August Moon: day 10

How will you make time work for you?

I think I accidentally answered this one yesterday - which is helpful, because I'm not sure I'm up to a very detailed post today. How to reconcile making a decent fist of the day job and doing all the other things I want to do. How to not end up, the first day of holiday when I don't actually have to do anything, spending most of the day in bed with an epic sore throat and no energy.

I talked about the nine-day fortnight yesterday: one day off every two weeks, with the house to myself. The downside to that arrangement is of course that each work day is forty-five minutes longer.

I've also mentioned the advantages of a long commute: reading time and writing time. I do at least reclaim a little bit of my day that way.

I would like my day to start a tiny bit later. Say half an hour. Say I were to aim for the 0745 rather than the 0715. That would mean getting up at 0615, which would probably leave me feeling a little bit more human. Start work at 0855. Half an hour for lunch (except on Pilates days, when it's an hour) would mean finishing at 1625 and the 1645 train home. If I were to add forty-five minutes onto the end of the day I'd finish at 1710 and get the 1745 train home. That would get me home at about seven o'clock. That's later than I want to be. Hmm. Need to think about that. There isn't enough work at the moment anyway.

Oh yes, and the other thing I was going to do when Pilates stopped being on a Wednesday was to go to the lunchtime communion service at the church over the road. That's going to kick in mid-September. It will help with the thing where I reclaim lunchtimes for myself, too. I wouldn't mind cutting lunchtimes the rest of the week down to 'twenty minutes with a book and a sandwich'.

I wonder if what I really want to do is go part-time. It would be a heck of a financial hit, particularly in terms of travel cost, since I'd still need an annual season ticket, and I feel that it's probably not an option at the moment. Would I want to, if it were and I could afford it? Probably. Well, that's a thing to think about.

August Moon: check-in

It's a beautiful moon. We are staying with my mother at the moment, and she has put us in the bedroom with a balcony looking south out over the English Channel. There's very little sky-glow and the moon is a sharp silver sickle. Vega is very bright and the Milky Way stretches east-west. We're very lucky.

I have come down with some vile bug and have spent most of today either in bed or sitting up in a chair feeling sorry for myself. I suspect it's a case of not having had enough holidays, and having been doing too much gallivanting on the ones I have had.

This weekend - a long drive and a wedding and a family get-together - has been the hinge between a week of work and a week of (it seems) enforced idleness. (Although I am still holding on to the hope that I'll be well enough tomorrow or Thursday to go to Amazon World and look at the poison arrow frogs.) In some ways it's easier to get August Moon posts done during a work day; I have the prompts buzzing in the back of my mind all day and the words pour out pretty quickly. On holiday - particularly one like this, where there are friends and family all over the place, and the laptop's at the bottom of the suitcase, and my brain's running on only two cylinders - it's more difficult. But I'm managing to carve out half-hours here and there to get on with it.

I've just finished reading White Feathers, Susan Lanigan's first novel, and am feeling mighty privileged because I don't think it's officially released yet, and also I saw the thing come together before my eyes. (In the acknowledgements, Susan credits the Pico group. I don't wish to blow our cover, but I'm part of it too and it's a fantastic, supportive, encouraging group, the best incentive to write that I've ever come across.) I will do a proper review tomorrow as part of the Wednesday What Are You Reading thing, and will content myself for the moment by saying, see? It can be done and I can do it too