7.5 rpm

From my lack of activity some may assume I’ve already bailed.

I’ve not.

Some time on the evening of 8th Jan, approximately when I needed to write my second post, our broadband connection at work was maliciously disconnected, and took approximately 10 days to get re-established. Suddenly, a whole raft of my New Year’s Revolutions became seemingly insurmountable. How, for example, was I going to use Evernote to capture ideas and plan tasks when any changes I made wouldn’t sync to my iPad? How could I possibly watch a TED talk in my lunch hour? And how was I going to run an online timebank or communicate with anyone?

Sure, that last paragraph was a little melodramatic, and of course you can still get on with plenty of other things without being plugged into the web, but it was interesting to eavesdrop on my own inner monologue – lack of internet became a lazy excuse, and although it was only the broadband at work that went AWOL, it became illogically the reason why I couldn’t blog that week. Or the next.

I should’ve re-read this excellent article which repeats the instruction that to get back into blogging, the only important thing is to just write.

So, here I am reticently cobbling together a bunch of things that I’ve been doing – reticently, because if much rather have an overall theme for this post and sadly all posts that fall into that category are still drafts or ideas (in Evernote).

A quick rundown of my New Year’s Revolutions checklist and it appears I’m actually doing rather well:
– despite not being able to sync at work I’ve still being using Evernote to capture all my ideas and tasks, and have started to be more efficient.
– I have lost on average 0.52 kg (2s.f.) per week, using the 5:2 diet
– I’ve done 2 Pilates sessions
– I’ve been on a date with Michelle. We watched ‘Into The Woods’: I loved it and she got bored after the happy ‘ending’ continued with a further 30minute twist of more singing.
– I’ve read my first book this year: ‘Foxglove Summer’ by Ben Aaronvitch. I might write about the series in a separate post, but if you want a series of novels that are suspenseful, funny, seek to create a scientific rationale for the practise of magic (a fictional one, obviously) and teach you a ton about how the police service works, check them out.
– I have been cycling as much as possible, but there has been an awful lot of frost in the mornings or warnings of minus degrees Celsius so I’ve been walking in instead some days. Safety first and all that (see the NYRs about being a good husband and long-term dad)

Some of them have shown some progress, but need a bit more attention in February:
– I’ve watched one TED video, so have a few to catch up on, but it has been awfully difficult to do this at work this month as previously explained!
– I fixed a broken front door lock within 2 days (that might sound an awful long time to fix a lock if my wife and kids were stuck inside all that time, but considering it was just that the lock kept bending/breaking our keys and we have a porch door in addition, I think that’s fairly quick). However, I still have bathroom lights to replace (Although, technically, I inherited that problem from 2014 rather than it being a new issue)
– I’ve blogged twice in January, rather than 4 times, although I did write a brass band arrangement of ‘All Creatures of our God and King’ (you’re welcome to listen to the WAV file created by the app I used, Notion, but there are 5 verses and it obviously sounds like it’s played by a computer) and created an Animoto video for our daughter Zoë’s dedication service, so it’s not like I was sitting around doing nothing instead.

And I’ve really not done much (or haven’t checked the progress) for the other two. 6 on track, 3 so-so and 2 meh. So about 7.5 rpm (revolutions per month). I’m happy with that.

I’ll end with a quote from ‘Into The Woods’ (James Corden, Meryl Streep, Chris Pine and the boy who plays Jack are all superb – check out this PDF of the screenplay if you’ve seen it and want a copy!):

CAREFUL THE WISH YOU MAKE, WISHES ARE CHILDREN.
CAREFUL THE PATH THEY TAKE– WISHES COME TRUE, NOT FREE.
CAREFUL THE SPELL YOU CAST, NOT JUST ON CHILDREN.
SOMETIMES THE SPELL MAY LAST, PAST WHAT YOU CAN SEE, AND TURN AGAINST YOU…
CAREFUL THE TALE YOU TELL. THAT IS THE SPELL. CHILDREN WILL LISTEN…