I can almost see Spring from here

What I'm up to:

Reading: Neuroscience articles. It's obnoxiously difficult to find articles on our best guesses about consciousness or cognition that are at an appropriate reading level for the kids in my class and that also make their case at all persuasively. 

Listening to:
Two of the songs we've been singing in Glee Club:

Watching:
Loads and loads of Top Chef. It's been the background noise to our evening reading and gaming, recently. Hail, Caesar, which was a whole lot of fun.

Doing:
Planning for next year -- both at school and at home. Visiting my parents in the North Country, going to the Schenectady Science Museum and playing Scrabble. Starting nearly from scratch with getting back into all my good habits.

Eating/Cooking:
Geez. Absolutely nothing interesting. We went to a pretty nice Thai restaurant in Schenectady. At home we've been eating whatever was easiest to make -- lots of pasta and salad.

Something that went particularly well, recently:
Last week we had a visit from an elder in the free school community. My classes have been going well. We had friends over to make music. I had a lovely visit with A. And a wonderful visit with Grandma.

Something that went less well:
The house is a wreck. I can't seem to get myself back on track with stocking the fridge. Some symptoms of depression and anxiety that I'm tracking, to see if they're an anomaly or the start of a trend I need to reverse. A bit of a stomach bug, this week.

Something I'm grateful for:
Confirmation of my continued good health (went for a stress test onaccounta some annoying symptoms -- everything looks good).

Something I'm thinking about:
A variety of ways to simplify my life.

Something I'm looking forward to:
Feeling better. I'm tired of feeling queasy.

Planting seeds

A few weeks ago I let my colleagues know that I won't be returning to the school next year as a staff member.  I've known since August that this was the right choice for me and my family, but it's...   To call it bittersweet doesn't do it justice.  The last three years have been among the most intense and most meaningful experiences of my life. I love my colleagues like family, love the school, love the kids, love the entire community.  But after devoting the majority of my time and energy, these last few years, to the work of building and sustaining the school, I'm feeling the need to spend some time focusing those same resources on my family.

One of the sweetest bits of the bittersweetness is the anticipation of finally getting to all the projects that've been shunted to my Someday/Eventually list, over the course of these last years.  I've been whiling away some of these dreary winter afternoons by dreaming of what the warmer weather will bring.

I use a combination of GTD organizational approaches and Flylady's habit-building when it comes to my work life.  I've been enjoying -- to a truly ridiculous extent -- turning that approach to the rest of my life (I've done it to some extent for years, but this is a more focused effort).

Here you can see my GTD-inspired collection of priorities and associated projects:

And here you can see the space where, over the next months, I'm going to be spiraling out into a really solid foundation for our home life and my own life out in the world.  Starting tonight, of course, with a Shiny Sink!

And here, of course, are all the literal seeds I'll be planting this Spring: