Category: work

Pomodoro: Using tomatoes for good (or evil)

Wondering why tomatoes have been on my brain? It’s because I have joined the Cult of Tomato.

Well, not really. But I have been using time management strategies that are inspired by the Pomodoro Technique. In the late 80s, some guy (not the tomato guy, at least as far as I know) developed a system involving using a timer to break down work times into manageable chunks. He named the technique Pomodoro, which is the Italian word for tomato, as the timer he used was a fairly standard tomato-shaped kitchen timer.

In a probably over-simplified way, the basics of the technique are:

  1. Pick a task to work on (typically one that is large and will take a lot of time and concentration)
  2. Set a timer for 25 minutes (a “tomato”), and dig into the task.
  3. Stay focussed on the task until the timer runs out.
  4. I said stay focussed on the task!
  5. Once your 25 minutes of intensive, focussed work is finished, you get a break! Step away from your work for 5 minutes or so.
  6. Seriously, take a break. This part is important.
  7. Once your break is up, set your timer again, and dive back into the work.

I’d heard of the Pomodoro Technique before from a friend of mine from grad school, who successfully used it to actually finish her degree. I think it was about the time that she told me about it that I found and downloaded an app to use.

And that was as far as I got.

Fast forward about 2 years to the spring of this year, and I read a post Veronica wrote about her decision to start working on projects using a timer method. She asked if any of her readers wanted to join her, and I commented that I was game to try Pomodoro. And  try it, I did.

I liked it.

Using tomatoes has helped me in a few main ways:

  •  It has helped me stay on task.
    For 25 minutes, barring unforeseen interruptions, I work in a concentrated way on my designated task. If, in the course of this tomato, I have the urge to look something up or to check on something else or do whatever puttering around beckons, I put the urge on hold until the end of the tomato. I know that my break will come up soon, and I can dive into puttering then. (Admittedly I often take longer breaks than 5 minutes.)
  •  It has helped me recognize smaller chunks of time as viable for getting work done.
    My schedule is often broken by appointments or other obligations, and sometimes I only have an hour or 2 to tackle my work. In the past, this would lead to me thinking “no point in getting started with that now. I’ll barely have time to get started.” With tomatoes, an hour or two suddenly becomes 2 to 4 viable chunks of work time. Because I can be focused, I actually get more done in those chunks than in previous larger but more nebulously structured lengths of time.
  • It has given my work more continuity
    Since managing my time in this way makes it easier for me to keep going on projects even when my time is limited, I am more likely to work on the projects on any given day. Meaning that fewer days go by without me touching a big project. This helps quite a bit.

I use a little app called Pomodoro that seems to be largely defunct and no longer available, but I think it was free when I got it. There are a whole bunch of other apps available that do more-or-less the same thing. (The more that that I like from the app I use is that it logs your tomatoes. You type in your task when you start a tomato (or it leaves the last task in by default) and then it has a little log where you can see your tomatoes listed by date, with task specified. It helps me track how long some projects have taken. (Usually longer than I’ve expected.)

For more on tomatoes, check out the Pomodoro Technique website. (The full technique involves more than just the timers, but I haven’t delved much into it.) I also found this blog post from a couple of years ago to be very insightful, plus it gives reviews and descriptions of some of the apps that were available (and many that still are). A quick search for “pomodoro” on the Apple App Store shows more than a dozen apps available, many tomato-themed, and ranging in price between free and $19.99. (Most are under $5.) And if you want something more concrete, you can even buy a wind-up tomato-shaped timer.

I highly recommend trying out a timer-based time management technique for anyone who has struggled to deal with dauntingly large, nebulous projects. Like finishing a degree. Or plotting to take over the world.

musings on the tomato (and suspected pseudonyms)

One of my tangential work-related projects has involved developing materials for labelling disfluencies¹ in speech, especially as they interact with prosody. Disfluencies include a number of phenomena such as filled pauses (um, uh) false starts (Hey! Those are my pa- trousers!) and unexpec- -ted … pauses or lengthening of woooords or partsss of words.² Disfluencies occur very frequently in natural speech, especially in spontaneous speech.³

Since they occur so frequently, it should be really easy to find examples of them, right? Well, yes and no. The trouble is that we’ve been looking for examples that we can redistribute, as part of training materials. Some of the materials we have used in previous research has not been licensed in this way. (A lot of people made such recordings before even imagining the web, let alone that their voices might show up there.) So, I have been on the hunt, on and off for several years, for materials that are suitable: high quality recordings of spontaneous speech produced by native speakers of American English. Those constraints right there limit things more than you might think. And then add on to that the desire to find things that have been released into the public domain, or shared with a creative commons license allowing derivative works and redistribution.

