Weeknotes w/c 5 April 2021 s2
This week I have been working whilst my daughter has been on Easter holidays, which has been fairly smooth and hasn’t impacted on the productivity too much. And I am chuffed to say on Friday it was Merry Jabmas for me. The NHS in Cardiff released a new number for folk my age and I was able to get a same day appointment. I wouldn’t want to be managing that call centre though! The amount of coordination involved is phenomenal- and quite moving really.
It was strange to be somewhere with so many people in fact – the place was thronging with appropriately distanced folk. I felt a number of fellow vaccinatees were displaying signs of thinly disguised anxiety- shifting about, tapping, restless and grumbling. Maybe post pandemic world will require a fair bit of adjustment for most of us.
I did discover a great little wheeze this week which will help online presentations. Basically it’s possible to turn your Google doc / word doc into a little teleprompter by making the margins incredibly wide on both sides so that the actual content is only a couple of inches wide and increasing the font to 16/18. This way each line can be read at once as a short phrase. With a bit of judicious scrolling and placing it close to your camera at the top of the screen it’s possible to get quite a professional effect when delivering a talk.
I have also managed some decent walks this week. I have made contact with people I haven’t seen for a little while who like me are freelance. A recurring theme from those chats is the balancing seeking work with doing the work, and what is an effective pipeline. If anyone has any tips I would love to hear them.
Book of the week
This week I have been enjoying Dean Burnett’s Psycho-Logical – an interesting read on the subject of mental health. I hadn’t appreciated before all the different systems of (im)balance in the systems within the brain. I wish I had known some of this earlier! Nor had I appreciated the different impact of the different terms and their uses. As an example he adds it is better to use disorder rather than illness as a term as mental disorders behave in a different way from physical illnesses. I also liked his point about knowledge and awareness not necessarily being enough to drive real change. Plenty of food for thought — in a deeply knowledgeable and humane book.
