Packing, Prepping, and More Packing

The last bit of laundry is in the washer, and as soon as it comes out of the dryer I will take it and the stuff strewn on my bed and finish packing. Four bags already sit in the hallway ready to go. I've said before that I can travel for two weeks in Ireland with a carry-on, but three days of Dance Camp and I fill the trunk. This time, however, it feels like I'm packing for two trips, which for all intents and purposes I am. For the first time since I arrived at the Seminary two years ago I am taking more than two or three days off at one time.

Each time I've gone to Dance Camp since moving south friends have said "You need to stop and see me." That just isn't possible in the course of a four day weekend, fourteen hours of which are spent on the road getting to Camp and back. This time I decided to take some vacation time the week before Camp to spend some extended time with Mom and friends. It will also be the first time in two years that I will have more than four days without the Guest Houses cell phone! I spent most of this short work week preparing what my colleagues will need to oversee the Guest Houses while I'm gone. I know they will manage just fine.

Tomorrow morning I will load up the car and head north; head home. And in ten days time I will pack up the car again and head south to home.

The Changing Nature of Filing

Every so often I go through my files to purge them of things I no longer need. Of all the things I've discarded I've only regretted throwing out one, a collection of cartoons I drew while in junior high and high school. This week I started another file purge sparked by rediscovering my Evernote account.

I first signed up for Evernote to track some online research I was doing. Eventually I finished that project and moved on. I found my Dropbox account much more useful for the kind of document storage and work I have been doing. When I got my new computer last month I stumbled upon an Evernote app and decided to take a look at it again. I poked around the internet to see what folks had to say about Evernote. One of the thing I learned was that the smart phone version has the ability to act as a scanner to import documents. So I started going through my file drawers.

The first thing I did was scan several pages of notes from a small notebook I kept when we were creating Renaissance Faire characters. There's a lot of good information there, but it has been a while since we've worked on that project. I now use the notebook for other miscellaneous research, but I don't want to discard the old research. Using my phone, I scanned them into notes and sorted them for future reference. Then I pulled a folder from the file drawers labeled "Cormorant". It contained a lot of my early notes, maps, city plans, genealogies, etc. for a world that serves as the setting for bits and pieces of short fiction that I write now and then. A lot of my concepts and ideas have evolved over the years, and some of the projects sparked by that research (my constructed languages, for instance) are kept in other places. Again there's good information that I don't want to discard at this stage, but I also haven't looked in the folder for a long time. So I scanned and sorted the contents into Evernote notes.

When I got to the last documents I found this 5 1/4" Minidisk between a couple of them. Its slip envelope also contained a folded sheet of paper with a list of document names. Some of them were obviously stored copies of some of the documents in the folder. A couple were from the early years of the Connecticut Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights. Some of the document names made no sense to me at all but obviously meant something when I created the list nearly a quarter of a century ago.

 These minidisks were an improvement over the 10" disks used by the Wang system, but they were supplanted by the even smaller 3 1/2" disks. It's difficult to retrieve information from all three of those old floppy disks. (Yes, we called the 3 1/2" disks floppy even though they weren't.) Then came CDs followed by flash drives. Now we're storing stuff on the Cloud. How long will it be before we have to move that information or run the risk of not being able to access it?

And our archiving systems haven't yet caught up with the new technology. Many institutions are still trying to develop systems and protocols for archiving email and the myriad of elecotronic documents that are sitting on our hard drives and online places like Goggle Docs. In 100 years will historians have access to technology that will be capable of opening the myriad of electronic data created in the late 20th and early 21st centuries? Or will they be as inaccessible as the documents on my minidisk?

Microfilm or microfiche anyone?

The Yankee Goes to Chapel

During the January Term one of the chapel sacristans asked if I would consider officiating at Noonday Prayer one day during the term. His face fell just slightly when I said I needed to check my calendar to see if I could and would email him. Later he told me he'd been surprised at how quickly I sent the email letting him know I would be happy to officiate. It wasn't until two days before that I received details about the service, and at 9:30 the night before I learned that a short reflection on the readings was part of officiating. The idea of the homily on such short notice had me a bit nervous, but I managed just fine, and I spoke without notes. I even received compliments from someone I respect as a priest.

A couple of weeks later I related the story to my spiritual director who happens to be the Chapel Coordinator for the Seminary. In one of our earlier meetings we'd talked about my involvement, or lack thereof, in the Seminary Chapel services. Until January, I could have probably counted on one hand the number of times I'd attended services in the chapel, primarily work related. Since February she's asked me to read at Morning Prayer twice and officiate at Morning Prayer once.

