Weeknotes #201 — 46

A week spent working on little projects and jobs at home with a couple of visits to family and friends. I was determined not to go back to work in January with regrets of not having completed any of the things I had been waiting for some time off to get done. There are still plenty of things to do, but I feel like I’ve made some good progress.

The weather has mainly been wet and miserable, which has put me off getting out on my bike. On Boxing Day I managed a lovely lumpy ride around our local hills, covering the cycling club route that had been called off a couple of weeks ago due to the snow and ice. The rest of the week was spent on the indoor bike trainer. I don’t mind riding in the rain if the heavens open when I’m out and about, but I can never bring myself to deliberately go out into it.

This was a week in which I:

• Made a five hour round-trip to Ross on Wye and back, in order to see my wife’s parents, brothers and children. It was so lovely to be there and meet up with everyone. We couldn’t stay because we had nobody to tend to our two cats overnight.
• Spent a very fun New Year’s Eve at the house of some close friends. Other friends of ours brought along a karaoke machine and we sang until the early hours.
• Made lots of progress with re-ripping my entire CD collection to my NAS drive in a lossless format. I’m determined to have it done before I go back to work. Lossless will mean that I will have a backup of all of the CDs I own, and will never need to do this again. I’ve found myself wrestling with the vagaries of iTunes the Music app in order to make sure that things end up named and catalogued correctly. The number of spelling errors in the automatically-matched database is shocking.
• Finished processing around 500 notes that I had made in the Drafts app. They dated back to late 2020. Next year I need to do much, much better at processing the notes that I make so that they don’t build up again.
• Turned 46. My wife, quite rightly, pulled me up when I made a comment about getting old. It’s a privilege that not everyone has.
• Watched a couple of movies with my wife. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022) was good fun, but didn’t feel like that much of a mystery. The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent (2022) was superb; it basically consisted of Nicolas Cage parodying himself, a less freaky version of Being John Malkovitch (1999) for modern times.
• Continued my journey through Grange Hill on Britbox. I’m now up to series six and it’s starting to turn into the show that I knew as a kid. Characters that are familiar to me have turned up, and are now being matched by much deeper storylines such as racism and bullying. It’s jarring to see how some of the issues were dealt with in the early 1980s; two young girls going off in a car with some strange men while on a school trip is just brushed off as ‘a nasty scare’ and nothing else is done about it.

Next week: Finishing off some home projects and getting back to work. There’s lots to do in 2023 and I’m looking forward to getting stuck in.