Casual Friday – July 31, 2015

On Fridays I join Aimee of Aimee Writes for Casual Friday, a post with “no structure, no prompts, no rules, anything goes.” Check out her blog here and join us in Casual Friday if you would like.

It’s the end of another week and unbelievably the end of another month. July is over. We look forward to August which is the month for back to school in many jurisdictions but more importantly for me, since I am well past school age, the start of football! I am a diehard football fan and am so very excited that NFL training camps are starting. That means that the football season cannot be far behind.

I had an extremely busy work week because there is so much going on in areas  for which I am responsible. At one point I had a short meeting in my office with a couple of my co-workers. I had left my email screen open and one of the people was facing my computer. He pointed out that I had email coming in so quickly that the screen actually looked like it was scrolling as messages came in one after another after another, all of which required a response or an action of some kind. My job is never boring.

View from my office window

What made things exceptionally difficult was that construction was began on a new building on the lot adjoining my office. So far all they are doing is moving dirt around and compacting soil. The view from my office window is of a pile of dirt. I cannot pretend to understand construction, but much of what I see them doing is moving the dirt from one pile to another. There are times when they are using a roller compacter. This week I learned more than I wanted to about this equipment. The type of roller being used is a vibratory roller which uses the principal of vibration in compacting the dirt. The vibrating rattles our entire building. I find it to be most unsettling but I heard one of my colleagues say that she likes it because it makes her tush feel funny.  Too much information!

I have exciting views of front end loaders and piles of dirt from my office window. At one point I glanced up and a front end loader was backing up at a rather rapid rate of speed right towards my office window. There was a moment of panic until it stopped about 10 feet away. I know I really was not in danger but I was definitely startled. After all, I did not know he would stop prior to crashing into my office!

Our summer continues without much extremely hot weather which I am very appreciative of. We have had rain a couple of times this week. One day we got an inch of rain in a 24 hour period. Living in this dry climate I truly love rain. We have an average annual rainfall of 14 inches so getting an inch of rain in one day is pretty unbelievable. I was checking some weather facts. The national annual average rainfall in the U.S. is 39 inches so here in Santa Fe we get 66% less than the rest of the nation. No wonder that gardening here is a challenge for us as compared to what our family in Wisconsin deals with. Our cosmos are blossoming but so far every blossom is white. We typically have pink and fuscia and purple.  I am not sure where the color is this year.

I continue to struggle with finding the right balance between blogging and other interests. I so love to read and do counted cross stitch which compete with blogging for my time. I am tempted to reduce posting to about once a week, but I don’t want to lose touch with the blogging contacts I have made.  I already feel guilty about being less responsive to comments that are posted on my blog. I also spend less time reading and commenting on other blogs. The views of my site are also down which I fully understand when I am not doing enough to build my community. You would think after 63 years on this earth I would not struggle so much in setting priorities but here I am!

I fully intend to spend this evening with needle in hand working on a small cross stitch project which is a bit of interim work until I am ready to start the next big project.

I hope everyone finds time this weekend to do whatever it is you most enjoy doing.