The good thing about being unfit is that when I do manage to get out for a run 15 mins / 1 mile is enough for the same physical release and seratonin hit that I needed to run 45 mins / 5 miles for when I was in practice. Way more time efficient.
If there's one important lesson I've learnt from my mother it's that if you want cake, and you don't have any, just make some.
Week in review: 30 Sept - 6 Oct
- Finished Tales from Earthsea; started The Other Wind.
- Some work on OCDS Kingfisher.
- Help with Open Data Services Co-op hiring admin.
- Went for some runs.
- Cooked for my Mum and my Grandma.
- Visited Southwell, and went on a jaunt to Nottingham.
- (photos from the week.)
I'm often late to the party on new day-to-day tech stuff, like how it was mindblowing when I finally got a contactless payment card. Now I have bluetooth headphones and it's soooo freeing.
(If only I could get ubuntu to pair with them, or anything, but you know one thing at a time. They work with my ye olde android phone.)
I finally picked a place to live in Bulgaria in November, and what swung it mostly was a chair in the apartment that looks super comfortable and like I could be very productive in that chair. The important things.
I obtained and tested peanut butter marmite (or is it marmite peanut butter?) as quickly as possible. Approved!
It's like slightly bitter peanut butter. Would make an excellent base for sauces.
I do agree you could get the same results for less money by combining marmite and peanut butter by hand though, and honestly I'm astonished I hadn't thought of this before.
In reply to: https://mobile.twitter.com/anitahehehe/status/1176306356325879808
I have been thinking about having a bar in my website header for this, maybe dynamically calculated based on how many meetings I had today, when I last ate, how much sleep I got (need to log that first), plus direct manual input
Hardcoded in my brain to drop to a whisper if conversing on the stairs in the evening in my Mum's house. My little brother hasn't been a small child sleeping in the room there for a long time, and I haven't lived in this house for more than 10 years.
Reflections prompted by #ClimateStrike
Since my day job is part of a workers' co-op, it doesn't make sense to strike against ourselves.
Instead, we're spending time conducting a thorough review of our internal policies (travel and equipment expenses mostly, but also what powers our servers etc) to find and act on areas where we can minimise our environmental impact. We're also looking for ways the co-op as an organisation can take some of the burden from individuals to help make environmentally friendly decisions in day-to-day work and home life. Because it's no one person's individual responsibility* and it is at best unfair, at worst impossible, to expect people to take the weight of the world on top of their immediate concerns; any real change will only happen at organisation, collective, corporate levels. We're a small organisation, but the least we can do are things like:
- Use our travel policy to discourage unnecessary international travel;
- encourage remote interactions rather than flying half way around the world for a few-day meeting or workshop;
- make it okay to say no to clients who ask for this.
- Use our expenses and flexitime policies to permit people who are willing and able to pay more and take more time to conduct necessary travel by land/sea instead of air.
- Cater in-person co-op meetings waste-free and meat-free where possible (taking into account our members' dietary needs).
- Use our expenses and device policies to encourage reuse of and secondhand electronics and homeworking equipment.
- Collectively plan ahead for events in non-home cities to aggregate information about local transport and food, so members can make better decisions on the fly in an unfamiliar place (essentially reduce the "fuck it, just get a taxi" approach).
- Use our flexitime, homeworking and leave policies to create a positive and relaxed working environment, encourage work-life balance and space to rest, freeing up mental capacity for conscious living.
- Use our internal policies to exemplify best practice, and make sure our clients and partner organisations know about this, hopefully spreading a message that they could do similarly.
And besides that, we're a remote organisation, so homeworking or local coworking spaces mean none of us are required to commute, and we don't have to power an office space. We also consider carefully the work we do (things for public good) and who we take money from, and every member of the co-op has equal input in this. Not to mention - we are a co-operative. We provide an alternative to power-hungry, profit-driven, top-down companies beholden to greedy shareholders; our existence is a protest in itself as best we can muster given we still need to function in a capitalist society.
This afternoon we had a meeting, optional, to share our collective trauma over the current state of the world**. Some of us will go out and find our local #ClimateStrike protests to join.
It's small, and seems kind of futile in the grand scheme of things. Why even bother? What difference are fewer than 20 people going to make? It seems like most people are in a complete state of cognitive dissonance, and who can blame them? The best we've got is to scrape together our collective energy - make space for our colleagues to breath and take stock - and do the small things. Nobody is under the illusion that this is going to fix the problem overnight. But at the very least we can spread the message, the intent, the energy to our friends, family, and possibly our clients, who might spread it onwards. I'm trying to write this from a position of hopefulness, rather than my usual semi-apathetic nihilism, and honestly, it's a struggle.
