cheJake

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Mountain bound

Next week I return to teaching my classes at McDaniel College Budapest, Intro to Journalism and Public Speaking. I'll also be starting a four-person seminar at Euler Hermes, a credit insurance company. So things will soon get busy.

But I digress from my reflections. It's 28 January and Spring feels like it's on its way. It's rainy and still cold, but not freezing anymore.

John Updike is dead. I haven't yet felt compelled to read any of his work. I'm reading the Little Princess. I shall now got read some more before Lucia turns out the light.

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Holidays Over

The holidays are passed. Cindi Rosner, my friend from high school has been visiting us. She came last Wednesday and leaves tomorrow. Before she came, my friend Claudia Raths, the jazz saxophonist from Switzerland was in town for a week or so to bring her son to be with his Hungarian father for the winter holidays. Cindi, Eldar and I went to an expat Christmas party hosted by long-time expat Tom Popper to which Claudia also came, at my invitation. But I see now that you can read about that in my previous post. I can tell now that my stress level has increased since then. The biggest reason for that is that I've had to get back to work. I'm working on a research project now that I realise got off on the wrong track because I failed to negotiate the terms of the work in the beginning. Now I see that the money figure wasn't sorted out and I have a significantly smaller budget than I had thought. And I may have to do a larger portion of the work than I originally thought. But I can deal with this. Meditation will be important this week.

Sunday night I basically pulled an all-nighter getting the text of my interview with Michael Tippin put into order for the BBJ. I got it done and was able to get out to a new Hungarian client in the morning on Monday.

Suddenly money for the coming months is an issue. I had wanted to just teach two classes, both at McDaniel and not teach a course at the Budapest Communications College. Now I'm beginning to think it might not be such a bad idea to teach a single class there. I floated the idea past them about a class on "Freakonomics" and it seemed to go over OK. I'll ask if this is still a possibility.

It's been an experience spending some time with Claudia after some years and then seeing Cindia again whom I last saw over a year and a half ago. Two very different personalities and two very different friendships.

Now Holidays are over and responsibilities begin again. My new Year's resolution was to make better use of my time and to go to Kevin Gardener's Yoga class before the end of January.

How could I make good use of my time today? At two, I shall ring Nenad, then call 3 or 4 real estate people to get useful input for this research. And I'll send some emails. Then I'll meditate at 16:30. Later I'll hang out with Cindi, this being her last night in town.

My impulse is to do all those things I haven't been doing . . . now that I have things I have to do.