Heavy sigh, silent start, mouth noise, heavy sigh.

I’m thinking about, I work for myself, so things should be chill, but the past couple days have been hectic.

Hectic, I say.

And I have house guests, and I have rehearsal, and you need stuff to happen to have a constant source of your daily Lex topics.

I feel like I’ve just been, not in a rut, but in a routine of doing the same thing over and over again each day and being really busy.

Oh, a rut.

But it’s funny to me that I work for myself and my calendar’s out of control.

I made a fix today.

I made a fix earlier today that will hopefully help with some of my calendar craziness.

I’d like to tell you about it.

Your Daily Lex.

So a lot of people use Calendly links, links that you can send to people so they can schedule themselves on your calendar.

Calendly has a great feature where it can also see your calendar, so it can tell you which slots work for you.

As a recipient, I sometimes find those links annoying, because it’s like, oh, don’t make me do all the work.

But it also saves so much back and forth on the email front of like, well, I can do this time.

Can you do this time?

That’s annoying.

I use Fantastical’s version of this thing from Flexibits.

I love Fantastical, the calendar app.

It really works for me, and so I use their scheduler thing.

And it’s great.

All my clients have access to book things on my calendar, and that’s fine.

It only lets them book things that are open, whatever.

But sometimes I look ahead and I’m like, oh, this is what my day looks like for the rest of the day.

But because of the way I had configured my calendaring, people could schedule themselves for just an hour from when they were booking it.

So I was like, okay, I’m free at 4 p.m., and then somebody at 2.45 p.m.

is looking.

They can book themselves for 4 p.m., and then suddenly I have another meeting on my calendar.

In one sense, that’s good.

But in early days of LexarMoon Consulting, not now when we’re 10 months in, but early days of LexarMoon Consulting when it was just a baby business, I was like, I gotta let people schedule for one minute ahead of time, one minute in the future, because I need all the business I can get.

Now that it’s well-established and I know what I’m doing and I’ve got a great roster of clients, I was realizing, hey, I don’t have to allow my own work schedule to get crazed.

So today I made a change where you can’t book a certain number, more than a, it’s gotta be enough hours from now so that you can’t surprise me on a given day.

And it’s not that any clients were doing anything wrong.

They were scheduling meetings that the calendar allowed, but it was stressing me out when I thought, oh, this is when I’ll do certain work.

Because sometimes I block the work time on my calendar, like here’s when I’ll do work for this client, because if you don’t block it, then when can you do it?

But other times I just kind of see it, oh, I can do it this afternoon, great.

And then when suddenly that time’s gone, it’s like, what?

What am I gonna do now?

And so the answer is, I’m gonna change how my calendar works, which I have now done.

So way to go, me.

We’re having kosher Chinese food for dinner tonight, which is always exciting.

I think I told you many months ago about the drama with the local kosher Chinese restaurant, which was found to be using not kosher food, and it was a giant scandal, and they closed.

So now the nearest kosher place is 30 minutes away instead of being eight minutes away, and is about 85% as good as the old one.

So a shame.

But we’re having it tonight, and it’s still exciting, even though it’s just got that 85% quality.

And I’m looking forward to that.

I’ve got an Elf music rehearsal tonight.

Music rehearsals are my least favorite rehearsals, because I need to practice music on my own.

And I’m actually, I’m confident that I will get where I need to get with Elf, but I was telling a couple trusted friends and the director of the show, I’m struggling a little bit with Elf right now.

I’m trying to find Walter.

Again, Walter is Buddy’s dad.

James Caan originated the role in the movie, and he’s a villain in the story.

He’s not the villain.

Another villain shows up, but he, for a long time, is the bad guy.

And I was trying to play him not as such a bad guy, but he needs to be a bad guy.

And the easy thing to do is just to yell.

But just yelling, just being angry, yelling, mean guy all the time, doesn’t have enough levels, doesn’t have enough layers.

So I had been trying, like, smoldering, like, quiet anger, like, thinking about James Caan.

I haven’t re-watched the Elf movie recently, but thinking about, like, quiet, angry James Caan.

And that doesn’t always read on stage.

So I don’t feel like I found it yet.

I don’t feel like I found it.

I’m confident I will find my way in, because, listen, he is kind of a trope-y character.

He’s kind of a, I don’t know, an archetype, whatever.

But I want to find my way in.

I want to give him some reality, some realness.

I’m just going to keep saying synonyms for some reason today.

But I haven’t found it.

I’m going to find it.

So nobody worry.

I don’t know if you’re panicked.

I’m not panicked.

It’s going to be fine.

I’m going to find angry Walter, who’s not cliched angry, but honest angry.

Villains don’t think they’re villains.

Anyway, that’s all I got.

Happy Tuesday.

I hope you too have kosher Chinese food sometime soon.

It’s good.