Sylvia's Journal

I am a sinistra, a forced lefty now. One or two of the little bones in my right hand are broken according to the X-ray. Axel took the bus to the airport so he could drive me to the X-ray machine which eventually led to the emergency room for a splint and pain meds.

An now I am adjusting to a period of lefthandedness. All the things I would like to do over the next few weeks (and that require two functional hands) had to be dropped in the ‘not this year’ bucket.

I abandoned the pain meds after the side effects turned out worse than enduring the pain of the broken bone(s).  Why anyone would want to take these for fun and pay a premium price for them is a mystery to me.

I have a half cast that an be removed for scratching and bathing, a good thing. I am already quite good at putting it on an off with one hand. For other daily living activities I need help from nurse Axel. It’ all too familiar. But because of the familiarity I also know this phase will pass.

Despite the new handicap I was able to start on my yearly mustard production and was able to produce two batches with one hand and very little help. So those who were worried about a mosterdless Christmass can relax. I call it my mostardicum sinistrum.

Tessa called us from Death Valley in California. It is a matter of seeing is believing, the real thing so much better than its name. They did get a flat tire which is why she had time to call us from the tire-fixing place. Otherwise they are rather busy trying to press everything they want to do on this road trip into the remaining weeks – it is down to weeks now.

Sita skyped in a little later from her New York City hotel room, with Faro on her lap. She is experiencing the travails of being a working mother while Jim handles the day-during-daytime routine. And so when she comes home from a long day scribing of deliberations about cold chains and supply chains, he hands the baby over to her, ‘here, now it is your turn.

Faro can now crawl across a bed, a room, any surface really. And with that a new phase has arrived, the phase of The Mobile Baby. He is also recognizing us on skype and trying to touch us, drooling on Sita’s precious keyboard. A handful indeed.

We just learned from facebook that Sita is sequestered, after hours, in the UNICEF building where the conference is taking place. A suspicious package led brought in NYPD, sirens, and shut down the HVAC and elevators. They are told to keep working. Jim will have to wait with his ‘here, he’s yours,’ it seems.

We are packed for Japan and I am ready to get on a plane and stop worrying about things not done. Today was one of those days – cleaning my desk and things kept falling down on it. I am glad I am travelling with my best friend.

Just as I am over my fever, and on the mend, Axel is starting to pick up whatever strain of bugs I introduced in the house. He has to collapse whatever he has into three days, no more.

In the meantime I am trying to collapse lots of small and big assignments into the remaining three days as I would like to leave on Saturday being able to focus on what lies ahead in Japan and nothing else.

This is a challenge because most of the hours I am at the office are booked for one or another meeting. And so my early arrival at the office (6:15 AM) is helpful, leaving me a few hours to be at my most productive and most creative. There is a benefit to getting up in the middle of the night.

Much of my time now is devoted to learning or promoting learning. It is an enjoyable task because I get to explore areas that had either faded into faraway parts of my brain or are entirely new. Today we listened to two knowledge management experts of a local (for profit) management consulting firm. With knowledge its primary product, the company spends considerable resources on knowledge management and learning. We invited them to see what such a Cadillac model looks like and spark some ideas about things we could do, given our limited resources.  A few of us left with our minds spinning and much in awe. We have a ways to go but were warned not to bite off more than we can chew.  Good advice.

We had Faro and his parents over for much of the Thanksgiving holiday and although I was feeling crummy, it was wonderful to have them around and watch Faro trying to crawl, play guitar and learn Dutch children’s songs.

We also talked with Tessa who has nearly reached the halfway point of their road trip. They are starting to think about the return trip, taking the southern route, which makes a lot of sense.

After another horrendous coughing fit that woke both of us u last night, and completing my second week of feeling poorly, it was time to pay a visit to our new doctor.  He congratulated me on seeking help (of course) and then told me I had ‘walking pneumonia’.  This simply means you don’t have to get hospitalized and can keep walking, a mild form of pneumonia or bronchitis, he couldn’t quite tell.

