Natural Example

I’ve seen pictures of this tenacious tree a number of times over the years, so this week I figured it was time to share it. I notice I’ve blogged regularly on the topic of not giving up; indeed, it seems an element of stubbornness is required of anyone who endeavors to string together more than fifty thousand words of a story. For me, when I track my word counts these days, that doggedness has to have an element unrelenting optimism. Last week, across three days, I managed 665 words. Less than a third of my stated goal.

There are always good reasons for this, too. Last week, one of my employer’s longest-serving employees finally gave notice and moved on. It turns out, a lot of what he had been doing is now going to land on my plate, so there were a lot of very long days as we coordinated that hand-off. And no small amount of sadness at losing a valued colleague, even though the opportunity he’s pursuing sounds exciting.

This week, I will be enduring the “joy” of another tooth extraction. Because of how long my days were last week, I may not even have to take any leave time for my scheduled day off.

Oddly, I also read about research released recently indicating Americans are skeptical about the likely return for investing hard work in their careers. It’s a different take on the issues inequality raises, so I was heartened to read, “if the increase in inequality results mostly from factors largely beyond the ability of individuals to control or counteract, then a strong case can be made for a public policy response.” From the reporting in that story, it sounds like there will be some interesting results over the next several years from the new investments headed to six large US cities.

At the intersection of silly and science, then, I saw a Buzzfeed article about training a neural network to generate recipes. I’m totally down with Chuck Wendig’s request to try some Beasy Mist:

“Beasy Mist.” https://t.co/h8EzqVC6A8

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) March 29, 2017

😀

As for the rest of my goals? Tashie is definitely improving, so my phone says I averaged 2,760 steps per day this week. It feels good to be walking more again, though it’s funny to recognize just how out of shape we’ve become while we babied our furbaby through her rehab. Hubs and I also snuggled up to keep up with our two favorite shows, maintaining our weekly in-home date night plan.

I even indulged myself with a book that won a contract with Amazon by participating in the Kindle Scout program. It was so gripping (despite a need for a final copy edit/line edit) it kept me up most of Friday night, and I’ll be writing a review at some point.

This week, in addition to everything else, I have all my monthly reports due at work, so I’ll be pushing hard to meet all my requirements before I drop off at the dental end of the week. I’m not holding my breath on catching up on my word counts, but I will keep digging among the roots of my story to grow my word count. We’ll see how it goes. In the meantime, check out how my ROW80 buddies are doing, and I’ll be back again next week.