Week note 8
These week notes come to you from deep under an electric blanket while the rain buckets down and the wind howls. Something in this house makes an eerie whistling noise when the wind blows. The lights are flickering and I’m sure we’ll lose power again today.
Probably an apt metaphor for this last week.
D was away for work. I was on my own, stuck in the house, trying to manage a dog in recovery, a renovation project in the worst state of waterfall delivery gone wrong, a demanding full time job and some other stressful things. If that isn’t stormy enough, the world continues to rage around us.
Realising how badly I cope by the end of a week being almost entirely on my own. Need to find some better strategies for future trips.
Work
A lot of blur. A lot of feeling like I’m getting nothing done, spinning my wheels in mud.
Public Health Wales discovery is wrapping up. The team have been PHENOMENAL and so dedicated to this project. And the client is so happy with what the team have produced for them as well as HOW we’ve worked together.
Next week I’ll talk a bit more about what we’ve done on the project, without giving too much away ahead of the final playback the week after next.
What I’ve been reading
It’s taken me a month, but I finished Fflur Dafydd’s “The Library Suicides”.
What. A. Book.
It’s a literary thriller in so many ways. It’s a thriller, written in a literary style. It’s a literary thriller about literature, books and libraries. It all gets a bit meta that way.
But it’s also much more than that. It’s about Wales, national identity, culture and its relationship to the bigger country next door. Though locations and names are never mentioned.
It also about truth, misogyny and identity and redemption.
Just go and read it.
Big thoughts
Our very way of (digital) working is under attack and is being weaponised for future use and rebuilding.
How do we ever make an argument for going into organisations and pushing for change? How do we make the case for doing technology in government right? How do we push for openness and transparency?
It’s all being aped by a bunch of fascists and tarnishing it forever more.
How do we build a case for change now? How do we untarnish our ways of working? We all need public services that work. Desperately. The lack of functioning public services is a huge reason why we are in this mess now.
It all just feels so hopeless at time.
But maybe I overthink too much. My head is a raging storm.