Bridge of Love

After so many weeks of crazy schedule, this was my week to settle into my new normal. To revel in my connections with hubs and my furbabies. Somehow it also became a time shift, so we’ve been able, inexplicably, to get to bed by midnight, and not be horribly discombobulated by the fact that KouKi has decided the new normal is to wake us up with early-morning cuddles. Her choice makes it nearly impossible not to look at the world through love-colored glasses these days: She is insanely cute and so very happy to ensconce herself between us to both absorb and radiate a contented essence of joy. It’s unfathomable that she will already be one year old this week. Even more boggling is that Natasha turned five this past week. Each of them gets a birthday celebration, each of which makes me wonder how it is time flies so quickly.

Interestingly, today I ran across two articles about relationships that look at long-term successful relationships without that love filter, and still come back to it. The first spoke of ways of arguing that help solve the issue while respecting each individual. The second revisited the topic of “trophy wife” from the perspective of appreciating what a strong, independent woman brings to the table as an equal teammate. Earlier this week, I read an article that spoke of the legendary status of certain programmers for their capacity to be stand-alone/lone wolf high achievers. All three taken together point to Rumi’s summation of truth–and KouKi’s avatar capacity for helping us live it daily.

Of course, hubs sent the cautionary note article this week: 20 cognitive biases that screw up decisionmaking. Do you suppose I’m falling into the confirmation or salience bias by seeing an underlying depth of emotion…?

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Either way, the nature of emotional connections makes for excellent story fodder, and I continue to plod forward with incorporating beta reader feedback into book 3. My word count increases and decreases each time I do this, but apparently I’m net plus ~200 after this week’s effort. Not that my effort was as sustained or consistent as I would have liked. Something about the new schedule hasn’t let me be quite as awake or effective in the evenings as I used to be–likely minor sleep deprivation signals.

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We slowly built up our walking habit, too. We walked 6 of 7 days for a total of 10.4 miles… and I felt it that I had been sedentary in prior weeks. Crazy how quickly your muscles fall out of shape. On the other hand, being tired in the evenings also made it easy to decide to watch the final episode of Sherlock Friday night for our stay-at-home date. “His Last Vow” still has us trying to wrap our minds around the various plot twists, so I think we’ve decided the best response is to binge-watch ALL the episodes at once.

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It now being close to the end of this latest round of ROW80, I have to face the fact that I didn’t meet my writing goals: I didn’t finish Fire to Dragon, nor did I post 3 more book reviews. For the most part everything else was on track, though–date nights, walking, and blogging are solidly part of my life. My hope is that now that my work life is settling into a new rhythm and I don’t have quite so much schedule disruption in the offing, I will be able to rejoin some of my favorite writing sprint groups and gear up for participation in NaNoWriMo this November. So while the other ROW80ers will be taking a week off between rounds, I’ll be back next Sunday getting ready to enumerate my goals once more and thinking about what works for me and what doesn’t.