One of my year-long projects this year is listening to all the works of Beethoven. I follow the calendar created at The Complete Beethoven. Usually the daily selections are pretty manageable. Some are quite short (an aria could be like 3-4 minutes), and a lot are in the 20-40 minute range (like a piano concerto).
When I was creating the Bach listening calendar last year I was quite focused on listening minutes — so I’d break up a longer selection into 3-4 days. The creator of The Complete Beethoven seems to have a different philosophy, and over the past few days he not only sprung Leonore on us (the early version of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio), he then sprung another later version of Leonore on us a few days later. Both of these are more than 2 hours long.
Now it could be an amazing listening project (or perhaps music thesis writing project) to compare all the different versions of Leonore (I’m pretty sure there’s a third one out there too?) and Fidelio, but I wasn’t planning to build all that extra listening time into my schedule this week. So I’m a bit behind. Maybe I’ll have a long car trip one of these days where it will be all Beethoven opera.
Something else I have not been doing this week: shopping online sales. Amazon’s Prime days were this week. I do plenty of Amazon shopping — overnight shipping of random items is sometimes what makes my life work. But I didn’t see any sales that particularly inspired me. What I did do was decide to buy my puzzles directly from their manufacturer. I had been buying White Mountain Puzzles at Amazon, but then White Mountain sent me a catalog and I decided I’ve been a customer long enough that I could just skip the middleman. I liked the website format and how they showcased their puzzles and the puzzles actually showed up after something like 3-4 days — so not much slower than Amazon’s 2-day shipping. I am very excited to start my National Parks puzzle! And then it will be on to the Puzzle Library and the ice cream truck ones.
In other news: Lots of content this week…First, I never did a Best of Both Worlds post, but in this week’s episode we had wardrobe expert Marcy Syms on, with Sarah interviewing her. The Q&A this week was about how to think about finances if you’re not currently earning much (training phase/early years) but your partner is more mid-career.
We posted our super secret special episode for Patreon members over there. We’re also having some great discussions on the Patreon page about extended family management and perimenopausal PMS. Good times!
The Before Breakfast podcast featured an interview with time management expert Kelly Nolan. She shared strategies for succeeding at work and life. Please check that out! In the short episodes I talked about how one might “Plan a night of nothing,” and that “You drive a car, not a time machine.” Wanting something to take less time won’t actually make it take less time.
Over at Vanderhacks — my Substack newsletter — I wrote a post about “What I packed (carry-on only) for 10 days in Europe.” That’s behind the paywall, but I was quite proud of my packing job! Honestly, I still could have packed less. I am also suggesting that one might “Plan in a different place.” Sometimes it’s helpful to separate out planning and execution.
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