It was a pretty regular week, but also an emotional one. In the midst of it I felt ill for a few days, still haven’t fully recovered.

This week I

• Met payroll. Always the best bookkeeping day of the month to me, paying all of us for our work.
• Did some of the bookkeeping for the VAT returns due end of the month.
• Had the weekly client meetings.
• Wrote a multiyear plan for the interprovincial ethics committee and the general ethics programme of the provinces, including a budget proposal, for the political decision making process to be completed before the end of the year.
• Had a shareholders meeting (which in our case is not in terms of people different from a directors meeting, but differs in formal roles and perspectives.)
• Received my first phone call from Y. Now that she’s 7 there are times where it is useful she can reach us or her grandparents on her own initiative. It’s a dumb phone, and it remains at home, with the most basic plan and no data. There are a few times now and then where she might be alone at home for 30-45 minutes, and this gives her the opportunity to reach us quickly if needed or for reassurance.
• Did a systems convening landscaping exercise with the team, in follow-up of our training together last month. It’s a good way to create new insights in the context of our work, and to identify some of the actual work we think needs doing. It’s also tough to do, as there is no one way to understand the systems we operate in, and multiple perspectives are equally valid. The result therefore is less important than the discussions while making that result. Still progress was made.
• Met with Y’s teacher to better understand her program (she has a strongly reduced set of the standard exercises to do to free up time for more challenging material, but that makes it hard to understand what she is working on, what she should be working on, and how far she should be)
• Didn’t feel well in the second half of the week.
• Participated in the interprovincial ethics working group, and briefly explained the plans for the committee and programme I drafted.
• Took a deep dive into the proposed EU Cyber Resilience Act, to see where the worries in the FOSS community are coming from.
• Discussed a potential trip to London early December to represent a client in an international meeting.
• Had the ‘The Green Land family day’, which was an afternoon event at my company. Each of our team had invited a few people from their family, or that they regarded as family, to get to know our company and our work better. And of course we got to know the background of our colleagues better. It was fun. E and Y were both there, but E came later, so it was Y who mostly represented my family. She did so with energy and without hesitation. That was rather amazing to see, how she interacted in a group of over 40 adults, opening conversations and enjoying herself.
• Went to the memorial service of the father of a dear friend who had passed away at the start of the week. The service took place in Heerenveen in Fryslân in the north.
• Drove to Fryslân a second time, to Leeuwarden, to meet-up with E’s entire family. We had lunch and then together visited the musical ‘De Tocht’, The Ride, about the Elfstedentocht, an ice skating race on natural ice over 200km through eleven cities that is quite famous in the Netherlands. The last one took place in the late 1990s, and since then it hasn’t been cold enough for the surface waters to freeze to be able to hold such an event. The memorial service and this musical being both partly in Frisian made me think of the place of that language in my own context. I can understand Frisian, which I learned as a child because it was what my paternal grandparents spoke to me. I associate the language with the relationship I had with my grandparents, so it is a language of intimacy and of life events for me. The memorial service I went to fit that pattern, but hearing it used in a cultural expression like that musical was a strange experience. Hearing it for me is associated with personal emotions, and it was almost as if I found the musical more emotionally touching because of it. A sort of contextual cognitive dissonance.

A Fryslân sign, similar to the I heart NYC sign. The red thing on the left is not a heart but a ‘pompeblêd‘, the stylised leaf of a water lily, which is part of the Frisian flag. It stood just outside the venue of the musical we went to on Sunday and I took this photo in passing.