Recognition for work assignment

Last week I received this thank-you note from the project manager of the work assignment I just finished. I never even met him; I only interact with him over long distance phone calls. It's nice to get the recognition though.

I’m sure you are already being assigned a billion tasks at [new client] but I just wanted to thank you for your excellent work on the Dashboard.

You have done a great job and, as I’m sure you were able to tell from the conference calls, [client] was very pleased with the results.

It was a pleasure working with you and I hope to have the opportunity to work together again in the future!

Good luck with the new project!

Wrapping up work assignment

I'm coming to a close on an assignment I've been working on for the last two months. It's for a client in the telecommunications industry and my mission has been to develop an infrastructure monitoring dashboard using ASP.NET.

It's been an interesting project for me. I got to dabble in Visual Basic, VBscript, Javascript, HTML, CSS. There has been lots of built in variety for me.

I'm told that there is another project team waiting for me to finish this assignment because they are waiting for my expertise in another area.

"It must be nice to be wanted," my current project manager wrote to me. Sure - as long as my picture isn't posted all over police stations with the words Dead or Alive.

Journaling and completion

A few years ago when I had mentioned that I journal to a friend, she thought it was a useless exercise and asked if I ever read my own journals.

I do from time to time find value in looking up previous entries. A couple of weeks ago I recalled having written some to do items in my journal towards the end of 2005. I wanted to know if there was anything on that list that I had not yet done.

I had some energy and wanted to set myself some new goals but I wanted to be sure I was complete first with my older goals. I did find a couple of big items that were left over from 2005. One was finalizing my pre-nup agreement with J; the other was getting one of my properties properly registered with the city as an accessory dwelling unit. I have re-committed myself to completing these tasks by the end of May.

There is value in reviewing old journal entries.

Morning pages

The book Artist's Way describes an exercise called Morning Pages. This is an exercise that the author, Julia Cameron, challenges the reader to do every day for a minimum of twelve weeks. The exercise is to write by longhand, three pages of stream of consciousness thoughts.

Could I do this for twelve weeks? Every day?!? Well, only one way to find out. I pulled out a notebook I used to journal in longhand before I started journaling electronically on my PDA. I used that notebook for a couple of days and then bought myself a new journal specifically for this exercise. Cameron encouraged me to make a commitment for twelve weeks, and I was uncertain whether I'd be able to keep up the pace for that long, but I was willing to give it a go. This was in January, twelve weeks ago. I was not on a work assignment at the time, so it was easy to fit doing the pages into my daily schedule. At first.

On some days, doing three pages just flowed. On other days, it was a stretch. Some days it seemed like I was putting in a lot of filler just to reach my three page target.

The three page requirement stretched me; it caused me to push on even when I ran out of things to say, to really reach within and write some thoughts that I'd never dared to write before, not even in my journal.

I was quite pleased that I was able to maintain this daily ritual - for six consecutive weeks. After six weeks I started a new work assignment; my day was busy and my evening calendar has been quite full since then as well. For the last few weeks all I've managed to get in was about two days a week of doing the pages.

Trail blazing

The men's group I'm involved with will be doing a community service project at the end of April, at a YMCA camp. The projects will include construction, building repairs and trail blazing, and is an opportunity for the men to serve the larger community.

I am looking forward to this event as I will be involved in the project leadership. I am also looking forward to doing some trail blazing - I've done a lot of hiking in past years, so as a former trail user, this will be a personal opportunity for me to give something back to the community.

Having your cake

Here's one from the where do these ideas come from department. Why don't they make a cake (they being the proverbial they), say a Black Forest cake, with an extra layer in the middle. This extra layer would be a layer of Pepto Bismol. Then you could eat as much cake as you wanted and you wouldn't get indigestion.