Returning to Normality (such as it is)

My long weekend has come & gone and the two additional days away from my cube to attend an office workshop are now ended: I'm back in my cube once again. After a cutover of some applications to a new hardware platform and creating a stack of work tickets for our weekend shifts, I'm largely caught up on my projects. Working the extra hours last week has certainly made this morning's return easier.

cuyahogarvr seems to be settling in nicely. Nearly all of the large furniture items have been arranged and/or stored so we're now down to merging smaller items such as stationery, tins of food and the like.

After nearly two weeks of being away from a microphone, we're back to square dance calling tonight with our regular Mainstream/Plus club night with the DC Lambda Squares. I'm still exhausted from my extended days in workshops so I might do a couple of the first tips and leave the bulk to kent4str. I'm still hoping to attend Friday's Zig Zaggers (A2) with justetthon but it's largely contingent on how early we're getting up Saturday and how much sleep I get tonight.

It's raining heavily outside as I write this but it should lighten up by early afternoon. I haven't heard a weather forecast in days so I was surprised when I was wakened by violent winds and pounding rain against the windows this morning around 4 AM. The reservoirs could certainly use the extra rainfall even if it made the morning commute somewhat unpleasant.

Returning to Normality (such as it is)

My long weekend has come & gone and the two additional days away from my cube to attend an office workshop are now ended: I'm back in my cube once again. After a cutover of some applications to a new hardware platform and creating a stack of work tickets for our weekend shifts, I'm largely caught up on my projects. Working the extra hours last week has certainly made this morning's return easier.

cuyahogarvr seems to be settling in nicely. Nearly all of the large furniture items have been arranged and/or stored so we're now down to merging smaller items such as stationery, tins of food and the like.

After nearly two weeks of being away from a microphone, we're back to square dance calling tonight with our regular Mainstream/Plus club night with the DC Lambda Squares. I'm still exhausted from my extended days in workshops so I might do a couple of the first tips and leave the bulk to kent4str. I'm still hoping to attend Friday's Zig Zaggers (A2) with justetthon but it's largely contingent on how early we're getting up Saturday and how much sleep I get tonight.

It's raining heavily outside as I write this but it should lighten up by early afternoon. I haven't heard a weather forecast in days so I was surprised when I was wakened by violent winds and pounding rain against the windows this morning around 4 AM. The reservoirs could certainly use the extra rainfall even if it made the morning commute somewhat unpleasant.

LOPSA Renewal

I received an e-mail notification that my membership in the League of Professional Systems Administrators is due in three days. I've renewed although I must confess I don't feel much like a sysadmin these days. My duties and responsibilities make me more a bureaucrat & traffic cop than an admin.

LOPSA Renewal

I received an e-mail notification that my membership in the League of Professional Systems Administrators is due in three days. I've renewed although I must confess I don't feel much like a sysadmin these days. My duties and responsibilities make me more a bureaucrat & traffic cop than an admin.

Wrapping up the Personal Insight Workshop

Yesterday's session was nearly as long as the prior day's: 11 hours. There was lots of new material but so much that a lot didn't sink it. It didn't help that there was occasional quackery mixed in the lot, but I'll get to that in a moment.

I've always considered myself trustworthy, but the workshop probed the nature of trust more thoroughly than I had seen previously. In this particular model, trust a combination of four aspects: reliability, acceptance, openness and consistency. I give myself extremely high grades for reliability and consistency although I'm not that great at acceptance and especially openness. Noted. I'm not sure at the moment if I should attempt to shore up my weak points or fine-tune my strong ones... more time and self-reflection is required here.

We did an exercise on "withholds," those times when we hold regrets, resentment or grudges by refusing forgiveness for ourselves or others. This is one exercise I just couldn't honestly participate. While I have a stack of withholds, perhaps more than most mortals, I don't find them as debilitating or draining as the facilitators believed they were, and I find they are very useful & powerful reminders of past betrayals. I know there is a difference between forgiving and forgetting and that this exercise was in the former rather than the latter, but I find forgiving makes the forgetting --and therefore repeating errors in trusting the untrustworthy-- vastly easier. I'm really not into repeating past errors. Withholds aren't a drain on my energy: they're an investment in my self-protection.

We also worked on thinking about things we retain from our childhood and thing which we have rejected. This module was largely forgettable.

The meditation portion --Dynamic Mind Practice (Anna Wise)-- was interesting but I already had some practice at this so it wasn't as valuable to me as others. Indeed, there was a portion which annoyed me, the aforementioned quackery.

I am easily annoyed by people who confuse models of reality with reality itself. In this particular meditation methodology, one relaxes to a point where we hit some sort of stress blockage which then unravels, releasing energy and brings us slightly back out of a restful state until it is resolved and then we sink lower into meditation. Lather, rinse, repeat. OK, I accept this as a model to demonstrate the concepts but our facilitators were talking about this in terms of actual energy (presumably chemical) and stress as tangible blockages. Nuts to them on this: good model, bad implementation.

Another bit which annoyed me had to do with Jungian psychology --of which I'm already skeptical-- but it may merely be a bad translation. We grow by having new and novel experiences; in Jung's synchronicity theory, we have an unconscious need to transform & grow. The quote, however, is as follows: "We attract experiences to us which allow us to become conscious of any limited or restricted parts of ourselves in order to transform." I have problems with the word 'attract.'

