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.
despite having taken three days off the week before last, I remain very much at the end of my tether. I know this because I spend a lot of time muttering stuff under my breath and swearing when very minor things go wrong.
by Wednesday night I was texting pictures of the cheese in the fridge to the group chat after our Sainsbury’s order arrived. by Thursday morning we’d moved onto discussing bin collections. life is truly scintillating right now.
bought a turbo trainer a couple of weeks ago. tried to put my bike on it. only then realised - and I should’ve thought about this beforehand - that turbos work best for bikes with vertical dropouts, not my semi-horizontal ones, because lining up cassette and chain is…tricky. any excuse to buy another bike I guess.
like Chris, I’m also interested in the search results for ‘garden shelter lean to’. the tree surgeons came on Friday, so now not only is our garden much lighter, but we also have logs to dry out. and as if I’m going to spend £160 on a wood store.
feel like I spend most of my spare time at the moment, and occasionally time in working hours, doing wifi network admin. I miss the days of broken internet during working hours being someone else’s problem. and have you ever tried to get a robot vacuum cleaner to connect to a mesh network? a world of pain.
finished Broken April by Kadare, a book about people in the Albanian mountains living by a code called the Kanun, which involves generations-long blood feuds between families. I don’t think I understood the ending, but bravo to Daunt Books (my mum bought me a subscription for Christmas), who absolutely nailed the brief of “I want to read things about utopias and dystopias and also the Western Balkans”.
the dog has discovered how much she loves chasing squirrels; so much for the easiest dog ever. let the hard training yards begin.