This week I continued easing myself back into running after the best part of three weeks out with a leg injury. The nearby school has sports fields that are easily accessible and I’ve been using a pitch to run round and across, at steady paces. By the end of the week I’d trotted through 29 kilometres — at full fitness I usually aim for 40km so a surprisingly good haul. Feel free to follow me on Strava where I record this stuff.
To help my running recovery I’ve been cycling indoors. I got a turbo trainer, the road bike is hooked into it, and they are stuck in the small back room by the washing machine. I’m using Zwift on the iPad to help make the grind a bit more interesting. (Unless I am biking through Harrogate, which is a bit dull as courses go. Sorry, Yorkshire.) Some interesting stuff about using an iPad and a phone at the same time for a ride using different Zwift apps but for another time. Hook up with me on Zwift by connecting with my profile.
With the government’s restrictions on movement I have had to swap around my exercising so the dog has a walker in the evening. The bike ride in the morning has been a good wakener and the run in the early evening is a nice wind down into other evening things.
Despite everything I finished reading Running Man by Charlie Engle and Meb Keflezighi’s autobiography 26 Marathons. I seem to be avoiding any worky books at the mo. Maybe 15 years of mainly worky books has earned me a bit of a break. Any recommendations for any particularly good audio books let me know. Non-fiction, biographies, seem to work well for me at the mo. And, yes, I’ve seen Audible has William Gibson’s Alien 3 screenplay as an audiobook. Woooo.
I finished my slow crawl through the third season of Ozark, started Devs, continued The Mandalorian. Not one of those shows I have hurtled through. Ozark an episode a night mostly, The Mandalorian two every fortnight. It feels just a bit more… wallowing that way.
I installed Sim City Build It on my iPad. I was after something more like Sim City 2000 to lose myself in for half an hour here and there, so I am ignoring all the fluffy/bloaty stuff like mayor challenges. Shame to get more land for my city I need to engage with the trading market so I can buy the land (and face head-on the lure of micro transactions for my real cash), but I am treating it more like a city styled Tamagotchi, dip in once or twice a day, do some routine maintenance and hygiene stuff, get out. I bet EA Games have a design system, uh huh.
Some time on the veg patch and in the garden was welcome, time to relax but also chew some problems over when they piped into my head. And a friend brought round some bags of wood chip so I managed to (nearly) finish the top patch of the garden. Knot/bind weed, still the annual bastard though.
I shared on Twitter a little thread about the shed. I’ll move it to a blog post this coming week.
And daily I have been posting pics of the guinea pigs on Twitter because… because some people seemed to like them the first time so I did again and again and it has continued. If it gives just one person a smile then the effort was worth it.
And work: That’s been, fun. Hard but rewarding. Last weekend I counted I’d been involved with nine projects over the last four weeks, some with a little help, others way more involved, doing things like research, product strategy, managementy stuff, design systemy stuff, service design, interaction design, being another pair of eyes… It’s been tough, a lot of jumping from one thing to the next, late shifts, but everyone has been great. It’s been heartening to see a lot of get stuff out there but giving that stuff some decent thinking through. It’s not just about a strategy of delivery, shipped? done! onto the next thing!. It’s about a strategy of delivering what works, delivering cyclicly.
This post tagged with:
weeknotes,
2020 weeknotes