i have trouble believing this is the last week of may. perhaps the quick way that time flies these days means that i’m truly getting older.

the word of the week is portmanteau - look it up.

buried is the best way to describe my work life right now. i continue to put in hours and can’t seem to catch up, so it’s pretty scary. i’m still preserving my weekends, so go me. i think i just have too many projects, and i’m definitely putting in a lot more hours than those around me. currently i’m juggling a lot of reunion projects, reunion pricing which is a BEAST, a couple 2011 events and of course, commencement. it’s a full load.

when i was conducting interviews a couple weeks ago, 2 people said things that really made me jealous. when asked about their favorite part of their last job, the answer was about the joy of working on a highly performing team. i do work with some high performers, but having a team that’s present when i’m present and putting in work when i’m putting in work, would be a whole different animal. i think the lack of energy i feel around me starts to suck the morale right out of me.

my day started off a bit exciting in a bad way. leith and i got into a small bike crash with each other. while changing gears, his bike came to a quick halt, causing me to fly into him a bit. my shin bent part of his gears, making his bike immovable and my leg bruised. it’s not terrible, but he did have to carry his bike about a mile and a half and i’m a bit limpy. strangely, i could only feel my leg, but now i have kind of general body aches. i guess bike accidents aren’t so different from car accidents in that way. getting in an accident is an easy excuse to get out of a meeting, if nothing else.

i got my craft knife this past sunday, so hopefully this weekend i can carve out time to think about using it. i have a couple books from the library - one on paper crafts and another on mexican flags, so we’ll see what i can come up with. i need to have a creative outlet beyond agricola, i think. of course, the wedding scrapbook is looming in the back of my mind, too, but i haven’t physically printed out the photos yet. perhaps that is more of a summer project. i can’t believe i thought i would finish that by the end of april!

last night i started reading/looking through african air. i found out about it in the stanford magazine. this alum flies above african landscapes in a motorized paraglider (i know, i never heard of them either!) to get these truly amazing photographs of the land. i’m just loving slowly going through the pictures - it really puts life into perspective.

it’s tuesday of the week, so more fun to come. yesterday, we saw deborah rhode give a great talk on the beauty bias in hiring from a legal perspective, which was awesome. And tomorrow we see Common perform and give a lecture. it doesn’t get better than that in a week!