The January blues have manifested for me this year in becoming slightly obsessive about the amount of daylight there is, when it is and how to make the most of it. Sick of the Met Office app making me do the basic arithmetic myself, I added a little note into my task management app over Christmas.
Thankfully we’re out of the sub-8 hour days now, as smlkjns_assistant can confirm.
And the prospect of coming home from work before it gets dark isn’t too far off.
Work has been a lot of staring at datasets or code lately, with more than a few hours spent banging my head against something that I know to be wrong but unable to see why. There has been some pleasure in figuring these things out eventually and, in what is perhaps the dullest accomplishment anyone has ever bragged about, I invested the time in finally cracking the spaghetti-like mess that is ethnicity data in higher education. If you ever find yourself having to grapple with such data, consider using my ultimate ethnicity schema reference lookup and buy me a beer as a thanks.
Engineering works have meant no train service this week and so after being almost driven mad by 4 hours on buses in standstill traffic on Monday I worked from home for the rest of the week. I think having me around so much has confused the cat a little, though thankfully she doesn’t seem to have grown tired of me yet.
Away from screens, I’ve spent some time fixing broken floorboards, which would be a generally unsatsifying task were it not for the excuse to perform a jump test.
Before
After
