Weeknotes 1578

Monthnotes

• It's been a busy few weeks!
• We went to the annual Lewes Rotary Club skittles tournament, where we were on a team with an old colleague of mine. We performed respectably but not well enough to get through to the next round, which is where you want to be.
• Went to see The Dark Room, which was really good, though I had to leave a bit early because I was exhausted and it was hot. Inspired us to do a Seagull article in a choose-your-own-adventure format, though.
• Due to illness and tiredness and various other things, we've not had Memhaz in a while, but two of the listeners we interact with the most who aren't irl friends, Tom and Alex, both came to see us (or "came to a conference in Brighton and happened to say hi" or some such similar excuse). I feel like our slackness is being encouraged by our listeners just coming and finding us where we live.
• We went to a farm to see some cows! They were just chilling, watching them was a very relaxing experience.
• Much less relaxing has been my return to BJJ now that health and time allow. Great fun but extremely tiring, I had bruises and gi burns all over my arms and legs after last time.
• Went along with Martyn to the Witchez cafe re-opening in the old Choccywoccydoodah location in the Lanes, which I think has been vacant since they shut down in 2019. A really nice place and a really good vibe—I'll definitely try and go along sometime in the normal course of opening.
• Had a chat with old friend Chris who wants to get involved with Seagull stuff, which is very exciting :)
• Every 6-18 months I have a night where I'm captured by a frantic desire to rearrange my living spaces and I stay up late scribbling things down on notepads then fall asleep and execute on it as best I can the next day. Every time I do this, there are fewer and fewer things I have to change, and I hope one day I will arrive at the Final Configuration. This time I rearranged my room, the kitchen, and my desk in my office. So far I'm pretty happy with the results.
• We finished FUB! I missed more of the sessions than I'd like and it was a bit of a rollercoaster but ultimately a very positive experience. Will hopefully take more of their courses in the new academic year.
• I had some ideas about limiting content intake, and then have thoroughly failed to operationalise any of them. That's one I need to build a more robust framework for, I think. It was a good idea, though.
• Yesterday was Trans Pride, and in addition to all my usual friends I bumped into my old housemate Alex, which was a lovely surprise! I've not seen him in years, so it was really good to catch up.
• I don't talk that much about work here, but it has definitely been busy-busy. I was very proud with some detective work I undertook for one of our clients—some numbers were wrong and after weeks of hitting my head against the problem I had a flash of inspiration and worked it out and I felt like Sherlock Holmes.
• Speaking of detective work: I seem to have a greater-than-usual susceptibility to eye infections, usually connected to my hay fever. For the last year, though, I've had particularly bad flare-ups of... well, I knew they weren't infections since they didn't respond to antibiotics; all I knew is they hurt like hell and when they got particularly bad they started to cloud my vision. This has happened to me about four or five times now, and every time the doctor's not quite sure what the deal is. The mix of symptoms feel like a combination of things that don't quite occur in the way they expect, there's something a bit weird—but it usually goes away when treated with steroid drops and eye moisturiser, so I just do that. This time, though, when it started happening I realised that I'd used some of my eczema ointment near my eye—eczema ointment I'd started using nearly a year ago. I searched "epimax near eyes" and lo and behold, the first result is an article in Nature Eye describing my situation exactly. I still ended up having to sit in eye hospital A&E all afternoon to get the treatment but at least I know what the problem is now, and how to avoid it in future!

Reading

• Nearly finished Revenant Gun, I am enjoying these books so much.
• Couple of really banger articles from Huw Lemmey recently: this one on anxiety and this one on the Huw Edwards stuff.

Watching

• We've been watching Only Connect with dinner. It's a good length, a good format and allows for a good level of engagement (CM is very good at the missing vowels round). Not really watching very much TV in general means that I've not watched much that's not "prestige" in some way for ages, so watching a low-budget, purposely obtuse BBC2 quiz show is weirdly refreshing.

Listening

• I was listening to the Andor soundtrack and then I started listening to the old AMCA episodes on Andor, and man I need to get back on that Andor rewatch.

Playing

• I finished Jedi Survivor. A good game!
• I think the final bit of Citizen Sleeper DLC has dropped so that's going to be the next thing, I think!

Keep it real everyone! Over and out.