Weeknotes 20

The week of not much note

• Monday - Mock service assessment

  I spent the day helping the ‘Apply for a grant for affordable housing’ service team to prepare for their upcoming Alpha service assessment.

  It brought back a lot of memories from my time in grant-making. The user needs are essentially the same, knowing if they are eligible to apply, how to apply and so on.

  As the time went on I felt quite tired and had a cracking headache, I thought that it was the result of a day spent with my headphones on, staring at the screen, connected to a horrible Microsoft Teams virtual meeting room.

• Tuesday - Flu strikes

  Turns out my headache and tiredness was actually down to a nasty bout of Flu. Monday night I went to bed and barely slept thanks to coughing, shivering and all the other horrible symptoms of flu.

  So I was off work and didn’t do anything apart from drink lots of water and cups of tea.

• Wednesday - Off poorly 🤒

• Thursday - Attempted come back but still 🤒

  Signed into our team stand-up at 09:15 only for my lovely team to tell me that I should stay off until I’m recovered. So I did.

• Friday - Off poorly 🤒

  I was still coughing a lot, weak and tired. So I was still officially off work. I did however jump on a call with Paul Downey to catch-up as he’s away on holiday next week. Looks like I will be changing focus workwise a little which might be interesting.

  I need to look after myself better when I’m well again. I think a healthier me would have fought this off by now.

Other happenings

• Tried Forman and Field’s lovely Welsh Rarebit Topping on a large slap of toast. It was very good and comforting.

• Watched Sicario because it’s a brilliant movie and I had time on my hands sadly.

• Found a knife in the woods, reported it to the police via 101 service, only for them to phone the very next day because they needed help locating it, was told it could have been significant to an investigation.

• Pondered my career and what the heck I’m doing with my life. Imposter syndrome combined with a real inner debate with myself about what the heck I actually enjoy doing.

  Where I was once very sure, now, not so much. More on this in a future blog post I think.

• Checked Better Internet Dashboard in the futile hope an ALTNet full fibre provider rocked up with a gigabit network over night. sigh.

• Donated and tried to avoid the news. There is just too much horrible stuff going on that I have no control or influence on. Hope the planet gives already incredibly unlucky people a fuckin break.