August 2024
The Vibe
Can winter end? It was another grey and cool weekend to round out August. We had a splash of warm weather a couple of weeks ago - a couple of glorious days of sunshine, but since then it's been back to grey skies, wind and rain. Temperature wise it's been very mild, but the greyness has got to me a bit and I am so looking forward to sunny days. Another week of this crap weather is predicted, so not a great start to spring.
This month felt like things were going a bit off the rails, so I took a mental health day where I sat down and ... wrote a list.
Not the most exciting thing in the world, but it is life-changing. The effort of just trying to clear my mind of the clutter was cathartic. In my teenage years of spiritual exploration, I dabbled in the occult and via the early internet stumbled into the writings of Aleister Crowley. One of the things that actually resonated was his book on Yoga, where he described the process of emptying the mind. Rather than thinking of nothing, what was required was not the absence of thought, but to have thought through everything. By systematically going through each thought and thinking through it, you can reach a meditative state.
That's the long anecdotal way of informing you that making a list of everything going on inside your mind is the only way to get clarity on what you actually need to do.
And for me, the list was very long.
What I got out of the exercise was a bit more clarity on what was going on inside my head and why I felt troubled. There was just a lot going on, and my mind was bouncing from one thing to another. To that end, I went back to try and organise things out - putting things into categories and priorities. I forget that I need this to function... I tend to organise myself, go on that path for a couple of months and then everything falls in a heap, including me - mentally and physically.
I doubled down a bit on Obsidian as a way to organise my brain - and I keep coming back to Johnny Decimal as a practical way to manage other stuff around me. But at the same time neither is setup correctly yet — that's going to take some time and effort dedicated to it. What I did implement was some of Doug Belshaw's ideas from his Weekly and Daily Planners. During this period, I felt I've needed something like this, especially as work has become much more unstructured. I haven't gone analogue or adopted this exact model, but I've incorporated the ideas into my Week Note set up, which has been going really well for me.
Alongside all of the hype and drama of work, we've been renovating now for over a month. Kicking off the day after my birthday, we sailed through July and into August without a kitchen. And the month has come and gone, and ... still no kitchen. There are cupboards but no appliances or plumbing. There are lots of semi-complete tasks and benchtops that need to be sorted before we can be anything like complete. There are also a few issues with things being straight, particularly the floors that mean our new fridge barely fits into its new spot, but more importantly, it can't sit level. So the drama will continue for another month!
Events
A highlight and something very new for me is that I have a friend in town! One of my best mates has moved to Adelaide in one of the most seamless moves I have ever seen. I'm looking forward to having someone close by that I've already connected with. New friends are great, but that old friend that already knows you, and you them, it's just so nice and comfortable!
I'll add in some photos from August - and one thing that has been great is the light. Some of the sunrises and sunsets have been amazing (usually due to the way the low sun hits the clouds).
Watched
I've sat through a few movies in August from Godzilla Minus One, Alien: Romulus and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare to some quality couch time with Alise watching Deadpool 2 and The Heat.
TVwise we devoted our family time to Time Bandits but also got through House of the Dragon (not going to recommend), The Umbrella Academy and making a big dent in Silo. There's also been some international rugby to watch as the Wallabies rebuild.