Once she scheduled me to officiate this morning's service I checked with her to see if there were any specifics about officiating in the Seminary chapel that I should know. She ran through the basic outline, with which I'm already familiar. Yet I still felt nervous when I arrived at sacristy this morning to check in with the sacristan. About halfway through the service I thought there's no reason to be nervous. I did this dozens of times at the Church Center when I worked there. I've led Morning Prayer on Sundays at my former parish when we were without clergy. I've led Daily Office services at any number of meetings and conferences. So what was it about this service of Morning Prayer?

Over the course of the day I spoke with a couple of the seminarians, and they have experienced much the same feelings when officiating or serving at chapel services. What is it about seminary services that causes this nervousness in those of us who have served in these roles many times before arriving here? It could be attributable to the feeling of being under the microscope of the ordination process, but I'm not in the process, and they have led services in other places as part of their process. So it must be something about being here at the Seminary. If we figure it out, we'll let you know.

In the meantime I expect that my spiritual director will invite me to participate in more chapel services, and I will probably say yes when it fits into my schedule.

The Yankee Plans for Retirement

For the past few years I've joked that they'll have to carry me out of wherever I'm working at the time in a body bag because I won't be able to afford to retire. I was only half kidding.

I entered the workforce as the economy began pulling itself out of the recession of the early 80s. At the time I attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin and had to drop out because I couldn't find work to support myself and didn't want to to further into debt. I swallowed my pride and called my parents. By the time my father came to get me, I had less than a dollar's worth of change in my pocket. Fortunately, the economy recovered more quickly in the Northeast, and I found work within a month. I was able to buy a used car keep up with both the student loan payments and the car payments. I met someone, and we started to make a life for ourselves.

But after a couple of years the parent company reorganized their U.S. subsidiaries, and they laid off the entire staff in my office. I found work as an office temporary, paid off the student loans and took the money that had been going to those payments and began investing it. I tried another stint of grad school, which put me in debt again. I found a new job, and the pattern repeated itself as businesses in the new economy paid stockholder dividends by cutting staff . Find a job, get laid off, temp for a while, find a new job...

Each time I ended up out of work, the debt increased, and because I never spent more than a couple of years at any one job, I never accumulated much in the way of a pension. After 11 years I also found myself single, which meant less money available to save, as I was responsible for 100% of the living expenses. Including outrageously expensive COBRA payments for insurance coverage whenever I was unemployed.

I'm not trying to tell you a sob story. We take life as it comes. I've been able to keep a roof over my head and food on my table. I've always found work eventually. And I've been able to do some great things over the years. For the last few years, however, retirement looked like something I wouldn't be able to do.

Until this past week. The company that handles the Seminary's retirement plan came to do a presentation and do some one on one meetings with staff members. I gathered my financial records and went to my appointment. It was an enlightening 30 minutes. With some adjustments to my portfolio--well, major ones--it appears I may just be able to retire when I'm eligible to receive full social security benefits.

I'll be working for a few years yet, but it looks like they won't be carrying me out in a body bag!

The Yankee Walks

It will probably surprise many of you that at one point in my life I ran five miles a day three to five times a week. One summer while visiting my grandparents in Chicago I went for my morning run along Lake Michigan. I ran two-and-a-half miles along the lake shore and then turned to head back. About halfway back I stopped and looked around. While I enjoyed being outside, I really didn't like running. I pretty much stopped running on a regular basis and after a couple of years gave it up altogether.

It does not surprise anyone that I am overweight. I have fought that battle for most of my life. I managed to reach a point where I stayed under the maximum weight I'd ever hit. Every once in a while I lowered that top number, but eventually I reached a plateau that lasted for a long time. When I moved to Seminary I made some serious decisions about my eating habits, especially since part of my package includes the same meal plan as the students have. Mostly through portion control (including rarely going for seconds) I avoided the so-called freshman 15. In fact I lost some weight and kept it off. In the past couple of months I've become a lot more deliberate about what I eat, including a drastic cutback in the amount of gluten in my food.

But it takes more than just watching food. It has helped that my office is across campus from most of the rest of the administrative offices. However, I started to walk after work and on the weekends because I needed some form of regular exercise. I began with shorter distances on campus and then increased the distance over time. I now walk what is essentially a 5K three or four times a week. I doubt very strongly I will be running a 5K in the near future, if at all. Never say never, but I'm also not 25 any more.

It helps to be surrounded by supportive people. The Seminary community includes marathon runners, triathletes, budding fitness trainers, and those just serious about their health and fitness. You can always find someone to answer a question about nutrition, types of diets, types of activities, or just about anything else. The first time I walked the complete perimeter of the combined Seminary and Episcopal High campuses, the equivalent of a 5K, these folks celebrated with me.

So I will continue to walk because it's good for me, and because I enjoy it.

Well maybe not when it rains...