There is no year of my life that has not, at some fundamental level, been wrapped up in the academic calendar.
My father was a university professor: our family vacations ran on his schedule.
Then there were my years of pre-school, elementary school, junior high, high school, and boarding school (a new and different schedule, that, but still, in principle the same.) College.
Working for my college for the year after graduation. I had very little to do with students, in general (I was doing web and project design for faculty), but you could still feel the ebb and flow of the school no matter what else happened.
I moved to Minnesota, for one year *not* working for a school - but in graduate school myself part time.
And then I began my current job, where I’ve been since fall of 2000, working in an independent day school. There are many things I love about it.
One of them is how often I get to pause and reflect on how much I love it. Every year, the last week teachers are around, there’s a parade of special lunches, ceremonies, in between the meetings. Some of the process gets a little tedious - but many of them help me remember just how fantastic the people I work with are, how neat the kids are, why I enjoy getting up almost every morning. (Almost. I *am* human, after all.)
And then there’s the part we’re in right now. The beginning of the year.
It’s unusually exciting this year. We’ve moved my desk (in the hopes being in the office will make noise-distractable me a) less stressed and b) more productive). We’ve negotiated some new duties that make my salary manageable, but that give me some significant challenges. And we have new carpet (the original, from the early 70s addition, was in place until last week) and a little new paint.
We come back a week before the faculty (who will be here next week.) They’re already trickling back to look at rooms and have initial meetings with colleagues, and it’s hard to go an hour without someone stopping by to chat about their summer (always too short!) and what they have in mind.
I’ve been sorting magazines (we get about 50), a process that always brings the news of the summer back in rush. Later this week, I get to start updating our patron database (something that has to be done manually.) And next week, we’re back to meetings and faculty gatherings. The week after that, students.
All of them remind me of cycles and new beginnings, and new possibilities. I love that.
But it’s also sometimes a little weird: it’s obviously (and for some historical reasons) off kilter from the traditional agricultural busy points. Just when my religious life is telling me to go be introspective and reflective, my work life is getting hectic with major projects. Just when my religious life is telling me to work hard on goals and projects, my schedule drops out from beneath me, and I often find myself somewhat adrift as summer vacation hits.
Now, there are advantages to some of this: four of the eight Sabbats fall in my vacations generally, so it can be easier for me to prepare in an unhurried way for ritual. I get a natural sense of ebb and flow to my schedule: things build and then diminish. I’m constantly turning from project to project as cycles shift and different things become easier to work on. I’m never bored.
But at the same time, it does give me a strange perspective on the Wheel of the Year. And one I think I’m never going to quite shake, even if I eventually end up working somewhere that isn’t a school.
My summer seems to have gotten away from me again: in a week, I’m back at work for the school year, with some new responsibilities, so I’m in “Argh, get life in order now!” mode.
I spent Friday at our local IKEA, picking up various items to help with that, which leads to my post today.
Background:
One of the things my covenmate asked me, back when I sent her the Role of the HPS post, what I thought the role was in regard to the covenstead: is it automatically the place where the HPS lives. I have some philosophical thoughts about that I’m still trying to sort out into words other people might understand, but I do know the practical thing it kicked off for me: a desire for my home to be a place where I can say “Sure, come right over, I’ll be here.” A place I can host (small) group ritual in. A place I can teach in. A place I can have friends - or group members - over and be hospitable.
There’s just one trick.
I live in a tiny little house - 400 square feet, the size of a studio apartment, though it’s divided a little differently. There are many things I like about it.
- It’s the amount of space I actually need for me and the cat.
- I can clean it thoroughly in about 2 hours, if I have to.
- It’s far more private than an apartment - there’s at least 15-20 feet between me and the next building.
- It requires me to think very carefully about how I live, and what I bring into my home.
- It fits my budget, and a larger space wouldn’t right now.
But there are also challenges. Now that I’ve lived here for a year, I have a much better sense of what they are, and which ones I really care about dealing with.
Some of them are just about the space: the tiny house dates from the mid-50s, and has at various times had tenants who did not take as good care of it as might be hoped. Plus, there’s an elderly gas stove and heater (they work fine, but they are not elegant or shiny or new.) There’s some cosmetic damage to the kitchen floor, a few places where the front room floor is splintering slightly (easy to throw a rug over), and so on. My landlady is aimable about fix-up work I want to do, like painting the bathroom, but money is a limit (on both sides!)
There’s also some limits for group work. My front room is about 8×11 feet, and has 3 bookshelves in it. It will fit 6-8 people, we think, if people are friendly about it (it requires a little moving around during circle casting, etc.) which is around the limit of what we want for the group anyway.