I count myself lucky to have co-workers who are open to talking frankly about these issues and making changes at an organisational level, when many people can't or won't even do that. It's reassuring and even delightful to be able to bring my personal ethical stances to a group without feeling like an annoying nag. For example:
- I consume vegan only; give money to all-vegan establishments as much as possible.
- I consume secondhand only; not putting money into exploitative endless consumption and disposal cycles.
- I don't fly (bar carefully considered special-case big-deal exceptions); go out of my way to plan complicated land and sea routes, often paying more $$ and spending a lot more time to do so.
- I own one 45L backpack of stuff, and try to take up as little space as possible.
I mostly do these things quietly, for myself. But if it comes up, I can use myself as evidence that living this way is possible, and to encourage other people to try it out even just occasionally to start with. And to offer my now years of experience with inconvenient land travel planning and finding vegan food in veg-hostile places to anyone who needs help.
I'm aware that the fact I travel has a negative environmental impact in itself. In order to be able to do that, I make more extreme tradeoffs for a lot of things to try to offset that. Things I should be doing better:
- Reducing waste; since I travel it's hard to buy bulk goods and have a large stock of reusable containers, and often difficult to know where or how to recycle things.
- Consider the impact of what I do consume; coffee, soy, avocados, almonds, packaged vegan junkfood. I try to buy local but I'm not consistent about it yet.
- Consider where I stay; I avoid hotels and find hostels to be less wasteful and generally more conscious, but I do use AirBnB and other options for private accommodation that I could do to be more picky about.
- Travel slower, take fewer journeys, stay in one place for longer.
When I fall short I try not to make excuses for myself, but I do sometimes. When I have energy to be, I'm angry at people with privilege and power who make excuses to not even make the smallest of changes to their own lives. I'm angry at people who use other peoples' disadvantages and circumstances as an excuse to not change their own behaviour, or scapegoat those less fortunate than themselves (see: disabled people and plastic straws; food deserts or poverty and particular diets). I'm angry at the society and power structures that make this happen.
But mostly I'm not angry, just dead inside.
Anyway.. counting my blessings, noting my privileges, trying not to bury my head; acknowledging the futility without giving up hope entirely, supporting and being supported by people who feel the same.
* Though there are a few powerful individuals who could make a big difference if they weren't such greedy and/or oblivious assholes, of course.
** In the last minutes of the meeting, it was proposed to make a time-tracker job for "existential crisis" and log hours against that where necessary to see how much it's really costing our business.
Week in review: 9 - 15 September
- Cafe worked in Prague. BODS i18n, and thinking about the ODS Co-op's environmental impact.
- Climbed Petrin Hill, walked around the Castle area, sunset from Vitkov hill.
- Went to the City Museum and up the Old Town Hall tower.
- Ate probably more vegan donuts than is reasonable.
- Finished The Farthest Shore.
- Watched lots of Battlestar Galactica.
Hello world, my [temp] phone [that I've been using for a year] got a bad update and I had to factory reset it. I can't set Signal and other messaging apps back up with the Greek number I was using for them, if you have that, because it won't get phone reception outside of Greece.
Relatedly, I haven't had access to the installation of Signal (desktop) that used my UK number for the last month. If you sent me any Signal messages to the UK number in the past month, I have not read them. I thought I'd be able to port it to my new desktop, but the FP1 is now so old Signal won't update on it, so I couldn't.
So if you need my new (Spanish) number for Signal (etc) contact, and I don't send it to you in the next couple of hours, do ping me.
As always, IRC and email are more reliable ways to contact me than anything involving a phone number.
I was all set to repair my Fairphone 1 (First Edition) in September when I can get a replacement motherboard and battery, but I just resuscitated it to check some things and it turns out latest Signal update is not compatible with Android 4.2.2 any more :(
I miss having duel SIM and a back that opens, but is it worth fixing it if I can't use Signal? The Fairphone 3 is so big and I don't think I really want one, yet at least. Grumble.
I know Signal is notoriously bad at being available on open OSs, anyone know any that will support it that will work on the FP1..?
Travis just emailing me over and over again that things are broken is really starting to sum up my afternoon.
Every couple of hours my boiler makes a sound like a stadium full of people cheering.
This summer's trick has been keeping a towel in the freezer to throw over head or shoulders for moments of relief when it is so unfathomably hot and there's no AC to be found. It only lasts a second, but what a second.