Weeknotes 1492
cold, cold, christmas
- As yesterday went on I started sneezing and sniffing more and more, and I woke up this morning with a very sore throat and a head full of cement. Today has been a day of enforced rest from everything I was going to do, which is useful but also annoying as the last time I was ill I said I was going to try and rest more and not just when I was forced to by illness. Maybe that will be one of my goals for the new year, which, good grief, is nearly upon us. Next weeknotes is in December, my goodness.
- We're starting to hit proper winter temperatures here on the sunny south coast of England. Today, for instance, we had beautiful blue skies and temperatures nearing zero and feeling negative thanks to the biting wind. We're meant to get some snow too, but there has been no sign yet.
- We have put up our Christmas tree, though!
- Speaking of Christmas, I had been planning to do a little folk carol concert with my friend Hazel just before Christmas, something we did in 2019 and were unable to do last year. Sadly we won't be able to do one this year, but there's still my Christmas playlist from last year which has a lot of the songs we would've sung. I don't know whether I have the juice for a new one this year, but if I do I will post it here.
- I can't remember whether I've mentioned this before, but I've had therapy a few times in the past and while I've always got something out of it, for whatever reason it's never quite hit in the way that it's meant to. I think part of that is just a me thing: I've never quite been able to open myself up enough to engage with it on the terms it requires. I started the latest round a few months ago, and I think it has come at just the right time, as every session has, I feel, yielded some kind of insight about myself, and we've been going for long enough now that certain themes have started to emerge and I feel like we're approaching some sort of grand unified theory of where my issues are arising from. Maybe that's a bit optimistic, but I'm definitely getting the most out of it. There's always a bit of difficulty when offering advice in knowing whether it will be heard by the right person, or even in the right way, but if you've tried therapy and it's not worked out as you hoped it might be worth trying again with someone else, possibly someone offering a different approach (my therapist mix-and-matches CBT and more "traditional" therapy, which I don't think I've quite had before) and making sure you're as completely open with them as you can be.
- I've also been doing business coaching, or "business therapy" as I sometimes describe it. It's equal parts working on my ideas/execution and myself, as often the impediment to things working out ideally is something I'm doing or some pattern of thought I'm stuck in. If you're trying to start a business or similar, it's definitely worth finding a trusted and neutral third party you can bounce ideas off.
- I'm really enjoing doing Memhaz again and getting back into that groove. I want to say that I think our bold new approach of trying to come back to cards will yield new depths of insight but I suspect, like most changes, it will seem like a big-ish thing to the people doing it and not show nearly as much on the outside as we think.
- CM's mum came to visit and we had a lovely time; particularly lovely was our visit to The Geese, whose sausage and mash offering was stupendous. I've never had Marmite mash before, and now I want to eat almost nothing else. Strong recommend.