Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote a marvelous book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. In it, he describes the ease and flow of our spirits when we have achieved an optimal level of competence in doing our lives and our jobs. With flow comes the success of doing a job well, but also the intense focus [...]
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Twas the night before going back to school and all through the house Creatures were stirring sleeplessly… including the mouse (gerbil). We have dusted off the notebooks, found all the important pencils and pens required for school, collected fresh clothes, checked the lunchroom account balance…. and tomorrow it’s back to school. I also unearthed a [...]
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Part of traveling is finding the unexpected, the serendipity, the extraordinary. Though we plan and plan for everything to “go without a hitch,” sometimes hitches make the journey very interesting. And sometimes, they just make it longer. We got back to the airport to discover our car battery dead as a great box of dead [...]
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It’s after Christmas and the damage on the wallet is still rolling in, but soon the financial bleeding will stop (before the tax bleed begins). The house is still a wreck, and dusting the darn nutcracker is fiddly. One entire box of lights hasn’t been put up in two years, and didn’t get up again [...]
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I really should have a much more interesting post for today, but right now, all I can think of is Turkey Soup. Mmmmm. I have all the ingredients. Leftover turkey (very important — has to be leftover, picked off the carcass personally), turkey broth (made from aforementioned carcass), some kind of vegetables (carrots and celery [...]
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Some of us, I guess, require a lot more than a simple list or a decision to make a committment to change. We feed off of the collective energy put into New Year’s Eve. It is an impressive display, isn’t it, creating a lot of momentum for whatever project is at hand. But what if [...]
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Instead of resolutions this year, I believe I will ponder this three-word rubric that I used when I taught writing. It’s quite simple: what are you going to START doing, what are you going to STOP doing, and what are you going to KEEP doing in 2009? One new start is an e-book I hope [...]
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Now I’m really behind… having skipped another day, with no catch-ups. Ah well, the sop to my conscience is that at least I’m busy and living well, rather than grinching in the background. Yesterday, we drove up from San Diego to Los Angeles… I intentionally wanted to take all day. We took the PCH from [...]
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I am behind in my Holidailies posts, which means I may drop below the dreaded line. The bright sunny afternoons, the beach here, the mild temperatures and the laid back California folks are having a turkey effect on me, which is a good thing for me, not such a great thing for racking up blog [...]
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The above phrase is a medical school rubric for simple procedures, such as starting an IV, doing IM injections and other technical work, up to and including invasive surgical procedures. While this model is sometimes disputed for safety and confidence issues, in non-invasive procedures and operations, such as knitting, painting, sewing, baking bread and embroidery, [...]
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