I don’t remember exactly when I came across the Internet Archive, and considered it as a potential resource for finding such soundfiles, but searches had been only moderately fruitful. But when I found the tomato guy, the Internet Archive bore fruit.

Buried among hundreds of podcasts, I found Musings with Sherman Oak, and I found Sherman Oak rambling about eating a tomato. This podcast was not only chock-full of examples of disfluencies, but tagged as public domain. And on top of that, I found it hilarious. If you have a minute, go have a listen to Sherman talking about tomatoes. (The whole episode is only 3 minutes and 17 seconds, but you can get a pretty good idea from the first minute. Or jump ahead to one of my favorite bits, around 1:30: “raw tomatoes are an evil vile thing.”)

I have no idea who Sherman Oak is. Sherman had a blog for a while, also called Musings with Sherman Oak. The blog has very little content, and a suspiciously large number of typos and other quirks. Which is completely in character with Sherman Oaks.

But I have this strong suspicion that Sherman Oak is a just that: a character. I think there’s a strong possibility that it is an actor or comedian, or comedian-actor, creating Sherman. In fact, I have a candidate: Thomas Lennon. (He was on, and one of the creators of, Reno 911, and has done a lot of stand-up and sketch comedy.)⁴

Listening to Sherman, I had this sense that I recognized his voice. And poking around more through some videos of Thomas Lennon on YouTube, I haven’t yet found anything that dissuades me.⁵ In fact, if Sherman Oak is not a character of Thomas Lennon, then he should be.

—

¹ Yeah, I just linked to Wikipedia. For a much denser and more academic discussion of disfluencies, see Shriberg’s 1994 dissertation.
² i.e. segmental lengthening that is not obviously in the service of phrasing or pitch accents.
³ Spontaneous speech typically is contrasted with read, elicited, or rehearsed speech.
⁴ He also, as is the case with many actors, lives in L.A. There is a district of LA called Sherman Oaks, which could be a coincidence. He is also from a town in Illinois called Oak Park. I only know these things from reading his Wiki page. I never previously had any cause to stalk him.
⁵ See, for example, this interview [youtube] or this stand-up bit [youtube].


Some tomatoes grown by a friend of mine in her garden. I did not eat them, though I have been known to enjoy a tomato. Even a raw one.

drive

Last night, amidst the feeble attempts to do work while manically checking election results, the hard drive of my laptop began its death throes. While I was able to access web pages (albeit slowly), I was unable to save files or send emails. Happily, I knew I had backed up only a couple of days before, and what work I’d done in the time since was mostly things like lab meeting notes and emails, most of which could probably be reconstructed.

When the very exciting election results came rolling in, it felt like everything–all the angst and the effort–was worth it. I was willing to count the loss of my hard drive and of my day’s productivity as acceptable sacrifices for the greater good.

Of course, my hard drive was not really a blood sacrifice to the cause of the election. Just a weird coincidence. And happily, I live with someone who is expert in dealing with computer trauma. Today, John went out and got me a new hard drive, and got it up and running with all my data, restored from my back-up, by dinner time. In the meantime, I had dug out my old laptop, a slow beast with a tendency to overheat when working with large media files (which I need to do for much of my work).

Here it is evening, and I am back on my proper laptop, with its shiny new hard drive. (Not that I can see it. I’m just sort of assuming that it’s shiny. Maybe even *sparkly*.) And I have to get moving on some work stuff for Friday. But it would seem that I have lost a good deal of my drive to do so.

I’m feeling downright zonked, possibly coming down with (yet another) cold. I think that part of this is post-election exhaustion.

I also am trying to decide about what to do tomorrow, as I had planned to drive into Cambridge to see a talk my advisor is giving at MIT. It would be good if I were there, but I don’t really *need* to be. And now that I’ve lost a solid day’s work time to hard drive failure, I could really use those 2+ hours that would be eaten up by the drive. Also, the weather is icky. We have had our first snow of the season, and a mix of driving rain and snow are forecast for tomorrow.

With this change in the weather, my thoughts are with those who are still without adequate power and shelter in New York and New Jersey. There have been several local drives to collect for victims of Sandy, and I am investigating what contributions will be most useful. (I hope to be mindful of not being part of the “disaster after the disaster,” resulting from well-meaning people giving a flood of items that aren’t needed.) I have also been very impressed by the Occupy Sandy Amazon registry, where volunteers on the ground in New York are requesting specific needed items. As the wind blew through my too-thin-for-the-day coat today, I thought of those who lost their homes, and those who are still in their homes but without power, and those who are working heroically to help them. I wish them warmth and shelter and safety.

The Accursed Book Review

Once upon a time there was a young graduate student, or if not young, at least one who as yet had no gray hairs on her head, who embarked on her journey towards the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy with great optimism and arrogance. She was confident that she would not be one of those for whom large numbers of harvests would pass before reaping the Golden Fruits of Doctorhood. Her hubris angered the gods of Mount Academia, who saw fit to place a curse that the student would forever make progress, forever see the end in sight, but forever get distracted by Other Things, until such day as her hair turned gray and her University turned her out.

Back when I started my PhD program, I imagined that I’d work through my various pre-dissertation requirements in a timely way. I mean, everyone knows it’s hard to finish a dissertation, right? But the other stuff, well that’s not such a big deal. I was already ahead in terms of course requirements, and in having completed my Master’s, had a head start on some other major requirements. Practically a Mere Technicality, the Book Review was to be something on a par with a course project. All you had to do was pick a relatively recent linguistics book, read it, and write a 12 to 15 page review.

Officially, according to the program requirements, it should be completed in the first year of PhD studies. (Not that most do.) Having received my Master’s in the fall of 2004, that was when I officially started the PhD program. I was on a reasonably reasonable schedule, picking my review book in that first year or so. I set to reading it. Slowly. Very, very slowly I read it. At some point, I lost it. Then found it. Probably realized I didn’t remember what I’d read. Started to reread it. Come 2006 I had read the book, but hadn’t yet written anything, when I experienced what might be considered a distraction from my studies. At some point later, John (my husband) tried to talk me into getting a Kindle. As a selling point, he told me about some books he found that were available. “They even have that one you keep falling asleep reading.” Yeah, that would be the Damned Book Review book.

A couple of years and another distraction later, my advisor and I agreed that I should pick a new book for the Damned Book Review. We picked a newly released updated edition by a noted person in my field. I plowed in diligently, being sure to take careful notes this time as I went. I was Determined. But then I realized along the way that reviewing a new edition should involve comparing it to the old one, which I had read before, but years earlier. I’d have to go through it again. The task went slowly. I got demoralized, thinking that I wasn’t really a great person to review the book. I mean, I had met with and corresponded with the author, who, as I said, was a quite well known person in my field. Who was I to criticize?

Come late 2010, I switched once more to a more recent book, this time by an author I’d never met! Who worked in my field, but a different analytic tradition! Yeah, I could critique that. I dug in. But I don’t know, other things came up along the way that were a higher priority. I’d read a chapter or 2, and then get caught up in some new wave of work deadlines or family crisis. Back in April or so I was provoked to make a new push to get through some more of my requirements, including the Damned Book Review. (Remind me to tell you about the Form of Shame.) I finished reading and had amassed 40 pages of notes. I was getting so freakin’ close. But not quite close enough. I had to switch gears to get ready for my trip to China and my presentation there. Next thing you know another couple of months and several new crunches and deadlines have passed before I got myself back to the Damned Book Review. Last week, suddenly free of other pressing deadlines, I dug back in.

And you know what? Today, while sitting in my in-laws’ basement and keeping Theo company while he rode a vintage tricycle around in circles and played with a pile of vintage matchbox cars, I reached a point that could be considered…good enough to send a draft to my advisor.

So, maybe not done. But 3 books and 8 years later, damn if it isn’t doner than it’s ever been.

The summer puzzle

School’s out for summer! Except when you are a grad student, or otherwise an academic researcher. For me, summer mostly means easier parking for lab meetings, and a shortage of subjects for experiments. If anything, I’m supposed to get more of my research done.

The yawning gulf of Phoebe’s summer vacation has been menacing me for months. “Sort out Phoebe’s summer plans” stubbornly stayed unchecked on my to-do list, day after day, week after week. Theo’s schedule seemed pretty uncomplicated; he’d just go to the same home daycare he’d been attending since he was an infant. This was also an option for Phoebe, as this was where she went after school and also a place she’d been going since she was an infant herself. However, she’d be the only school-aged kid there with just a couple of 3-year-olds. Plus Phoebe had expressed an interest in going back to the place where she’d gone for pre-K. They have a summer program, and she had some friends going.

