Sunday Breakfast

 

Property of Stormberry

These last weeks have been really something, and I mean that in the most stressing and absurd of ways. I wrapped around my witchy side, my path and flicked my hand and said "Oh, this is all Mercury Retrograde", and though I want to believe it has exacerbated some things, trust me, not all of this crazy is due to a god up there - or a planet - doing a rendering of Michael Jackson's Moonwalk. 

But what has been happening? Well, let me tell you. It's quite crazy, I promise you.

First of all, there was this project at the office on which I was working last year, and which had a lot of "special circumstances" surrounding it. You know, the typical case were a task gets wrapped in office-politics. A lot of people had to give data for it, a lot of it wasn't matching, and then there were differences in opinions about how to do this or that, what should be included, what not, and so on. It becomes extra-complicated when there are a lot of opinions, but basically only one person actually doing the document, and trying to fit the unfitting parts others want in it.

But, in the end - the last workday of 2020, the project was finished, reviewed by the group and sent on its way. Or... well, maybe. Anyway, then it seems that other people were also working on the same project, and they didn't know about the document I compiled, and so some feathers were ruffled. THEN, in these past weeks, it happens that we noticed that one of the annexes of the document weren't updated. The info in the document was, but not one item in one annex. Well, that was enough for hell to break loose. Before you ask, no, actually the outdated data wasn't all that different from the previous one, and the impact on the whole was minimal. Not like it reflected on the content of the document, because there the calculations were done with the updated information.

So I checked, I found other mistakes, corrected them, and sent the document revised, corrected and updated. No biggie, right? Well, no. Those who were there, giving opinions and sending a flurry of documents my way, act as if the London Bridge has fallen down. It did upset me, honestly, because it was an honest mistake, and the ones berating me actually were tasked with revising the document, so they should have caught the slip earlier. It took me sometime, some meditation, calming rose quartz and grounding hematite, but I let it slide. You know, it must be the Mercury Retrograde.

Found at
 https://www.horoscope.com/

I did consult on my Tarot decks, and the first one showed me The Tower. Yeah, catastrofe, but also the moment when false ideals fall, and the truth is revealed. This certainly was a moment where this sort of message seemed to fit like a glove.

Then... because these kind of things never come alone, classes at the Master's Program really got heavy. We had accumulated for this week four projects for three classes (yeah, in one we have two), and though I had worked in one of them before hand, and on the other I'm with some classmates that really pull their weights, all of that got toppled with an insane amount of readings, just for this week. There is an average of how much our readings add up per week, and the normal amount is about some 60 pages per week. There have been outliers, like weeks were it goes up to 120, but this week alone we've got  600 pages just for one class, and a homework that's taking most of us over two days to at least have the outline.

I haven't been able to read anything (I mean, like novels, my leisure readings and stuff like that), because I'm constantly busy, and it's driving me crazy because it feels like it never ends.

And my house also got a leaking pipe (there was one, but now we found another, and this is really big, and in a complicated place), so yes, there are plenty of issues to keep me even more occupied.

So, what to do?

Property of Stomberry

Well, first, make yourself a coffee, maybe order some brain-sustenance (donuts, I ordered donuts), and make a plan of what can you do, what needs to be done now, what can be pushed back for later, what can you just leave without doing (like summarizing tasks or sharing them with others). Break those tasks in smaller chunks and do as much as you can. So you may not be able to finish it all, but see what can you finish and what really, really needs to be finished and when it is due.

I know the assignments and the essays need to be done because my grades depend on that, but not the readings. I can skip reading, or do it later, after the class, just reading the parts that weren't clear from the presentation. Thankfully, these classes have no tests, so there's no problem with that.

And when you have had such a stuffed week or two weeks or month, take a break, start your Sunday with a special breakfast. Today I tried making a poached egg for the first time, and I made a hot sandwich with roasted mushrooms (crimini mushrooms), chives and pepper slices. A nice tea, and then ordered my donuts and made a coffee, and sat down to blog.

A much needed break, before delving again into homework. And you know what? I feel less stuck, less blocked already.

Happy Sunday!

Coffee with a Friend at the Distance

Property of Stormberry

Every Wednesday, my Best Friend and I send each other a picture of our coffee or our tea, as a way to pretend we are out for a coffee together. We take a moment and chit-chat a little throughout the day, and talk about things in out lives.

I love these moments, as we understand each other incredibly well, and we can always give really good advise to each other. We live in different contients, so we really can't just meet weekly at a coffeeshop, so this is something we devised a long ago in order to have "our coffee time". Little we knew that we would all live such a crazy change of all our structures, and these Coffee Dates would become our normalcy little nook.

Last year, if you remember, Quarantine Diaries became a thing, and maybe we thought this would be a thing of a season, half a year, and yet, here we are, thorn from our old normalcy, and now that we start to understand - really understand - that this is how things go and will go from now on, we start working on getting on our feet and finding our new rhythm.

What a curious and exciting generation we are! From the totally analogical world, where phonecalls and color TV were luxuries, where we still wrote letters and did research at libraries from encyclopedias, we are now in a fast world, one that has gone so fast, it but a hard break on us. One, we are surviving through even faster communication.

If you are here, if you are loosing your step, if you feel disconnected, take a picture of your drink, send it to a friend or post it on your social media, and caption it #happycoffeedate.