and partying two or more days in a row) I just got fed up with it and stopped doing it.

Maybe I was never really fed up with shopping, but ever since I left home to go to university at 18, I never really had any money, and without money shopping is not so fun. Now 14 years down the road, after years of undergraduate education, many more years of grad school and one year in a decently paid real job I finally have a bit of money to spare. I was almost shocked when i realized that I will actually be able to put some money away for savings and still have some left to play with. I am aware that this wouldn't come as a surprise to most thirty somethings with a good job, but since the academic life style has been so intimately related with cheap food, bargains, overdrafts, loans and credit for so long I still feel nervous every time I open the bank statement or sign in to pay the bills online - but now for no reason.

So I decided to walk down to the city centre today to check out the sales since I wanted to do something else than just hang out at home and had promised myself a day off. My excuse was that I was going to look for a pair of winter boots, but I didn't find the kind I was looking for, so I ended up going into random shops, looking at random things and finding lots of things I suddenly wanted like scented candles, brightly coloured napkins, books I don't have the time to read, sparkly pens, cute flower patterned tank top, DVDs, bath salts....and lots and lots of other things.

My typical shopping pattern when I look at "stuff I don't really need and didn't even know I wanted" is: spend a looong time in a shop, touch and turn all nice items, pick one up I really like, walk around with it in hand while checking out the rest of the shop, put back really nice thing because I realize I don't really need it after all and leave shop empty-handed. But today I decided to give it a go and go shopping for real. So five hours later I arrived home with bath salts enough for a mini spa from super delicious all natural products (I got the bath soak grain jar with essential oils of orange, lemon, geranium and seaweed and bath bubbles with tangerine, peppermint, vanila and thyme), travel size organic bath soaps (shower gel with bergamot and ginger) and vanila body butter, shoes, four books (I might have gotten those anyway), four DVDs, two kinds of napkins, a magazine, cash card for the cell phone (which I also needed anyway) and a mixed feeling of wanting to pamper myself this way more often and irrational fear of the next bank statement.

It's weird how letting go of the need to control even the smallest expenses can be so difficult. It's like I am afraid that if I allow myself to buy little things to brighten up my life that i can actually afford now, I will suddenly overnight start buying designers bags and furniture and order expensive cruises and run myself straight into debt again.

The good, the bad and the ugly

The good:

I have been to the gym today and yesterday! I don't do real New Year's resolutions, but I do think about areas of my life I want to improve now and then. Typically it is some sort of outside change that makes me think about new goals. This time it was leaving my temporary teaching position in the Arctic and returning to postdoc city that made me think about what I wanted to change in my life. I have been pretty sloppy with my health for the past six-seven months - ever since I embarked on the teaching experience - and in the end I almost couldn't stand the couch potato life anymore. I am normally the kind of person who can live well for a long time without much physical activity and I'd much rather relax in front of a DVD after a long day at work than run around in the streets, so when I feel an urge to exercise it is really about time to do so. I already had a gym membership, but I haven't been there for at least seven months, and I was almost embarrassed to come back in case somebody would comment on this (they scan the membership card at the counter, so you need to be face to face with an actual person). But severe need to do something other than work and lie around below the blankets at home made me go yesterday and it was great. It was so nice to work out and also really good to do something after work. I got so worked up about the whole thing that I signed up for a dance class already today, so now I feel like every muscle in my body has been stretched to its limit and beyond, not unlike if I'd been run over by something heavy. But the dance class was fun, and I will come back when my achy limbs feel better. I hope I can at least get back in reasonable shape before leaving for the Argentina trip in early March and I hope I can get rid of some of the pounds I have piled on when I was in the throes of professorhood.

The bad:

First we had no winter for a loooong time and everybody complained about the lack of skiing conditions (this country must be on ski-loving nation's top three). Then we had three, maybe four beautiful winter days when everything was covered in powder snow and all the neighborhood kids were gathering at the small hill just outside our house to play in the snow, and everybody finally went skiing and stopped talking about green fields and rain and flowers. Now it looks like Mr. Frost has decided to stick around for a while, but not at the -5 degrees celsius romantic prettiness kind of way, but in the +0.5 degrees celsius sleet, ice and wet slush everywhere kind of way. The road was so slippery this morning that I hardly made it up the nearest hill in the car and on my way home I had to take a detour to turn the car since I got stuck in the snow practically outside the house the first time around. I was seriously tempted to go outside and take a picture of the road for the blog, but considering the wind and the sleet and the wetness outside and the fact that it is dark now I opted out of it.

The ugly:

Well, ugly is an exaggeration, but this is my least favorite item on the list nevertheless. I am supposed to be grading exams and now I haven't done it because I have been to the gym, cooked a nutritious dinner and written all this. I tell you, these exams are haunting me. I have been dragging them around for a month now and I MUST finish the remaining ones tomorrow. Not only do I have to finish grading the ones I have already got, I also have to write a whole new one for ONE student who was sick when the original exam was given. It doesn't help that the average grade is not going to be high. It was not a difficult exam and the students were not too shabby brain-wise, but oh, such miserable answers. I don't know where they are keeping their heads, not on top of their shoulders one might think. I should try to get through at least one or two more tonight or get into work early tomorrow morning (none of which seems attractive at all).

Revitalised

After a couple of days off work I seem to finally be recovering from the endless row of illnesses I have been visited by for the past two weeks. Nothing serious - just cold-related annoyances and lately some stomach bug and I have been going to the office more or less sick since I came back from christmas break. But now my energy is returning. We are also done re-decorating the house after Fiancé moved in and though it's been fun shopping for furniture, decluttering and rearranging the rooms, it has also been quite a lot of work. But now it's done and it's beatiful and every time we walk into a room we are talking about how great our place is and how nice we've made it. I suppose the novelty will wear off at some point, but I like that we actually do appreciate a nice home both of us. It doesn't hurt that we have the most fantastic view over a snow clad city at the moment.

Maybe it's the improved health, maybe it's the improved living conditions, maybe it's the forty-something hours I must have been sleeping since Thursday - anyway, I do feel energized and like it possible, if not even attractive to face a new work week soon. I do still think I will have too much to do and have a strange position in the hierarchy (as I talked about here), but I do feel better prepared to handle it this week.

Today I:

• took down the christmas decorations (about time one might say)
  
• bought colourful tulips for the living room and the kitchen
  
• shopped lots of yummy vegetables for cooking lots of healthy meals next weeks
  
• planned to finally reappear at the gym (after six months hiatus) on Monday
  

Now, I am going to cook African food from Côte d'Ivoire (Ginger - Avocado salad) and Congo (Vegetables in coconut milk) for dinner. I got this cookbook as a christmas gift with vegetarian recipes from around the world and it looks like I am going to use it frequently.

Home sweet home

I am home! For 36 hours. Not in my temporary home in the arctic, not in Germany, not in a hotel room, not visiting anybody, but home where I live according to the social security system and where I keep most of my stuff. I realize most people wouldn't find this extraordinary, but I am so fed up with this nomadic life style right now and waking up in my own bed for the first time in months was heavenly to say the least. I can't wait to get back in two weeks. To top it off Fiancé moved in today. He was here for even less time than I, since he is driving the rented moving van back to the continent and finish off a few things at work before he moves in to stay. But we have unpacked some of the boxes and placed most of the furniture, so it feels like a home for both of us now. It looks so much better now than it did before and I never had enough furniture to fill the house anyway.

In an ideal world my entire focus today should obviously have been on Fiance and his moving in, but I just didn't have enough time for that. I came here last night after another long conference day and a super exhausting flight thanks to airport security and end of week travelling, and just wanted to sleep, read Cosmopolitan, eat chocolate and sleep some more. (One might wonder why he is willing to move in with this hibernating person in the first place since all I want when I am not at work is SLEEP). Alas, I couldn't hibernate all day as I am leaving for another meeting in Russia at 5 AM tomorrow morning and had a lot of things I needed to finish before leaving.

My students are waiting for the evaluations of their research projects (I promised they would have these a week ago), the study administration is waiting for the official version of the finals exam (I wrote the questions yesterday during an extraordinarily boring presentation at yesterday's conference) and I must prepare the presentation for the next meeting (to be given on Monday). It is 9 PM now and I haven't finished any of these tasks yet. So far I have done laundry, carried boxes, rearranged furniture, put up chistmas decorations (very pretty), booked a hotel room for a stop-over on the return trip, booked a ticket for visiting my parents for christmas, eaten take-away chop suey and watched a lot of TV.

I don't want to do things sloppily or at the last minute and I feel kind of guilty for not really working effectively today. But I have practically no time for breaks right now. All my free time is spent in airports or on planes or in random hotel rooms and I just can't relax when it goes on and on like that. I wish I was going to stay here and could allow myself to chill out just for tonight. Instead I am maximising my chill-out at home time by watching a very girly TV program where couples talk about love and what they value in their relationships (practically Cosmo on screen) while I write evaluations of research projects for the students and eat mint chocolates.

Things I want to change in my life

With my time in the visiting position coming to an end, our recent engagement and Fiance's moving in I have been thinking a lot about how I want my life to be when I get back to my home and real job. The six months I have been away have almost entirely been about work and except for more parties than I normally attend and a few trips to the local swimming pool I haven't really had a life. I think I probably had time for a life, but when I am busy and tired it takes so much energy to decide to get out of the house and do something, that I just never got around to it. When I get back home I want this to change. I am sick of being the kind of person who never does anything real because I think I am too busy at work, and then end up staying longer at work at night because I don't know what I am going to do with all the empty time when I get home.

When I get back I want to:

• Go to the gym again
• Spend more time outside
• Use the 15 minutes paid exercise break we have at work
• Buy bath salts and use the bath tub
• Go skiing in the weekends
• Cook nutritious food and have leftovers for busy days
• Bake again
• Leave work at the end of the day
• Work from home sometimes (this is more tricky as we have set times where we need to be in the office, but I love working from home and it is something I miss enormously from my grad school days, and since I am going to be the boss now maybe I can fix at least the occasional work from home day)
• Read more non-work books (I am already doing this and I love it, I just don't want to fall back in the TV-only habit again when I get back)
• Use the fire place
• Learn something new (I am not sure what this is going to be. I would love to take some sort of course from the university in another field than my own, but I am not sure it is possible since I am travelling so much)
• Get to know new parts of the town
• Go kayaking
• Get better at keeping in touch with my friends in home-country (I am afraid my only real friendships will slip away if I keep prioritising work over people)
• Decorate our home so it feels like a home and not a temporary roof over our head
• Buy flowers more often
• Go hiking in the mountains
• Get a newspaper subscription