Elise Matthesen

This is reminding me of the fortune cookie that told me "The reward of patience is patience."

My wrangler, with whom I have a weekly meeting which I refer to as "renting some executive function", pointed out recently that I have completed three large finance-related To Do things that have been on my list for a long time. This is excellent. Now I move on to the need-to-do things that were on that list fully as long but were not quite as survival-related in terms of direness.

(My wrangler continues to be one of the most high-return things I pay for someone to do.)

The things that have moved to forefront positions involve (mostly) art and the things around art that make the art possible. It's interesting to have a To Do list that doesn't start with "Work on X, Y, and Z financial things until the screaming point, and then go to the workbench until you're OK again."

(Workbench time improves everything except overuse and inflammation in the hands and arms.)

I guess I should think of a thing that's a relief from workbench, in order to have something to rest my hands during the say.

Huh. I've recently begun listening to podcasts, which is a thing I mostly do while watching the live captions on screen, unless the podcasters are really good at enunciation, very cleanly recorded and produced, and in the range of sounds I can hear better. Stuff I don't need to watch captions for quite so assiduously can be played while I am at the workbench, if it's that kind of workbench day. Maybe I could save the challenging ones for breaktime? Rest my hands, ice what needs icing, watch the words while I listen to the podcast?

Do any of you have favorite podcast episodes? I'm a person that loves documentaries and that loved interviewing people about their passions back when I was a small-time journalist.

This birthday month practice that I am doing, which is to get enough sleep (where 'enough' is defined as 'as much as my body asks for' rather than 'as much as i give my body before i wake using external means'), is startling sometimes. Granted, I did go to bed really late, but I did not expect my waking time today to be after 4 p.m. That's a bunch of sleep. I am trying to learn from this. Also, I think it's helping relax some muscles and might lead to some good things.

On the good side of today, I remembered to try a perfume, which is a thing that almost always makes me happy. (I use scent for various things including pain management. One side benefit of having minimal f2f social contact since the pandemic started is that I haven't had to keep track of where I was being and who I was being around and how I should arrange my schedule so that I could do scent work late in the day after being around anyone it might trouble, et cetera.) On the bad side of today, it turns out that today is a day my hands do not work as well as I would wish, so I spilled a bunch of BPAL single note Golden Champa Attar when I opened it, inadvertently turning today into a slather day. On the oh well side of today, it turns out I don't actually love this perfume, so it will go in the Go Away Box for swaps and sales when the weather turns coolish, so having spilled it does not bum me out too much.

Also for today I decided to start the day's entry early (well, it's early in my particular day, seeing as I woke up less than an hour and a half ago), while in the part of my day which is post-medication-ingestion and pre-put-food-in-me, the part where the meds settle. So here is an early start, and I will add more if the day works out that way.

And how is your day going? Do you use scents for anything? Ands how are your hands doing, and the coordination thereof?