Fortunately we had childcare from about 9:15, so I was able to get most of my work done. Three of the five children saw Dogman. I finished a draft of a book chapter. I did a podcast interview. I am getting close to caught up on my time tracking emails (this was a project…I’m so glad that we had 1600+ people tracking their time in January but it has taken me longer than I’d like to get back to everyone).

Some content from this week…Over at Before Breakfast, I had episodes on “The case for a winter walk” and “Carpooling isn’t just for kids.” For the longer episode I interviewed Mary Laura Philpott about “Being patient until the right idea comes.” She talks about how she’s had a gentle year creatively as she figures out her next project. She’s approaching the process with curiosity, rather than a sense of hustle. There are turtle metaphors. Please check it out!

Over at Vanderhacks, I piggybacked on Groundhog Day and the associated movie to ask “Would you live today over again?” Related: “How to enjoy 6 more weeks of winter.” I suggested people “Try a 30-minute closet triage” and “How to (finally) make progress on your personal to-do list” (those two are behind the paywall).

The Best of Both Worlds Patreon community had a fun discussion of the best jeans (I have been informed that this was an expensive thread). We also talked early money memories, and favorite TV shows. Membership is $9/month (you can join here).

Thanks for supporting my writing and podcasting! I appreciate it. In the meantime, a tongue-in-cheek sonnet about big game football…

Some sixty thousand people in the stands
All scream alike as seconds tick to none.
The lights glow green, the crowd is slapping hands
confetti flutters, people start to run,

as fireworks explode into the air.
The players rush the field, their helmets tossed.
In this cold night, the revelers will dare
to claim that all is changed from if they’d lost.

And yet, a few blocks over, someone else
sits in her condo, watching Netflix, sure,
that nothing else has happened, and she tells
her friend that it’s a boring night, and you’re

on your way over right? Oh yes, I’ll try.
I see some traffic — but I don’t know why.

Photo: A different sort of bird, through the car window. Note: no snow.

In the meantime…Before Breakfast continues to feature four short (new) tips each week plus a longer episode featuring an interview. This week’s interview was with novelist Camille Pagán. She talked about making time for creative work, and how inspiration tends to follow the work. We don’t get inspired and then sit down and write a novel (or anything else). We sit down regularly to write and then we get ideas. I know this is true for me. I also suggested that people “Don’t sweat the seconds” and that you might “Browse for a project.”

The Vanderhacks newsletter continues to grow! Each week I share five ideas to make life better. This week I shared ideas to “Make journaling useful.” The post behind the paywall was about “How to lighten your mental load.”

This week’s Best of Both Worlds episode on new routines, whining, and preschool vs. childcare was so fun for me that I listened to it twice. Check it out! In the meantime, the BOBW Patreon community has been discussing planning fatigue, and if there’s actually any upside to waiting to make holiday plans…which has become a discussion of people who plan vs. people who seem allergic to making plans (and how, if those folks aren’t living in chaos, it’s often because they’re relying on other people in their lives to figure things out…).

Thanks for reading/listening! I appreciate it.

I also listened to the Christmas Oratorio this week. I wound up listening more than once because the first video I’d chosen wasn’t really my favorite. It’s a frequently performed work so not everyone does it as well as it could be done. I wound up settling on the JS Bach Foundation version. I’m a big fan of the opening chorus to the 5th part. So catchy. That powered me through a strength training session the other day. I should be going to a Bach concert this weekend put on by an early music group, so I’m looking forward to that.

Meanwhile….I took my 14-year-old (almost 15-year-old!) to a running store last night to get fitted for better running shoes. He’s been running on the high school cross-country team for the last few weeks and his coach pointed out that he was over-pronating so we went to get some more stabilizing shoes. It was quite the involved experience (he tried on like 8 pairs!) but we left with one he liked. And several pairs of running socks because, hey, we were there.

It’s been fun to watch him do this sport, which I’m now realizing would have been a fairly accessible high school or middle school sport to do. Like on an average day they do some warm-ups then go for a 45-minute run. That sounds like a very pleasant way to end a school day! Not that dissimilar to what I do now.

Although I’ve actually been running in the morning more lately. Now that no one usually needs to be up before 7 a.m. if I pop up early enough, I will go run 2 miles on the treadmill. I’ve been aiming to do some speed work during these sessions. I’m really, really slow (my “speed” is like 7 mph) but hopefully it will help. I do another long run this weekend, but probably not quite as long because I’m planning to do a hike with an area trails association too. Hopefully tonight will be fairly chill (such as it ever is) because it’s been a long week. I went to two back-to-school nights this week, but those are now over. We hit all four! I also feel like I’ve been doing a lot of paperwork. The two high school kids will go to NYC with their school music program this spring and I need to register for that and I was somewhat blindsided by the paperwork volume for an activity for the 9-year-old. I signed him up for an after-school robotics activity, but since it’s run by the official aftercare provider, I had to do everything to register for that as a childcare agency – like the various agreements, vaccination record, getting the app from the childcare provider with a pin to check him out (as did everyone else who might check him out), etc. Whoa.

