Some days it’s best to just give up and spend the afternoon sitting in the kitchen listening to the radio and covering balloons in tissue paper.

If you’re wondering, the image is from a copy of the Sunday Times Magazine wherein Mariah Carey describes her music as “hardcore, but not too hardcore.” I love this. It proves you can say anything, and as long as you believe it – even if you are the sort of person so deluded that you want a million white kittens to serenade you as you enter a room – people will print it without questioning. Okay, so it probably helps to be both extremely rich and superbly famous, but if Mariah Carey can claim to be hardcore without anyone so much as raising an eyebrow, I should be able to get away with more.

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.

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.)

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

How to Understand Your Users with Personas
PONIES!