All these things that I have done

I wrote quite a bit of an entry yesterday in between bits and bobs at work but then I forgot to post it and I guess draft saving is not a thing these days? Maybe I turned it off somewhere or something. Anyway. The most annoying thing about the project I'm working on at the minute is that every time you change the code you have to do a rebuild of the whole solution and then it takes about 3 minutes to spin up on first load which is enough time to be boring but not enough time to do very much. That being said, it does work for things like writing journal entries or, hopefully, writing the Brownies letter I need to do at some point today, I just have to make sure I have enough little things like that.

The developing is still working out well - I was the SQL expert for my colleague yesterday, which was a pretty good feeling and I'm definitely feeling like the ASP.NET skills have de-rusted pretty fast and I'm making actual contributions. I'm also getting into the swing of things at the gym, I think. I've managed to go three times this week and I have a session booked with a personal trainer on Sunday - you get three as part of the sign up package so I figure getting a bit of advice on using machines, etc can't hurt.

The other excitement of this weekend is that I have a new experience coming my way. Having heard that I like game, my boss immediately decided to offer me the results of his weekend shooting, with the result that I now have two pheasants and 2 wood pigeons hanging in my shed! I've never actually dealt with a carcass before, but I'm game to have a go at anything so we'll see how that goes! If nothing else, I expect that it'll fascinate the cats!

So, I made it through! Did the final day at school with only a bit of a sniffle as my class sang a goodbye song for me (which was very charming of them, bless them - they'd filked something I didn't recognise but the result was lovely), and had a great time with my new colleagues at their Christmas party. There was an end of year meeting beforehand and I came out of that feeling super positive about the whole thing, which feels like a good sign. I like all the other people I've met so far, which is always a good start, and am looking forward to getting started next year. The one thing which was less good was that in the course of the dinner, we discovered that I am really quite allergic to truffle oil, we think - the odour of several people's plates all at once (including mine - I hadn't noticed it listed as an ingredient in the steak sauce) was so awful that I broke out in a sweat, got light headed and had to go outside for some fresh air, which was a bit of a surprise! Fortunately, that was enough to recover and the restaurant were kind enough to swap the food but that's something I won't be trying in a hurry.

Have been using the between jobs/years gap to get lots of things booked in for next year - my calendar of holidays is already looking pretty full for 2019, assuming that we do make it to Bangkok as well, but it's all super exciting stuff. Who knows what's coming on a more global scale, but at a personal level, I'm feeling pretty up about 2019 :)

As I get closer and closer to the end of term, I'm finding I've got more and more free brain cycles to do things at the weekend, make plans, feel bouncy and cheerful. It's a very freeing thought. Next week should be fairly straight forward because we are having assessment week, so that takes up a lot of timetable time, and although it does involve quite a bit of marking, it's not too bad because it's all quite specific/straight forward marking with a mark scheme. Then there's just the residential to get through. I'm a little nervous about that - I worry about managing the homesick ones - but I think overall it should be a fairly good week if the weather is ok. So close now though!

Term crawls on but I was in a better mood most of this week - a couple of good nights of sleep helped, as did some very very soppy cats snuggling up to me. I spent yesterday afternoon going through my book case purging teaching books. Although I have a lot of these, they are mostly either (a) gifts that I never got around to reading, (b) set texts from my qualification or (c) books that other teachers have passed on to me from their categories (a) and (b) when they retired. Lots of them are hopelessly out of date at this point so I ended up with one bag I think Oxfam can sell and 3 that are going straight to the recycling centre. I barely ever read any of them - I never had sufficient energy/desire to and from my position of having decided to cut ties from the profession I look back and wonder if I should have asked myself about my lack of intellectual connection with teaching earlier, although asking that now isn't itself particularly valuable. In fact, trawling through our non fiction shelf reminds me that I very rarely have the energy to read serious non-fiction, although I often find it tempting/fascinating. I rediscovered several history and philosophy texts that I wasn't able to resist buying but have easily manage to resist opening. Maybe I'll start reading some of those in January.

