A night at the opera

We had another date night last night. Watching Turandot, and left with Nessun Dorma on replay mode in our brains. Didn't make it for our gym date tonight though. Both of us snowed under with work.

It is one of these rare days where I made a choice between work and family, and chose in favour of one hour of reading Alice in Wonderland and painting eggs with Sophie and her friends. I wonder what the career consequences of this would be, but whilst I felt pain at giving up what looked like another chance of getting more billable hours, there's another part of me that doesn't actually care.

There is no way I am even thinking about being a partner yet, I am about to take another 6 months off work to have our second child. Yet I feel the pain sometimes of balancing on a razor edge between being merely professional and being actually passionate about my job.

Without going into too many technical and indeed confidential details, I am help business become energy efficient and/or switch to cleaner forms of energy. Of course, I do bread and butter kind of arbitration work as well (it pays the rent) but at least I spend a lot of time doing stuff which I derive real satisfaction from doing.