Last week I took a very well earned break from work. Things have been getting increasingly intense at work for the last few weeks leading to a few sleepless nights and 5am emails as deadlines loomed. A week long dedicated break seemed sensible to avoid the inevitable burn out.
Given that it was also the school holidays its been a fantastic chance to reconnect with and spend some quality time with the family. Long dog walks and family visits have been the primary focus of this last week off, oh and getting a personal best on my 10k time!
Despite all the ‘distractions’ I’ve been able to get some solid reading done and have got started on Mysterious Island, which I’m reading in paperback, and Dune on Audible. Why have I gone back to paperback books? Having to take some kind of electronic device to bed to be able to read at night gradually led to phones, iPads and even laptops back in the bedroom at night. Moving back to good old paper books has solved this problem and now all my devices either stay downstairs or get put on charge in the office, not near me when I’m getting ready for sleep.
I’ve also managed to make some decent headway in the home automation / monitoring arena setting up two Raspberry Pi’s with Motion and connecting this to my Home Assistant server. I’ll hopefully get another one set up next week and be able to fully replace my ancient Dropcam (which I’ll probably end up re-deploying as a baby monitor). I’ll admit to wasting not a small amount of time trying to get the Pi camera board working with one of my second gen Raspberry Pi’s only to realise that the ribbon cable I was using was for the Pi Zero…..
There is still quite a bit of tinkering to do here to get the cameras to only monitor motion when I’m away and to Telegram notifications working.
Faced with the prospect of having to move house yet again, I’m becoming increasingly aware of just how much stuff we have bought in the last 4 months. This has led to some serious clearing out of our junk and will doubtless power a week of furious e-baying, who knows, we may even make some money!
While I have a list as long as my arm of stuff I haven’t managed to get done this week, we did finally manage to check out the local swimming pool and had an all round good time. I also discovered it’s almost exactly a 5k round trip run. This opens up the option of getting some swimming included in my weekly workout: 2.5k run to the pool, swim (working up to c. 20 lengths) then a 2.5k run home. Probably not doable in a lunch hour, but more than possible of an evening.