Sylvia's Journal

I slept in this morning, all the way till 7:30. I am not yet on vacation but decided to work from home till the end of the week when my vacation starts. This requires a very short commute, less than a minute to get down the stairs.  Getting up at 7:30 gives thus gives me plenty of time to wash, eat and write.

I dreamed about technology and teaching. I suspect this was brought on by my conversations with Aman who runs a blog about health, technology and development. I have asked whether I can become a guest blogger and his first response was positive. This was actually on my to-do list for close to a year and Kristen, who put it there, kept sending me these occasional emails asking where I was with that. So I finally bit the bullet and since then Aman and I have been talking by email about how, what and why. I have added the blog to my blog roll so you can check it out. I will be writing about leadership and management in international health and why it is important, my life’s work, so to speak, so the writing should be easy. It is not going to be daily however, as I would have to get up at 4 AM if I were to add another activity to my morning routine.

Yesterday in the office many people were checking off their pre-vacation checklist and frantically meeting and calling to get everything in order before takeoff. When I did not appear on anyone’s checklist anymore I went for a slow row on the Charles River. The weather was perfect and there was only one obnoxious motor boat making waves. I like to row during the middle of the day; I have the boat house to myself, I have a wide choice of boats, and there is little, if any traffic on the river.

The commute home was a killer commute again, 45 minutes to get onto route 1, a distance of less than 5 miles. I though everyone was one vacation and the schools are closed, who are these people? By the time I pulled up to our house I was practically slumped over my steering wheel. Axel came to my rescue, as he is always very solicitous of me in such a state and pointed triumphantly at how far along he was with the meal which included another Mamadou salad, a grilled steak and the final leftovers of the leftover meal.

We went to bed early but not until I had finished Jill Taylor’s stroke book with its message of hope that centered on giving one’s right brain some face time and shutting up the left brain storyteller once in awhile. She makes it sound so easy. I wonder if you have to have had a stroke before you know how to do this. I also abandoned myself to some internet surfing, following the threads about PowerPoint’s 20^th anniversary that stirred the parts of my brain that like to be creative and have fun. If that sounds like a paradox I recommend you check out what David Byrne has done with the software.