Day in the Life

Now that I'm back from vacation and have finished blogging about it, life is back to normal.

Here is what a typical weekday looks like for me.

I wake up whenever I feel like it. (I haven't set my alarm since I got back from vacation, just allowing myself to wake up naturally, but I'll probably set it again at some point.) After breakfast and typical morning things, I go to my desk to start my work on Utah Historical Quarterly. On Tuesdays, I go into the office in Millcreek.

I do a small chore every day, so I usually do this halfway through my UHQ workday when I need to take a break. On Tuesdays, I do it after work.

Once I have done five hours of UHQ work, I then switch to my personal laptop to do my BYU work for three hours. (Using my personal laptop can make it harder to stay on task.)

Then I'm done working for the day. Besides work, my priorities each day are a chore, cardio, and strength exercises. So evening time is when I exercise, and the temperature and amount of daylight determine when I do those things. For strength, I either use my Home Workout app or our weight machine.

Ideally, my cardio is a trail run, and trail runnning is something I consider a hobby. There are so many options near my house, so I can change it up according to length, difficulty, shadiness, and other factors. It is such a refreshing and exhilarating activity. There are always new things to see, according to the time of year. This week, I saw the first red leaves of the year! 

Sometimes, the weather is not suitable for trail running, so I do some other form of cardio. Tuesday this week was hot, so I went and swam with the recreational swim team, but I do that more often in the winter and early spring. Likewise, I usually reserve street running and occasional biking for winter and early spring. 

And in the summer and fall, I like to go on walks in my neighborhood to try to eradicate goatheads. There are three spots in the neighborhood that I have adopted, and I do think I've made a significant difference in those spots. There have been several times this summer I've gone on a walk and haven't found any to pull up. Of course, there are plenty of other goathead patches out there. But by maintaining these three spots, I prevent their nefarious seeds from spreading to other spots; and if any seeds get transferred to them, I can pull them up there.

After doing all this, I often have some extra time, which I might spend cooking, reading (mostly academic history books), writing, or shopping.

Of course, I don't always do all these things. There are other things that alter my schedule. These include church activities, family events, community lectures, and other things. 

One adorable diversion was on Wednesday this week. I went to finish a chapter of a book (see below). Predictably, Reggie came and sat on me while I read. What was unusual this time, however, was that he sat on me for more than an hour and a half. Not wanting to move him, I just spent some time looking at my phone and doing more reading than I expected. So I didn't do cardio that night. (Part of that was the temperature.)

What was I reading? I get a lot of free books for my job that I am obligated to read, and one of the books I got was a memoir called A Million Miles: My Peace Corps Journey by Jody Olsen. It sounds like a real snooze fest, right? For many of these work books, I "gut" them, meaning I read the introduction and conclusion and skim the rest. But for this book, I was surprised that I actually wanted to fully read it! The author writes in such an engaging style, a style I would expect more from a novel. She was the daughter of a Utah politician, and then she became director of the Peace Corps during Trump's first term and COVID. The book talks about her time with the Peace Corps over the decades. But she also tells a fascinating story of her family life. When Jody was a young child, her birth mother left the family, but then they reunited when Jody was in her twenties. Jody and her brother spent some time with another family, and the mother of that family threatened the children that she would kill herself with a hammer if they didn't quiet down. Jody's father remarried, and her stepmother often told Jody she couldn't attend school events because she had to help raise her younger siblings. Jody's brother died in a car crash at twenty-one. And after nearly three decades of marriage, her husband came out as gay and married a man (at a time when this was less common), but they ultimately remained close.

Anyway. If you ever have been curious about what a typical day looks like for me, this might give you some idea!