Tags: life

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Thinking about routines after an extended trip

| life

An extended vacation is a great opportunity to examine the routines that you take for granted. You stop doing some things and postpone others. It’s surprising how flexible day to day life is, how much you can put on hold.

We were away for a month. For a month, I didn’t schedule appointments or conversations. For a month, I postponed e-mails and decisions. For a month, I had no library books on the go, no projects to work on, no focused topics for learning and exploration.

Now we’re back home and slowly returning to our normal life. I started cooking in bulk again, freezing 14 chicken curry lunches to save us time in the weeks ahead. The cats are back from the boarding place, so there’s that 15-30 minute daily commitment to pet care. I have quiet time for myself again, truly discretionary time. What routines and activities do I want to restore? What do I want to put back slowly, carefully, intentionally? What do I want to lessen or reconsider?

2014-01-01 Routines I put away for the trip and which ones I want to put back

Click on the image to view a larger version.

I drew during the vacation as an aid to thinking, but not as much as I did at home. I’m back to my normal rhythms of drawing and writing, although it will take me a little time to ramp up to the same kind of buffer I enjoyed. I like this and will do more of it.

Being picky and guiltless about e-mail seems to work out fine. I answered almost all my mail, although some replies took weeks. The world didn’t end.

Work feels less urgent, too. Good transition. No emergencies. I’ll work on this for another couple of months, and then we’ll plan again from there.

Less time reading, perhaps. I reviewed the list of new business books from the library and didn’t feel called by any of the titles. There’s so much I want to learn, but maybe I’ll try more targeted searches – reading specific books or websites, perhaps, instead of just picking through what’s new.

Sometimes I look at how little time I’ve spent directly writing code and wonder if I’m slipping into that vicious cycle of rustiness and impostor’s syndrome. I remind myself that I’ve felt that way about Emacs and Rails and WordPress before, and still there are ideas and projects that lead me back. I don’t have to waste energy on second-guessing myself. I’ll come back to this in time. For now, I’m focusing on learning how to share what I’m learning. When I return to focusing on coding, I can use these skills to share even more. The important thing is for me to keep that confidence that I can learn what I want to learn – as long as I have that, I can pick things up again.

I miss biking. I want to set up a winter exercise routine to get me through those cold and dangerous months. Maybe something I can do at home, so I have no excuse. We have weights, I have an exercise partner, I should be able to make this work.

A vacation is an excellent excuse to disrupt routines, since people automatically understand. I wonder how I can do this even during a staycation. Perhaps a vague “I’m taking a break and will get back to you in a month?” It’s useful to interrupt your life so that you can see what you take for granted and be deliberate about what you put back.

Are you returning from an extended break? What have you learned about your everyday life?

Stocking up on chicken stock stock stock

Posted: - Modified: | cooking

We save the bones from chicken quarters, turkey drumsticks, and other pieces of poultry that pass through our kitchen. They get tossed into the freezer, and when two freezer bags or so get full, it’s time to make a pot of chicken stock.

I joke about renaming winter to “baking season.” It’s soup season, too. Chicken soup to ward off the cold, leek and potato soup for variety, split pea soup with its pork cracklings… Chicken stock goes into stir fries and sauces too. Very useful to have around.

Since we’re trying to eat more vegetables and less meat, we don’t have that many bones to cook with—not as many as we would want if we’re having soup weekly. Fortunately, a large bag of chicken bones costs $1. The largest stock pot we have can fit two bags of bones initially, with a third squeezed in once the chicken bones settle.

2012-12-30 20.28.35

This is what all that stock looks like: three layers of containers, probably around 40 cups. There’s no room in the fridge (there’s a turkey defrosting) and the stock has to cool before we can freeze it, so W- took the containers to the shed, where they’ll cool (and most likely freeze, too). Side benefit of winter: free cold storage. Not quite a walk-in freezer (at least until it hits -18C), but decent at chilling things quickly.

I want to learn how to make vegetable stock as well. That’ll give me another use for all these vegetable odds and ends, and it might lead to other interesting soups along the way.

On Changing the World

| life, passion

Like Daniel at Young and Frugal, I am going to change the world.

I’m changing it already, and as I grow, I’ll do better and better. I won’t always succeed, but I’ll always learn. I’ll get better and better at finding better and better fits between what I’m passionate about, what I’m good at, and what the world needs.

It’s not because I can be anything I want to be, but because I’m becoming more of who I am. Let’s face it: I’m unlikely to become an Olympic swimming champion or the CEO of a wildly successful social networking platform. But there’s so much I can do right now, and there’s so much I want to grow into in the future.

There are amazing people around me who encourage me to keep following my passion, keep exploring new areas. They know you can’t train people to do what I do, and that I create a lot of value you can’t put into a job description. If people around me weren’t this supportive, I’d just look for a different environment. I would keep following my passions, because I can’t imagine living any other way.

I have what-am-I-doing moments. I have do-I-really-have-to-do-this moments. I have just-get-me-through-this-day moments. But I also have I-totally-rock moments and I-helped-someone-else-totally-rock moments, and I’m going to have more of those.

When people tell me I’m special, I tell them that I’m just like they are, and I ask them what it would take for them to live like I do. What would it take for people to live with passion and joy?

I’m Sacha Chua, and this is not just about Generation Y. =)