However, to do this, everything in there except the shelves have to be moveable. And yet, I need to make sure there’s enough seating that 6-8 people could potentially sit around and chat and eat after ritual. there’s still a question of seating.
(I should note here: L and I are rotating who hosts ritual: she has somewhat more space, and substantially more outside space. On the other hand, doing things at her place means affecting her partner’s schedule. He’s very amiable about it, but at the same time, we want to keep things balanced.)
Some solutions:
As of this weekend, I have two hard kitchen chairs, a computer chair, and a stepstool that people can sit on. The idea is that these would be easy to move around, but more comfortable seating for conversations and teaching. I also have plans for more floor pillows (something the cat approves of.)
The last thing I want is one or two ottoman footstools (padded, but square and portable) that can be used for seating, and otherwise live in the corner. I’m also considering 2-3 TV trays that can be used for portable tables (or quarter altar space) but I’m still considering where I’d store them.
So, what happens for ritual?
- The harp is moved into the bedroom alcove, along with any other furniture we’re not planning on using.
- The computer gets moved from the desk (in the front room) to my dresser (in the alcove). It’s an iMac, so this is fortunately pretty easy.
- The low bookshelf in the west (usually my personal altar space) is cleared, and used as the west quarter altar.
- I just got a set of narrow shelves that live by the computer desk (used for the east altar)
- A flat-bottomed chair and a stool get used for north and south altars, respectively.
- The desk can also be used to eat around after ritual, with a little planning.
The only part of this that is particularly tedious is moving the computer (and even that is only about a 5 minute process).
There is one other thing I’m considering, which is creating fabric drapes to go over the tall bookshelves, so that people do not need to look at my book selections during ritual. (I’m thinking that light but opaque fabric held on with strips of velcro would do nicely, and other people have suggested that this should work, but I have not yet gone fabric shopping or put them together.)
Inside my head:
But there’s also what it means for my own habits: it means training myself to put things back neatly on visible shelves. On keeping the books down to what *can* be shelved. On keeping on top of dishes and other such things (so that not only are they not distracting, but we have dishes to eat out of afterwards!) The rest of my week is getting devoted to doing a chunk of this and getting things lined up so that I can maintain them when I go back to work.
I grew up with a mother who was very particular about house-cleaning - and I was *not* naturally neat as a child. Naturally organised, yes: I knew where in a pile of stuff things were. But not tidy.
I’ve been learning tidy as an adult (and am currently in a weird place where I strongly prefer things to be tidy, but don’t quite have the habits ingrained to keep them that way even when I’m tired/out late/got lots of other demands. I’m working on it.) I intend to talk somewhat more about this at some point, but some of it is complicated by chronic medical foo (asthma can affect cleaning for me, and as of yesterday, we appear to be having late-summer pollen allergies kicking in: traditionally my worst season. This means I’ve got less energy to spare, and it takes me longer to get moving in the morning.)
Time for another ‘day in the life’ post, I think.
8:15: Wake up, having not set my alarm until later that morning. (8am is about normal for me on a weekend: I finally stopped waking up at 6:30, regardless of when I went to bed, which is nice.) I’d gone to bed fairly late, due to having been out at a concert the evening before (a local Baroque ensemble: I’d gotten a comp ticket from my boss, who plays with them.)
8:15-10am: Catch up on email, online forums, and other various tasks (a question about some web research for a friend, who’s getting stuck on something, re-uploading an old essay of mine someone’s asked about to this site, and do other miscellaneous puttering around.
10:30am: Leave for the day’s activities. I have a meeting near where the friend I walk with regularly lives, so we’re walking beforehand.
11am: Show up, walk with her for almost 45 minutes, doing some very excellent and needed conversation about various topics of interest in the current shiny-new-coven work (managing, I think, to resolve several points of concern.) One of my tasks for Monday is sending email to my covenmate to discuss them.
noon: Walk into the place we’re having our Pagan Pride board meeting. The event is in October, and we just finished filing for 501(c)3 status (the topic that’s been eating our meeting time and energy for the past few months), so we spend a lot of time discussing various issues like our budget, the fund raising we need to do *have* the budget we like, and what implications this has for future events. We set up a wide range of things - two people take on exploratory research for simple fund raisers. We talk about the web site (one of my current projects), where I need to do some serious work in the coming week to get the forms up we want for programming and vendors, so we can get mail out about those.
The meeting lasts about 3 hours, which is par for the course for us, but we all feel it’s been generally very productive and a good time, which is really good.
