two pleasures

Earlier this week, I spent a nearly 18 hour day, mostly working. Our IS department had called, asking for help stemming the burgeoning flood of virus-laden email stampeding over our mailserver, and despite having graduated away from working on desktop/email problems some years ago (and apparently moving on to professionally mixing metaphors), I said that I’d help.

It’s not like it involved anything particularly clever – I picked the best-looking tool for the job, and carefully installed it on our border mailers while they were still fielding mail. Got everything configured and running around midnight, documented by 12:30, and then I went to bed. It had been a very long day of one activity: sitting in front of the computer, twiddling things far from me. Getting into bed, though, I felt great. I’d helped out the IS folks, the tool was working as advertised, and over the course of the evening, it had blocked some several hundred viruses from causing trouble. Even the next morning I was still riding high on this.

I’d spent so long sitting in one position that my body was stiff, so in the afternoon, I made sure things were running smoothly at the office, and went out for a walk. The day was bright and cold, the snow from a couple of days ago had melted and refrozen a couple of times, and I was walking in places nobody else had walked, at least since the snow fell. I putzed around a couple of underpasses, checked out a restaurant Kate and I had wondered about, discovered a bizarre limosine company I’d had no idea was there, saw some row houses, and walked home via densely packed side streets filled with houses deep in competition with each other over how much seasonal kitsch they could display. It was great, despite highlighting my near-complete lack of regular physical activity recently. I came home tired, but very pleased.

48 hours. Two significant and pleasant accomplishments: one sedentary, one physical. One abstract, one concrete. Complementary, not contradictory.