In the meantime, here’s this week’s content… Over at the Best of Both Worlds Patreon community page, I just posted the recording of our book club discussion on Jodi Wellman’s You Only Die Once. Membership is $9/month and we have multiple discussion threads going each week on issues related to work and life. Please check it out!

The Before Breakfast podcast featured my longer episode where I interview Sarah Hart-Unger about mornings and routines. I also have an episode advising to “Check if you’ll need to reschedule” and one on the idea to “Start a goal club.”

At Vanderhacks I wrote that “Complaining is boring.” I suggested that one might “Map out a busy season.” And behind the paywall I noted that “Procrastination happens” — but here are my tips for getting things done anyway. Next week I’ll be starting my video posts (I believe usually on Tuesdays but we shall see).

Thanks for reading!

I was booked to give a speech in Tampa at 8:50 a.m. on Thursday. I planned to fly from PHL to Tampa on the last direct flight on Wednesday (4:15 p.m.). The plane boarded on time, but then there was some issue with an armrest that had to be repaired. Then maintenance took a little longer and we were slightly delayed. Then we needed to be rerouted around storms that had moved in (possibly during our delay? It was unclear.). The route that air traffic control gave us required more fuel than we had. The pilots and air traffic control went back and forth on this several times. No route was agreed upon, so after almost two hours on the tarmac, we went back to the gate to get more fuel. Alas, at that point, one of our pilots timed out. We all had to deplane as theoretically the airline was finding a reserve, but that did not happen. About 30 minutes later they canceled the flight.

So, what to do? I wound up rebooking on the 7 a.m. flight that got in to Tampa at 9:30. This was, of course, after the original speech was to start, but the hosts agreed to move things around. My speech would now start at 10:15. Fortunately, the venue was only a short distance from the Tampa airport. I’d talk, get back in the car, and with any luck make my original flight home (12:05 p.m.!)

It did seem like much could go wrong in this scenario, what with being on the ground in Tampa for only 2.5 hours, but after the Wednesday disaster, Thursday was fairly charmed. I left my house in Pennsylvania at 5:30 a.m., and was back home in my house by 4 p.m. In between, I went all the way to Florida and back! And gave a speech. We finished at 11:05 a.m., I got in the car and made my flight with plenty of time to spare. Hurrah.

I’m doing Mommy Day #3 this weekend, which will be a bit more elaborate, so more to come on that…

My Medium column this week looked at How to Stop Wishing Time Away.

The Before Breakfast podcast covered several topics, including “Don’t be minute wise and hour foolish,” that “Your friends are my friends,” and why you should “Track time while off the clock.”

Photo: I have no actual photos of Tampa, so this early morning picture of the parking lot at PHL will have to do. I always snap a photo of my car’s location and what deck of the parking garage I’m on. I think I’ll remember but…I don’t. 

In any case, the scripts are all 500-1000 words, with most of them hovering toward the lower end of that range. I wrote the first handful separately, but I’ve kept one word file of Before Breakfast episodes for all the fully edited scripts from then on. The running word count on that file recently crossed 600,000 words.

This is an interesting number. It is roughly the number of words in War and Peace. It is not quite as long as the King James Bible (which clocks in at a bit under 800,000 words) but it is a lot of words nonetheless.

One of the items on my current List of 100 Dreams is to write an epic novel. On some level this is a daunting goal. But I have apparently recorded something equivalent in length over the last three years. It’s just that instead of a sweeping multi-generational character saga, it comes in the form of bite-sized productivity advice.

There are lots of ways to view this realization, but one positive approach is to realize that if I do want to write that epic novel, I could use a similar method. Just write 500-600 words every weekday for three years. Or for two years (I don’t need to actually hit 600,000 words!). Producing scripts has not been onerous. I can often write or edit 2-3 during my 12-year-old’s 1-hour fencing class. Fiction is harder, for sure. The organizational work will be a lot more intense. But the process is still all habit, execution, and patience. Just like anything else. Time passes. Words add up. The question is what they add up to.

(In case anyone is wondering, blog posts also add up. WordPress says I’ve published 2750 posts over the years. If each clocked in at 300 words on average, and my guess is the average is higher, that’s over 800,000 words right there…)