May was much busier than April, partly for fun reasons – going to more events and seeing friends more – but partly for unexpected work busy-ness and family illness.
Fun
Music
When trying to pre-order the upcoming GoGo Penguin album from Rough Trade, I found that Totorro would be playing there on May 23rd. I quickly signed my friend Josh up to attend with me, using our usual “I’ll pay for the tickets if you do the driving” system. (I hate driving to new places but don’t mind paying for things, while he enjoys driving but likes saving money).
I’ve never been to a gig for an instrumental band before, and have been curious about how different it would be from the rock gigs I’m used to. I also wondered where the audience focal point would be for a band without a singer; turns out that my default focus was on the guitarist on the left.
Totorro had a really fun energy on stage, with the band members having non-verbal in-jokes such as miming playing tennis with each other via the headstocks of their guitars while still being note-perfect. The support band, STEALTH CAT, were also good, but only had a 5-song setlist to show off in. We had a great time, especially as it was such a small gig that we had personal space and could go outside between sets to cool down and chat about music. For me, gigs of about 100 people are the perfect size.
Other
I finally had some in-person Magic: The Gathering sessions with friends after months of us not having the time to meet. The others were being responsible adults and, in some cases, parents, so I can’t blame them!
I had forgotten just how long our games tend to last, especially when we are rusty on the timings and effect resolutions. One of the games definitely lasted over 3 hours. In one match I tried to use the Murders at Karlov Manor deck I picked up at EGX last year, but struggled to get the commander’s effect to kick in or to summon any stealth face-down creatures, so ended up conceding. My faithful Chatterfang squirrel-token deck did claim one win, which I was happy with.
Games
The list of games I want to try has increased, as always, but I’ve fallen back down the Two Point Hospital rabbit hole so very little else is being played. However, I did try out some new demos on both Xbox and Steam, and I also wrote mini-reviews of the demos I tried in April.
Work
A busy month with a lot of meetings that were all scheduled for Tuesdays (my usual non-working day). I helped derail one of these meetings strongly enough that it lasted 80 minutes instead of 30, as the person leading the meeting was trying to explain things involving my in-work specialist subject (data validation / correction in EMIS) to us while not being knowledgeable about that subject, and so they answered each question vaguely enough to create multiple new questions.
I was in error-spotting mode for a fair bit of the month, and was frequently frustrated by instances when others did not think things through before releasing them or communicating them. One of the things that trips me up in work is dealing with the existence of mistakes and inefficiencies. So many of my strongest skills and most useful moments comes from spotting errors and inconsistencies that my own mistakes aren’t just annoying; they feel almost… hypocritical? Also, while I know logically that errors will happen and people aren’t robots, my brain latches on to the cascading effects of errors and the collective human-time they waste, which makes them even more annoying. E.g. if someone saves themselves two minutes by not double-checking that the link they are including in an email is correct, but they’ve sent that email to 200 people, then instead of saving 2 minutes they have potentially wasted 400.
A couple of months ago, I started working on a new version of a particularly inefficient document that annoys my colleagues every week. The way it is formatted means that working around the formatting, and reformatting the document when it is ready to send out, can take as much time as actually filling it in does. This kind of entirely-avoidable inefficiency irritates me. I showed my idea to the colleagues who were most annoyed by the old form, and they really liked it. I then showed it to my manager who said “I like it, but I have bad news – the new director just asked us to use a different form”. We agreed on a compromise – using their new layout and the extra information they needed but using my simplified formatting – and now everyone is happy. That’s one annoyance solved at least!
Family
My aunt spent most of a week in hospital with cellulitis, and was discharged on the 28th. She came back to my nan’s house for a couple of days to recuperate and catch up on sleep, while a helpful friend stayed at her house to look after the pets. (I visited to help with the pets and collect clothes to deliver to my aunt, and learned that cleaning a parrotlet’s cage is a bit more difficult when said parrotlet decides to perch on your head).
