I’m in the midst of a big contrast in weeks at the moment. This past week: Some fun events! Next week: Not so much.
This past week
Early last week, there was an informal get-together of some people I worked with at my first daily newspaper job. Dropping in to see them again was as enjoyable as I’d hoped.
Some periods of our lives leave stronger imprints on us than others. I started working at that first job when I was 21 and stayed almost 10 years -- a critical time in my transition from student to adult. I’d moved to Boston to be with my then-boyfriend/now-husband and didn’t know anyone else in the area. My newsroom co-workers became a huge part of my social life.
As is the case in a lot of intense workplaces, we bonded over shared experiences. Some of those bonds have lasted until now, and I’m still close friends with people I worked with four decades ago. But even some people I no longer talk with regularly still evoke strong and (mostly) happy memories.
It was fun to see everyone again and catch up. And I was happy to discover that it felt totally fine to say I’m retired, instead of feeling the need to have a title. Of course it didn’t hurt that I was far from the only one at the table who was either mostly or fully retired. It was great to swap “How’s your retirement going?” info – something I couldn’t have imagined myself doing back in the 1980s, or even at our last reunion a few years ago.
The next day, my husband and I went with friends to the new van Gogh exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. It’s still a surprising-to-me luxury that I can do something like that on a weekday morning when crowds are thinner than on weekends. The paintings were stunning and the exhibit well curated, with interesting tidbits of info about van Gogh’s work and life.
Also this week, I did my version of nerd creativity and coded my first “retrieval augmented generation” (RAG) project in the R programming language. That’s something which made me happy because I greatly enjoy programming new things in R. The app is for my little neighborhood blog, and lets someone ask a natural language question and get an answer based only on my blog posts. I’ve coded RAG apps before, but in Python, a language I don’t know well and don’t enjoy as much as R.
If you’re interested, the app is here (it will take a few seconds to load): https://apps.machlis.com/shiny/district2framingham_chat/
Then on Friday, we finally had a day of glorious weather: sunny and in the high 60s! My fitness watch recorded a 16,000-step day thanks to my first run of the spring, a round-trip walk of 2 miles or so to a meditation class, plus an online dance party to raise money for a girls school in Malawi. And, I even sat outside for a bit without a jacket! Big news for April in New England.
It was a great week – as long as I didn’t look at my investment accounts or otherwise follow the news.
This coming week
Ah, but as we’re reminded repeatedly in my Buddhist meditation classes: Nothing is permanent. Everything changes.
The weather here as I write this on Saturday afternoon: cold rain and 42°.
On the calendar for next week? Not museum visits and a mini-reunion, but colonoscopy prep, my colonoscopy (rescheduled from last month), and jury duty. All the same week! Ho ho ho!
I’m not exactly looking forward to any of that. But I’m still grateful that I don’t have to squeeze it all in around a full-time job, which would have significantly compounded the stress.
I remember the last time I was called for jury duty. I wasn’t picked for a trial, but we still had to wait around for hours. Of course I was trying to answer work email and get other work done between instructions from court officials. It was basically a Workday Plus.
This year, I’ve got nothing urgent that needs to be finished while I’m at the courthouse. There is an online tech conference I wanted to “attend” remotely, which I might try to do if I’m hanging around waiting to see if we’re called. Otherwise I’ll try to read a book on my iPad, or maybe bring a project to crochet, or check in on Bluesky. I can watch conference recordings later whenever they’re available online – I’m still very interested in the topic, but it’s OK now if I don’t see it the day it happens.
If I’m not picked to sit on a trial that lasts multiple days, I may still get to my meditation class this Friday. As for the weather, it’s not looking great for most of the week. But hopefully Spring will return sometime this month!
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