I received an antibiotic injection and prescriptions for two kinds of antibiotics, one for now and the other as a backup to use when I get on my way to Japan and still feel crummy. I would like to enter the plane on Saturday morning as a healthy person. I also would like to come out healthy on the other end because at Narita they have giant heat sensors to pick out people with (any kind of) the flu. And who knows what happens then.

I also went to see the foot doctor for another cortisone injection because I would like to be able to walk in Japan. Lately, a walk around the block ended in a hard to disguise limp. The last shot was 6 month ago. So tomorrow I should be well again.

I notice my entries are getting further and further apart. I believe it is because of sinking from a cold into something more serious over the last 2 weeks, when I returned from Bangladesh.  Still, in the meantime we went south to DC and west for thanksgiving and north for post-Thanksgiving.

In Franconia (NH) we experienced our first snow of the season. It is really winter there. Canon mountain had all the snowmakers going on full blast when we arrived and was fairly white when we left (snowmakers still going but now complementing the natural layer that had fallen overnight).

The softly descending snowflakes on Sunday morning put me in a poetic mood, with a poem surfacing without any effort from my side. It was my first poem in ages.  Snow slows things down, even when just watching it from a warm inside. It also creates a mood of ‘now.’  Both seem to be important for bringing forth the muse.

We drove our second cousin once or twice removed (?) to Cambridge. She was part of the mini family reunion we had up there at her New York uncles’ and California aunt’s old vacation home in Franconia.

We took advantage of being in Cambridge and went to see Lincoln and then have a lovely after theatre culinary experience at a Kendall Square wine bar called belly. Although we are vegetarian wannabees we cannot help ourselves to order steak tartare at those rare occasions when it is on the menu – it was well worth the trangression, and nicely bracketed by an arugula salad and a beet/bean salad.

Despite the stuffy nose and having been in an all day meeting, there was an extension of the day at the WorldBank where I attended a Fail Faire.

Colleagues had told me about this Fail Faire and I had been skeptical, wondering why anyone would be willing to get up on a stage and talk about his or her failure. I do accept the premise that we learn from failure but somehow I couldn’t get my head around the concept of this being done on a stage and in a public place.

The WorldBank hosted the event which was well attended by a large crowd of predominantly young (inferred from the high energy at 6 PM on a Friday) development workers with an ICT interest, as this was the focus of the failures. There was much twittering around me about the lessons that emerged out of the failures – a very connected crowd.

We listened to the failure stories which were presented in comedy club style – there was much laughing and many clever slides with even more clever pictures and very little text. At the end, using applause level as the measure, we elected the church lady and the computer class in Angola as the winner – not necessarily the most insightful failure but certainly the funniest story and best presentation.

I had expected something completely different and now can understand the appeal. Who would not want to be entertained on a Friday evening, with free drinks and snacks, in the company of best friends and colleagues listen to people who fell on their faces? I’d go again but I don’t think I would ever present as these were hard acts to follow.

I thought that with the daily use of the neti pot I had finally conquered colds, forever. I had not had a cold since last March when I went on a serious detoxifying Ayurveda diet with all its side practices of neti pot, tong scraping, meditation, brushing and what not. The only thing I never stopped using was the neti pot and I discovered I remained cold free. QED!

Not anymore. A mega cold has hit me but I remained in denial till Wednesday night, going off to work in the middle of the night and to bed in the early evening, waking up miserably every two hours.

Now I am in Arlington with my stuffy nose. It may not interfere with the plans for today: I am going to indulge with five other colleagues in figuring out how we can become a learning organization. It is the slack time to do this which some twenty years ago we joked about. Imagine that, paid slack time. And now, here it is. Three cheers for never giving up.

