Week in review: Week to 23 August
Aug. 26th, 2025 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. I reached a milestone in 750 Words: one year since I resumed keeping a journal and began what has become by far my longest streak. Though the streak count (which goes by days when I actually wrote an entry) only just reached 300 days, which gives you some idea of how shamelessly I've been exploiting the generous allocation of vacation days on the occasions when I haven't found time or haven't felt up to stringing words together.
Still, it's an achievement that I haven't straight-up missed a single day all year - until this week. I didn't write a single journal entry all week, until Friday, when I sat down after work and banged out five journal entries in a row. I wrote them in a text file instead of 750 Words because I didn't want to have to worry about the distraction alarm and such, and I was so relieved to have written so much that I completely forgot that as far as 750 Words knew I'd written nothing and that I needed to either write 750 words about something else or (as I'd been doing through the week) mark it as a vacation day; I didn't do either, and so my streak was broken.
The good news is that 750 Words is also generous with streak recovery, and lets you patch a streak together by writing an extra-long entry the next day, which is not particularly difficult to achieve the way I ramble in my journal entries. So my streak count is still climbing up from 300 - but I'll always know that the break and the patch-up happened.
. Sunday was the first meeting of the new committee since they were elected in the AGM. I'm still the secretary; I wouldn't have minded stepping down for a bit of a rest, but nobody else wants the job and I didn't push it because so many other committee members were leaving or changing roles that I thought it might be a good idea to have a bit of continuity. I'm also hoping that having a new committee president will shake up the vibe a bit and provide an infusion of vitality.
What with one thing and another, I didn't finish writing up the official minutes until Friday morning (which is slow by my standards, though I remind myself that compared to some volunteer group secretaries I've known it's really not bad). I suspect this has some contribution to why I didn't feel up to writing Sunday's journal entry until Friday afternoon.
. On Monday, I woke up while it was still dark. As I lay in bed, I found myself singing a riff on "Morning Has Broken" that started by observing that morning had not yet broken and ended with the conclusion that this might be a good opportunity to do some productive work done before the day started and distractions arrived. I did not in fact get any productive work done, because when I got up I went on the internet to look up a rhyming dictionary and try to improve one of the rhymes in the song, and from there I was perfectly capable of distracting myself.
. This week at the board game club I wound up on the casual card games table and played Monty Python Fluxx, UNO Show 'Em No Mercy, and Flip 7. Monty Python Fluxx didn't go very well - in my experience, it's a game that only really works if all the players are the right kind of nerd, and only a couple of people at the table were - and I got the feeling we were all a bit relieved when somebody won and we could move on to something else. UNO Show 'Em No Mercy went much better: everybody was in the right kind of mood, where the sudden arbitrary reversals of fortune were amusing instead of frustrating. Flip 7 went for me the way it usually does; I kept letting the internal voice saying "just one more card" drown out the internal voice saying "this would be a good place to stop pushing my luck", and finding out that the second voice was right.
There was also a Sunday afternoon session this week; I missed the main game, because of the committee meeting, but showed up in time to join in on a smaller game afterward. The smaller game was Libertalia, which is about sharing out pirate booty and gaining the largest share by strategically deploying cards representing pirates, colonial governors, and other assorted ne'er-do-wells. I took a while to come to grips with the strategy, and I was trailing behind for most of the game, but I made some good plays during the final round (including using a Merchant to turn a load of cursed artifacts into good money), and ended up coming third.
. I've been listening to a fair bit of classical music this week. It started when I watched a video about The Shawshank Redemption and then decided to listen to the full version of the Mozart aria that's featured in one scene, which led to Youtube suggesting other bits of Mozart to listen to. I also, unrelatedly to that, saw a post with a linked video about a violin piece by Bach which is designed so that it can be played both forward and backward and that if it's played forward and backward at the same time it forms a pleasing duet.
. The week at work has been interesting, with several challenging projects that were stressful to be faced with but satisfying to have completed successfully.
. Parkrun went well. My shoelaces stayed done up the whole way around the course (which has not always been the case, but I think I've finally figured out what the problem was). Around halfway around the course, I got in a slow, polite race with one of the other people who walks the course at a similar speed to me; usually he overtakes me around the halfway point when my initial energy wears off and finishes in front, but this time I managed to stay in front of him the whole way around. In the process, I got a new personal best time, shaving nearly a minute off my previous record.
. I've started another jigsaw puzzle.
