Sylvia's Journal

I am reading HBR to find out how management is reinventing itself while waiting for my computer to self check and restart. I am underwhelmed with the so-called ‘new thinking’ of a famous management guru. It is hard to overwhelm me this early in the morning. It’s not even 4:30 AM yet (but by the time I am writing this it will be). In a week I am leaving again on a trip and even that does not overwhelm me.

After a mildly productive day at work I left early to go to the dentist and have my tooth looked at, the one that has lost three chips over the last few days. It is falling apart, finally. It is the one that is mostly filling, stemming from my childhood days when the dentist’s philosophy was to remove as much as possible from healthy teeth as a preventive measure.

But I never made it to the dentist because I had a flat tire. I don’t know if it was simply punctured by a nail or other sharp object or someone slashed it. I will find out later today when I pick it up again. I had slipped into a rare free parking space in Cambridge, along the side of the street next to my office. The prize was mine because I had arrived so early. Did I upset anyone?

AAA came to the rescue although not right away, so I missed my dental appointment slot. I could, of course, have changed the tire myself but I was glad I did not, watching the mechanic zip one tire off and the other on in just a couple of minutes with his power tools. I would have had to work with tools from the stone ages, practically hand-hewn, that would have required a lot of force.

I arrived home early and hungry with no one there to feed me. I just ate stuff standing in front of the refrigerator and our ‘carbohydrates’ cabinet (as Alistair once called it trying to figure out the organizing principle behind its contents). I ended with something that actually needed cooking, a soft boiled egg just when Axel returned. He scraped together his own meal while I took a bath. I had a fantasy of going to bed before 7 PM or watch a movie. We did the latter and watched the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency movie. I think it will be one of my favorite movies, not the least because of the great singing and the wonderful lilting Southern African talk.