1641: poking my head in

Gosh, that was a whole month! Not back to normal yet but did at least want confirm I'm still here.

A bunch of stuff has happened in this time.

Had a bit of a wobble about work and my own abilities and realised that my self-esteem could use a little work, so I'm trying to work on that. I also realised that I'm not really focusing on some core values I'd like to prioritise so I'm going to try to do some of that too! Lots of journalling—for some reason I'd never considered making multiple journals in Day One until Jay posted about it, now I have seven!
My Cybersyn talk was cancelled at the last minute due to venue issues and I've now been pushed to February because they're all booked up for the next little while. Sad, but fair enough.
Pretty much completely stopped listening to podcasts and reading news as an experiment, which had the unexpected side-effect of almost totally killing my desire for snacks and treats. ??? on the causation there but it coincided 1:1. Slowly introducing some audio—been listing to SFUltra (of course) and lecture on Youtube while I'm at the gym, but mostly trying to not always have something in my ears while I'm doing other things and my head feels a heck of a lot clearer for it.
Had a Day Of Birthdays—celebrations for three of my friends' birthdays which necessitated a lot of baking, but I got it all sorted and it was a really nice time even if some of the attendance at parties was only brief. Made another cake for birthdays later in the month and was told it was my best yet!
Just in time for the summer to end, I remembered that our road has a community garden. Went and spent some time reading over there, it was lovely.
Had a week off; went to Dorset to see my parents and their new dog. She's called Kia, a rescue from Cyprus, she has big sad eyes and loves her squeaky elephant.

Went to a conference in London—met some people I've never met IRL, and lovely to meet them too!—but left early to go to Slough and watch the baseball playoffs; Brewers lost, sadly, but it was really nice to be there and I somehow ended up doing commentary down the phone to the baseball crew—all that listening to Northwoods Sleep Baseball really paid off.
Did a bunch of flat clearout stuff, again (several people have inherited some really good jumpers) and got rid of a bunch of bits and bobs we just don't use or have smaller versions of that we will take up less space.
Bought some wedding bits, sorted venue stuff; at this rate we'll be all ready before the end of the year!
Nogi BJJ is great; definitely preferring it to gi atm. Also started a new gym routine that's a bit more intense than previous (and takes a bit longer) and I'm really enjoying it. (It's the 4-day Upper/Lower split in Hevy, the app I've switched to from Strong, which was really starting to get creaky).
I've been trying to practice a little bit of driving every day to keep myself comfortable with it. I'm doing better but still finding it a bit stressful. It's possible that I just don't really like driving, but I would still like to be able to do it more easily when called to.
Nearly done with S5 of Gilmore Girls; Luke and Lorelai are together (finally!) and I'm liking Logan a lot more than I expected to based on the descriptions I'd heard.
The last week or so I've been ill off-and-mostly-on, which has really sucked since it's caused me to miss several things I was very much looking forward to—lunch with Shona, our new vicar's licensing mass, Abi's birthday walk. But I did (between spells of illness) make it to a conference which I wasn't expecting to go to by virtue of someone passing on their ticket at the last minute, and I got to hang with Bassey and Victor and some old colleagues and that was lovely.
We also dragged ourselves to church (despite my voice having completely gone and CM having had almost no sleep) for our new vicar Fr Rich's first service and it was really good and positive. All our fill-in ministers over the last year have been wonderful and a blessing but it's really, really good to have a regular minister again.
Entirely unexpectedly, a friend I've not talked to for about five years got in touch, and it's been extremely nice chatting to them again. (I also know they read the blog, hello Rachel!)
Tired and ill and no voice but doing pretty well considering.