I didn’t look forward to those double drop-offs and pick-ups. Even though both places were pretty close, with the time spent settling and collecting each child, the two-location solution gave even work-at-home days effectively an hour-plus commute, twice a day.

Then there were all the other enticing summer options. We’d already signed up Phoebe for karate camp at her dojo for the first full week of her vacation, and there was the option of a 2nd week at the end of August. Elsewhere were art camps (Phoebe loves art). Swimming lessons (Phoebe should learn to swim). Spanish camp (an appealing option). Camps for horseback-riding and gymnastics (Phoebe has been asking to do both of these activities).The number of options was dizzying, as was the thought of trying to get her to so many places. Not to mention that all these options were either expensive, and/or had really awkward hours. Plus it seemed like Phoebe should have some time just to enjoy the summer in an unstructured way. She loves to make projects for herself, and to play outside and look for rocks and bugs.

After weeks of hemming and hawing, trying to work this out in the blur surrounding my trip to China, I was considering just having Phoebe join Theo at the home daycare. Thus reducing the expense and the hassle, if making summer potentially less exciting (and social) for Phoebe.

Then our daycare provider broke the news to us that she would be closing her business. In two weeks. There had been a decline in enrollment, and it was looking like our kids would be the only ones left come the fall. What’s more, I’d already told her that I was looking to start Theo in a pre-K program in the fall, so he’d be going down to part-time. It wasn’t feasible for her to stay open, and she found a new full-time job.

In some ways this change made things a bit less complicated, if not exactly easier. We wouldn’t have to consider how our childcare choices would affect her income, or her feelings. (She’s been our main childcare provider for almost 6 years, and she’s been like family to us, given that our families live so far away.) She put us in touch with a couple of her friends with home daycares with openings, both of whom we’ve met and like, and who have interacted with our kids on things like joint daycare field trips and other meet-ups.

In the end, though, I thought it would be easier to just let Phoebe go to the place Phoebe wanted to go, and have Theo start pre-K earlier, thus having them both go to the same place. In deference to summer, I opted to have them in childcare only 3 days a week, giving us more time for things like seeing friends and summery fun. I picked Tuesday through Thursday at the center, leaving more options for long-weekend trips. I managed to get my lab meetings shifted to Wednesdays from the planned summer schedule of Fridays. I was going to start the kids in the summer program on Tuesday, July 10th, after the planned to my in-laws’ the week of the 4th of July.

I had solved the big puzzle. I’d made it all fit.

Then I remembered that I’d left out some pieces.

Like meetings with an undergrad for a summer project. Due to her other job schedule, we’d talked about meeting either Mondays or Fridays, starting in July. And that one lab meeting on Tuesday this week, the last meeting of the month with all 3 of the professors I work with. (John ended up taking both kids into his office.) Plus having the kids in childcare only 3 days a week leaves me only about 20 hours of week-day work time, even fewer on the weeks when I have to commute into Boston. And then there have already been sick days (Phoebe’s and mine) and business travel (John’s) and other unscheduled schedule conflicts.

Summer is great big jigsaw puzzle, but I’m pretty sure that the pieces aren’t all from the same box. Not all of the pieces fit together, not all of the gaps can be filled, and I’m still trying to figure out what the end picture will look like.

I think I’ll only have that figured out come fall.

Worth at least 2 million words

If I had to describe my trip to China in one word, that word would have to be ohmygoditwasabsolutelyamazingholycrapthatwasanamazingtripdidimentionitwasama-zingbutdamndoihavejetlagnowandistillhavetoomuchtodoleftfrombeforemytrip. Or something like that. Let me check the thesaurus, and I’ll get back to you.

As you might imagine, I have lots of photos. Well over 2000 of them, in fact. Some of them are basically duplicates, as I had my camera set to produce both raw format and jpg for the Great Wall visit, but I still have to sort through them to decide which to keep and post-process. I have spent a little time looking through them, and so far have selected a conservative 200 or so to share. Sometime.

I also have plenty of tales to tell. (You might, for example, enjoy the story of how I killed my iPod. Or how I won an award, which was not for the most creative murder of an iPod. Or about how I seemingly got a small group of us kicked out of a restaurant, which turned out to be a good thing.)

But remember that staggering to-do list I posted before my trip? Unfortunately, I do. And there are things left that still haven’t been done, and still need to be done. So I need to do some of them (the work-related ones) soon. Also, I really really really need a nap. (I fell asleep last night around 9 while trying to post this, but then woke up at two in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. I’m not quite adjusted to this time zone.)

