An Almost Anonymous Blog

Wednesday Thoughts 10

It's been a little while since I've written out some unfiltered thoughts so now's as good a time as any. For newer readers (are there any, really?) these posts are a collection of unconnected thoughts that I haven't fleshed out into a full blog post.

A few weeks ago my organization announced it was moving to 4 in-office days by October, and then 5 days by February. Most businesses / corporations have done the same thing, or will be. Earlier in the year I felt extremely tired doing 4 days after being used to 3 days for so long. And then there are weeks like this week, where I have late softball games and need to drag myself out of bed early on less than 7 hours of sleep.

At the same time I did 5 days a week before COVID changed things. It will take a little while to get used to it, but I'll manage. It will mean readjusting some after-work commitments like personal training, but it's not impossible.

I've been thinking lately of reviving my book podcast, The Slow Reader. The reason I stopped was because reading started to feel like a job. Even though my recordings weren't on a schedule, reading became a chore. Now that I'm having fun reading again, I want to talk about it more. I don't have as much time to devote to recording as I would like, so I'm thinking of just starting it off as a blog first, then a podcast later.

It also helps that I really enjoy the look and feel of the site1, which makes it even more enticing to use.

For the longest time at work I've not had enough work to do. Two of my employees retired last week, and I've added on more work than I anticipated. It's not insurmountable, but it has meant I don't have as much free time to throw toward random blog posts (like this one). It also makes a difference that the workplace seating arrangements were changed up, and there are way more people around me. I feel very self-conscious when I have anything other than work windows pulled up. Even Notepad, in which I'm writing these thoughts.

It's funny, because I don't care what other people have on their screens.

I remain steadfast in my commitment to not track my media consumption this year. As I think about what it means to "not track", it seems to me that it started with being tempted to use Trackt.tv to track TV shows. I didn't want to set up another account. I keep up with Letterboxd, the one exception to my tracking rule. Last.fm is still active, because it's hooked into my Spotify account, but I don't manually enter albums anymore like I was doing last year. It's passive tracking, so I'll allow it. I stopped tracking my books on Goodreads a long time ago when I switched to The Storygraph, but I've stopped there as well. I have replaced that much with a media database in Obsidian, but that is mostly for me to enter in the books/movies/games that I own than it is to track my reading.

Having a space to leave simple reviews of the books I've read is the side benefit. I'm still happy to avoid the public media consumption tracking but am looking for some solutions to track TV shows. I've tried a notebook, but it's not sticking and a bit of a pain to update. I'm leaning toward a spreadsheet solution, but if there is some sort of offline tracking system people know about, please let me know.

My wife is away on business again this weekend, so I am left to my own devices. I have some plans floating around in my head:

I try my best to fit in as much as I can into these weekends. It's not that I'm unable to do these while she's here, it's just that we are busier doing things together - that, and there are definitely shows/movies I want to watch that she won't want to watch.

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  1. Yes, it's Wordpress, and therefore bloated. But I could never put together something like this myself (it's more about not being able to choose the aesthetics, and less about crafting the code - but that's a big part of it too).↩

#echo #thoughts