Our home work was to study organizations that have tried to do what we are trying to do. We are in odd company: LL. Beans, the US army and lots of hospitals. Harvard professors have written about the learning organization and then there is of course the society for organizational learning and its founder Peter Senge who popularized the concept in the early 90s. I think that is just about the time we talked about slack time.

Axel has joined me – we have decided that whenever possible, he should come along, a break from being the stay at home partner is just as important as a break from being the travelling partner. We are also travelling together to Japan in a few weeks.

Miles and days have passed since I last wrote. The trip tripped me up, health wise, as I am struggling to keep, what feels like the flu, at bay. I haven’t been sick in 9 months and thought that I could stay ahead of colds and the like with my neti pot and mostly vegetarian eating. Not quite.

The trip back felt interminably long. The last straw was a Boston jet way that couldn’t connect to the plane in the right way, keeping us standing cheek to jowl in the aisles, everyone wanting to get out so badly. Once we were out a security door was locked leaving ground personnel flummoxed and us travelers stranded between the plane and the immigration area in the bowels of Logan airport.  After 20 hours of travel such things become major irritants.

Finally, at 2:30 PM I was home at beautiful Lobster Cove on a beautiful fall day, although I don’t recall much about it. At 5:10 PM I was sound asleep.

Monday was a holiday, and another 10+ fall day. I spent much time outside, cleaning out one of the garden beds to plant the garlic and getting the daylight to help reset my bio clock back to Manchester time. It is not quite there yet. I keep getting up at 3 AM, wide awake. This makes for an early arrival at work (before 6 AM), lunch at 10 AM and I am ready to go home at 2 PM., and back to bed at 8 PM.

Sunday was entirely claimed by Sandy, approaching the Eastern seaboard accompanied by calls from officials to be prepared. We were: dry wood stacked inside, refrigerator on extra cold, bottled water, batteries, candles and hurricane lamps ready.

The run up to the hurricane kept millions of people busy, buying, selling, organizing, checking, exhorting. We responded to these calls by removing loose items outside and battening down.

We did go out a few times to chekc out the waves and the cove, a foamy cauldron – quite spectacular.  But the trees held, we only lost our beach sand which was deposited on another part of the cove and hopefully comes back before next summer.

And then it was Monday and the office closed and I stayed most of the day in my pajamas, sitting by the fire and making it a holiday; cooking, knitting and enjoying the coziness of home with electricity while it lasted. We were prepared for it to go out but it never did. This time we lucked out. When we saw the devastation just a few hundred miles down from us we realized many had not been so lucky.

Tessa checked in from the Badlands – a name more apt for the east coast at that time.  The temperatures over there are dropping but as far as I know they are still camping – two dogs would keep you warm, especially Oona with her blanket for hair.

And now I am looking eastwards again, with my departure imminent today. This will be a short trip, less than two weeks. I hope that this time we will complete the assignment and conduct the alignment meeting without interference from strikes. But knowing Bangladesh a bit, this may be a bit too optimistic.

I took Friday off to celebrate part one of Sita’s birthday by introducing her to some amazing folks in her neck of the woods. These are connections through other connections that were random, or may be not, starting with a plane ride to Dhaka. I have a friend who met her husband on a plane ride to South Africa, these things happen and are wonderful. After a three hour ride we arrived in beautiful Ahsfield on a gorgeous fall day. We had a winter soup lunch and talked about complex adaptive systems, mathematical models, large group methods and working around the world.

Although we were not done talking, we had to leave, late in the afternoon to pick up Jim and the Bunwinkies’ instruments for a show in Worcester. The Bunwinkies were playing without their drummer and their male lead singer, making it an all women band except for Jim. It was the first time we saw them perform; we were in charge of the baby, a charge we shared with the other oma and opa who drove up from Beverly. We were the only people over 40 in an old firehouse that had been bought by 10 young men who’d made it into a very interesting living space with lots of space for band practice and performance on the ground flour.

