Monday Dropped Phoebe off later into school, her condition means she tires easily so she has a reduced timetable on certain days. After that I headed to Wickes to get paint stuff to paint the dining room. Han needs a bigger space to demonstrate larger exercises for her nurse tutoring YouTube channel. The wall is kind of a meh beige so I’ve painted it white for now. I really hate painting, any job that takes longer to prepare for than to do won’t float my boat....

This week my brother Mark and I cycled around the Netherlands. Mark lives in Australia and we’ve kind of formed this little tradition of going on cycling holidays when he’s back over. This is our third one, our first was 12 years ago where we cycled over Dartmoor. 2 years ago we picked the Somerset levels. We both enjoyed the lack of hills last time and Mark is an active travel consultant, so of course we picked the Netherlands....

Hello its been a while, so long in fact I’ve moved platforms since the last time I weeknoted. I never bothered to port my old notes over from medium, I’m not sure why but I wont bother now. I had a quick look, my last weeknote was 2019, the before times, so much has changed, and perhaps not that much at all. I’ve found it hard weeknoting as a contractor, I’m never really sure what I can and can’t say, when I was a fulltime civil servant I was always pretty honest about how work made me feel as well as what we were doing, that feels more high stakes as a contractor, it probably isn’t, it probably just the fear of the unknown....

I’ve never been much of a one for career planning, from reading the ‘5 minutes with’ series from Jon Rhodes that seems to be a common trait of delivery people, lots of us kind of fall into it and enjoy it, that’s certainly been my situation. The Amesy method of career development: For the last few years I have been contracting, this has been a great experience seeing how different organisations work, learning about lots of new problem domains, and hopefully making things just a bit better; I’ve kind of just taken the contracts that were available at the time and haven’t been overly deliberate when selecting work, I find myself getting frustrated by common patterns and want to address them....

Despite a pretty awful journey home from UKGovCamp I’m still buzzing from it and thinking about it. I’m also horribly out of my blogging flow so you’ll have to put up with yet another ‘reflections on UKGovCamp’ post I’m afraid. Before I went. I’ve been thinking about my reflections (meta) and understanding the headspace I was in before I went is important to give context. To summarise it in one word: jaded....