Author: neil

It’s day 5 of the holidays.
No structure required or in place.
It also means that there’s nothing I have to tick off a list.

I woke up earlier than I’ve done in the last 4 weeks, to the sounds of rain and birds chirping, and  the sounds snores of the kids sleeping in their rooms.

The hardest thing to do is to switch off from a mode of always on, always doing something to just being. This idea of just being is a struggle for me.
It feels like laziness to me. Just be? What does that even mean?

We went out for a walk on the beach when the rain paused for a bit this evening. My second walk this week, and it was still tiring.

Just as we walked back to our car, the skies parted, and the sun, very briefly, poked a finger or two through the clouds. And into my soul. The promise of brighter days is enough to keep going. I can just be…

Writing (nearly) every day has been a rewarding experience, allowing me to process the day’s emotional journey with lesser damage to myself and those around me than otherwise likely.

I read through what I wrote this year in my journals, and some consistent themes show up. Some I’m aware of, explicitly.  There are others that keep showing up now and then, very tied to my emotional state on the day.

Reflecting on the writing is what I have planned for the next few hours, and to identify the ones I believe are useful in the next sprint – 2 weeks of doing something consistently every single day. 2 weeks I can do, and 2 weeks can help me build some systems.

Today I had another success too – I finally managed to resuscitate the otherwise healthy Macbook Pro that had somehow upgraded itself to MontereyOS and then killed itself.  It took patience, a little bit of googling, finding the right Apple links for download. In the end, I was able to turn it into a working device that is now available for use. Pleased with the outcome.

 

It was a quiet Christmas, with some friends spending time with us this morning and walking on the beach to with the kids to end the day. It was a day to be thankful for, and I’m truly thankful for the gift of family & friends I have.

The exhaustion I’m feeling continues, with the cough persisting despite the medication.  The weather today didn’t help either.

Hopefully tomorrow is a better day: the forecast suggests a cooler change coming through tonight.

*Yet Another Christmas Day.

I invested two days of the holiday season learning how to build / repair a website.

I’ve sort of done it before.  This blog, for example, was inspired by reading Dave Winer’s blog, and then learning how to set up a site from scratch. I know enough to be dangerous – as in, I’ll probably take the site out – but not enough that it could be a side hustle.

So when the opportunity arose to resuscitate the community radio station’s rather unhealthy and slow website, I decided to jump in, do it and learn while at it. If something broke, I’d beg forgiveness and ask the professional who manages the website to restore it.

Watching a generous two hour video by Tyler Moore while waiting for my doctor’s appointment yesterday morning was how I started it. Learnt enough – or remembered enough – to deactivate all the plug-ins on the site that had made the exercise a painfully slow process the evening before.

I pretty quickly figured out how the various pages hung together in the theme that’s used as default, the menus and sub-menus, the widgets that brought things together, and some of the quirky pages that were hobbled together.   I rearranged the pages, made them a little more consistent in appearance, brought together things that should be, and removed things that didn’t need to be. I learnt how to use Elementor and it’s various options as I was building or rearranging the site.

I learnt also how to set up and embed an online payment option on the site so membership and donations can start to flow in quicker than by post (not a joke!).

None of my volunteer colleagues on the Board have the skills, or the inclination to do what I did in two days. I’m by no means an expert – or want to be – and yet, in two days I’ve built enough skills to talk to the webmaster to communicate the intent of the radio station. I know enough about this now to know why it takes time, & where the bullshit starts with costs.

Taking the initiative means I get to do the work (or I have to do the work, as many would describe it). I get to walk the talk, not merely posture or wave hands in frustration or anger.  The skills I’ve built are transferable, and they will certainly be. I have come to realise that I love being the generalist – jack of many trades and master of a very few – and it is where I play the strongest.

 

The 18 days of break over Christmas & New Years started today.
The exhaustion is real – and so is the fatigue over the newest outbreak.

NSW saw 5715 cases today and the Premier and Prime Minister seem to be stuck in election cycle. Freedom for everyone, open for business was the song.  The traffic on the streets today suggests that not everyone’s buying it.  Most people are masked despite the pollies not wanting to use the ‘m’ word – mandatory. The queues for testing are getting longer, while the duration the testing centers remain open is getting shorter. Christmas is in two days and it is very likely that cases are going to hit 10K in the next week or so.

Rest and relax at home. That’s the best we can do.

And I’m learning how to build a website. So rest, relax and learn.

The Byrds sang “Turn! Turn! Turn!” the lyrics from the apostle Paul’s letter to the Ecclesiastes (with music made famous I didn’t know by Pete Seeger!).

The season right now, in the part of the world I live in, is supposed to be one of celebration and gifting and food. There’s a strange feeling in the air of joy and freedom and festivities, mixed with the weight of the renewed outbreak of the omicron variant.  Let’s just get on with our lives, and deal with the effects later say our local political leaders, much to the chagrin of the health officials.  The exhaustion that medical professionals are feeling, behind the veneer of privacy for patients in hospital wards and corridors, is palpable – our several friends who work in healthcare tell us explicitly.

I saw today a lot of people unmasked while going about their day. A trivial inconvenience at best, two years of living under low level stress seemingly has made people mad at the virus, and not wearing a mask is the way of showing strength (?) at something that doesn’t care nor discriminate.

There’s an election around the corner and the politicians seem mostly interested in not letting this crisis go to waste, & feeding the collective psyche with ‘good news’.  The inability to go to hospital and be attended for something that is not covid related hurts a lot of vulnerable people who will be collateral casualties. But for the moment, ‘merry christmas’ is the only thing on our collective minds.

It’s a whole different kind of a mask we’re wearing instead of the one we need to.