November 2021 Diary Update

I have "missed" a number of posts this month. I've also missed a number of trips to the gym, and there were whole days when I barely left the house except after dark to have my daily walk.

I stopped going to the gym because I had a problem with my right hip which had reached see-the-osteopath serious. Osteo's don't like it when you come in after a weights session with tight and hard muscles. They can't do those odd manoeuvres to put your spine back in alignment easily or sometimes at all. I've got one more visit left and it should be clear. When I go back to the gym it won't be to do heavy-ish weights as I have been doing. My days of ego-lifting are now well past, and really stopped early in 2019. I'm going to be all about the health-lifting, which is nowhere near as much fun.

The days I barely left the house were about a) the lack of motivation that sweeps over me at the sight of a dull grey sky, b) the fact that 10,000 steps in a day now wipes me out when in 2019 I could do that standing on my head, c) a lack of connection with London and all other places. This is all about me pulling myself together and just f***ing doing it and various other deeply sensitive maxims. There's a thing called "commute hardening" that we never notice because we commute all the time, but all those months working from home have left me and many others "commute soft", and unable to handle the amount of walking and effort needed for a commute. (That's going to be a real issue when getting all those cosseted bankers and civil servants out of their homes and back into their over-crowded open-plan offices.) So I'm working on building up the ability to handle a 10k-step day without feeling exhausted halfway through. Nothing I can do about my reaction to grey skies, except stop being a cissy.

I've missed the posts because I've been caught up in various decisions and other things, none of which I could formulate coherent thoughts about. (Which has never stopped me in the past.)

I am not going to put a curtain against my front wall, as I suggested I might in a previous post about Room Treatment for Small Rooms. Nor am I going to buy some absorbing panels from Ginger White (not actually a lot more expensive than some curtains). I came this close to both.

I decided that a) having 10kg of absorbing panels on my front wall right above all my kit would be disastrous if any screws came loose (you don't know my walls), b) I couldn't man-handle something that size and weight on my own, c) what happened if it didn't work enough, or was more absorbent than I could live with? As for the curtains, it would look odd, but because you should leave space between curtains and the wall, the curtains would be tucked in behind the Kallax units and it would all look silly.

I finally got up the nerve to bust out the drill, measured up, drilled three holes (two into brick, one into plaster - I do not live in a precision-built house) put in Rawlplugs and screws, and hung three of my collages. Perspex has to be as reflective as plaster, so I'm not expecting acoustic improvements, but at least I'm not staring at a blank white wall anymore.

Because for a domestic listening room, sonic treatment screams you can take this too far, you know.

And I've been reading as well. You have no idea how fascinating the theory of antennas is. I started my life as an electrical engineering student, and while I get electric circuits, I've never really grokked electromagnetism in all its weirdness. Antennas are exactly that. And that was just one of the subjects I read.

So there will be the usual gratuitous back-filling, and I will carry on. The self-imposed restriction on writing about "current affairs" (as we used to call it) does remove an easy source of posts, but it also stops me wasting time on nonsense, or at least writing about it.