Still, it's an achievement that I haven't straight-up missed a single day all year - until this week. I didn't write a single journal entry all week, until Friday, when I sat down after work and banged out five journal entries in a row. I wrote them in a text file instead of 750 Words because I didn't want to have to worry about the distraction alarm and such, and I was so relieved to have written so much that I completely forgot that as far as 750 Words knew I'd written nothing and that I needed to either write 750 words about something else or (as I'd been doing through the week) mark it as a vacation day; I didn't do either, and so my streak was broken.
The good news is that 750 Words is also generous with streak recovery, and lets you patch a streak together by writing an extra-long entry the next day, which is not particularly difficult to achieve the way I ramble in my journal entries. So my streak count is still climbing up from 300 - but I'll always know that the break and the patch-up happened.
. Sunday was the first meeting of the new committee since they were elected in the AGM. I'm still the secretary; I wouldn't have minded stepping down for a bit of a rest, but nobody else wants the job and I didn't push it because so many other committee members were leaving or changing roles that I thought it might be a good idea to have a bit of continuity. I'm also hoping that having a new committee president will shake up the vibe a bit and provide an infusion of vitality.
What with one thing and another, I didn't finish writing up the official minutes until Friday morning (which is slow by my standards, though I remind myself that compared to some volunteer group secretaries I've known it's really not bad). I suspect this has some contribution to why I didn't feel up to writing Sunday's journal entry until Friday afternoon.
. On Monday, I woke up while it was still dark. As I lay in bed, I found myself singing a riff on "Morning Has Broken" that started by observing that morning had not yet broken and ended with the conclusion that this might be a good opportunity to do some productive work done before the day started and distractions arrived. I did not in fact get any productive work done, because when I got up I went on the internet to look up a rhyming dictionary and try to improve one of the rhymes in the song, and from there I was perfectly capable of distracting myself.
. This week at the board game club I wound up on the casual card games table and played Monty Python Fluxx, UNO Show 'Em No Mercy, and Flip 7. Monty Python Fluxx didn't go very well - in my experience, it's a game that only really works if all the players are the right kind of nerd, and only a couple of people at the table were - and I got the feeling we were all a bit relieved when somebody won and we could move on to something else. UNO Show 'Em No Mercy went much better: everybody was in the right kind of mood, where the sudden arbitrary reversals of fortune were amusing instead of frustrating. Flip 7 went for me the way it usually does; I kept letting the internal voice saying "just one more card" drown out the internal voice saying "this would be a good place to stop pushing my luck", and finding out that the second voice was right.
There was also a Sunday afternoon session this week; I missed the main game, because of the committee meeting, but showed up in time to join in on a smaller game afterward. The smaller game was Libertalia, which is about sharing out pirate booty and gaining the largest share by strategically deploying cards representing pirates, colonial governors, and other assorted ne'er-do-wells. I took a while to come to grips with the strategy, and I was trailing behind for most of the game, but I made some good plays during the final round (including using a Merchant to turn a load of cursed artifacts into good money), and ended up coming third.
. I've been listening to a fair bit of classical music this week. It started when I watched a video about The Shawshank Redemption and then decided to listen to the full version of the Mozart aria that's featured in one scene, which led to Youtube suggesting other bits of Mozart to listen to. I also, unrelatedly to that, saw a post with a linked video about a violin piece by Bach which is designed so that it can be played both forward and backward and that if it's played forward and backward at the same time it forms a pleasing duet.
. The week at work has been interesting, with several challenging projects that were stressful to be faced with but satisfying to have completed successfully.
. Parkrun went well. My shoelaces stayed done up the whole way around the course (which has not always been the case, but I think I've finally figured out what the problem was). Around halfway around the course, I got in a slow, polite race with one of the other people who walks the course at a similar speed to me; usually he overtakes me around the halfway point when my initial energy wears off and finishes in front, but this time I managed to stay in front of him the whole way around. In the process, I got a new personal best time, shaving nearly a minute off my previous record.
. I've started another jigsaw puzzle.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-26 05:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-26 07:46 pm (UTC)The best way for me to get to my destination in hurry when cycling is to find someone who cycles just a little bit faster than I normally do when left to my own devices, and to stick to him like glue, or at least as long as I'm physically able. Seeing someone else pulling away in front of you (or being conscious of them hanging around behind you waiting for an opportunity to pass!) is a considerable motivation to put out effort at a higher level in order to maintain your relative positions.
Although what tends to happen is that my 'pacer' proceeds to sail through a red light and disappear into the distance while I wait at the traffic signals, at which point I do take a vengeful pleasure in 'hunting him down' again once the lights change in order to demonstrate that he hasn't actually gained anything by cheating :-p But if they jump *every* red light where they aren't physically prevented from doing so by opposing traffic then they inevitably pull away, which is of course why they do it in the first place -- because they don't want to be held up by traffic lights.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-27 01:02 am (UTC)