Attitude and Effort

I’ve enjoyed my sabbatical, but it now officially has an end date. I return to day job land on July 30 as an IT Project Manager, Lead. The opportunity is intriguing because it has a built-in path for career growth for me, and one of my new colleagues described their current trajectory as potentially being a “catastrophic success”. So I’ll be working hard to make sure that first adjective falls off the table.

I’m also picking up my duties on the board of advisors to InfoWarCon starting this week. It’s an invitational congress for cyber training, so if anyone is interested in sponsoring it or speaking at it, give a holler.

For anyone else who remains in the job market, there was an interesting article at Fast Company this week with seven tips to avoid skeevy employers.

All of which to say that my remaining free time is dedicated to finishing Team Alpha before my return to my other career. My intrepid editor, Liana, has me penciled in for her piece of the work starting July 29. In the meantime, I’ve been reading about why Bahasa Indonesia is not spoken outside of school to help me get into one of my character’s heads. Then there was recent reporting on a new paper speculating about why we haven’t yet found aliens. Because of that, another character gets to comment on the Drake equation, while yet another worries about the impact of humans on a new planet. Obviously, this is something humans currently on Earth haven’t worried enough about, given a new study’s findings that humanity has killed 83% of all wild mammals and half of all plants.

Another point of pride for Americans, then? The US made the top ten of countries most dangerous for women in 2018 according to the Thomson Reuters Foundation Annual Poll.

After all those downers, some tips from Lifehacker on getting your head in a better space.

As for my goals? My phone says I averaged 3,969 steps a day last week, or 1.6 miles. That’s down quite a bit from the week before (mainly because the humidity was regularly reaching 90% and none of us could take being out in that), but still above goal. My phone also says I averaged 8 hours and 16 minutes of sleep last week. Plus I added over 5,500 words to my WIP.

I figure if I can average 2,000 words/day through the 28th, I’ll be in good shape to meet my deadline. Of course, today, we have other plans. For our date night, we’re going to see Ant Man and the Wasp. We have high expectations. And this is my birthday week, so we have additional plans. All of which means… unless I double my output on multiple days, the deadline is in jeopardy. So I’ll be putting my blog posting on hiatus for the next couple weeks again to focus all my efforts appropriately. In the meantime, I recommend checking out how the other ROW80ers are doing with their goals.