3:00pm: I stop by the library branch I use in this neck of the woods to pick up a book that came in on hold (I use two different library systems - Minneapolis and Ramsey County - fairly regularly. ) Drive home.
4-6pm: Take a break in my day to play World of Warcraft, getting a chance to chat briefly with one of my friends, and setting up an older (long-unplayed) character somewhere I can get used to her again.
6pm: Have a bath, as my back is stiff.
6:30pm: Finish up other computer things.
7pm: Tidy up around the house for 30 minutes or so (mostly putting laundry away). I need to do more cleaning sometime soon, but this was apparently not the weekend that was going to happen.
7:30-8:15pm: Take notes on one of my current personal practice projects: reading the book in question and making notes in a blank book for later review. Have about 10 minutes of the cat insisting on sitting in the middle of the book and notebook in the middle of this, so pause for petting of the cat.
8:15-8:30ish? (I didn’t actually look at the clock when I was done): do the meditation work I intended to do tonight. I didn’t have a particular time requirement: this was more about ‘get in, do what I need to do tonight, get on with the evening’
8:30ish to 9:15: Read and make notes about a book my sister gave me for the holidays, because she’s going to be in town next Saturday (she lives about a 4 hour drive away), and we will probably talk about it.
9:15: Pick up my current pleasure reading (related to the personal practice topic, but not one I need to take notes on) and read until my eyes start closing. Turn off the lights, pet the cat, fall asleep.
I’ve been sleeping somewhat poorly the last week or two (lots of weird and disjointed dreams, waking up several times briefly overnight, etc). I keep a variety of sleep-enhancing oils on hand, and I think it is perhaps time to try a different one tonight.
Why is it that coming back from vacation always feels far more tiring than before vacation? This week has been full of work, and catching up with other things (like a professional self-education project that’s got an April 16th deadline.)
On top of that, I’ve been feeling somewhat stuck and therefore crabby in the ongoing job search, and as with many reasonably self-aware witches of my acquaintance, am trying to figure out which things I could be doing better, which ones I’m okay at, and whether magical or ritual work might actually help any of these. (The last one, naturally, is what makes it ‘witches’ of my acquaintance, rather than ‘people’)
My weekend, however, promises slightly more sanity: after some schedule conniptions, I have tonight free, am gaming tomorrow (after a walk with a friend), and have Sunday to work on a couple of larger projects (some form design for Pagan Pride Day, for example) before a new moon ritual in the evening.
Of course, there’s a lot of other miscellaneous tasks in there, too - I’ve got to go food shopping tonight for food for both tomorrow and Sunday (pepperoni, and a small chicken to roast) and I need to start a loaf of bread for ritual and so on and so forth. But I can also look forward to a nice long bath by candlelight, and reading, and good company, and those always improve my world.
More content forthcoming, maybe this weekend, maybe early next week.
You actually get two days, this time, as they’re closely interconnected.
Friday:
5:45 : Get up. Morning computer time, devotional work, making of tea.
7:10 : Leave for work. Work until 4pm.
4:00: Drive to a friend’s house to walk. Get told at a stoplight that my back right tire has gone flat. Limp up to her house (a mile or so) to change it. Get lucky - her husband is working from home, and able to come out and help change it. (It was about 10 degrees out, and while I know the theory, I’ve never actually changed a tire before.)
5:30: Drive carefully up to our covenstead on the donut tire to be part of the 2nd degree elevation ritual for a dear friend and covenmate. The last time my HPS and HP did this ritual was my elevation over 2 years ago. We have a fantastic time, and everything goes beautifully, despite a little last-minute scrambling.
9:30: Finish ritual (we started at 7) and take off for the celebratory food part of the evening, at Ruby Tuesday’s, with other people not at the ritual. (I incidentally recommend their strawberry lemonade.)
11:30: Leave there, drive carefully home. Make online appointment with my car dealership for 8:15 using their online automated system.
12:30: Actually go to sleep.
Saturday:
7:20 : Get up, rapidly pack everything I need for the day (ritual gear, ritual clothing, bread for the ritual, and a few other things) and head out carefully to the dealership (which is a 20 minute drive.)
8:15: Explain things to the dealership and go off to read in the waiting room.
9:45: They’re done with everything and send me on the way with a repaired tire, two other small (and cheap!) fixes, and the oil change and new filter I was due for. More money than I really wanted to spend, but far less than it could have been.
9:50: Go have brunch/breakfast at Perkins, because I know I won’t be eating again until after ritual in the evening, and something substantial is called for.
