Baseball, sigh. All I can say is that after walking over my boys, the Chicago White Sox had damn well better break their streak and win the series.
The work week was not too dreadful. Probably that was because I took off Tuesday and Wednesday (for Rosh Hashanah). And that meant most of Thursday was devoted to catching up on email and voicemail. I had one urgent chore to take care of and think I may have exceeded expectations simply by having a bit of common sense on how to present information. In short, bar charts have their uses and tables have their uses and if you provide both in the package you put together everyone will be happy. It also helps to have a bit of gumption in tracking down the information for the charts. I'm increasingly convinced that my single most valuable job skill is the willingness to pick up the telephone.
My one real frustration this week had to do with making travel arrangements. I'm going to Boston for a conference and had a horrible time finding a hotel that was within the per diem. If something is a little over, I can make it up by eating cheaper. And if there is really nothing available within per diem, then you can get it signed off on anyway. I did eventually find something, but it took a second phone call. The real annoyance was that the original reservation (which was some $20 or so over per diem) was at a hotel different than the one that the travel agent had led me to believe it was. If I'm listing hotels in Cambridge, it seems the agent should have mentioned the Hyatt she was trying to book me at was the one at the airport, not the one in Cambridge. And why the fuck is the only hotel in all of Massachusetts that my company has a negotiated rate with at the airport? And over per diem?
I have a bunch of personal travel arrangements to do, also. But at least those don't involve the woes of dealing with the company travel agent.
Anyway, I've been in one of those states where I seem to need a lot of physical activity. I've satisfied that with long walks and I even did a couple of stints on the exercise bike at the gym in my complex. It rained too hard yesterday to go out at all, alas. Today, I did the year-round Volksmarch in downtown Fairfax. It's always enjoyable to discover new places to walk close to home. The first part of the walk was through Old Town and a residential neighborhood and wasn't particularly interesting. But the rest had lengthy sections along various park trails. It's not like there's anything to see on the trails but they are woodsy and peaceful and I was reminded again of how nicely contemplative walking is.
Which brings me to the thing that bugs me about the current American attitude towards exercise. If you treat everything as medical obligation, you take away all the joy from it. Not every second that I pedal that exercise bike is unmitigated joy and I do admit to a certain amount of "two minutes to go" type thinking. But mostly I do enjoy it. I get into a rhythm that takes me into more or less a trance state. Today, while on the park trails, there were a few times where I just felt I had to run for a bit. I'm not a runner, but running was just what the trail and my body seemed to call for. That seems to me a far healthier approach than all of the ought-to's in the world.
Copyright 2005 Miriam H. Nadel