Since I don’t know where to start in on my photos, here is one I took from the plane during my flight back. Once again, my choice of window seat paid off. I happened to glance out the window about an hour or two into the flight, and saw a rather dramatic looking mountain peeking through the clouds. I grabbed for my camera, and managed to snap a few shots before the mountain left my view. I probably would have gotten a clearer shot with my telephoto lens, but fortunately I correctly assessed that I wouldn’t have had time to dig it out from my bag and change lenses in time. Once the mountain was behind me, I looked at the live flight map on the individual monitor to see where we were: roughly over Tokyo. Further investigations once I got home confirmed my suspicions: this was Mount Fuji.

Things jostling for space in my head.

A week from tomorrow,¹ I need to set the alarm for 3:00 a.m. when I go to bed. Historically, I’ve been more likely to see 3 am from the other side of the clock. What on earth could possess me to get up so damn early? I have to catch a 7 a.m. flight to Newark. What on earth would possess me to fly to Newark at 7 a.m.? My 10:50 a.m. flight to Shanghai. Because I am going to Shanghai.

And also briefly to Beijing so that I can see the Great Wall. (Not that Shanghai and Beijing are all that close together. But closer than Boston and Beijing.)

I can hardly contain my excitement.

However, my excitement must share mental space with my soberingly intimidating to-do list, which keeps rudely poking its elbows into my excitement.

Here are some of the tasks weighing on my mind:

Work & School stuff:

  • finish a 12 to 15 page book review (because it’s already several years late)
  • prepare and practice a 15-minute talk at the conference (because that’s why I’m going to Shanghai)
  • read a large number of articles related to my conference presentation, especially given that the authors of those articles may be at the conference
  • rework images for a journal article by my research group

Trip prep stuff:

  • figure out transportation to and from airport on this end
  • Sort out as many details as I can for home and schedule in my absence (to minimize the hassle for John’s solo parenting. Yet another 11 days for him.)
  • find my multi-country travel adaptor doohickey I got for Hong Kong
  • dig out the unlocked cell phone I got in Hong Kong
  • (Happily, I already have my passport and visa squared away, and hotels, flights, and conference registration…)

Home stuff:

  • Finish dealing with thank you notes for Phoebe’s birthday party, which was now over a month ago. Gah!
  • Pack up a pile of books to donate for the town library’s book sale.
  • (Screw all the other household stuff that’s been clogging my to-do list for months. It will all be waiting for me whe I get back.)

Stuff I want to do before my trip.:

  • Plan out and read reviews for places to go and things to do and eat (this sort of thing is what distracts me the most when I’m supposed to be focussing on work)
  • In addition, I’d really like to finish writing about, and sharing photos from, my Hong Kong trip of last August. (I’d love to get these write-ups written up before I leave, because clearly I’m going to have a lot more to share very shortly.) I owe write-ups of:
    • Day 5, part 2 of my guided tour and harbour cruise from hell (I posted part 1 in November.)
    • Day 6 my fantastic outing/hike with YTSL (YTSL posted about it herself back in August!)
    • Day 7: last day of the conference and conference banquet (actually, there’s not too much to say here, so that should be quick)
    • Day 8: excursion to Macau (This was a big day, and full of minor (mis)adventures. I have a lot to say.)

All of my plans are being further irritated by a new cold or spate of allergies, which is leaving me wanting to sleep. A lot. Or curl up in a ball and groan. (You’ll note that curling up in a ball and groaning is not on my to-do list.) And other typical daily things like laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, kid shuttling as well as other family and social obligations, plus occasional attempts at personal hygiene, are also vying for my time and mental energy. (What, I have to brush my hair again? And find another pair of clean socks?)


Yes, I am seriously flying back to Asia less than a year after my trip to Hong Kong last August. I was hoping this conference wouldn’t end up in Shanghai, because I didn’t imagine that I’d be able to swing two trips of this magnitude in less than a year. But end up in Shanghai the conference did. Seriously, if the deadline for the conference submissions had been even in October, I would have said “no way.” But by the end of November, I was already thinking, “well, maybe I can do it.” And then my paper got accepted for a talk, and then I thought, “Hell yeah, I’m going.”