11:00 Arrive at the January temporary librarian job (I’ve been working at the school I got my MLIS degree at on Monday and Tuesday evenings, and Saturday and Sunday 12-5 filling in for a librarian who was out of the country teaching in January.) Catch up on email and online conversations upstairs at a free computer.
12:00: Head downstairs and go to work at the reference desk. Develop a splitting headache which is helped a little by going and getting water, but not as much as I’d like.
4:20: The friend I’m driving up to ritual shows up after busing over to the school. I get her to go get me another drink, and she hangs out and reads in the library until I’m done.
5:00: Get in the car, drive to the covenstead.
5:30: Arrive at the covenstead for full moon ritual. Did I mention that I’m priestessing and that gather time was 5pm? (They knew I’d be showing up as soon as I finished work and got up there, obviously.)
Peel out of the winter outerwear, drop the required items for this ritual in the assigned baskets, change rapidly into ritual dress and jewelry, take 30 seconds to ground and center, and head downstairs to check with my priest for the evening and run through any last minute changes with the person who wrote the ritual. We do that.
6:00: We’re in ritual. It’s fantastic - everything goes very smoothly, we pick up cues, and the people trying out new roles do an amazing job.
8:45: We finish ritual (it was quite long: we were doing oracular work). We head upstairs, grab food, and settle down for a little bit to hang out and socialise.
9:20: The friend I drove and I head out for the other party we need to get to (a 25th wedding anniversary for a very dear friend of hers, and a friend of mine) Informal party, but it was important that she go, and I wanted to.
10:45: Leave that party, I drop my friend at home, and go home and fall over.
Sunday, thankfully, was a little more peaceful: I slept late, got up around 9, got myself off to work from 12-5, and then met up with friends for the season premiere of Torchwood on Tivo, and pizza, and other goodnesses.
[These posts are part of a 'what does my life look like' series: check out the 'day in the life' category in the sidebar for more: the first post in the category has more information.]
I’m working a temporary job in January (as a reference librarian, woo!) that means I’m working Monday and Tuesday evenings (except for this week, when it’s been Wednesday/Thursday, due to the New Year’s holiday), and Saturday and Sunday afternoons. I’m off from my day job until Monday, but that means that today was my last day with no scheduled work until January 21st. (I love both jobs, but still, that’s a little depressing.)
What’d I do? Go out with friends.
7am: Wake up, get through my morning routine.
8:20am: Head off to pick up one friend from her house, then drive to pick up the other:
9:20am: Arrive at the Science Museum of Minnesota. We were going to see the touring Pompeii exhibit. We went down to see one friend’s mother-in-law (who works there), then got in line for 10am tickets for the exhibit.
10-11:45: We have a fantastic time in the exhibit (they have some interesting religious items - statues, lares, etc. - and some fascinating other items. They also have six of the plaster casts made from the forms of people (and animals) trapped in the explosion, which are very human. We then go have lunch.
12:30 : We come back and look at an excellent exhibit on raptors and birds of prey (covering biology, environmental aspects, cultural usages in the Native American population, and rehab and medicine issues. Very nicely done.) We divert to check out the seismic tone generator downstairs, and…
2pm: Come back up for a puppet theatre show called “The Pumpkin Girl” recommended by my friend’s MIL. (Very endearing and sweet: it’s a folk tale from Iran which has some resemblance to Cinderella. Also, it has an ogre, a wolf, a lion, and a girl in a pumpkin. What’s not to like?) We then hang out and chat to friend’s MIL and co-workers for a good bit, cheerfully geeking about rocks, bones, and other interesting natural objects.
3pm: We go to the Omnitheatre. I’d been warned by a co-worker that this film (about Greece and Greek history) is amazingly boring (She’s a Latin teacher. Her comment is “How can you make Greece boring? They did. It was very strange.”) But she’d recommended the visuals (which were stunning, but really, Santorini does that nicely without too much need to help, and the tickets were free.) At the end of the show, we discovered that all three of us wanted to snark about the same bits of narration (which is part of why these people are my close friends: we share similar desires in our information resources.)
4pm: We head to the gift shop (where I find a gorgeous and surprisingly inexpensive glass jar that I intend to use for water on my eventual group altar: it’s a clear turquoise glass.) We putter at books, and head off.
4:30: We go to two stores we want to introduce my second friend to - one is an excellent consignment store that friend one and I had great luck in previously. We have a fantastic time, find things we like, and get a chance to try on things and get feedback. (These two friends and another are all collaborating to get me a more interesting wardrobe that still meets my requirements for comfort and wearability: I was wearing one of our recent finds today which was a loose fitting silk shirt that was incredibly comfortable and flattering and interesting! (Far more so than my usual turtlenecks…)
The other store is called “Fairy Godmother” which has all sorts of lovely little things. (and also one of the best card selections for people I’m likely to give greeting cards to.) We spent less time here, because we were getting tired, but it was good to stop in. I drove both friends back, and ….
