minaal | Reading

I made an automation flow that actually works!! I did realise afterwards that I need to add more error handling into it, but I am fully into celebrating the initial success right now.

Particularly because work is otherwise not as rich in successes as I would like. My inbox is a disaster area (everything in there requires action; I aim to keep it under 100 items and right now I'm running at 125 on a good day), the last report I actually completed in full was for July and I have a cumulative 2800 items to review in case they need moving, 900 duplicate records that need cleaning up, three test plans to write, an entire component that is supposed to go live before Christmas but which isn't with me for testing yet... and none of those things are even on the action tracker Boss Lady and I go through in my weekly 121.

But I did cross off one of my ten KANBAN items this morning and deleted two or three to-do list items. I'm hoping that tonight I will sleep instead of going for a series of one-hour naps all night, and maybe tomorrow I'll have the energy to tackle Power Automate...

wychwood

My boss gave me a Christmas present, which is very nice of her! It's... a coffee mug (I only drink cold water) with snowy London landmarks on it (why).

In other puzzling news, I haven't had to wade through two inches of water to get to the station since last spring! I was assuming it was just because we'd had such a dry summer, but there have been several downpours which 100% would have flooded the station entrance last year now. We had a whole thing where the back of our site kept flooding and our management company spent months arguing with the water company about whose fault it was, and eventually the water company admitted it was them and did a bunch of work on the main road to fix it; I'm thinking the flooding by the station must have been part of the same problem, since it's the parallel road downslope. Who knew it was actually fixable without completely reconstructing the whole rear station entrance area! My wet boots thank them from the bottom of their soles.

I've been experimenting again with the automation software at work; at this stage it's a process of continuous failure - you create a process, you run it, it falls over, you spend ten minutes working out why, you fix that, it falls over at the next step, you spend fifteen minutes and call a colleague to fix that, rinse and repeat. On the other hand, the buzz from getting anything to work (I would say "a process" but I haven't actually got a complete flow for anything yet!!) is pretty good. And if I can get the flow I was working on yesterday up and running, it'll save me a couple of hours of extremely tedious manual checks every fortnight, and I'm all in favour of that.

wychwood

December is busy! I looked in detail at my calendar last week and had a little meltdown about it. How do I do this to myself so often.

Anyway. On Saturday I used 7 onions, 2 aubergines, 4 peppers, 6 courgettes, a little under 1.5kg pasta, 3.5 jars of pesto, and 2 bags of cheese and made just about enough packed meals to get me through to the end of next week. On Sunday A came over and we put up my tree and made disappointing experimental maple and pecan cookies (edible, but weirdly cake-like and not particularly good). I am more-or-less up-to-date on laundry and washing up and the like, and have started my Christmas cards.

I am in the office tomorrow as usual and then every working day through to 15 December inclusive, and am also out every single one of those seven nights. Then the week after I have choir four days in a row. Then I get a whole one day off between finishing work and Christmas Eve, for which I shall be duly grateful.

I think I am sufficiently prepared to make it that far, although there's going to be a lot of things waiting for me! But I've got most of my Christmas shopping sorted, I'm OK for food, and I don't think I should run out of clothes. Anything above and beyond that is a bonus!

Also this evening I made a little graph of how many books I finished per month and the point where I stopped intensively playing computer games is extremely visible. I knew all the hand-wringing about my reading decline was futile anyway, but also it turns out that the cause is almost entirely Bioware. Spoiler: if I'm playing ten or fifteen hours of a computer game, I do not read as much, who could have predicted.

Malfoy Manor

Where blood value counts.

Reading

late in time behold him come

resisting entropy

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