Wake me up when September ends...

September felt like it would never end

The first two weeks, Carl was staying with me at the lab from 7pm til around 10. When he comes home from work, he'd pick me up from school and we'll have dinner (lucky if I'd already prepared dinner ahead of time, but usually I still had to cook). We figured we were both productive if we weren't tempted to watch TV or Netflix (or go to bed after dinner - LOL) and if we knew we only had limited resources (i.e., we set a time frame for ourselves to get our stuff done for the day). It worked out for a while, but then we would come home really exhausted after a very long day and it became a struggle to spend quality family time during weekdays. We also started missing the gym, which was not a good idea. Carl was playing frisbee twice a week with people from work during thier lunch break and he would also use their on-site gym facilities so he wasn't missing a lot. But me, my only dose of exercise was walking to school everyday. Then I sit on my chair and work on my data set, run analyses, create lectures, teach class, attend class. If only mental exercise can burn as much calories as running on the treadmill or 45 minutes of Zumba, I'd be in perfect shape.

Anyway, we reworked our routine and decided we'll make it a point to go to the gym at least once a week, work over time on campus three times a week instead of everyday, and made sure that 3 nights worth of dinners would be pre-made/frozen so cooking wouldn't take up much of my time. It was a little bit better, but I still did not meet some of my self-imposed deadlines - and one of those being a WORKING DRAFT of my THESIS PROSPECTUS. I need to defend it during the fall semester if I wanted to graduate in April, and that's the goal...and by the way things turned out by the end of September, I might be in slight trouble...

Carl works non-stop, thanks to his data service enabled phone which decreases the stress of not being able to respond to job requests and project needs right away. Some of the things that Carl puts his hands into are time sensitive, and depending on who sends him the request - the response time could be a matter of thirty short minutes. Making sure that mormon.org works, aside from other things, occupies a relatively large portion of Carl's day (and night, sometimes). The stresses of work gets to him sometimes, and sometimes I feel like I don't understand - the same way that the stresses of work and school bring out the worst in me, and I feel like he doesn't understand why I have to run my data over and over again. One time, we watched this video of Paora Winitana from whom we learned a very valuable lesson.

We realized how important it is to come home after a long day and still give your 100% percent to your family. Our loved ones do not deserve left overs - they deserve the WHOLE of us. It is our responsibility to put them on the top of our list, to prioritize them. This applies to a lot of things in our family life. I always tell my students that we are free agents, and by virtue of agency we can choose to make things work or we can give up because life is just darn hard. We can choose to become a SPOUSE first, and everything else can come after that.

So every waking day, even when what's ahead is dreadful and exhausting -  we are assured that at the end of it all, we are not alone in the journey. And that makes it all better...