Lisa Sieverts

The mountain bisected by clouds. #mbaug

Flow #mbaug

Peace #mbaug 📷

Bug OK, technically not a bug. #mbaug 📷

Floating #mbaug 📷

Up #mbaug 📷

Loving the new album Alambari from DakhaBrakha. Ukrainian-based world music. Funky, jazzy, fun! Apple Music Link 🎵

Sourdough buckwheat waffles this morning with our own raspberries and bacon from a neighbor’s farm 🍞

Good morning, sourdough crumpets🍞

My view on the morning walk to the lake 📸

This is a happy day! Keynote finally supports “Play Slideshow in Window” which will be a game-changer for Zoom. #edu

Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn I LOVE this album, have already listened to it many times. It gives me hope for a future world where humans focus on what we have in common instead of what divides us.

🎶

Also on team sourdough

I feel very lucky to have more work in this time of coronavirus than I had before. But unfortunately, that has led to a resurgence of a repetitive stress injury in my arms. I’m experimenting with voice control on my Mac. So far it’s working surprisingly well. In the distant past, I was a Dragon user, so the various oddnesses of dictation are somewhat familiar. The struggle is re-learning how to think via my voice instead of via my fingers.

I’m grateful for paid work. My main gig disappeared and then came back in a different form. My other gig went from having a fun face-to-face teaching weekend to having 14 hours in Zoom. I’m working on making it fun. And I made sourdough popovers. Yum.

Didn’t get any course preparation done today. Started off with a useful and interesting gathering of coaches and consultants at our local business incubator. We’ve decided to meet monthly, with a focus on one of our businesses each time. The presenter will describe their business AND either teach us a tool or share a case study. That way, we learn each other’s businesses as well as something useful and new.

This first week of the year has been all about learning that I have to do my hard work in the morning. I’ve heard other people say it and I’ve always discounted the idea. But I watched myself this past year, tracking my time using a wheel that I first saw here on micro.blog. The facts don’t lie so I’ve set a resolution to do the hard work in the morning and save the easy stuff for afternoon.

My course has one additional webinar this year, so today I focused on refreshing my memory about all of the pieces of the course that I want to be sure to include. I’m finding Curio to be so valuable. It has an infinite canvas so I can keep adding to my visual picture of the course as I think of another part that I want represented.

I’ve always had a visual representation of the course. It’s evolved from mind maps to Scapple to Trello and now to Curio. I like Curio best — it provides me with the tools I need without forcing me into any specific layout.

Goal for tomorrow: fill up the “hole” that is Webinar 6, now that I understand everything that leads up to and follows it.

How do folks figure out what to write about? I’m thinking about making my NaNoWriMo project be to simply post something on micro.blog once a day in November. But jeez, writing is such a struggle. Oh, here’s a photo.

Thinking about planning out my Agile class. This is year 4 for me at this school, so it’s time for some significant changes. There’s a lot that I like from prior years, but I feel that there is enough room in the schedule to add in some new material. For my planning process this year, I used Curio, a visual planning app for the Mac. Even though I know the importance of a picture when communicating the overall structure of a project, I was surprised at how helpful it was to make this picture. I’m sure it will be too small to view, but I’m doing this to share the method, not the details. Color, text, boxes. I went through many iterations of laying out the course in different ways. The end result seems so obvious, but there were 4 significant changes to the structure and schedule of the course before I arrived at this one. Of course, since it is an Agile course, I fully understand that things may change over the semester. But I am so grateful to have had the time in August to do this deep thinking about the course so that once it begins in January, I’m ready to roll.

Morning walk yesterday #nofilter. Loving these end of summer days in New England. 📷

Hanging out in Vermont 📷

View from the train while passing NYC 📷

That New York mix of old and new at St. Patrick’s 📷

Seated at the show no one has heard of: Molasses in January. It’s about the Great Molasses Flood that took place about a century ago in Boston. Somehow these folks have made a musical about the event … 📷

Eclair on my NYC day 📷