In the final week of Spring I was putting the finishing touches into the musical playlist that I intended to embed memories of the past months in. Spring 2023 had been pleasant, as best as I can recall it now. The fading glow of Giunio 23 had carried me through Winter. My work/life balance was correcting itself. My body parts were coming together with enough cohesion that I was even able to complete a mini, late-30s equivalent of Bulktember. A more age appropriate approach. Rehab repetitions prioritised over moving weight. Balancing pain signals with progression. I suffered only moderate lower back pain.

By the end of November, despite a recurrence of my dodgy, left shoulder I was moving well, energised by technology and the future. There was bacon in the Barossa, panini on lunch breaks, lamb roasts in the slow cooker, burgers before basketball games. Lots of coffee. Flowers were blooming, the outdoors was calling, and by mid November my index finger had some blood back in it.

Life was not perfect, but I was enjoying it. It felt like, as spring turned to summer around me that in my life too would bloom into sunshine and blue skies and a semblance of control.

Alas, storm clouds approached, as spring will do. Literally, initially, as late November rain pummelled the house and got into the gym literally hours before we were to set off on a cross country road trip.

December from start to finish was problematic. The road trip that was supposed to be a break was plagued by injury, weather, snakes (actually those were cool) and actual plague. Driving long distances in the rain just to isolate in cheap motel rooms was not fun. It was becoming apparent that my wrist injury was not minor, and the Napoleon movie totally lacked historical accuracy and nuance. In fact, I was craving a return to home life and work routine by the end, knowing fate would choose that moment to at least clear out my sinuses. We returned to a mouldy, ruined gym, more rain, a sad puppy and a whole train of minor inconveniences. The final two work weeks of the year did bring some sense of normality back, and then I got covid and missed out on Christmas. By the time it was 2024 I was exhausted. And I'd felt comfortable enough with where my feelings were to share my Spring playlist that just served to remind me of happier times.

Time never stops though. And through all of this, and the continued wrist pain, insurance drama, back pain, life stress, and shoulder pain it did feel like I've done this all before. It did feel that all I had to do was keep getting through work days, keep doing rehab morning, lunchtime and night, keep going to the beach at the end of hot days, keep making phone calls, keep taking the dog for a walk and mowing the lawn after limbering up that things wouldn't necessarily get better, but they might average out. I listened to the Spring playlist a lot, and of course new music and so I added to it already aware that I was now making a Spring/Summer double album playlist. In some ways it made sense, under the influence of the narrative fallacy: Spring was a rise and fall, summer would be a fall and rise. The perfect sine wave. With gym repairs scheduled and two weddings at the end of February to look forward to it seemed appropriate that by the end of summer I'd feel balanced and I'd have a second collection of songs.

Well, it worked to an extent. My wrist still hurts most days but not that much. I have no idea if the next storm will flood some part of my house. Jobs still cause stress. But I have a Spring/Summer playlist. And I know that I will listen to it for years to come sometimes when things are going bad and sometimes when things are going well and sometimes when some things are bad and other things are good. This is life. I am accepting it. Because I can't change it. Seasons will continue to come one by one and I'll relish posting a mixtape for each one for as long as I can.

Memories of:
Driving down South Road in sunshine. Lifting light weights in the gym. Driving to a bonfire. Books about Mars, and Nipples. Taking coffee breaks in the backyard on WFH mornings. Being in the groove in front of VS Studio while looking out over the Adelaide hills. More hours on my back on the rubber mats on the floor. Long stretches of country roads. FLOWERS BLOOMING. Feeling sad. Being in the groove in front of CS Studio with the air conditioner on and the curtains drawn. The same walks around Croydon. Memories of Paris. Passionfruit. Trying to hold a plank.

It has been four years since I moved into this house and I am still receiving mail for the previous tenants.

I am a good Australian. I write "NATA" on the envelopes, and scribble an arrow in the direction of the return address. Then I put these back in the red post boxes the next time I need something to add some spice to the monotony of living in the same place for four years during the Work From Home era.

...God damn it, 2024 journals are literally becoming a case study into turning forty.

Anyway, another letter arrived today with the same old names. I could kind of see through the thin envelope that this was just crappy promotional material, so I decided to just rip it open and throw it in the bin.

Who was marketing to the old owner occupiers today? The freaking real estate agent who sold their house to us! Of all the people who should know they are NATA, it would be him.

Also he paid the "Card Only" stamp price and he stuck a big magnet inside the envelope as well. Typical Real Estate Agents. Adelaide median house prices went up 11.5% last year and he hasn't made enough millions to pay full price for a letter.

