Harbingers

Yesterday, I saw a vulture picking at a dead squirrel. Yes, that’s quite a visual to start a post but vultures are migratory and when they show up, it means spring is not too far away. Also, I saw a large flight of sandhill cranes flying north. It is always a sight because there were at least 50 birds and they have the most distinctive call even though sometimes you’ll hear them but struggle to see them because they can fly pretty high. Lastly, we have some daffodils attempting to come up. So, even though we are about to hit with another cold blast this weekend, spring is coming.

Today was kind of a return to normal day. I told you about Dolly which was Sunday but I may also have forgotten to mention that our furnace went out while we were on vacation so we came back to a cold house. Fortunately, we were able to get a new one installed yesterday so it just meant one cold day.

And, yesterday, I got to meet with the HR flack to talk about my team. They’ve got a nice spreadsheet to score people on so that all decisions about firing can be done as objectively as possible. Even though some of the pieces that go into the ratings are subjective but no matter it is all legal. I was talking with a finance guy today and he said something about anyone on the books at the end of June still counts against us next year which means the firings will likely commence soon. We are going through the annual reviews and the first two have been interesting as how do you talk about the future when the future might only be a couple of months.

Dancing is on tap for tonight with two lessons. I have no idea what we will be doing. I’ll have to brush up on my notes because I wasn’t thinking about much last week. So we’ll see how it goes.

And I had my workout today. It was good to get back to that. I actually managed to have a higher than normal step count last week even though we were on vacation. We did a lot of walking on the beach and sight seeing and walking between places for dinner and breakfast. Of course we also had gelato every day so that cancelled it all out.

Anyway, she had me trying to do this one thing that was kind of like a push up except I was only supposed to move my shoulder blades. Another one of those weird things where you find out that there are certain parts that don’t know how to work on their own. As usual, she finished with planks. Four of 20 seconds each with a 10 second rest between. I hate planks.

So back from vacation and back to the real world. The rhythm of the house is different without Dolly. Rocco still seems a bit off and a little more clingy than normal. I have no idea what will happen the rest of the year. From a financial security standpoint, keeping the job is best. But I’m not sure that is really best for my mental state. I’m just going to go with flow and see what happens assuming that whatever happens is for a reason.