It's been another one of those unscheduled 6 week hiatuses, with some fairly drastic changes for your host. Regular blogging will now resume, to go along with a more general reordering of priorities. Over the last 2 months, a lot has changed, and it's past time to deal with it.
Originally, I disappeared back in the middle of April, right after my second patent came through, because I was in the middle of the mother of all miserable programming projects for work. Artificial deadlines kept popping up (all deadlines are artificial, but some are more pointlessly brutal than others), multiple teams within the larger project all wanted a part of my time, and the challenge was to try to fit an 8-hour workday of actual productivity into the mix along with 3-4 hours a day of teleconferences, plus the 5+ hours of commuting I do twice each week. Spending much time on teleconferences costs you considerably more than just the time actually wasted on the phone, because any call that takes more than 20 minutes is likely to do so only for nefarious reasons. So considerable extra time is wasted steaming about the waste of time. Suffice it to say that your host was putting in 80-hour work weeks again, much like those that caused the original hiatus that sent Semantic Compositions into a tailspin in the middle of last year.
But something different happened this time. Three weeks ago, in the midst of all the craziness, SC went for his first physical exam in half a decade. The results were sobering. Pick a desired health metric, and I can assure you I'm on the wrong side of it. Not always horribly so -- while I've made jokes about my weight before, I have never been the sort of person who ought to be buying two tickets on an airplane -- but a loud and clear message was received that a lot needed to change, and quickly.
Needless to say, the next day I informed my coworkers that I did not consider my paycheck worth dying for, and promptly set about devising the necessary course of action to fix things. This meant returning to the gym, which used to be an occasional source of posts, but which I stopped doing altogether as a result of my present project. A 20-pound weight gain can plausibly be attributed to said project, and while I made some changes that reversed most of that earlier in the year, they were largely passive (eating less) and not at all active. No more. It also meant adopting a rigorously scientific, metrics-based approach to managing my diet and exercise habits, and not allowing excuse-making to go unquantified, and thus not dealt with. As I learn more about what works for me, some of my methods may get written up here. Perhaps most importantly, it meant cutting back hard on stress, and not allowing work to expand to fill all of the waking hours available to do it in. Cutting back the amount of unpaid overtime I was putting in obviously couldn't occur overnight -- before you can redefine your obligations, you have to fulfill your current ones -- but I've reached a point where that excess work is down to a manageable level.
Needless to say, these changes couldn't occur in a vacuum, and I consider myself blessed to work with a pair of truly outstanding individuals who have been very supportive, and have done a lot to help relieve the stress, in part by taking on even more work themselves (and I thought I was the least overworked of the three of us before!). I am also lucky to have another friend who is a doctor (and who occasionally comments here, under a variety of pseudonyms), who has done a lot to help me understand what all the lab values mean and how to respond to them. Most especially, I'm grateful that Mrs. SC has patiently stood by through the depths of my workahol addiction, and has done everything you could ever hope for in a spouse, like sharing in the sacrifices (oh, for a bottle of Coke Classic right now!). SC readers will be edified to know that she's been pushing possible topics at me to give me something to work with once I restarted writing.
So that's the story. As is generally the case when I've gone away for a while, I'm not particularly current on other linguistics blogs, nor on the e-mail account associated with this blog. I apologize if anyone has felt snubbed or ignored, and I hope that this time, both because I enjoy writing this blog and for my health, that things really will stay different.
Welcome back!
Posted by: polyglot conspiracy | June 03, 2006 at 09:04 AM
The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride f*cking with you. F*ck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.
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Posted by: Jaheem | March 30, 2009 at 08:02 PM
The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride f*cking with you. F*ck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.
9bdf33e50499ad1be6bf215537e1c6de
Posted by: Name | March 30, 2009 at 08:03 PM