Unlike some of my neighbours, who spend hours tending to their verges in the beating sun, and who water great stretches of the street, I am not a lawn care aficionado. I mow my grass when it gets hard to pick up the dog shit, and about twice a year I edge it to prevent it from growing into the garden.

There is a sense of satisfaction that comes from a manicured lawn. I felt it yesterday after I employed the leaf blower to suck up the scraps of edged grass clippings and put the green bin back down the side of the house. Is this because I am turning 40 this year? This is the edging job that will see me through to that milestone. Am I about to join my neighbours in maintaining their verges. God, I hope not.

Anyway I took this photo with my new phone that will also likely be with me as I enter my forties. It too has 90° edges. Maybe that's going to be a theme.

Along with the Azure AI Search functionality I described back on Monday, my time at work so far this year has been mainly dedicated to using Chat GPT to write python code for me that generates Mule projects based on a dictionary of metadata. That is pretty cool, and I do hope it saves upward of the 30+ days of development I have invested so far in creating it.

As I'm currently only 3 days billable, I used my time on Friday to convert a spreadsheet I have for estimating integration development sizes into a webpage for better reuse. Well, Chat GPT did this for me too, but I told it what to do and I fixed its bugs. This started off as a Flask app but as I wasn't persisting any data it quickly became a standalone HTML + pure JavaScript app which is great because I was afraid I was going to have to work out how to containerise it and integrate with Azure AD to protect it. I still might do that…

You'd think all of this gives me enough coding to do, and yet I still find myself spending hours in the evenings adding features to Fireworks using React and PHP to ideally save me minutes in the future. And yet, this could feasibly add up to a time saving.

This maintenance work distracts me from my actual current project, which is a SvelteKit app using PocketBase as a back end. Svelte had a bit of a learning curve coming from React but I kind of cracked it on Sunday and then didn't get a chance to do anything further because my new phone was shipped and I decided I needed to prioritise going through old photos in Lightroom and creating 19.5:9 aspect ratio backgrounds.

Vanessa went to a hen's day this afternoon, so I finally had a chance to spend some time on the projects of my choosing. I wasn't sure what I should focus on first. So for that reason, I decided today I was going to find out if CLR would do to the stains in our toilet bowl what toilet cleaner and bleach could not. It did an amazing job of removing some of the build up that I think was included in the cost of buying this house. It did take me an hour of scrubbing and rinsing though. I think it was a good thing I got away from the computer.

This month I am celebrating my ten year anniversary of being a home owner.
I know that a lot of people might envy me, but a lot of people also didn't have to spend twenty minutes of their evening today searching for a replacement pre-filter sponge for the pump of their backyard water feature either.
And even that doesn't compare to the actual time and cognitive energy that I have dedicated to my home insurer since the roof of the gym was flooded back in November. (That was not related to the pump or my water feature).
I wish there was some compromise between travelling around the world and staying in cool places every night without worrying about maintenance and rates, and always having a safe place to hang up canvases and for Nash to chill.
My first instinct is a houseboat, but I strongly doubt that would involve less insurance, maintenance and flooding issues...

Every Monday of 2023 I made a short, coffee related video.

Coffee and my phone, basically the only two ubiquitous aspects of every day of 2023.

Good thing I drilled a hole in the ceiling when it bloated from rain water, according to the roofer who came tonight. If not, the ceiling could have collapsed.

He then proceeded to demolish the ceiling, sending plaster, sodden insulation and black mold down to the floor.

No matter where I turn in my house I see something half-arsed that I did or built or bought. Examples include: the shower grouting, the hair straightener hook, the cupboard door under the kitchen sink, the cardboard curtain on the window above the stairs, the rug, the rangehood lighting, the front door shelving.

I spend a lot of time at work getting the colours correct and the alignments perfectly straight in my architecture diagrams. I proofread all my Teams messages. I update design documents after go live to include any changes during development. Is this why I don't have the energy to full-arse home improvements? Or is physical work just a lot harder?

Last weekend I tried to get through a few things on the to-do list. I half-arsed a mount for the fan in the gym, and I half-arsed relocating the tomato from a pot to the corner of the garden. Now the tomato is dead. It's tied up like a crucifixion to a trellis, but I know it's dead because I didn't dig a deep enough hole or erect a sturdy enough trellis or keep enough roots attached when I lifted it from its pot. I loved that tomato. It provided nearly three years of amazing service and killing it was no way to thank it. Will this be enough to motivate me to stop half-arsing things around the house? I don't know, but my passionfruit vine can only hope.