Weeknotes #13

It’s fair to say the past three weeks have been stressful. I haven’t had the energy to put any real work into side projects or blog at all, which sucks. I’ve gone through many dry spells in the past, but usually that’s down to apathy or burnout. This is 100% down to stress: work stress + life stress. But that’s positive in a weird sort of way. It feels like a season of business, rather than a lack of drive to code. I’m not sure if that’s an important distinction, but it feels like it.

After much thought, I was ready to put an offer in on a flat on Tuesday, but got a call on Monday night to say it had been snapped up. Somewhat surprisingly, my reaction wasn’t one of regret or frustration, it was relief. The process had gone from 0 to 60 in the space of a week, and was beginning to feel like a runaway train. I’m sure that’s a pretty normal feeling for the frankly bonkers process of buying a house, but it was handy to have the brakes applied by an external force. I’m in a much stronger and more knowledgeable position now, so when the time does come, I’m hoping it won’t feel quite so insane.

Sleep (or a lack of) appears to be quite a good warning sign that life is too stressful, and sadly this week was quite sparse for decent shut-eye. It’s clear that I need to take more care of myself and drop some stress-inducing things pronto. It’s the knock-on effect during the day that’s most frustrating, running on fumes is rubbish and you end up being ratty - so apologies to my wonderful colleagues!

I won’t dwell too much on work things, other than to say it’s been another challenging week. Productive, but challenging. The playback at the end of the week went down well, and good project progress has been made, it has just felt like an uphill struggle (probably because of the sleep). I also need to start focusing on positives more; I’m naturally quite pessimistic so I have to work extra hard to spin that around. There’s a lot of amazing things happening, and I need to focus on them more and catch myself if I drift.

Seeing friends over the weekend and during the week really boosted the old spirits, as did hitting a squash ball rather hard on Thursday evening! Anyway, that’s plenty of rambling for a train journey home…

Photos of the week