Week 17

A steady week, sunshine makes all the difference to my mood and the variety of things we can do.

🤷‍♂️ Life

• Glorious sunshine all weekend, so managed to get a start on building a slide/swing/climbing frame for Jack.
• Mundane things, cutting the grass, little fixes and improvements to Vera, some walks, a lot of stretching, such was my week. And that’s ok, I enjoy the quieter routines of daily life more and more as I get older. Life is as simple as we make it.
• As I mentioned last week, my bang-about-bike has seen better days, but I’m not ready to ditch it just yet, so off to the bike shop it went. I could/should do it myself but I don’t have the time at present and what I would sweat, curse, and spend too much time/money on, they’ll do easily and in a third of the time. It was nice to take 20 mins to cycle along the local cycle path on a beautiful sunny morning.
• More writing done as well, I’m riding the wave my brain is currently on —even if I’m not fully sure why— to capture thoughts in my novel, and across multiple drafts of future posts for my blog too. I’m a little surprised that the novel leapt forward this past week too, as I’d fallen away from it for a week or two, but I guess that’s partly me finding the balance, and partly having the time to get things clicked into place. 15k words or so by my last count. The advantages of getting up at 5am are true! (except I’m bloody knackered so thankfully it only happened twice).
• My 4 year old boy is growing with confidence day after day. The most recent example was the return of Squirrels (part of the Scouts movement) which had been off for a couple of weeks, and I was half expecting him to want me to wait with him for the duration (it’s an hour on a Wednesday evening) as I had when we first started going. But no, we got in, and when I asked if he wanted me to wait at least until it started, he shook his head and pointed at the door. BYE THEN! What a wonderful wee guy he’s turning out to be (phew!).
• Worth mentioning the London Marathon which saw two world records. It is utterly astonishing how fast these elite athletes run. I couldn’t run the men’s or women’s paces for 30secs, let alone 2hrs!

📚 Read

• The Girl in Cell A by Vaseem Khan – once this gets going (and it takes a couple of chapters) it definitely classes as a ‘page turner’ with well paced action and drama keeping things tight through the various twists and turns all the way to the final pages. Fun read!
• Flashlight by Susan Choi – About halfway through, an intriguing exploration of a family, of loss, and of the many day to day aspects of humanity, all handle with deft and a wonderful turn of language. A joy to read.

📰 Considered

• Talking to students – by Rosecrans Baldwin — “In early drafts, don’t worry the first 20 pages to death.” GUILTY!
• Literary Hub » It’s Getting Harder to Spot AI in Contemporary Publishing. And That’s Very, Very Bad. — I don’t my writing style will ever be mistaken for AI, but I am aware of the next cog in the chain being editors, how do they know?
• Earth gets brighter every year but progression is volatile, study finds | US news | The Guardian — How much of this is down to those super bright white car headlights?
• Recalibrating my reading for thinking – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden — I’m on a similar journey myself, splurging on RSS feeds only to find myself now cutting them down to a ‘better’ set of feeds. Also reading more fiction, cos it is a different mindset/brain need.
• How to Begin | Sydney Review of Books — On a bit of a ‘reading about writing’ tip it seems, but come on, if the phrase “the novel is a capacious carpetbag of a form” isn’t enough to get you read this….
• 16 Glee-ridden Words from Schitt’s Creek | Merriam-Webster — Almost finished our rewatch of Schitt’s Creek, the (sadly) late Cartherine O’Hara delivery is part of the joy, and these words just add to the allure of her performance.
• Creating Baby Geniuses to Thwart the AI Threat? (Yes, Really.) – Mother Jones — Genetic engineering. Complex topic, long article, fascinatingly terrifying and hopeful all at once.
• The Wind in the Willows and reading out loud (Interconnected) — I recorded myself reading some of Jacks stories —Goodnight Moon et al— and it makes the prose all the richer.
• HVD Bodedo | HvD Fonts — I love potatoes. I love fonts. “When we finally had the full aphabet we stamped it on paper, made a font out of this and called it Bodedo.”
• Canada has banned employers from ghosting job candidates. Will the idea catch on? – Positive News — I hope this catches on. It’s always seemed the most unprofessional side of job hunting.

📺 Watched

• Project Hail Mary – what a great movie. The special effects are dazzling, the emotional arc is wonderful, and I was utterly captivated. Ryan Gosling holds the heartbeat of this movie so so well. As does Rocky. There were tears. Much thumbs down (in-joke). Lots of hints and throwbacks to sci-fi movies that have gone before too, definitely one for the geeks.
• Your Friends and Neighbours– I enjoy the little expositions about some of the items, reminds me a little of West Wing when they, for no good reason, offer way more info than you need. Anyway, season 1 was great, once it got going it didn’t let up and whilst it’s a very white, very safe, TV show, it had enough nice moments to keep me watching.
• Monarch– it’s the monsters —Godzilla, Titan X— that keep me watching despite more leaps of faith in the storyline and some fairly by the books acting.

In my queue, new seasons of For All Mankind, Criminal Record, & Shrinking (and soon, Silo!).

🎧 Listened

• A lot of Prince: Like this (Super Bowl Halftime show), and this Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performance, and my favourite album of his,Lovesexy. Wanna go deeper? Anil Dash has you covered(I’ve converted his Discover Prince Spotify playlist to an Apple Music one)
• Nine Inch Noize – which, as a NIN fan, is a sonic treatment that shines a whole new light on some tracks. The temptation is to turn up the volume, give in and turn it up to 11!
• Your Favorite Toy by Foo Fighters – A bit of a throwback to their earlier stuff, will listen more, but it is what a Foos album always is, catchy riff based rock best played loud!
• Bleep Mix #308: DJ Food, ‘O is for Orange 2025’ by DJ Food – beyond the mouthful of a title, this is an electric DJ Mix that is at once ethereal and full of catchy beats. Tracing this all the way back to Coldcut and my early love of House Music.

🫀 Health

• Current Weight: 112.8kg. Same as last week.
• Avg. Sleep: 6h 40mins. Down from last week.
• Lots of walking, feels good to move.

👨‍💻 Tech

• Spent some time with Pixelmator Pro this week. As ever, it started with me wanting to do something simple —add a dash more colour behind my profile pic that I use everywhere— and a few hours later I’d charged through some Youtube videos and figured out using Masks, gotten some more advanced filters, and created a lightly stylised version of the photo, with some snazzy/patterns and colours behind. You can see it on my About page.
• Also ordered a ‘might be crap might be good’ iPhone stand to give me another option for when I’m in office. I like having my iPhone on a stand for the times when, for example, I need to Authenticate myself and Face ID kicks in, saves me leering over the phone flat on the desk. Yes, it was from an Instagram advert.

💻 Site Notes

• Starting to add more pages (static content) to my site. Republished (from 2005!) my Ego page, a Categories page(which needs some work), and aUses page, and a Gigs page. More to come and yes, I’m blaming slashpages.net for this.
• More tweaks in both design and functionality, and a few more to come. Yes, I will be moving away from AI for my featured images so have a plugin to help with that now.

🗓️ Next Week

• Our wedding anniversary on Thursday, 4 years! Still not sure quite how I managed to get so lucky but, we will dine out (baby sitter sorted!) and try our best not to talk about Jack!