Evgenia Arbugauva

Poet and fellow blogger Kathleen Kirk often credits an online magazine she is associated with called Escape into Life. Besides poetry, one of the cool things they do there is put up very interesting photography.  Today, she used a photograph of Evgenia Arbugauva in her own blog, Wait! I Have a Blog?,which promptly led me to EIL to learn more. Arbugauva was born in a small town in Siberia called Tiksi. The photos you will find at EIL chronicle her return to Tiksi after many years. You can find them HERE.   

New Year's Resolutions, anyone?

Yeah, yeah, yeah--it's all a bit belated. So sue me. Anyway, I wanted to post a link to a Slate article about vowing to do less as a resolution. And without even knowing about this idea, this is precisely what I've done. With the new year, I dropped from five days to four at work, and rather to my surprise, it went into effect immediately. I used to work four days, but a sequence of events led me to go to five for the past five or six years. Dropping back would not seem to be any big deal, then, but in fact, it has been a little disconcerting. For one thing, I haven't had a regular weekend as America has come to think of it--Saturday and Sunday--in literally a couple of decades. I could have taken a couple of weekdays as I used to do, but there was a part of me that wanted to change it up a bit.

My first Saturday has been a little anticlimatic, I suppose. It's been wet and gray, and I have a cold, and if I hadn't had a cold, I would probably have been helping a friend move. But the idea that we can be time starved as well as starved in other ways, which the article mentions, rings true. I have been operating at a deficit for some while now, and it may take me some time to adjust to real weekends.

Read the article and see if you too might find a way to vow to do less. It may prove an interesting experiment...