I am deep into revisions on Off the Clock. (My next book; current subtitle is “The fine art of feeling less busy while getting more done.”) This is consuming pretty much all my mental energy, so I don’t have a lot on the blog front. So just a few thoughts.
First, please leave a comment on the previous post on abandoned books! I will choose a comment at random (using a random number generator) and that commenter can choose one of my abandoned books. But even if you have no interest in the give-away, it’s a fun discussion. Certain books seem to have been abandoned by a LOT of people.
I had an unexpectedly charmed dealing with the health care system yesterday. My daughter had a fever and ear ache last week, and then I thought it was getting better, but then she clearly couldn’t hear us well on Monday. So I called her pediatrician’s office when it opened on Tuesday morning. They offered me an appointment with her physician at 11:30. I picked my daughter up from camp at 11:20. We got to the office at 11:28, and despite the waiting room being pretty full, we were in by 11:32 (maybe the others were seeing other providers?) We got a quick ear infection diagnosis, and were in the car to the drug store by 11:50. They filled the scrip while my daughter and I chose a shade of nail polish. I made it back to the camp before 12:30 when the boys got out. Efficiency!
I’m still running daily. I had a goal to run the equivalent of a 5k daily in Q2. I’m only 0.8 miles, total, ahead of schedule, so I guess I need to push it for the next week. I really thought I was going to be farther ahead than that, but this is often the fascinating result of tracking things. It feels like I’m running a lot, so I would have assumed I had done a lot more than a 5k daily. Nope.
Speaking of gaps between perception and reality — the American Time Use Survey should be out next week! Long time readers know this is my favorite time survey (yes, I have one). More on that when it’s released. One of the fun findings last year is that the amount Americans sleep per day has actually *risen* by a statistically significant amount over the last 15 years.
I have two karate belt graduation ceremonies on Saturday. Good times.
This morning, while I was making the kids waffles, my daughter twisted off the top of a squishy rubber dinosaur. Inside were thousands of tiny pellets, about the size of a grain of sand. I have been stepping on them all day. This is one of those parenting things where you just think why? Why?
Pellets and sand – the bane of my parenting existence!!
And it’s my goal to be one of the contributors to the increased sleep per night statistic. Life is just so much better when we get sleep.
@Revanche – there’s been a lot of stuff on the floor this week. Pellets from the dinosaur, pellets from the noisemaker my kids made in church camp (and then broke), plus the 2-year-old dumping a flower pot out of the floor. And taking off his diaper and peeing on the floor, but that’s sort of in a different category.
Reminds me of the time a bean bag chair busted in my daughter’s room. 3 vacuums and a few hours later we sort of had the mess contained but we found those little electrostatic balls in everything for weeks afterwards…
Interesting fact about the increase of sleep. Does this reflect demographic changes (e.g., changes in the labor force participation rate), or does it hold across demographic groups?
@L – I haven’t looked at the numbers broken out across demographics, though even the groups you’d think would sleep quite little (e.g. employed parents of young kids) average more than 8 hours/day. I suspect the increase over the whole population is partly labor force participation, as work and sleep tend to be inversely correlated (something I found with my time diary studies too). So as fewer people are working, that means sleep will be higher. There may be aspects of an aging population too.