The bunwinkies followed a guitarist whose poems we couldn’t quite understand but made wonderful music. Everytime people clapped Faro would startle throwing his arms wide open, then fall asleep again. By the time his mom and dad were on he had fallen asleep again, missing a wonderful performance, with Sita on lead guitar. This girl continues to amaze us. We left after the Bunwinkies had finished their act, knowing that Sita could look after Faro again. Besides, it was past our bedtime. After midnight when we tumbled into bed, I realized we had driven more than 200 miles.

The next day was Sita’s real birthday and continued with part two.  Seeing her now at 32 years, a mother herself, brought back many memories. She commented that birthdays should really be celebrations of motherhood and that it was the mother of the birthday person who should be acknowledged and feted.

We gave her a massage by Abi as a birthday present, knowing it would be exactly what she needed (it was). While she was relaxing I shopped for the ingredients of a rijsttafel, an Indonesian culinary extravaganza that required an entire day of cooking, another birthday present. We are now all of the age at which it is people’s time and effort rather than material gifts, that are the best birthday presents. I had assigned Axel and Jim a dish each (coconut chicken and beef rendang) while I took care of the remaining dishes (nasi goreng, telor bumbu, atjar, gado-gado and peanut sauce). All the spoons, bowls, cutting boards and knives in the house were used and re-used, making the kitchen look like a battlefield.

By the time the guests arrived (2 pairs of in-laws) I was exhausted. They ate, provided lots of compliments and then cleaned up the kitchen when not hanging out with our collective grandchild. We concluded Sita’s birthday watching Hercule Poirot after all the guests had left. Sita loves Poirot so much that for his first haloween Faro will be Hercule – the costume is already purchased, he has a pacifier with a Poirot mustache, only the white spats are missing.  His dad will be Captain Hastings (repeating ‘Good Lord’ over and over again) and Sita will be Miss Lemon. They will be quite a trio.

We are treated to another visit of Sita and Faro. Early Thursday we got up what seemed to be in the middle of the night, fed and packed up the baby with all his gear, dropped him off in Beverly, where his (only) retired oma lives and then proceeded to Cambridge where Sita had a one day assignment, scribing for some company we had never heard of but which seems to be doing good work to help people stay or become healthy. All stops were conveniently on the way to work.

During the drive in Sita gave me some good ideas for a global conference I am asked to design and facilitate next spring in Southern Africa. It is the best thing a mother can wish for, to get advice from her daughter on matters related to work. I wished she could be there with me, like we were working as a pair in Afghanistan, 6 years ago.

In the morning we had our quarterly global meeting at MSH. It is a carefully orchestrated and painstakingly prepared event with voices coming in from all over the world – We have come a long way to inclusivity and it was nearly flawless: Islamabad was on the line, with Sania Nishtar, the founder of an organization called heartfile that helps the Pakistani government address the rise of chronic diseases, soon to outperform the infectious diseases. In the (US) Midwest a researcher told us about his Blue Zones work, trying to identify the secrets of longevity (no surprises there: diet, family, community, meditation and such), a colleague in Uganda showed how chronic diseases detection and treatment have been incorporated in the work MSH is usually engaged in.

I reflected on my year back at MSH which started so badly and realized I can once again be proud to belong to this organization I felt so abandoned by last fall. It was an inspiring meeting.

The rest of the day I was invited to learn about a new technology platform MSH has purchased that allows us to design courses online and track who has taken what course. It is truly a Big Brother arrangement because just about anything the learner does can be tracked, except maybe picking his or her nose.

While we were learning about how to build a course my hands were itching to design a real course. I notice a surge of energy each time I am engaged in something creative and a drip-drip loss of energy when I am not.

The new consortium we are part of with John Hopkins allows for lots of creativity, in fact it promised innovative approaches to our funder. I am busy reading up on how insights and innovations happen and am, once again, energized by that.  I am also given the opportunity to become an accredited coach. One of the companies we are considering for the training has an energy model as its basic philosophy. It looks like all energy streams are coming together.