Tag: Bullet Journal

Making it to the Weekend

I’ve been sitting in the dark of the junk room for last last hour, with every intention of writing something, but instead tinkering with this and that, daydreaming, or just gazing into space. I can’t help but remember a stand-up routine by Mickey Flanagan – complaining that getting nothing done is a worthy skill that should be held onto. At least I know I’m good at something though, right ?

It’s been a week. Today was another slog – finishing a little after 6pm after working straight through lunch for the fifth day in a row. I wonder what it is about clients that causes them to occasionally forget you’re a human being? I’m probably being over-dramatic, but that’s how it feels sometimes.

Anyway. We made it through the week more-or-less unscathed. I’m still running myself ragged while my other half recuperates from accidentally putting a swiss army knife through her hand last weekend. It’s healing well – but she’s still in a lot of pain – surviving on a cocktail of ibuprofen and paracetamol. Tonight she has slept since getting in from work.

In other news I returned to using the bullet journal. I tried to get on with Google Keep – I really did – but ultimately I only seem to remember things if I’ve written them down. There’s something about a paper notebook too – a permanence, and a feeling of crafting something when putting pen to paper. People often comment about my handwriting, but I would typically counter by simply observing that I care about how my writing looks – even if I’m the only person that sees it.

I feel like I should be excited that it’s the weekend, but the overwhelming feeling seems to be relief. Relief that I made it to the weekend. Perhaps I’ll actually get a chance to catch up with blogs over the next couple of days – to repay the kindness extended by those that have followed my recent adventures, and asked after me.

Bank Holiday Monday

The rest of the family are out for the day – leaving me here to wallow in my own silence, and hopefully get a bit better. My body still hasn’t got the note about stopping the epic snot drive that’s been going on for several weeks now. I took some pretty powerful medication last night, which allowed me to sleep, but also resulted in some of the most impressive snoring in recorded history. I woke up at 5am to the rather guilty discovery that my other half had retreated to the sofa at some point in the night.

So here I am – nursing a cup of coffee, listening to Spotify, and quietly tinkering with this and that.

I decided not to stop using the bullet journal after all. I’m not sure if I wrote about that or not. After emptying my head onto the printed page for the last couple of years, it’s a hard habit to break. Sure, mobile apps are very clever, and they can remind you of all sorts of things you might have forgotten, but in a strange sort of way setting aside the time to check what you might be doing over the coming days, weeks, or months has become the most important part of the whole thing. I suppose some people call it “being mindful” – I call it “reminding myself continually”.

I suppose I should really go read “The Bullet Journey Method” now – the book by Ryder Carroll about the various ways you can integrate a Bullet Journal into your life. I’ve fallen into using mine only to record what I have done – not so much to plan out what I have to get done. I tend to shy away from planning too much because my life doesn’t tend to follow any sort of prescribed path. Most people’s “total chaos” seems quite orderly compared to my own experiences.

In other news, I wiped Linux from the old desktop computer at home. I got fed up with the computer running so slowly, but forgot that Linux tends to cause the temperature of the motherboard to erupt (don’t ask me why) – which in turns causes the fans in the case to turn themselves up to eleven. It sounded like a box full of cheap hairdryers all turned on at once – not that I’ve ever heard that, but I have a good imagination.

We voted in the European elections at the end of last week – deliberately voting against the wave of nationalism that seems to be sweeping the nation. Apparently 40% of the electorate bothered to vote, and of those, 30% voted to burn our bridges. I guess all it takes is apathy, time, and a general lack of education to cause the events that led to the second world war to happen all over again. It’s quite dispiriting really – the very same people that grew up in the shadow of Nazism and Fascism in the decades following the war are now playing to the same songbook. There’s a stunning level of hypocrisy going on.

It seems to me that we are surrounded by hypocrisy most of the time. People are all for socialism while they have nothing – and then as soon as they have something, they don’t want to share it any more. People are also all for reading books about benevolent creators in the sky – until they need hospital treatment, and then the typical rubbish they spout flies straight out of the window as they grasp at anything the last few hundred years of scientific research might offer to help them – you know – the same research that got people burned, or locked up. Don’t even get me started about the growing army of rich old white men writing laws in the US to dictate what woman can and cannot do to their own body. I guess we also learned last month that being seen to help re-build an old church is far more important to billionaires than feeding anybody.

I’ll stop there. I could go on. Ranting about the state of the world makes me no better than the army of idiots that post all over social media complaining about their lot instead of doing something about it. I’m going to go fuss the cat, and hang some washing out.

Falling Into The Weekend

After a seemingly never ending week filled with stress and drama I can’t write anything about, the weekend has finally arrived – and not just any weekend – a long weekend.

While most people will be lazing around reading the newspaper, drinking tea, and making plans to visit friends to do fun things together, we will be working on a hell-scape of a garden again – mostly because it doesn’t cost anything to hack the jungle down. “Most people” is of course an invention of my own mind – a wonderland that everybody else lives in, while I grumble and look on bitterly at the much more better lives everybody else must have.

None of this is true by the way. I rarely think about anything while working on the garden, other than “die you f*cking nasty stinging nettle bastards”.

I’m writing this in “FocusWriter” on the old desktop computer, for what it’s worth. I had something of a fit of temper late the other night when Windows wanted to do an update. It rebooted in the middle of me doing something, and took ten years to restart. I got my own back on it by installing Linux on it, and setting it to boot into Linux by default. I guess a good analogy would be shutting somebody you don’t like in a cupboard while somebody you do like comes to visit.

Oh dear. I’m starting to sound like a maniac.

I have a confession to make. I nearly broke up with my bullet journal this week. It’s all been a bit dramatic really. I started playing with a to-do list app on my phone, and then realised that I could use Evernote for 90% of what I use the bullet journal for. But then I kind of realised that I would need three apps and a paper notebook to replace what I use the bullet journal for. So I’m keeping at it. For now. It’s funny really – when I started using a bullet journal I tried to make the pages look interesting, but as time has gone on I have become very boring indeed – each page is filled with lists of either things to do, or things that have been completed. No doodles, and very few diagrams.

My nose is still producing snot for England, if you’re interested. And my chest is still sneaking up on me with coughing fits from time to time – but it IS getting better. My other half has been trying to talk me into taking paracetamol every four hours over the weekend to give my body a fighting chance. We’ll see.

Isn’t this post wonderfully random and disjointed. Perhaps it’s the start of some thing new? Or the beginning of a slide into mediocrity – why have big thoughts about important things when you can have little thoughts about nothing in particular. Maybe I should change the tagline to reflect that.