Full Circle

The moonrise was glorious this evening. The glowing orb brought in the start of the weekend and darkness just after 5pm. As much as I yearned to, I didn't do anything exciting with my Friday night. It was cold, dark and damp. Injuries and injury recoveries limited movement. There was a pandemic. This was like an onion of enveloping external factors that made me sad. The fact that this same time last year I felt the same way just added another iteration to the layers.

When I think back to June 2019 - holidays, hiking, craft beers and so much surplus sunshine - it really hits me that on those days I feel like I'm living life to 200 percent. I'm getting in return twice what I'm putting in; each day feels like two in one.

The only place I went tonight was the supermarket for an ice-cream run. By that point the moon had shrunk in its ascent to its usual perspective.

Winter in covid feels like I'm living life 50 percent. Each day feels worthless. The point of a week seems only to be to reach the end. And I can't do anything to rectify it because I'm trapped in this stupid onion. It makes me want to cry.
I was musing on this as I returned from the shops. My brain tried to console me with some bullshit like, "sometimes in summer it's too hot." It distracted me long enough to try and find some joy in the world: The haunted, misty outlook over the arterial road. The cheap price of pumpkin that I'll try to turn into soup. Then I thought, what if I developed an Android app that sent a notification at random intervals to prompt you for your current mood, observations, weather conditions, a photo, maybe a miscellaneous topic like what you felt about what you ate for breakfast that day.
Over time these prompts would accumulate into a little journal that you could then use to compare if you really did live a better life in summer than winter.
This app probably already exists. If not, I might or might not name this app "Bradism". It depends if I'd be willing to give up my domain name.
Then I thought, I wonder if Android has a system API that apps can use to detect if a user is driving/flying or not - so journal prompts could be delivered more safely. Not just based on an accelerometer, but like if the maps app had been used recently for navigation. And if speed changes were stop/start, and GPS coordinates of the pauses matched known public transport stops the API would be logical enough to report the user was on public transport rather than driving. I doubted any system API was that sophisticated, as it would need a lot of permissions, but perhaps I could develop it even if I knew next to nothing about Android application development.

That mental journey was enough to occupy my mind until I got me, the pumpkin and the ice-cream to the half-arse heating in my house. I immediately set about not developing an app with only one arm, and instead had two bowls of ice-cream while watching Jaws under a blanket, then I went to bed. Another half a day of my life in the books. Tomorrow, Vanessa is making me breakfast.