July 2024
The Vibe
July just flew by. Probably because a lot happened during the month that's kept things busy. Ms A was away for a week visiting family during the school holidays, and the dog had a week at the kennels, so there were a couple of "quieter" weeks during the month.
My walking regime has been OK, but the gym completely fell of this month. I need to reconfigure my routine during August so that I am prioritising this time and burn off of calories. I think it would do my mental health wonders, but as always, these are always the hardest things to do when you're in a funk.
Work.... I don't think things have gotten any better. My complaint is the lack of planning or organisation regarding the work that needs to be done. I've tried to intervene positively and prompt basic things like to-do lists and schedules to be developed and time put aside to collaborate, but nothing happened in that space. I think that's the end of me trying to change anything now. I have to draw a line when it comes to wasted effort, and that's now. There is no point in continuing to try and affect any change - there is absolutely no appetite for it.
The course is set, and there is no turning back now.
At the same time, I am concerned about the effect this will have on my team and all the other personnel involved. No one seems to give a fuck anymore from a practical capacity about work and welfare. Sure, they say all the right words in public, but the reality is that every decision undermines trust, refuses to acknowledge any of the realities of being a human (getting sick, being tired, stressed and overwhelmed) and diminishes the key structures that allow people to remain resilient - the team and the people around them. Rather than seeking to build up the existing support structures, the focus is on some theoretical notion of leadership and teams that are so far removed from any practical reality you can tell that only people who lack any experience in this area could have thought it up. And rather than utilising the skill and experience at their fingertips, and against all advice they keep returning to their imagined reality as the way things will get done.
Events
Well my big event for July was my 44th Birthday. Unlike previous years, we did plan a bit of a celebration and a night out with friends feasting at Peel St and an after-dinner cocktail at Bibliotheca. I also had a couple of pints of Kilkenny and a Chinese meal at the Brecknock Hotel Corner Bar - an old pub that's been divided into a cozy homestyle Irish bar in the small front bar and a massive Chinese restaurant in the rest of the building.
The week after the biggest thing to happen to our home started - the kitchen renovations. Having dreamt this up almost as soon as we moved in, after about 3 years, we're finally underway... slowly. The unique angles in the house obviously played havoc for the cabinet makers during the installation, and we're now stuck without a viable kitchen as all the other dependencies kick in. We currently have cabinets in and benchtop templates ready to go to the stainless steel fabricators, but that's it. There's no more forward momentum until the benches are in, so no usable kitchen. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We had a week of ongoing dramas with the installation - missing elements like taps and sink, new fridge not fitting through the doorway without requiring pin-point manoeuvring to get into the house and a few "hold my beer moments" with the other appliances. I think we're on track now, but it is a bit of a wait-and-see when it will actually be finished, so at the moment, the house is a mess, there are no usable benches for meal prep, and it's not fun attempting to cook anything at this point in time.
I also spoke at the TALAS Symposium - an opportunity to share practice and ideas with our UniSA colleagues. It was a good opportunity for me to share the work around Learning Types and Patterns that I've been doing in the background. It also gave me the impetus to pull together a revamp of the Learning Patterns website. It's not 100% public (but if you know where to look) it's up online so I can do some testing with it. I've updated the CSS, now have a dark mode, and swapped out the entire site to be a single page with details popping up using the new Popover API! I'm super happy as it's performant, works with Translation features and has almost zero javascript. Hopefully, pulling all of this into the public-facing version soon.
At the same time as all of this is going on there are snippets of joy. There was a koala in our yard one morning! One of my best friends is moving to Adelaide! We climbed a hill and had an amazing view of a pod of dolphins frolicking in the bay! And the sunrises and sunsets have been spectacular - and I'm awake to see them!
Photos
Ooops - I forgot about June photos so added them to the Flickr album too.
Watched
I had a bit of a stroll down memory lane with Axel F. The next season of Vikings Valhalla, which I like but it never quite gets me that into the story - I think maybe its the character switching - each of the stories are interesting, but you're constantly switching between story arcs. Also finished off the Boys and The Acolyte - both underwhelming but entertaining.
Listened
There were some great podcasts I made my way through during July.
Both seasons of Ultra by Rachel Maddow - a really great and unknown story for me about the rightwing, and literal Nazis in American politics. So good and poignant and ultimately human story.
I smashed through season 2 of Buried. I love the story but hate the episode length. So frustrating that when you're finally getting into it and it ends, and then theres a couple of minutes of credits, ads and preroll. This season is on PCB contamination and the unlikely hero, Douglas Gowan
I also went through S04 & S05 of Cover Up, The Anthrax Threat and The Conspiracy Tapes. The Anthrax Treat was quite eye-opening in how wide-reaching and large-scale that attack was and that so many people died. The Conspiracy Tapes was something else, quite Jon Ronson in the sense of it going back and tugging on the threads back to the source of so much of the conspiracy theory culture that exists.
I also finally got around to finishing up Scene on Radio's Seeing White season. I got a huge amount out of this series and thoroughly recommend it as one of the best explorations of race out there. While the context is American, so much of the concept of 'whiteness' resonates here in Australian society. A country that had a literal White Australia Policy has a lot to reconcile with, especially as we have grown into a truly ethnically diverse nation. The history, the topics, the stories and perspectives shared in the series really were amazingly compelling. It took me a while to get through the series, I've had to stop and think at certain points along the way to really unpack what was just introduced. The latest of these was when the idea of Markedness was introduced.