Things feel like they're changing so fast at the moment that I always have to check on what had happened last time I posted before I start an update! So the last update was written the weekend before half term, when I was still job-hunting. On the Friday of that week, the last day of term, I suddenly got an interview with a company who were very keen to talk to me having just seen my CV that morning and I ended up heading over there straight after school, and then from *there*, straight to Brownies! That was a really good conversation, and I got on really well with them so that seemed very optimistic. Separately, over the Thursday, Friday and Saturday I ended up setting up 4 separate phone interviews for the Monday, which made for a quite surreal day, as we were visiting with my parents so I was taking these calls in between doing sewing things with Mum. Tuesday saw me finishing off a coding test while stopped of in Cambridge to see Alex's family on the way home and nearly all of the companies I spoke to on Monday set up interviews for later in the week. On Wednesday I went back to see the company I saw on the Friday (as well as one other) - again, got on really really well with the people and they made me an offer that afternoon. I dithered about waiting and going to one of my Friday interviews, which had sounded really interesting, but in the end I decided that I wasn't going to find a better culture fit and it seemed likely that the job was going to be a bit wooly, which I felt less confident I could definitely do after my time out of the industry so I accepted and will be starting in January. They're a small marketing company which specialise in loyalty programmes, mostly for businesses selling to smaller businesses. People look politely baffled when I say I find that fascinating but I really do think there's the potential for some really interesting data stuff in there which could be genuinely cool. It's also a good balance of stuff I remember well and am certain I can be good at again very quickly (data feed management) and stuff which is a bit more hazy and has changed rather more since I went into teaching and all in all, I think it will really suit me well.

School has been back this week and been very busy and I spent yesterday slumped on the couch, to tired to do anything really, which really reminded me why I want to leave! The weekend before I'd been really active and cheerful and now I feel pulled down and grey again. Only another 6 weeks to go!

Book: The Explorer by Katherine Rundell
Amount read: All of it - this was an actual physical book so I feel percentages are inappropriate :)
Thoughts: I really liked this. It's a kids book - I would say aimed at 10-13 year olds probably, so not even what I would call YA. It's got a good sense of realism about what it might actually be like to be stranded in the Amazon - it doesn't romanticise it as much as this type of book often do. I found the explorer himself a little more unlikely as a character but not enough to give me a real problem with the narrative. It clips along well and I found the ending affecting, in a good way.
Overall: Nothing of any great depth, but a pleasure to read.

( Re-reads of Going Postal, Feet of Clay, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club and Unnatural Death )

Book: The Ballad of Halo Jones by Alan Moore and Ian Gibson
Amount read: 100%
Thoughts: Hmmm. I know this is a classic and all, but the first thing I feel like I want to say here is that I found the art style really tough to wade through. I've been consistently surprised, although I probably shouldn't be, by how much difference this makes when reading comics. Some of the pages were really busy and as well as not being aesthetically to my taste, I found some of it genuinely hard to parse and it took me quite while to figure out which character was which.

I wasn't in love with the pacing, and for a lot of the time I felt like I couldn't figure out what the story it was trying to tell was. Some bits really dragged and some bits I got kind of swept along with. If it hadn't been the book group book for the month, I'm not sure I would have persevered with it. That being said, the thing that I did like and found really interesting was something I noticed half way through, which is that the narrative is completely female focused; it's not in any way a feature of the story, but I realised part way through that all the characters are female unless there is a specific reason for them to be male and that reason is usually for them to be in some way a love interest/sex object. I just loved the fact that, just like in reverse in most stories, it's never mentioned, it's not a feature of the universe to be 90% female or anything, it's just that's the way the writer chooses to be focused.

Overall: So yeah. I'm kind of pleased to have read it from an academic point of view but I wouldn't recommend it as a piece of storytelling in and of itself.

