Solsticial

Shortest Day! Shortest Day!

Tra-la-la-la, it’s the Winter Solstice.

I don’t think I need to say any more than that, really.


Shortest

In happier news, today is the Winter Solstice (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) so it’s the shortest day. This year that shortest day is 7 hours 49 minutes and 49 seconds.

The changes are (as always) tiny for a while, but it’s at least good to know that we’re done with the shortest one and that we’re heading back towards the time of sunlight…


September Restart (Hopefully)

So, yes, I’m still alive. There’s been a bundle of stuff going on that isn’t blog-friendly (or even interesting) and August has been it’s usual shower of shit.

I don’t know why it happens, but it does, and it’s not a conscious process at all.  But I’ll have about two weeks where pretty much nothing goes right, and it whacks my brain hard, and then I realise that yes, yet again, it’s bloody August.

Obviously this year I also got slightly walloped by July, but well, who’s counting?

As is obvious, I got through it all – and in fairness, it’s nothing major that’s been occurring, I’m still in the same house, same job, nothing epic has altered.  But it hits me hard anyway, like I’ve had enough energy to keep going ’til now, then I just feel like I’ve been slammed into a wall, and there’s little to no time or energy to do anything for a few weeks.

So anyway, yes, September. Let’s see how things go from here…


Extending Daylight

As of today, the days are getting longer again (for the next six months, anyway)  It’s only five seconds longer today than yesterday, but at least it’s heading in the right direction.

This is A Good Thing.

That is all.


Slump

Things have been quiet on D4D of late. Basically, I’m in a bit of a slump, and at the moment I’m not quite sure how to get out of it.

There’s a lot of reasons behind it, but mainly it’s down to an overbearing feeling of stagnation, or being a bit bogged down. I’m used to having change in my life, and at the moment it’s not really there. Some of that is inertia, some of it is still the final stages from the bankruptcy process and some of it is the current state of things. But it all adds up to an overall sludge – and while I know I want things to change, I also don’t quite know what I want to do next, or where I want to be.

Domestically, I’ve been in this house for seven years. That’s by far the longest I’ve been in any one place since I left the family home. I was looking at moving last year when the tenancy came up, but that was only just after the bankruptcy finished, and I didn’t want to push things while it was still showing up on credit checks and the like.  So I’m thinking about it for this year – but there’s also nowhere that’s dragging me, nowhere that I’ve been and thought “OK, this is where I want/need to be”, and it’s all a bit up in the air. There’s still time, though.

Workwise, I’ve been working on the same project for more than three years. (Probably closer to 4, all told)  And while we’ve got a lot done, there still feels like no end in sight (things keep on being added in to it, or stuff is more complex than initially expected) which doesn’t help. I like contracting in general for exactly this – that each contract is finite – even though they can (and usually do) get extended, they still have an end date where I can say “Nope, I’m done”. This one is open-ended, and it’s feeling more and more like a proper job and blah blah.

Outside of those two things, there’s so much doubt about what’s going on in the UK – with Brexit being delayed even further, it’s left everything in limbo again, of not knowing what’ll happen with it, and what’ll happen with jobs, economy and so on if and when it happens. I can’t deny, that all contributes to the current sense of stagnation.

I’m not depressed – well, no more than usual – and I’m still getting out and getting other stuff done. It’s just that I’ve not got the time or energy for anything extra. I wish I did, but I don’t.

I’m going to keep on working on it, though.  I know I need a couple of new projects to be getting on with – but I also need to find the motivation to get it going. That’s where the stagnation is really hurting – I know I need and want to change, but right now the drive to change things is also being blocked.

I’ll figure it out, I know – I always do, and always have done.  And hopefully it won’t take too much longer to turn the corner.


Solsticial

Today’s the Winter Solstice – the shortest day of the year. From here, the days get longer again, although initially it’s barely noticeable. (From that page, by New Year the day will be one whole minute longer than today, although the differences do increase as we go through the year)

In terms of daylight, this day is 8 hours, 49 minutes shorter than on June Solstice.

Oddly, the latest sunrise doesn’t happen ’til the end of the year, rather than being on the shortest day. (Orbital mechanics be weird, y’all)

Regardless, at least the days are going to get longer. We’re almost over the hump.


Bourdain

Last week, I was as surprised as everyone else to hear that the chef Anthony Bourdain had committed suicide.

Bourdain was a huge influence on the catering world – you only have to read the many obituaries (including this one) to see the influence he had, and the respect in which he was held.

Depression and suicide are bastards. They make you think you’re not worth anything, make you think the world won’t miss you, make you insignificant. They’re lying bastards.

Twitter and Facebook have been full of people expressing shock, and making depression and mental health a subject to speak about, to help remove the stigma around it all, and make more people aware of how prevalent these things really are.

If nothing else good comes out of the deaths of celebrities, then at least it’s making people talk, making mental health normalised and spoken about.  And that can’t be a bad legacy really, can it?