Personal
Personal reflections, comments about things I've been doing, etc.
Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. Happy Chanukah.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 12/01/2010 - 08:04A new month begins with the greeting, Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. It is accompanied by the start of Chanukah and for me, the start of a new job. The new job is Social Media Manager at Community Health Center. I’ve held off writing much about it until things were pretty certain, and it has been a long process. Close friends who have known about this have said that the jobs sounds like a perfect fit for both me and CHC. I am pretty excited about the job and the potential to do some really fun and important work. However, I’m going to hold off saying much more until I’ve actually had some time to sit down and talk more with the people I’m working with about strategy.
That probably won’t happen until tomorrow at the earliest. Today will be filled with orientation and forms and starting to learn my way around the place. More soon...
As a final note, I want to thank a few people who entered into the Buckyballs Contest last night. With all the stuff going on with my job change, I haven't promoted it as much as I would like. I'm going to keep the contest open for another day or so, and then announce the winners, so please, check out Buckyballs,enter the contest and spread the word. As with my new job, More soon...
The Last Day of November
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 11/30/2010 - 10:46“Live everyday as if it were your last”. While I understand the idea behind it, this saying never really resonated with me. If I knew today was going to be my last day, I’d probably be pretty depressed and try to spend time just with family. I probably wouldn’t get the laundry done.
Perhaps, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” is a better way to get the idea across. Yet today, the last day of November, I am thinking in terms of last days. Today is the last day before I start a new job. There are so many things that I need to clean up and straighten out before tomorrow comes, and I’m kind of thinking that tomorrow will be the first day of the rest of my life.
That said, I also recall listening to a psychologist talking to the incoming freshman class when I started college. She spoke about how every year a new group of freshman come in, determined to turn over a new leaf and it rarely happens that they really do turn over a new leaf. I look out the window and see the piles of leaves that have fallen around here and I think about my new leaf. Will my new job be simply another leaf turned over into a large pile of leaves, or will it be something different this time? We shall see. I’m optimistic.
What will all of this mean for my other projects? Well, I suspect I’ll not have as much time to play with Drupal or the Nokia N900, although I’ll probably still have some blog posts up about it. In fact, I am not sure if I’ll be able to keep up my pace of daily blog posts. I suspect it will also mean that I’ll spend less time surfing blogs than I have recently and may cut back in my interaction in some of the blogging circles. I am also talking about what happens with my column for the Bethwood Patch.
All of this said, my new job is about social media, so I’ll still be very involved online and I have to figure out how the job and my blog will relate. More on this later.
One of those days
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 11/27/2010 - 22:17Here it is, after nine in the evening, and I haven’t written anything. I wrote a lot this past week, and I’ve got some big things I hope to write about later in the coming week, for right now, I’m pretty much out of steam.
It has been a very food oriented weekend, above and beyond the turkey on Thursday. Friday, we went to Lorenzo’s in West Haven. It is a restaurant that Kim and her family have been going to long before I came into the picture. Today, Kim’s brother and his three children joined Kim, Fiona and I as we took Wesley, our five month old Labrador Great Pyrenees mix puppy to a dog run and then to Long Island sound. Afterward, we stopped for a late lunch.
Back home, I rested a little bit, and then Kim and I went to dinner with some friends in town.
Now, I’m tired, and will probably go to bed early. Let’s see if I come up with something more substantial to write about tomorrow.
A Thanksgiving Play
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/26/2010 - 11:08The Thanksgiving Story, as presented by Fiona and her cousins.
Story.lab Homework
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/19/2010 - 11:09I am frustrated. My computers are running slowly this morning at I have lots to do. While they are crucial to my work, the computers that I have are pretty old. I’ve managed to keep them running well past their expected lifespan.
One of the things on my todo list, actually for yesterday, but it got bumped to this morning, and I really need to get it done, is this blog post about story.lab. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been heading down to The Grove to join in a discussion about living the mission of our lives as stories. What are those stories? What is the object of desire in the story? What is the controlling idea? What is the over arching value of my controlling idea? The cause for my overarching idea? How must my character transform if I am able to live my story?
In other discussions, there have been questions about what prevents us from living our stories? What are the antagonists? For home work, we are supposed to think through some of these questions and be prepared to share them. So, here is my first take.
The controlling idea is about engagement. With that, I guess the object of desire is for people to become more engaged in their communities. This is an open ended object of desire. Ideally, it is obtained every day and at the same time becomes the new object of desire. No matter how involved people come, there is always that desire to become more involved.
As people become more involved in their communities, their lives and the lives of their communities become transformed. With that, I need to constantly be finding new ways of helping people become more involved in their communities as I need to constantly better understand and become more involved in the communities I’m part of.
Yet this comes to the antagonists. It is easy to become burnt out. When there is a setback, it is easy to become disillusioned. Through all of this, there is a struggle to make a living, to help get bread on the table. Unfortunately, promoting community involvement often doesn’t pay all that well. It means juggling resources and keeping old computers running and the frustration that comes with it. It means juggling time commitments.
With that, this blog post is written quickly and not edited. I need to juggle some of my time commitments. So, what is the story line for the mission of your life?
