Breakfast in South Australia (apple, oats, chia and yogurt), lunch in Victoria (pepper steak pie), dinner in NSW (schnitzel and pizza).

Everything worked as expected today. The new windscreen wipers proved their worth, the $30 phone holder held my phone for 800km, my shoulders did not fall off, the Hay Plain was boring and beautiful in the golden light, Google maps took me down a dirt road for 30 minutes to try and save fifteen seconds. The road trip playlist only got two skips between 7:30 am and 6pm.

I have a 2022 Keep note with a list of potential journal entry titles, and after a while it became a list of journal entries that I didn't get around to writing.

This list includes "Yest We Forgot" - which was some thoughts I had after seeing a little war memorial in the suburbs last ANZAC day with no wreaths on it, as well as a note admonishing me for not writing a review of Phil Jackson's autobiography "11 Rings".

It also had an entry called "Crossroads" which was a hint to start me writing a potential entry in late May about if it was time for bradism.com to make a left or right turn, maybe start writing more entries about evaluating your API Strategy and ways to assess an organisation's integration maturity. Given that June's entries focused mainly on injuries, zooper doopers, the weather and photos of the garden it's clear that bradism.com ploughed on straight ahead without slowing to yield, and my decision not to reflect on my decision at these crossroads seems justified as I didn't hit anything and I'm still going in the same direction. What the fuck am I talking about? I got acquired by a big consulting firm, I tried working for a big consulting firm, I decided I preferred working for small consulting firms and so after a few months of business development, pitches and invoicing I had my last day today. Well, officially my last day is in two weeks, but I have some leave to take between now and then. During which we're going for a road trip which, due to Adelaide being a long road away from anywhere, will involve a lot of roads, but not many crossroads.

One day I will install a copy of MediaWiki on my NAS to maintain a knowledge base of all the mundane things I have to learn or understand to maintain my car, house, body, finances and all the rest of life's details.

So I don't forget today's lessons, and because the drill's manual seems to assume you know exactly what you are doing, here's the way to drill holes in bricks without standing there for thirty minutes to make a tiny hole.

1. Be Safe
2. Charge the battery
3. Mark where the hole is going
4. Lock in a smaller masonry drill bit and make sure it's not crooked
5. Put it on Hammer mode
6. Set the numbers thingy to 20
7. Flick the switch on the top to 2
8. Make sure you're not in reverse mode
9. Drill a pilot hole with the small bit, then replace with the bigger masonry bit
10. Repeat 5-8
11. Drill the full hole
12. Sweep the dust out and put the anchors in
13. Change settings to screw mode.
14. Screw in the screws into the bracket/anchors
15. Wash hands/face/clothes
16. Drink beer

On Friday night one of my dreams became reality. I saw people in real life for a beer after work. Okay, that is just a recent fancy. A pre-covid fantasy I've always harboured came true five beers into Friday night when I was under the lights of a stand up comedy stage, microphone in hand and crowd waiting for me to speak. I've often wondered if this was a career I missed the calling for, given that I like crafting words together, making people laugh, and having conversations within the bounds of established social structures. When I was offered the chance after Chetan's show I didn't hesitate other than for a second of faux-modesty and I stepped up onto the stage and delivered what I thought were the better of my draft Tweets that I never published between 2019 and 2022. Including such pithy gems as:

"Every morning my wife measures her weight, body fat percentage, muscle tone and then tracks it over time. And yet she claims cricket is boring."

"I keep having the same dream where I grow extra teeth."

"Who here saw their dad's penis at some point in your lives? It's like a rite of passage. But I am thinking of blocking him on Snapchat."

The results were predictable. I enunciated poorly, delivered the punchlines too rapidly, and no one laughed. Sometimes people laughed when other people around them explained the joke. (It was an intimate venue). I'll be honest, I was a little bit disheartened, but Chetan shared some feedback that was very apt and I wanted to record it here so I remember it in future. It boiled down to: You have to read your audience. Some of these jokes might have been funnier with the right delivery, but it doesn't matter how well constructed or clever a joke is if the audience is not ready to hear it. At 9pm on a Friday night after everyone else has had five beers the punchlines need to match the mood. That is something I never truly gave enough significance to in a lot of what I have written and said and almost definitely explains why I never got many retweets. I will be aiming in all pursuits not to simply know my audience, but cater to my audience, in things going forward.