Ruminations on Cheese
April 5th, 2008
This week I made cheese. This is otherwise not something of particular importance that needs to be reported, however it was one of the longest/oldest things on my todo list, and the fact that I’ve actually done it means that I’ve made a significant dent in all the things on that list. Baby steps in reclaiming my free time, as it were, and I’m starting to feel a little more liberated in that regard.
The catch though is that this next month, at least from a work perspective, is really going to suck. I can’t really go into the details, but in a nutshell all the things on my plate are coming to a head NOW, and some of those things are interfering with the others due to some legacy processes that we’re still trying to scale. Given that I work in the Agency World™, process improvements don’t happen unless you have an ROI argument or a client willing to pay for it. If it’s not built right the first time, chances are you’re stuck.
Thankfully, the experience is invaluable, and I’ve learned some absolutely amazing things about building large scale multi-platform deliverable applications. Next time around much of this won’t happen, though for the time being I’m going to have to find some of my own time to throw at the issue so that in the long run I can have some peace of mind and free time.
Unfortunately, that means that Dance has effectively fallen off my radar. I know I love to do it, but when I can’t guarantee that I’ll be free for my 8PM lessons on a regular basis on account of work, well, I can’t really do anything about that. So in order to make sure I don’t lose the hobby altogether I’m doing a measured pullback and returning to my roots and origins: Salsa. As much as I hate to step away from Swing and Tango and Ballroom and all the others for the time being I’m afraid I just don’t have the time.
Scaling that back, however, has opened up a surprising amount of time for other things, time that under other circumstances would have been spent in transit or in support of my usual posterior shimmying. For instance, my apartment garden is flourishing, my Bonsai are crawling out of their pots, and I’ve started releasing some code libraries again over at Practical Flash. Plus, of course, I’m making cheese.
Having said that, I’m looking forward to this next week. On Monday I’m speaking at Flex Camp Cleveland on “How to build your first Flex Application”. I’m pretty nervous about that one, actually, since I go on right after Ben Forta . Yes, that Ben Forta, the guy who’s pretty much the face of ColdFusion for Adobe. Furthermore, on Friday and Saturday I’ll be volunteering at the Cap City Classic. The original plan was to run the Half Marathon, but splints stopped my training, though I’ve just gotten a small post-work running group started to get me back up to some acceptable mileage. Given that, I’ll be running back and forth from my road marshal position on saturday, which nets me about 8 miles and change with a nice long break between the two.
Then in May, I’m taking a break. I have 2 weeks of “vacation” scheduled, one for the Adobe Community Conference in San Francisco (Which neatly coincides with my birthday. Hint Hint), and then a week of careless lounging at the beach for memorial day. I still have to find someone to help me run the May Adobe User Group presentation night, but I should be able to get that done fairly easily. I hope.
Ahh well, back to polishing off my presentation, and then I’m off to go enjoy the nice weather some more.
viel glueck und als spruch des Tages: “weniger ist mehr”