June 2015 Review

Seems I was busier last month than I thought. I took a day off to let British Gas tell me my boiler was fine, and then did some gardening. A couple of weeks later, I took a long weekend because the MI mainframes were offline, and did more gardening. The important bit on both occasions wasn’t that I cut huge amounts of shrubs and cleared out the garden shed, but that I took the rubbish to the Tip immediately. Those with gardens will know how significant that is.

I saw Les Sept Doigts du Main show Traces at the Peacock Theatre, Paco Pena at Sadler’s Wells and fitted in an emergency visit to the orthodontist. Sis and I dined at Picture on a Wednesday, and I had lunch at Moro the Saturday of Paco Pena.

I wrote three Python programs, getting just familiar enough with IDLE to decided to try PyCharm Community edition, which is excellent.

I watched Sons of Anarchy S6. Jesus H Christ. Only Shakespere littered his plays with more dead people than Sons does.

I read Mathematics Without Apologies, Michael Harris; 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology, by Ruscio and Beyerstein; I Think You’ll Find It’s A Bit More Complicated Than That, by Ben Goldacre; Decoded, by Mai Jia; Cakes, Custard and Category Theory, by Eugenia Cheng; Behind The Housing Crash, by Aaron Clary; Stand By Your Manhood, by Peter Lloyd; The Philosophy of Mathematical Practice, edited by Paolo Mancuso.

Having braces is one of those things you should only do if you really need to. You will salivate all the time. Eating chocolate and biscuits is nowhere near as pleasant the excess saliva removes the taste, and you feel your inner mouth rubbing against the plastic bits they stick on your teeth. Plus your teeth move, so every five days another bit of your mouth hurts or gets rubbed by metal.

The personal training is doing what I wanted it to do. I’m working hard, but not waking up the next morning aching and in need of more sleep that I can’t have. I have learned various moves, such as The Nine Squat positions, and The Twenty-Seven push-up positions, and the Three Ways of stepping up onto blocks. Not to mention the Three positions for doing lateral raises, and more ways of swinging a vipr and weighted ball than you would believe. It is slowly coming together and I am more flexible than I was.

And I bought an iPad Air. Heaven’s it’s lovely. Streaming music is so much better than using Chrome on my old Asus netbook.

A conference with my solicitors about Wills and Powers of Attorney was maybe a little more real than I was expecting. I will discuss some of those issues in another post as well.

And setting the alarm for 06:00, and not starting the morning routine until then feels a lot better. If I’m awake earlier, I make coffee, sit by the window and read, even if it’s only for ten minutes. Feels a lot more relaxed. I will meditate on what the FitBit is telling me later.