I could accept that we unconsciously seek out such experiences or that we become sensitized to such situations which occur randomly in our lives because they help us grow. I cannot accept that somehow we magically attract such situations. When someone blindsides me in a meeting, I'm not "attracting" the unpleasant surprise: it either just happens or, at worst, I unconsciously set myself up for it by ignoring preceding signals. Not having Jung's original German text in hand, I may be reading too much into a sloppy translation. Or Jung was just as spectacularly wrong as Freud was on so many topics.

The entire workshop wrapped up with everyone pairing off to co-mentor each other on setting a personal and professional commitment, then following up in the near future to ensure we work towards our goals. I'm going to personally work harder on my square dance calling, being willing to take more risks on the microphone with challenging choreo when appropriate; professionally, I'm going to raise my profile within my division by badgering my manager for more projects. If my manager doesn't comply, I'll be badgering other managers and directors until I'm unleashed onto something new and challenging.

There's still much self-reflection to work on. I hope to make some additional time very soon to continue reading through the materials & notes while the workshop is still fresh in memory.

Wrapping up the Personal Insight Workshop

Yesterday's session was nearly as long as the prior day's: 11 hours. There was lots of new material but so much that a lot didn't sink it. It didn't help that there was occasional quackery mixed in the lot, but I'll get to that in a moment.

I've always considered myself trustworthy, but the workshop probed the nature of trust more thoroughly than I had seen previously. In this particular model, trust a combination of four aspects: reliability, acceptance, openness and consistency. I give myself extremely high grades for reliability and consistency although I'm not that great at acceptance and especially openness. Noted. I'm not sure at the moment if I should attempt to shore up my weak points or fine-tune my strong ones... more time and self-reflection is required here.

We did an exercise on "withholds," those times when we hold regrets, resentment or grudges by refusing forgiveness for ourselves or others. This is one exercise I just couldn't honestly participate. While I have a stack of withholds, perhaps more than most mortals, I don't find them as debilitating or draining as the facilitators believed they were, and I find they are very useful & powerful reminders of past betrayals. I know there is a difference between forgiving and forgetting and that this exercise was in the former rather than the latter, but I find forgiving makes the forgetting --and therefore repeating errors in trusting the untrustworthy-- vastly easier. I'm really not into repeating past errors. Withholds aren't a drain on my energy: they're an investment in my self-protection.

We also worked on thinking about things we retain from our childhood and thing which we have rejected. This module was largely forgettable.

The meditation portion --Dynamic Mind Practice (Anna Wise)-- was interesting but I already had some practice at this so it wasn't as valuable to me as others. Indeed, there was a portion which annoyed me, the aforementioned quackery.

I am easily annoyed by people who confuse models of reality with reality itself. In this particular meditation methodology, one relaxes to a point where we hit some sort of stress blockage which then unravels, releasing energy and brings us slightly back out of a restful state until it is resolved and then we sink lower into meditation. Lather, rinse, repeat. OK, I accept this as a model to demonstrate the concepts but our facilitators were talking about this in terms of actual energy (presumably chemical) and stress as tangible blockages. Nuts to them on this: good model, bad implementation.

Another bit which annoyed me had to do with Jungian psychology --of which I'm already skeptical-- but it may merely be a bad translation. We grow by having new and novel experiences; in Jung's synchronicity theory, we have an unconscious need to transform & grow. The quote, however, is as follows: "We attract experiences to us which allow us to become conscious of any limited or restricted parts of ourselves in order to transform." I have problems with the word 'attract.'

I could accept that we unconsciously seek out such experiences or that we become sensitized to such situations which occur randomly in our lives because they help us grow. I cannot accept that somehow we magically attract such situations. When someone blindsides me in a meeting, I'm not "attracting" the unpleasant surprise: it either just happens or, at worst, I unconsciously set myself up for it by ignoring preceding signals. Not having Jung's original German text in hand, I may be reading too much into a sloppy translation. Or Jung was just as spectacularly wrong as Freud was on so many topics.

The entire workshop wrapped up with everyone pairing off to co-mentor each other on setting a personal and professional commitment, then following up in the near future to ensure we work towards our goals. I'm going to personally work harder on my square dance calling, being willing to take more risks on the microphone with challenging choreo when appropriate; professionally, I'm going to raise my profile within my division by badgering my manager for more projects. If my manager doesn't comply, I'll be badgering other managers and directors until I'm unleashed onto something new and challenging.

There's still much self-reflection to work on. I hope to make some additional time very soon to continue reading through the materials & notes while the workshop is still fresh in memory.

Mainstream/Plus Club Night

Just got home from DC Lambda Squares' regular club night. I opened the evening by calling two Mainstream and two Plus tips in the first hour; kent4str arrived sometime during my block and called all Plus during the latter hour of the evening.

There's not much else to report on tonight. I'm still recovering from sleep deprivation of the past few days; the dancers tonight should be thanking god I managed to get in a short nap before heading downtown to call.

Mainstream/Plus Club Night

Just got home from DC Lambda Squares' regular club night. I opened the evening by calling two Mainstream and two Plus tips in the first hour; kent4str arrived sometime during my block and called all Plus during the latter hour of the evening.

There's not much else to report on tonight. I'm still recovering from sleep deprivation of the past few days; the dancers tonight should be thanking god I managed to get in a short nap before heading downtown to call.