life and stuff.
i got up early to do a photoshop thing before heading out to metairie with a mellophone that needs repair. thought it would be appropriate to not neglect this space and write a quick entry.
right now i'm in a contradictory busy/not busy sort of rut. mainly, things at work have been super busy - for some reason this year feels more busy than most years i've worked with the TUMB, the result being that when i get home from the MWF rehearsal days i feel pretty exhausted and the only thing i want to do is relax. cook a meal, read a book, play some FTL.
i have a lot of independent projects that are falling to the wayside as a result of this that the more-free-tuesdays-and-thursdays time can't make up for. Many of the independent projects don't have strict deadlines and in the past couple of years i've been doing okay with instilling more self-discipline, but this academic year has been tougher.
so i'm a little frustrated. Not that i don't think that down time is important - i need to be able to achieve life balance between my veg-out time with my productive time with my social time. But i still feel like i can be pushing myself more, doing more, being generally more productive with the time that i do have instead of doing things that are ultimately distractions.
I know that some of this is because work has become more active. I've been given more responsibility, i've been giving myself more responsibility, so even during our "non-busy" periods i'm occupying my time completely with work where in previous years i could get away with doing some of my music writing or other projects during those slow periods. But now with the big recruitment project i took on, with the revamp of the budget report that i built from the ground up, with always trying to find improvements to how we do our operations, to staying on top of inventory that i'm in charge of and dealing with reservation logistics on top of the teaching and writing and deciding to meet with my students once a week, even slow times aren't really slow anymore.
i think part of it will come around - i always go through high and low inertia points, where there's a period of a month or two where i seem to get absolutely nothing done that i need to and then in the next two months i've completely redecorated the house, written two pieces of music, organized a concert, and come up with new ways to use some of my tech. i can start to feel myself turning that corner right now as i somewhat settle into whatever new groove that i'm in.
we'll see what happens. Last october i was going through a bunch of health issues with my back and still managed to get a lot done. maybe i'll make october this year the kick-ass month too, solidify everything that i want to. Here's hoping.