7pm Get home myself. Have computer time, cat-petting time, a bath, some dinner - and now it’s 11pm, and I need to aim at playing my harp and going to bed.
[Part of a series of posts about daily life and schedules: check out the day in the life category in the sidebar for more: the first post in that category has more explanation]
To get an idea of a typical day when I’m not doing anything hugely scheduled, here is my yesterday.
5:45 : My alarm goes off with a gentle CD. I pet the cat, get up, use the bathroom, and settle down to my morning computer check. While on the computer, put my hair up for the day, have the extract I take. I try to eat breakfast, but this is not one of the days when that happens.
6:40: I do my brief morning devotionals - right now, this involves a brief welcome to the four quarters and to my deities. Sometimes it involves some moving meditation (dance, in my case). I also apply a little perfume, the other part of my daily practice.
6:55ish: I fill the electric kettle with water and turn it on. My herbalist wants me to drink at least two cups of the tea mix she suggests every day, so I boil water, add it to my french press mug, bring it to work, and stop it steeping when I get there. Get dressed while the water is going.
7:10: Walk out of the house, petting the cat one last time.
7:30: I’m at work, and I’ll be here until 4pm. (The joy of school schedules.) It’s the last day before finals, so there’s a lot of chaos, but it’s a decent day. Our current online resource project is almost ready to go. I eat lunch around 11:30, as usual.
4:10: Leave a little bit late, due to waiting for one of our tech guys to finish up fixing something in the lab. Head off to a friend’s house for our regular walking date.
4:40: Arrive at friend’s house. We do a short walk, because the air quality is not great, and I need to run bunches of errands. We figure out plans for help with party prep for her party on Friday, talk about various things, and work out other bits of scheduling.
5:10: I’m in the car again to drop off books at the library near her, and pick up a couple on hold. As always, I walk out with about 10 books. Once I’m out of the library, I head out to do some shopping.
5:40: I stop by one of our malls to hit both Borders (for a particular CD from a local music ensemble for my mother) and PetSmart (for more cat food). I get out of both fairly fast, even though there’s a line at Borders.
6:30: I walk in the door at home, and immediately set yeast proofing for bread, since I’ve been really strongly encouraged to bring another loaf like the one I brought to Yule to our meeting on Wednesday. (It’s my basic bread recipe with cinnamon, nutmeg, and cardamon instead of my usual herbs. Also about a third of a stick of softened butter.)
6:45: I’ve changed, and the bread is mixed and rising. I start marinating some mushrooms for baked mushrooms later, and I steam some potstickers for dinner, part 1. Once those are in progress, I work on some computer stuff. I chat with a friend on IM, thank another for a card, and catch up on various fora.
7:30: The mushrooms go in to bake for a bit. I work on shaping the bread (which refuses to behave) but is rising nicely. I give up on shaping, and dust it with crushed amber sugar crystals, cinnamon, and nutmeg.
8:20: The bread goes in. I bake it for 20 minutes, decide that it needs a little longer. By the time it’s done, out, and cooled, it’s after 9, and I decide I’ll have a bath in the morning, rather than before bed (my usual preference).
9:30: I go to bed (setting the alarm to 5:30 to allow for the bath), the cat curls up, and I read until I fall asleep. (Current read: Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body by Courtney Martin: it got recommended in about 3 places I read in the space of a week.)
Other events this week include taking a friend food shopping on Monday (she doesn’t drive, so I take her out to Trader Joe’s every two weeks or so when I do my own run.), this on Tuesday, a meeting on Wednesday, and helping the above friend with party prep on Thursday. I’ll probably talk about this week’s Wednesday tomorrow.
One thing that fascinates me in talking to other witches, Pagans, and people of similar interests, is what it actually means to our day to day lives. As part of that, I want to periodically share a day in my life, to let people get a feel for what my time actually looks like, and what choices I make.
Bear in mind when you read this that I’m single and live alone: a lot of my ‘home’ time is totally on my own schedule. On the other hand, nothing gets clean, the snow doesn’t get shovelled, and I don’t eat if I don’t do the work.
I’m will include some ‘light’ days, and some ‘heavy’ days (depending on my schedule), but we all know I’m more likely to talk about the somewhat interesting ones rather than the tediously boring ones, right?
You can find all the daily life posts by checking out the ‘day in the life’ category over on the sidebar.