Had a night at the pub yesterday, something I haven’t done for a long time. I’m not normally one for raucous shouting with beer flowing everywhere, but I had a good time. I won’t go as far as to imply that I needed to unwind after all the virtual corporate monkey poop slung my way over the past few weeks, but it did give me some time with people I know in the real world well away from computer screens – smart phone Wikipedia checking notwithstanding. The lack of day-to-day contact with real people I can live with, I’m coming to the conclusion that during the times I need to work it’s far more effective for me to block distractions out and just crack on with things, rather than face the interruptions of people asking for stuff. It’s not an anti-social personality trait that I have, at least I don’t think so, it’s something I need to do to keep myself going. I haven’t spoken to many other people about this, but I regard my brain as a completely separate entity to the rest of me. I’ve talked in the past about having brain issues and wonky wiring that means I have to try extra hard at some stuff, and less hard at things other folks might find tricky. My brain dictates what I do. The rest of me is the visible effect of this, be it in my actions, speech, or whatever. In this case, there’s a wire between my body and my brain. Something tells my brain what it wants to do and my brain in turn makes that happen. Occasionally, my brain wants to do something different (invariably destructive in some fashion) and the something that normally just tells my brain what it wants to do has to work three times as hard to remove the destructive element. This ‘something’ is an unknown thing to me. I know it’s there, and I know it does its job better each day, generally, but I also now that when times get bumpy it stops working. Last night was one of those nights where I could happily switch off that part of me and just let things happen, not worry about stuff and let the good times roll. And they did.

I’ve got my first walking injury of recent times to contend with today. I rather overdid the walking yesterday morning and I’ve got a sore ankle, not really helped by walking another two miles yesterday evening: one mile to the pub, another back home from the pub in a booze-fuelled fug. One of the nice side-effects of blasting through a 1,000 calorie lard-busting walk is that I don’t have to pay too much attention to how many calories I was snarfing down at the pub. And there were a lot, more food than I’ve eaten in a long time. I’m OK with it, I gave myself a treat night out, had some fun and came home safe. I’m having the rest of the day off walking as I technically completed my requirements earlier this morning: the return journey from the pub back home was after midnight and more than a mile, so that’s my tick box ticked for the day. My thinking is that if I rest my ankle today and tomorrow, do a short, easy walk tomorrow afternoon if all is well then I can get back into the swing of things later in the week. I set myself a target for walking 365 miles by the end of the year, this is going to be an easy target at this rate, so I’ve set myself a shorter-term target of 100 miles in a month. If that turns out OK then I’m anticipating having that as a regular thing. Three and a bit miles each day should cover that nicely, and the healthy side-effects of the walking will continue all year round. It also means that I can go to the pub now and again, which is nice.

Today is another oddly sunny Sunday in January. Emma’s folks are coming over late afternoon so we’re going to be cleaning the remainder of the house for their arrival. The laundry is reaching a critical tipping point as we’ve held back on that over the last few days. It’s mostly a floorspace thing, we’re not well off for drying space inside the house, and when people come round we try and avoid having novelty underwear on display. The upshot of this is that we’ll likely spend the rest of the week catching up and running the washing machine twice a day. The timescales involved with this make drying it outside on the line less effective if we don’t start early enough. For example, it’s nearly 11am as I’m writing this, it’ll take 2+ hours for the cycle to complete, and then we’ve got about 2 or so hours of daylight, but the sun has disappeared behind the houses at this stage so it’s largely irrelevant. Then it has to be brought in to avoid it getting wet if it rains overnight, but we need to find space for it inside, and we’re short of space (as previously mentioned), so we’re…you get the picture.

We had a good Emma and Pete Show recording session yesterday afternoon. I’ve invested some money in new recording gear to get us set up in a new environment, and it worked out really well for a first run. The microphones will need pop filters so the end result is more normal, but I’m confident that this is the beginning of a new era of shows. We’re doing OK on the more regular show schedule, and recording downstairs at a proper table is far more invigorating than under a duvet. I don’t know how viable the plans are to do live broadcasting when we record in future, but now I know we get good sound from the new gear, I can fine-tune that and think about live video and audio. Fun times.