Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be increasingly cloudy and cooler with a high of 62. Sunrise is 7:21 and sunset is 5:55 for 10 hours 34 minutes of daylight. The moon was full late last night, and now 99.6% of its visible disk is illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board holds an annual budget hearing at 5 PM and a regular meeting at 6 PM.
On this day in 1944, the Battle of Leyte Gulf ends with an overwhelming American victory. (“The Imperial Japanese Navy had suffered the greatest loss of ships and crew in its entire history. Its failure to dislodge the Allied invaders from Leyte meant the inevitable loss of the Philippines, which in turn meant Japan would be all but cut off from its occupied territories in Southeast Asia.”)
Last Tuesday, at a meeting of the Whitewater Common Council, the city’s finance director presented on the city’s draft budget. The video embedded immediately below is her presentation; the document embedded thereafter is her slideshow presentation.
The presentation was sound, well-reasoned, and delivered in a confident and yet relaxed manner. (These are not times — for the city, state, or nation — in which one hears many presentations that are both confident and yet relaxed.) This finance director has been, these years, an intellectual and scholastic gain for our city.
The presentation ends with a slide entitled Questions? I’ll not pose any direct questions during a busy time of planning, but I do have a rhetorical question arising from a council member’s comment before the finance presentation began.
The council member observed that “the master budget document takes somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 minutes to open up because of all the linked things. So just a shout out to all the work that goes on behind the scenes.” It is a lot of work admirably undertaken on behalf of the community.
That’s also a long time to open a document. Needless to say, I am not he who could design the described document differently. The observation does raise, however, my rhetorical question: How does one fill the time? The presumption, of course, is that one simply multitasks on other necessary matters.
In these times of intense and demanding tasks, I’ll suggest an alternative. Sometimes work advances best and most soundly with a few minutes away from one’s principal task before returning to that obligation again.
So, for example, those minutes might offer time for folding a few origami animals, a crossword, or a bit of online Scrabble. Here one can see my preferences, but how one would fill the time would rest on personal needs and preferences. Simply a suggestion.
The deeper point is that in demanding times one sometimes healthfully avails oneself of a moment or two away before returning to one’s impressive budgetary work.
Inside Japan’s biggest origami convention: