- It’s cold.
- I also caught a cold and wham, it proper knocked me out for about five days. Properly hacking cough, the works.
- So, apart from one really great courtyard dinner at Lurra last week, all other outdoor plans got cancelled.
- A lot of tele and online courses and work instead.
- Watched Nomadland, and was mesmerised throughout. Jessica Bruder the author of the book on which the film is based is a sort of distant cousin in the logical family of our Burning Man camp, and it’s no coincidence that the film begins and ends in Empire, Nevada – the penultimate desert outpost before the festival. It’s a place that I’ve always had a slightly grim fascination with due to the decline of the gypsum mine and the modern day parallels with 80s UK. I read a review that drew much deeper historical parallels with the pioneers and Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
- What will the near-future incarnation of this look like when tech industry is redundant / replaced by bots? I woke up at 6am on Sunday and, inexplicably, wrote a poem musing on this. I don’t write poems. I’m not sure what happened. But it’s sitting in drafts to be looked at suspiciously later.
- Also watched The Rider (to continue the Chloe Zhao binge) and, because we are apparently now suckers for films that follow outsiders, Sauvage (which contains pretty graphic violence & sex scenes in case you’re considering). All three are very good in their ways, although I think I need something lighter for the foreseeable.
- Someone shared this tool with me which looks pretty good: WhatsFinished – a way of summarising and announcing a team’s work.
- I tried again unsuccessfully to get a fly-by vaccine at the Crick last week, but it seems that new age groups are opening up about once or twice a week so it should be only a matter of time before I can worry slightly less about being an inadvertent super-spreader.
- I can now play at least two chords pretty well on the guitar thanks to Yousician and Coursera’s introduction to guitar course. Knowing music theory is very helpful. My fingers are regularly numb.
- Work ramps back up this week to a reasonable thrum so I’m really pleased I got everything on the life admin list done in the last couple of quieter weeks (I did not).