Monthly report: April 2023

It was a good month, although an early spell of good weather rather lulled me into thinking that spring had sprung, only for April to go out like a lion.

Highlights of the month:

• The academic paper was published to no substantive objection. Yet
• Negative biopsy. Yay!
• Excellent visit to old friends in Brussels, plus recorded an episode of ETP there
• Dismantled the old bike completely (with professional help) and started to fix things up
• Fine visit from an old friend and colleague, and her daughter and mother
• Made actual use of ChatGPT to write a little program
• A succession of successful snail hunts on the terrace
• One piece of paid work, and that was plenty

Activities

Steps up, sleep down. Must be the seasons.

April:

• Walking with sticks: 0
• Reading: 5
• Steps (avge): 9143
• Podcasts: 33 (31 of them logged)
• In bed/asleep 8:12/7:26
• 7 Minutes: 5 days
• Cycled: 4 days
• Weight (avge): 86.8
• Naps: 5

March:

• Walking with sticks: 0
• Reading: 17
• Steps (avge): 8947
• Podcasts: 33 (28 of them logged)
• In bed/asleep 8:33/7:42
• 7 Minutes: 6 days
• Cycled: 10 days
• Weight (avge): 87.2
• Naps: 4

Stuff Done

Still getting loads of spam to just one or two posts, despite having deleted all previous spam comments, so I guess the spammers are not actually monitoring anything, just blasting their crap out willy nilly. I cannot think of anything more soul-crushing.

On the bike restoration, I oscillate madly between the fantasy of wanting to lovingly fix absolutely every original part and the reality of knowing that I definitely don't have the patience and likely don't have the skills or resources. I'm currently stalking eBay for a replacement saddle, a quill stem and a left crank, having discovered to my astonishment that the cranks are ill-matched, with a right of 165mm and a left of 170mm. Never noticed that before now.

Splurged out on Keyboard Maestro, in order to use a single macro that converts Bike outline files into Markdown files, and am finding it very much harder to understand or, dare I say it, grok, than I anticipated. I've built a couple of little things to speed my chores, fractionally, but I'm torn between accepting it was an expensive purchase and spending yet more for a tutorial course.

Hours logged per month

Percent of logged hours

Previous years are on an archive page.

Goals

Nine posts here, which will do nicely. $project got absolutely no attention, and that needs to be fixed. The little automations I built were satisfying.

Niggles

Not too many this month. I would still like to be a bit more disciplined about blocking time for things, but I am not beating myself up about it.

Final remarks

Not too bothered about the lack of Twitter as I do seem to be able to follow lists. So maybe I need to put more people into one list or the other.

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Here’s the table

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Month	Total	Daily	Admin %	ETP %	Writing %	Other %
04	102.9	3.4	49	25	19	7
03	117.9	3.8	40	28	15	17
02	116.3	4.8	48	19	15	18
2023-01	101.0	4.8	53	31	13	3