Actually I had planned to write this last night, but I was – once again – so tired, that I felt like I couldn’t form any coherent thought anymore. I went to bed shortly after 8, read quite a bit, but fell asleep around 9.30 and slept soundly till around 5. I couldn’t go back to sleep then, but that was fine. That’s why I keep a book on my nightstand most of the time.
The morning before I was awake before 4, because I had left the window open a crack; it was a warm summer night after all. But just like a few more times in the recent years, the happy birds outside my window didn’t let me fall back to sleep. I had to get up and close the window. I used to be able to sleep with the window open a crack for decades. I have no idea what had changed. It’s not as if I don’t like bird song, because I do. I was thrilled when I discovered that the alarm I bought last year (or the year before… ? Sometime between 2020 and 2022) had not just the normal loud alarm sounds or the radio option, but also bird song. Which is my favourite way to wake up. Just not before 4 on a weekday. Not before 4 on any day in fact.
Yesterday morning I went for another run and that went ok as well. I started a bit too fast on the first few segments until I remembered that just because I run a bit faster, doesn’t mean I should. So I slowed down to keep my breathing and heart rate at a less frantic pace. When I was back home, after my shower, with the first coffee next to me I scrolled through my social media and on TikTok I once again stopped at a newly discovered account. She calls herself a midsized newbie runner and I like too see people like me trying the things I try. Don’t let me think too much about how much of snooping (?) in my other phone activities have told TikTok to show me this account. Anyway, this woman ins a bit critical about the C25K program and I get her points and I realize I should / need to incorporate a bit more strength training on the days I’m not running. She is using another program, a better on according to her. I went to look for it, but apparently it’s mostly only available through a paid app. Yes, there is a free week of trial but no real information anywhere else about the idea behind this program or the schedules and all that. So I’m sticking to C25K for the moment at least in an adapted form and let’s see how it goes.
I switched office days around this week, so I won’t go in today but tomorrow and Friday instead. That also means that I won’t try a different pool on my way to work for an early morning swim this morning. Neither doing it at my pool, but consider today a rest day in a way. It felt like I definitely needed that one anyway.
Work was… work. A good online meeting to brainstorm ideas about our team’s communication strategy, goals and such for this year and the future. At the moment I’m still sort of the comms person for our team, even though a new person shall take over after the summer. At least that’s one of the new staff position we’re hiring for at the moment. I’m not quite in charge of hiring, but as I’m one of the two with the most experience on our team I assist our supervisor with it and it’s an interesting process. I still sometimes feel like an imposter in all this, but I guess that will always be a (small) part of me and as long as I’ve got the tools to deal with it, I’ll be fine.
I could assist coworkers from other departments with a few of their questions / requests even though they weren’t all meant for me. But the teammate in question is on vacation this week so I was glad I knew enough of her work to assist the other departments. My imposter syndrome kept quiet for this one, which was a nice relief.
One of the aspects of working in public administration is to handle the behaviour of the actual public. As in the residents of the city I work in, who call or sent mails regarding a variety of issues. I know modern public administration models might even call those people costumers, because part of what the administration does is providing a variety of services. Internal post office isn’t part of that yet though. I in the department for environment got a mail regarding a clearly not environmental issue, but the survey office. It started with
“Dear Miss D.,
I know it might not be your job to deal with these things, but maybe you could pass it on to the right office. Here is my problem….”
I mean, what the fuck? I checked my previous mails. I don’t know this person. No one else in my team got a similar email. But due to my last name starting with D, I am the one on top of the contact list in my team, so sometimes get calls / mails about issues others in my team deal with. Which is still not the right team for this issue. Not even the right department. Ugh! When I looked up which department this would be, I realized that the respective team leader is someone who has worked in our department before, on the same floor even, albeit in another team. I tried to call him about it to just pass the issue on informally (not quite the right way to do it, but as I knew him…), but he was out of office. Vacation time. So I replied to this resident, that he is correct in this not being my problem and gave him the correct email for the department. In a more friendly way than it might sound here now. But seriously: if you can look up ONE email address on the administration website, I trust you that with two more clicks you might even find the RIGHT one.
Ugh. People!
Once I had logged off from work, I ran some errands, went to my brothers place to take photos of the lilies in bloom, as he’d suggested.
With this new drive to live a bit more healthy, I recently bought additional pots and pans, because I was cooking more and tired of running out of clean pots before the dishwasher was fully stacked. And thus I was also trying out a few more new recipes. It’s still a bit of trial and error what works and what I like, but that’s not bad right?
Once I had finished cleaning up the kitchen though I felt too knackered to write all this down and… well I explained all that at the top of this post.
