Writing & Reconnection: July

This month I decided to take advantage of one of the benefits of being a civil servant: I worked compressed hours.

For those not in the know, compressed hours is a flexible working scheme where you work the same number of hours and receive the same amount of pay, but you do so in a shorter period of time. Each work day is longer, but in exchange you have fewer of them, resulting in one glorious extra day of weekend.

A whole extra day off! A whole day I could focus on writing and personal projects and volunteering my expertise to community projects. Maybe even get my whole web accessibility project off the ground.

Haha, yeah, none of that happened. 🙃

Instead I spent those days being sleepy or ill or running errands, because life is a neverending slog of trying to stay alive whilst having too much I want to do and not nearly enough time to do all of it.

Hmm, maybe I should book some time off.

Year of Writing

Despite this, I did get two blog posts out. The first, a nice, thorough look-back at my legacy of personal websites, which took a decent amount of time to write, even if the ending feels rather unsatisfactory. I’m finding that I’m rather bad at writing conclusions, though I suppose in this case, it’s all still an ongoing story.

The other was written far more hastily and is basically meant to be a tongue-in-cheek rant about people who, for some godforsaken reason, seem to think Bluesky is a viable alternative to Twitter. Bluesky? Really? The barely-functioning service founded and steered by the guy who fucked up and sold out Twitter in the first place? Really?

Writing outside of blogs has been pretty much non-existent, the whims just not coming freely as of late.

Year of Reconnection

Socialisation has also been a lot thinner on the ground this month, but very much intentionally.

I didn’t even realise until the day, but up until the 15th of this month I hadn’t had a quiet weekend since the beginning of May. I’d been attending events, travelling, visiting friends or being visited for ten consecutive weeks and I was burned out to hell.

In the first couple of weekends I hung out with furries, hung out with Chris (my oldest friend from t’norf) and his fianceé Laura, hung out with more furries, hung out with bronies, hung out with Tim and Alexx (two old friends who are now married and live in Canada), reconnected online with a somewhat newer friend from Australia, and probably talked the ears off of a few other unsuspecting international friends.

The last few weekends have thus been, quite purposefully, quiet ones. I watched the Barbie movie on Saturday. It’s really good.

Conclusion.