Starting to rely on myself

Last week, I wrote how I have begun to feel that I can start relying on myself.

An example of this is that I am blogging this week in spite of being booked for a late night of Thursday working for one of my employer’s larger clients.  This might not sound much of an achievement.  However, it was late night working for this same client during the course of last year which first interrupted my regular weekly blogging as a few of the jobs for them were on a Thursday night which, at that time was my routine blogging evening.

“Success kid” Sammy Griner was used to help his father find a new kidney

I’m starting to rely on myself as I am starting to manage my time a lot better.

One thing that has really helped is to stop focusing on end goals.

Traditional goal setting was not working for me.  I found that setting a goal meant that I drifted away before reaching a goal post.

Now I have found that creating a daily routine which will help me work towards my aims is working.  My goals now are to complete my daily routine items for ten consecutive days and I reward myself each time i achieve this.

I am finding myself getting healthier, dealing with emails and paperwork, studying towards a qualification, doing things around the house and more.

I didn’t think of this myself but read about it on this blog post by this blogger James Clear.

I’m starting to believe that I can do some of those things that I wished I was capable of but never believed in myself enough to achieve them.

Hopefully, in the years to come, you will share in my success.

I hope to share in all of your successes, too.

One of these days I gotta get myself organizized

No, I’m not becoming a real life Travis Bickle, nor am I uploading another post of quotes that I like.

I really do need to get myself organised.

It’s more than a month since my last activity on WordPress.  For several months I’ve been posting nearly every Thursday; each month saw at least four offerings from little ol’ me.  So what happened?

It was the middle of May and I had to work late one Thursday night.  I actually finished at 1 am on Friday morning, slept a few hours and was then back in work that same Friday morning.  After work, and up until dusk on Sunday, I was busy with ripping down my old garden shed and putting up a new one.  So, no posting activity that week.

At least the new shed looks good

From then on, I started to find that things happened to me rather than be controlled by me.  It has become clear to me that I am not controlling my life so much as I should do.  I have never been well-organised and this has got to stop.  It’s affecting my health.

Every week, I’ve being feeling increasingly rough each day when I’ve awoken and Monday was spent in the bathroom emptying the contents of my stomach rather than going to work.  It’s a good job I have made some improvements to my diet and my weight already this year as I dread to think how bad I would be if I hadn’t.

Enough already, I must take control of my life.

No, this has not been a complaint against life but rather a confession of my own failings.  Life has treated me very well over the last few weeks when I consider how badly I’ve been pursuing my life.  I gotta get myself organizized.

And so, I’ve been enjoying a work free week

Working has a few major advantages over not working.  Whilst being able to pay your bills is probably the major reason, I thought that I would spend a few moments musing on a different advantage – without the stress of work the enjoyment of holiday time would not be so sweet.  I mean, how do you enjoy a holiday if you spend your whole life at leisure?  What are you doing on holiday that’s different to normal when it is the case that you never go out to work?

This week, Gloria and I have been on holiday from our respective employers and have thoroughly enjoyed the time.  This is in spite of us not venturing very far from home.

Apart from being on holiday from work, one thing that we don’t do every week is to buy takeaway food.  And so, we have eaten out every day and loved every mouthful of the experience.

Doggy bag – all that remains of our meal out this evening

We’ve only eaten once today – this evening at the local Indian (or is it Bangladeshi?) restaurant.  We both had a starter and both of us had a main course but neither of us had space in our bellies for pudding.

Actually, I did venture into the workplace today as I had to pick something up that had been delivered there this morning.  A few people spoke about work things to me while I was in the office.  I pretended to listen intently but my brain is usually able to ignore work things when I’m not on duty.  It’s an awesome talent and helps to keep me on the right side of high anxiety.  One of my colleagues even moaned that he worked late last night and suffered the same fate that I did last week.

Time for a cup of tea, I reckon.  And praise be to God that I’m free to do all of this.

Late night at work – and still no mini cocktail bar

Yesterday for me was a really annoying day at work.

Man, I need to go home

I won’t bore everyone with the details so I’ll just throw out one phrase that I don’t want to see again when I’m the only one left working in the office late at night – “You can only specify the READPAST lock in the READ COMMITTED or REPEATABLE READ isolation levels”

In case any SQL experts are passing…no, I don’t need any help with this now.

Where the heck were you last night when I did need you?

It was several months ago that I told the Operations Director and the Customer Services Manager that I would work better if there was a mini cocktail bar behind my desk.

There’s enough space between my chair and the window for one.  I suppose that the reason that my request has never been fulfilled is that they’re worried that I’d never go home; but I definitely would.

A mini bar like this one will help me at work

If I stayed in the office I might end up doing a lot more work than I’m paid to do.

The cleaners were vacuuming around me at 8 o’clock and I was nowhere near finished.  ‘Oh well, I’m locking the building and setting the alarm again,’ I thought (like most evenings).

One of the cleaners said to me that I must really love my job.  “I wouldn’t be working at this time.”

“You’re here!” I pointed out to him.

I was prepared for yesterday being a late one, but Señora SQL Replication (actually, she probably isn’t Spanish) added an hour or two onto my anticipated workday.  I’d cooked my tea the night before of lamb chops, boiled new potatoes and peas and came home to add a couple of slices of bread and two fried eggs.  And when I did get to finally eat it, I had started to feel quite hungry and the plate failed to satisfy.  I ended up eating too many biscuits with my evening RedBush tea.

Oh well, I managed to leave early today after speaking to the Senior Project Manager.  I wonder who’s locking up the office tonight?  Actually, I’m not really that bothered.