Sylvia's Journal

When Sita has business in Boston, we get to do business with our grandson. An early morning commute from Manchester to Boston beats one from Easthampton. We don’t mind, even if I only get to hear Faro when I get up early to go to work. I also get home early – now with Daylight Savings Time it stays light longer – and I get to give him his dinner. It was red/orange today: roasted beets, butternut squash, sweet potatoes, turnips and carrots; a nice wintery mush that went in fast.

He has two front teeth that would make the Velveteen Rabbit jealous. I gave him a celery stick which he crunched and crunched, without knowing quite what to make of it. Coming from a musical home, it took a longtime before he put the celery stick in his mouth – he has already learned that sticks are for drumming, not for eating.

Yesterday I had my stitches taken out. The doctor showed us the scope pictures which confirmed that the tibia/talus joint is in bad repair – pink color being bad, bone on bone. It explained the painful walking. We explored next steps if this doesn’t do the trick – too early to tell. Ankle resurfacing (or reconstruction) is, compared to knee and hip technology, lagging behind and the top orthopede at Mass General would not recommend it. The case load is not quite big enough to create deep and wide expertise in this complicated procedure. So for now, we cross our fingers.

The coaching program I started a month ago is picking up in the amount of time I have to dedicate to it. Every week I have two hours of peer coaching, one as the coach and one as the coachee. And then there is a a peer group teleconference, with five other women who participated in our workshop last month. In a few weeks the program adds to that a weekly mass teleconference (of 90 minutes) plus a half hour with my own mentor.  All this should be completed by June when I take the second workshop over a 30 hour weekend. It is all very challenging and the more I learn the less I realize that I know. Coaching comes with incredible promises of more happiness, more income, more customers, and the stories abound, but I can’t quite believe that I could ever pull this off. I have to keep reminding myself that practice makes perfect.

I am immersing myself in the social innovation/innovation world with the coursera course I take which is based on the book “Creative people must be stopped,” by David Owens from Vanderbilt University. Fascinating. I can’t help but think that the new attention to innovation at my work may shake something loose that has been stuck and rusty for a long time.