The middle of this month was more difficult than expected for me, as I became caught up in work-project-land and got too worried about things I couldn’t control and wasn’t supposed to be responsible for. This meant I spent a little too much time in my own head and so disconnected from the world a bit. For me that disconnection means my bad sense of time gets even worse, to the point of losing track of what day it is, or of what time I start/finish work even during that day. Giving reasonable estimates about tasks and deadlines around that is a bit of a challenge!.
Fun
Music
After thinking about it last month, I decided to order a CD player for more offline music listening, and chose a Discman (D131) due to my loyalty to Sony Walkman MP3 players. I had hoped to use it both with earphones and with my desktop speakers, but was concerned that it might make weird noises or lose volume control when plugged into my speakers. However, the Discman has the opposite problem; it works well with the speakers, but I cannot use it with earphones as the minimum possible volume is too loud.(Thanks, over-sensitive ears).
eBay also finally had a copy of a CD I had been looking for – Elva, by Unwritten Law. This album is not available digitally on Bandcamp or 7Digital, and every other time I’ve checked eBay there have been no UK-based copies available. My CD collection has now outgrown its storage in a slightly gravity-defying way, so I need to rethink where to store them, but that’s a problem for future-me.
Books
This month I re-read We Learn Nothing by Tim Krieder, and read The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green.
My favourite essay from We Learn Nothing is probably still the one which prompted me to buy the book in the first place, “The Busy Trap“, which talks about the way that many of us use being busy as a shield to guard against existential dread.
Explaining the premise of “The Anthropocene Reviewed” – author reviews various aspects of life and society on a 5-star scale – makes it sound like it will be shallow or flippant. That is not the case. Green’s essays are comforting and humanity-affirming, with the kind of warmth that reminds you that, despite everything, the world is full of pockets of beauty.
Games
At the start of July I bought Letterlike, which is basically a roguelike crossed with Letter Quest. As of the end of the month, I haven’t fully beat the tutorial game! I think I’m having the same issue as with the Expert mode of Letter Quest in that I’m trying to win by making the coolest words rather than by making the words that will best align with the buffs and multipliers on my board. I’m probably doing a bad job of the strategy too; I’m picking the straightforward buffs of bonus points per letter because I don’t yet understand the less immediate but more potentially powerful world-multiplier buffs.
The yearly expansion pack plus large update combination for Destiny 2 also released this month. I managed to avoid the internet’s hype and annoyance around the changes in advance and instead hear the summaries from friends, so the direction and mechanics of the new area were mostly unspoiled. Most of the changes made to how armour and weapons stats work, and how the stats are named, are reasonable, and I logically understand why they were implemented. However, my initial response to seeing my vault post-update was “all of the numbers on my gear are wrong, and I don’t like it”. I’m also a little unhappy that the majority of my old armour has now been made obsolete, given how long it took me to get the exact stats I wanted during each season. I guess that’s on me for forgetting that Destiny 2 is a looter-shooter at heart.
Finally, I officially stopped playing Pokemon Go and deleted my account. I’ve written up my thoughts on that one separately.
Work
I had a busier-than-intended time during the second week of July, as a training-records project I was borrowed to help with quickly became a much larger task than I expected. What was supposed to be a meeting on the 8th to catch up with what I needed to do turned into a full-day-whirlwind of meetings with requests presented so haphazardly that I hadn’t realised quite how much work I agreed to (and for how many teams). That’s a processing weakness of mine ,which has luckily not caused many issues before that day (in this role, anyway).
It was only when my line manager and another manager asked me about what I was doing on the next day, and I had to summarise the list and say it one go, that I realised quite how big the task list was. Their response of “… what the hell?!” was unexpected but effective confirmation that I might have agreed to an illogical amount of both tasks and responsibility. Following that, my team had to juggle some rotas to get me the free time to finish what I’d promised to do, which I appreciated but also felt a bit guilty about.
That week was also our data quality week, which is normally my specialist subject in work. However, I wasn’t able to do any direct data corrections myself or any teaching sessions with clinicians, as I had been borrowed on the training project for so much of the week, which was quite annoying!.
Work on the training project is currently stalled, as I’m waiting for a group of people to collectively agree on what the next parts I need to add actually are… I’m ok with this, as those two weeks involved a fair bit of overtime, and the project pausing gives me time to figure out how to balance the extra tasks with what I’m actually supposed to be doing.
In the meantime, I’ve got plans with our Therapy team manager to improve the tool they use for checking how many patient visits their team need to make each day, as the original author made some odd decisions on it.
Finally, I nominated my line manager for a company award. The yearly awards and especially the ceremony are not that big a deal to my office, as they often seem to be centred on corporate teams over clinical staff, but I would like my line manager to have the little ego boost of being nominated for an award even if she doesn’t get shortlisted.
Family
I took my Nan for her yearly hearing-aid-checkup, and discovered that without her aids in, she couldn’t hear a 100db beep in her worse ear! Her less-affected ear actually performed better on the audio testing than last year, which is unexpected but helpful for her.
My mum and sister also visited for a weekend, which was mostly spent shopping for clothes for my sister’s upcoming school trip. As I’ve never had an “obsessed with fashion” phase, I find her approach to clothes and shopping confusing. To be fair, she finds most of my interests confusing too!