Spotlight
LED lights from Poundstretcher, converted from battery to plug powered by Al. Now I just need to get my hands on some very small balloons and Balloon Light Project 2.0 can begin.
Transition
It turns out that I’m terrible at this blogging every day thing, although I have been keeping to my photo a day resolution. I apologise for the lack of posting, but I have been too busy – oh, you know - leaving the house to write every day. Oh yeah. After almost six weeks of feeling a little like death warmed up and then rapidly cooled down to shivery before being boiled up once more, I’m able to get up and out most days. This week the plan is to build up to leaving the house and working in any given day. Don’t get too jealous all at once, now.
I am realising, though, that in some strange way I probably needed the last six weeks of complete body breakdown. I stopped. For the first time in years, everything ground to a complete halt – even brain activity seemed to stop for a while. Every so often a Big Thought would push its way through the fog, but with time to contemplate I actually managed to get somewhere with my thinking. There’s a few things I’m a lot closer to being able to let go of now, just because I had no choice but to work through them before having another nap (to get over the exertion of thinking!), so recovering from it all almost feels like a renewal in some way; an emerging. I’ve realised how blocked my head had become, and while I’m no clearer just yet on where I want to go, it feels like something I’m able to think about now instead of the messy tangle of before.
Part of my frustration is in realising that I’m struggling to express myself in any way – somewhere between thought initiation and expression, something gets blocked, and nothing – written or spoken – comes out feeling authentic. I’ve always felt divided in some way – I’m not wholly academic or naturally artistic, not entirely cynical but not fully optimistic, even not badly ill but still not very well – and it almost feels like that’s where the conflict lies, like I’m struggling to work out how to straddle all of the elements yet remain a cohesive person. I don’t think I’m managing it at all at the moment, but I’m starting to figure out that working that out a little is probably the key to working out everything else, like what I want to do with myself and where I want to go.
(And this is the part where I would normally insert a pithy joke about how lousy I am. But I am not going to let myself do that – although you have no idea how hard that feels, being Queen of all Humour is the Best Defence – I’m just going to let this lie for a bit. Let it go out there into the universe and maybe help my brain to start working on it all. We’ll see.)
Mighty Morphin’ Power Links
Because I have a couple of half-written lengthy draft entries that I don’t have the energy to finish before I collapse into bed for the night, I’ll share some (admittedly work-based) links with you instead.
Typekit
Typekit can be summarised as font replacement through javascript, which in turn can be summarised as “magic happens”. I’ve not played around with this as much as I’d hoped, but if you read this on the site (as opposed to the RSS feed), you’ll notice I’m using it for entry titles (and all other h3 elements, too). Disturbingly easy to implement, this is something I’d genuinely pay for if the choice of fonts improves.
Brizzly
Managing more than one Twitter account? Brizzly is the best solution I’ve found, making it suitably difficult to announce your personal secrets to your work account. Now includes Facebook integration and has seemingly managed to get over a bizarre bug where it finds search results over and over and over again, announcing them as new every time. This wouldn’t be so annoying had I not posted the tweets that triggered the search finding in the first place… (Still invite only, I think. Leave a comment or send a message to @whoopdedoo on Twitter if you want one).
Mobile website development
Without giving anything whatsoever away about what I’m currently looking into for work purposes:
- Smashing Magazine on Mobile Web Design Trends. Despite my own prejudices, Smashing Magazine do actually produce consistently useful articles, all of which must include the word “trends”.
- Cameron Moll: Mobile Web Design Book.
- Jakob Nielson: Mobile Web Usability
Lost in space
I can’t find my reset button. Maybe I have a key combination instead? Some particular button order that will get me into diagnostic mode?
Your batteries are flat. Please recharge and return to normal.
Do you know where my charger is?
I know a bit about fatigue, but it’s not making this time any easier. I’m trying not to beat myself up, trying to reassure myself that it took me five weeks of virus to get this run down and tired, so it’s bound to take more than a couple of days and a quick nap before I’m back to where I was. But the level of frustration is high – I have so much work to catch up on. Doctors don’t write you a note if you’re ill and self employed. Instead they say, “well that’s good then,” like your clients and letting agency won’t mind if you just take to your bed for a few weeks, submit no work and pay no rent. Self-employment: it’s easy!
For now, I’ll make do with celebrations of little steps (like getting through two-and-a-half to do list items!) before climbing into bed and hoping for tomorrow.
Rachel’s birthday
It was on this day, a whole 30 years ago, that my big sister was born. When I was little I always had a sneaking suspicion that Rachel being born at 4.11pm was just part of the world’s biggest suck-up trick (my Dad’s birthday being the 4th, and my Mum’s the 11th. Oh, what a handy coincidence for someone looking to seal their fate as Favourite Daughter!), but then I also also, variously, believed that Rachel was adopted, I was adopted, and Um Bongo had poison in it. One Christmas, my only present request was for a burst balloon, so you can make your own mind up about the way my mind worked as a child.
I’d claim Rachel got all the good genes, but she is both older and shorter than me, so HAH! When we die, we should probably be buried next to each other and have separate gravestones with, “which gravestone’s tallest?” engraved on them, although that would be mostly pointless because Rachel’s will be standing on tippytoes and our skeletons would do nothing but fight. She got all of the attractive, healthy and sociable genes, but was also lumbered with a hard time when we were growing up because I got the mental arithmetic gene. And look where that one got me, eh, every teacher I’ve ever had? If I went back in time my advice to little me would be to go for attractive, healthy and sociable too: it turns out that nobody ever really needs their seven times table (you can even get a degree without doing any maths past the age of 13) and soon they will invent this thing called Word which will correct all of your spelling anyway.
Happy birthday, Rachel.
About
Sarah: freelance web designer, fan of kangaroos, cupcakes, Project Runway, stationery, playing one song on repeat for hours on end and anything with a bird on it.Search
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