6:45: I wake up and give Hazel some belly scratches until she wakes up fully. Belly scratches used to make her nervous, but now she won’t get out of bed without them. This dog is weird.

7:00: I shove three pills down Hazel’s throat: a giant frozen horse pill that’s supposed to help her ear condition, a Prozac, and a tranquilizer to keep her from shaking her head every five minutes. Then I mix up some food with some fish oil and feed her. It smells like ass.

7:10: In the new shower. The heated floor feels nice.

7:30: I kiss the girls goodbye and head out the door.

7:40: I’m sitting in the car, parked a little ways away from the train station. I’ve got about 10 minutes to kill before I have to walk to the platform, so I sip some coffee and search for some new podcasts to follow.

8:00: I’m on the train, listening to Sidedoor, the Smithsonian’s podcast about things in their collection you might not see in the museum. Highly recommended.

8:45: Filing through Union Station, following hundreds of other people on their morning commute.

8:50: I drop my bag at my desk in the office. Then I spend about 15 minutes warming up my oatmeal, sipping coffee, and reading the day’s headlines while I eat.

9:10: One of my designers asks me for some help with a visual in Flourish, our interactive charting software. We spend the next 20 minutes trying to get it to do what we want (showing percentages in a popup for data in a bar chart that is represented by numerical values). I’m able to get it displaying percentage data from a different part of the spreadsheet but I can’t crack the particular formula it needs, so we send an email to their enterprise support team.

9:30: I meet with my video producer, who thanks me for the noise-cancelling headphones I got for him, and asks for my help transferring a project from Final Cut Pro to Premiere. I spend the next half-hour directing him on a wild goose chase; he’d heard that previous versions of Premiere would import FCP files, and we have several machines that are running older versions. This proves to be false. He finds a way with a third-party application, and gets to work.

9:45: I set up my production manager’s new MacBook Pro with a Dropbox account and begin syncing about 35GB of data.

9:50: Down to the café to reset the Amazon Fire stick running the display software for that room; the TV has been set to shut itself off from 7PM-8AM and the Fire stick didn’t reboot itself. The batteries in the remote are dead, so I source some new ones. I update some settings and do the same for the three lobby displays upstairs. Fire sticks are unreliable. I’ve returned two of them and another is acting strange.

10:00: I leave a message with a data visualization candidate I’m hoping to hire: I’ve got some good news for her.

10:15: Going through email, sorting out the day’s priorities and tasks (I have 5 hours blocked out on my calendar for actually producing some work, and I’m able to take advantage of about 1 hour of it).

10:40: I get a callback from my candidate and offer her a job! Best part of my day. She’s excited and we work out some of the details.

11:00: I dig up a slide deck from 2017 to answer a question from the London office about getting a map of our locations printed for their walls; the map they like is three years out of date. I find a suitable replacement, set it up for print, and send it to them.

11:15: I shoot an email to my data viz candidate about a side project she sent me a link to (Muppets!) and offer some feedback. Now I have the Muppet Show theme song stuck in my head.

11:18: We get an email back from the Flourish folks, who say they’re working on a solution.

11:30: Reviewing some videos from an international office and fielding questions from other folks on our team, then request a meeting to review the strategy.

11:45: I have to look over some design changes from the folks who are building a system to create interactive reports for us; they’re going into production this week.

12:00: Cleaning out my email inbox, which has filled up again.

12:15: I set up a blank drive and begin cloning the internal drive on my old laptop so that I can return it this week. When that’s done I check on the Dropbox syncing on the other laptop.

12:30: I run out for some Chipotle and bring it back to eat at my desk. I’m not finished with it when…

1:00: …I jump into an hourlong meeting with an external web vendor to talk about design needs; the first 45 minutes is spent going through data spreadsheets until I ask to change direction, and we accomplish everything I need to in the last 5 minutes of the meeting.

2:00: I go directly into another meeting to talk about the IO videos and sort things out.

2:30: I’m called out of that meeting to go shoot some pictures of one of our program leads, who is getting an award from the DOD for being a great boss and giving one of his employees enough time to join the Air National Guard and go through a 6-month training program. I sit through a very low-key ceremony, then have the lead and the DOD rep follow me to our step-and-repeat, shoot some standard grip and grins, then go to a different spot and repeat the process.

3:00: I go back to finish the video discussion, and help come up with a strategy.

3:45: Following up on more email. So much daily email.

4:15: Both laptops are done, so I wipe the drive on my old machine and install Catalina.

4:20: I finish final details with my data viz candidate and arrange for the offer letter to be sent.

4:25: Reviewing about 20 new candidates for our Graphic Design position, taking notes, and narrowing down to 4 for follow ups.

4:40: There are about 20 shots of the award group to go through, so I cull them down to 5 good ones, color-correct the best two, and post them to our Flickr feed. Then I send an email to the DOD rep and our internal team to kickstart the social media posts.

4:50: I lock all the cameras, laptops, and other gear away and attempt to straighten up my desk.

5:05: I’m out the door and on my way to the train. Listening to Broken Record, a podcast with Rick Rubin interviewing various musicians.

5:20: my train pulls out of the station and I’m on my way home.

5:58: I hike back to my car and drive to the liquor store to replenish our beer supply. Jen gets a 6-pack of Harp and I choose a six-pack of Victory Cloud Walker, a hazy juicy IPA.

6:30: We sit down for some dinner: a southern beans and rice recipe Jen found that includes chorizo. Yummy.

7:15: I help Finn go through her homework to make sure everything is complete.

8:20: Jen and Finn head upstairs to bed. I let Hazel out for an evening pee.

8:30: Playing through Fallout 4 as a new character, because I’m lazy and I don’t feel like learning a whole new game. Hazel is settling at my feet, after wandering the first floor worrying at her bones.

9:15: Watching an episode from the latest season of The Venture Brothers on Hulu. Just as funny as it was in 2004.

9:50: I put Hazel out for her last pee of the day. She comes back in and waits by the stairs for me to pick her up and put her over the baby gate.

10:15: Laying in bed and reading through some dumb Internet before going to sleep.