¹ I don’t remember when I started this post, but I’m pretty sure that this once said “in just over 2 weeks,” then various shrinking amounts of time since then. Here’s hoping that I manage to post this before I have to say “a few weeks ago…”

unwound

The past few weeks have been a crazy whirlwind of activity and productivity. Sunday night was an abstract deadline, and my research group got one in shortly before midnight. (It was nearly ready to submit the day before, but when finishing involves emails among 4 people, the process can be slow. Especially on weekends. Also, one generally will take as much time as one is given to put on the final touches. There is generally a process of hacking away at the text to make it all fit the space constraints, with adverbs getting mercilessly excised, and then at the end, an attempt to re-elegantize it.) In the weeks leading up to this, I spent every free moment working on processing the data, which consisted of several thousand tokens of elicited productions of speech of specific characteristics. Somehow I managed to fit all of this in with time spent with family and friends, including a week-long trip to my in-laws and several gatherings, as well as Christmas-related activities.

I have been busy.

I thought I had been managing to still get enough sleep along the way, as I had been making efforts to get to bed by midnight. I glibly wrote in an email I sent less than an hour after the abstract submission was complete that I believed myself not to be sleep-deprived. However, yesterday, I found that the tiredness kicked in. I had a day with the kids, taking advantage of Phoebe’s day off from school to visit some friends we don’t see often enough. By afternoon, I could barely keep my eyes open (which is not great, given that I was driving). Then we still had the violin lesson. Last night I imagined myself posting something here, but I found myself tied up in my words. (I was trying to write something intelligent and meaningful, attempting to mark Martin Luther King day in an intelligent and meaningful way. It proved to be beyond me.)

Today I was unable to focus, and unable to figure out what to tackle next. (Because, naturally, there are many things I have had to put off in my mad rush of productivity.) So I puttered about online. I puttered about in my photo library. I puttered about the kitchen. Then I took a two hour nap. I guess I needed to unwind.

Hopefully I will be able to regain my productivity again tomorrow. I have lots I’d love to write about here. (Yes, including wrapping up the recaps of my Hong Kong trip!) Then there are the next steps in my own research projects.

Plus at some point, we’ll probably need to take down the Christmas tree.

And do something with the pumpkins on the porch.


These photos are of a giant spool that appeared in the hallway outside the lab where I sometimes work at MIT. I’m particularly amused by the little “acoustic level” sign that sits above the spool in the top photo. (As I got together this set of photos to post, I had a sense of déja-vu. In fact, I had vu this déja just over 2 years ago, when I had started a draft post with the post title “unwound” in December of 2009.)

feeling the burn


My tissue paper flames from my Halloween 2009 costume.

At 11:29 last night, I submitted an abstract to a conference (with a cut-off time of 11:59 p.m.). Last Wednesday, I submitted a paper to another conference. For the last few months, I have been working full-speed on a project relating to my own research, and have been making real progress. Last night I went to bed feeling triumphant and giddy, having succeeded in getting both of those submissions together.

This morning I woke up tired.

There is a long list of things that I’d been largely putting off the last few weeks, and things (laundry, grocery shopping, battling the chaos) that I had somewhat let slide. Today I hoped to make a dent in that list, and get organized for the next push with my group’s research, with another conference deadline a few weeks away in mind. Given the tiredness, it might not surprise you to learn that I got very little done in the morning.

One small errand I had to run was dropping off some art supplies for Phoebe’s classroom that I had signed up to donate. This afternoon, after putting air in a mostly flat tire that I tried not to notice yesterday, I headed out with my bag of glitter and multi-colored tissue paper with plans to continue on my way to take care of some other things.

At Phoebe’s school, I sort of expected that they would collect the things at the front office, and get them to the classroom. But the woman at the desk called Phoebe’s classroom, and the teacher said I could bring the things by. It’s fun to see what the kids are up to, and since I had a bit of time, I didn’t object. When I went in the classroom, the teacher and aide welcomed me and collected the things I’d brought. Phoebe’s teacher called Phoebe over to say hi to me. Phoebe smiled at first, and then looked stricken as she came over. “I think I have a fever,” she said to me when she got up close. Half thinking that she was just angling to go home early with me, I felt her head. It did feel kind of hot, but I’d just been outside, and my hands were a bit cool. The teachers said she hadn’t complained of anything all day. I decided to take Phoebe to the school nurse’s office just to make sure.

103.3 degrees.

We went back to the classroom to collect Phoebe’s things and let the teachers know I’d be taking her home. Not what I expected from my glitter drop-off!

I have to say, I’m just amazed at how considerate Phoebe is with her timing. If this had happened yesterday, I likely would have missed the abstract deadline. Likewise, if this had been any time in the last week. Really, I feel like she’s given me an unexpected gift. Quite honestly, I’m looking forward to having a quiet day with her tomorrow.


This is a gift that Phoebe intentionally made over Thanksgiving weekend.


See the inside?