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Book: Night watch by Terry Pratchett
Re-reading because: Someone on my twitter feed mentioned re-reading this in order to do a podcast on it. I was looking for something to read just to chill out on the garden seat and started The Shepherds Crown, which I found depressing and will finish and post about later in the holiday so decided to switch to this instead.
Thoughts: I mean, in general TP books stand up incredibly well to re-reading because what's amazing about them is his razor sharp understanding of people and his use of language, not especially what happens. This is actually one I didn't love so much when I first read it because I was distracted by the plot, which didn't quite feel right in the setting somehow (I think I mentally associate time travel with sci-fi rather than fantasy) and I have found that on re-reading, I've actually enjoyed it a lot more because I focused in more on the themes and ideas he's trying to explore. I found myself thinking about the fact that although this book focuses on the way that Vimes was created by Keel/his older self but actually doesn't quite acknowledge that Carrot is also key in creating the Vimes of the present - like this plants the seed, but without Carrot, it wouldn't come to fruition or something? The line that sticks in my mind most strongly at the minute is Vimes talking to Ned Coates, probably the most effective revolutionary the book shows us (unless you count Vetinari), when he says "Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again - that's why they're called revolutions. People die and nothing changes." I think it encapsulates what I love about Vimes as a character - that world weary cynicism is something that I think we share.
Overall: If you haven't read any Pratchett, I wouldn't start with this one, but I do love it and if you read it once and didn't quite connect, I would definitely recommend giving it a second pass.

It's too hot to do very much at the moment, which is making school very tough indeed. I am going to be so glad when the holidays start. On the plus side, my tomatoes are just starting to ripen, which is very exciting and there are loads and loads and loads of them so that'll be good. I did write a post about Pride in my head but it is too hot to post it.

Ugh. I hate writing reports! I'm not sure quite why they are such hard work, but I find it a real slog. I'm feeling very demotivated for work in general at the minute, which is not helpful as I also need to write a report for my leadership course. It doesn't have to be too long, but it does have to get done. So of course, I spent most of this evening looking at transport options for our trip to France in the summer. At least I did find something that worked for that, so that's something but I really need to pull my finger out and get productive over the next week or so!

Watching

Since Liz's visit, I've got very into Queer Eye. I inhaled the new series on Netflix and am now going back and watching the original show on YouTube as it doesn't seem to be legally available anywhere I can see. It's just very charming and definitely scratches my itch for TV which is basically about people being nice, a bit like Sewing Bee and things like that. For me, it feels like the new series is very much about challenging toxic masculinity and saying to these guys that it's ok to care about how they look and to talk about how they feel and so on, which is also really cheering me up right now!

Listening

As a result of that, I have started listening to Getting Curious, which is a podcast that Jonathan from new Queer Eye does, which is adorable. Basically, each fortnight, he takes a topic that he's curious about and gets an expert on to talk about it. Recent episodes include "How can we be less rude to bees" and "Why's the bail system such a hot mess?" (I haven't listened to that one yet, but I'm going to guess racism). Much more so than queer eye, I feel like it shows how confident he is because it's full of bits where he'll stop the person talking and say "Hang on, I totally didn't get that, explain what pollination is!" or whatever it is. Recommended.

Reading

I'm feeling really disconnected from my reading at the moment - I'm finding it hard to get excited about any new reading and at the same time, feeling like I've re-read all my comfort re-reading too many times. I think maybe I need to go and browse in a real bookshop and find some new things that are a little out left field.

What I did read yesterday was a lot of the FT, which I quite like to read. It's partly my attempt to pretend to myself that I'm not completely in my internet bubble, although while it's not left wing, its still very definitely intellectual and pro-intellectualism so it barely really counts. I spent many years being annoyed about the pay wall and occasionally going to see how much it cost and being put off again and then discovered that Alex has a sub via the university so I use that now. I wish they had some kind of micro payments system where you could pay per article - I wonder why no-one does that in newspapers. It feels like something I'd definitely have done with the FT and probably ended up spending quite a bit, if not quite the level of the subscription cost.