went for a beer with Alice and suggested I might write a weeknote when I got home
we each had two pints of Neck Oil. it was £6.30 for one pint. I’m glad I don’t go to the pub three or four nights a week any more
last night our next door neighbour said to me, “there’s a house round the corner, they’ve taken the whole roof off. shall we go round with the cargo bike and see if we can get some wood?”. so we did. I had a head torch. felt like a robber.
is it robbing if it’s in a skip?
wrapped Pepsi up in a blanket in the cargo bike this evening, cos it was gloves weather for me, and she can’t tell me if she’s cold or not, can she?
every day I enjoy being part of the anti-growth coalition just a little bit more.
C bought me one of those Ooni pizza ovens for my birthday last week so now I can be anti-growth while I eat pizza in the back garden, fuelled by the wood from the house round the corner’s roof. I wonder how many pizzas it takes, if you consider each pizza as one that isn’t ordered from a takeaway, but also the cost of the pizza oven, to get to a place where it’s actively damaging the economy?
suppose this is only true if I don’t spend my money on other things. guess what: it’s all going on buying different types of insulation.
noting as I look down the sidebar of iAWriter that Angus shaming me into writing week notes lasted three notes. it seems that shame isn’t a great motivator.
for whatever reasons, the world has felt ridiculously heteronormative recently, whether in the films we’ve watched or the things going on around us. it’s a hard do-not-relate, and as someone who has arrogantly never particularly engaged with LGBTQ+ communities and cultures, it leaves me feeling a little rock-and-hard-place. don’t want that and those values: not sure where else to look. where’s the art and the poetry and the sports sitting in the middle of the queer hipster x normcore venn? that’s where I live!
might start writing about work stuff a little more than I have done in the past, because there are floating thoughts and bringing them all together feels like a good idea. I have soooo many tabs open.
today marks one year since Pepsi got found by the side of a road with her pups by a dog shelter in Bulgaria. next week will be six months since she arrived home with us. she’s the chillest dog in the world and having been 100% a cat person, am now convinced that it’s true: it’s better with Pepsi.
there is a real simplicity to having a dog, especially in the mornings. wake up, get dog up, feed dog, leave the house. I like it.
spending most of my time this week thinking about drilling holes in things and going for walks with the dog; about data as a material to design with; about potential. and Checksies too, our lovely little side project that needs a bit of love.
C just sent out a weeknote. we haven’t discussed this. SYNERGY.
vaccine tomorrow. just put the first Vaccines’ album on in anticipation. all of my 20s music snobbery has evaporated.
so many browser tabs. so many half started thoughts. so many “maybe I’ll be more productive when I’ve…..” moments. I think I could use a couple of days in an office. let’s not talk about work, hey?
bought 5 more Hive thermostatic radiator valves; now when we try to boost the heating in one or both of our offices during the day, we can keep the rest of the house cool. gutted that our smart meter has broken and I can’t see what impact this is going to make on our bills. hopefully it’ll reduce, because we’re not heating the whole house every time we want to be a bit warmer at work. but maybe it’ll increase, because the radiators in our offices are always trying to be or get to 18 degrees, rather than us letting them get to 15-16 before we press the ‘boost’ button.
I wonder whether, had I learned the phrase 'balance the heating system’ before yesterday, we could’ve done something jazzy like this using only the usual, non-smart thermostatic valves.
only the best content for my weeknotes crew.
if the stock market carries on this way, I’m going to retire by Christmas 2021. [the stock market will not carry on this way]
we got sent a brand new robot vacuum because of the network issues. it still doesn’t connect to the mesh network. but we can just stick it in a room, press 'play’, and it vacuums. in context, that’s still quite something.
taking a week off next week. apparently bike fitters can still work in this lockdown, so I’m going to go and get one on Tuesday. I am sick of my knees feeling dreadful every time I get on two wheels. I miss feeling brilliant on a bike, instead of nervously waiting for the moment my body starts to creak.
finally admitted to myself that perhaps my inflexible biomechanics are part of the picture here, so like All The Toms, I have started stretching more. Apple Fitness+ seems to take away the inertia of choice, because filtering for length of session is so easy. one more SaaS product enters the picture. at first I was wondering how long I’d have to do daily yoga for before it makes a difference, but that’s not the right mindset: really I think I need to admit that if I don’t stretch properly 3-5 times a week for the rest of my life, at some point it’s gonna hurt.
just as things (heating, robots) were starting to feel like they were working around here, the council have stopped collecting our garden waste. they came this morning, picked up everyone else’s on the street, looked at ours, and skipped it (says our lovely neighbour). mmm, more bureaucracy to interact with. I love it.
new sofa arrived. unlike bureaucracy, I genuinely love it.
slowly, reluctantly, disappointingly beginning to consider whether it would be easier or better to get a car. urgh.