Siliceous and Delicious

The end of last week was a bit of a struggle—the accumulated weeks of struggle combined with watching SJ and John Crowley defend (in the same day) drove the point of my stasis home with a vengeance. It was a bit of a low.

It was doubly pleasant and important, then, that the weekend was a real raiser of spirits. On Saturday Kati and I got away for the day, spent a very relaxing morning talking at Darwin’s, and then a restorative afternoon walking through Maudslay State Park in Newburyport. It gave us the chance to finally spend the sort of quality, pair-bonding, unstructured and carefree time together that I had hoped Copenhagen would provide, but was disappointed that it hadn’t. Perhaps it just needed time, but things feel markedly improved this morning.

On Sunday afternoon we spent some time with Evan and Katie (and Gavi), which was also a surprising source of motivation. Evan has an almost uncannily positive attitude to big tasks and intimidating projects at work. Perhaps it was because I came primed from a weekend of relaxing and connecting, but somehow giving my usual “no, I’m not done yet” pity party spiel this time inspired me to take a more Evan-ish, optimistic, go-gettum view of the task at hand. I am at a point where I can finish up (these first two chapters, at the very least), and what a formidable challenge. So, instead of moping, fearing, and pushing my head far into the sand until the last moment of the weekend, I actually spent Sunday evening quietly looking forward to getting to work and moving forward. I programmed the coffee maker before bed and felt rested and ready to go this morning.

Anyway, this is all a long preamble, but the bottom line is that I am working at Darwin’s today feeling qualitatively different than I have for the past few months—since the big push started petering out in March.