Week 41: Plumbing Problems

Time: Made. I finished 'Make Time'. It's a really short book but I still felt a sense of achievement in actually finishing it. Many of the book's ideas were conclusions I'd already come to on my own: avoiding mealtime screens & reducing phone time, skipping wheely suitcases(?!), a good routine stopping the blurring of time, the double-edged music sword and the toxic default that is daily or breaking news. Reinforcing your world view is great for morale...

The main takeaways for me were: not all exercise being 'training' and considering the other benefits of exercise beyond running faster. Actually starting days with a specific goal in mind.

Drip Drip. A beginning of the week, the ceramic valve on the hot side of the kitchen tap started dripping and leaking all over the counter. The seven(!) year old dishwasher broke irreparably and the hot water pressure became so low that it started to impact my mood.

All of the above are now fixed or WIP, but not at the cost of considerable willpower. A definite lows: the dishwasher repairman explaining that they usually last about three years, and incorrectly fixing my tap.

Local. It's been a good week for local area life. An excellent July menu at BBB; a Parkrun with friends; a Geoff Marshall sighting & a damp heath party were but a few highlights. During our damp birthday partaying we managed to come up with songs referencing 14 of the 32 London boroughs. Very proud of my two contributions 'London Boy' and 'The Sun Will Come Up, the Seasons Will Change' for Islington/Camden and Fulham.

Best Pilot In All the Galaxy. I downloaded and played some Geometry Wars this week. High scores set while at school, in particular those by friends, seems alarmingly high vs my current abilities. We've also been enjoying playing the 'Vondel' Warzone map and mode with more forgiving respawns.

WebDeving. I've been working on an update to the OPA Ecosystem page which shows the different OPA projects in categories. It's been an interesting lesson in Hugo function partials and how its opinionated structure can be painful for versioned documentation sites. Hugo is still a great tool and is genuinely flexible. The fact that we even managed to build this feature at all is noteworthy.