A container barge pulled by a tug on the Thames. The Shard is visible directly behind, on the far bank.

The Thames on a sunny Wednesday afternoon

You can probably track how well things are going by when I publish these weeknotes. First thing on a Monday? I’m probably feeling optimistic and energetic. Late on Wednesday? The dead weight of work has been pulling me down, I’ve spent days staring at the screen in futility, I’ve achieved nothing, and I feel like I can’t take time out to write.

This is the second scenario. Nothing works, everything is bugs, and the documentation website used by the library that is giving me grief has evaporated, having succumbed to a case of Our Incredible Journey.

I often describe my job as digital entomology because what I do all day is stare at bugs on a computer screen. And sometimes they make my skin crawl.

I didn’t sleep well on Monday night but the dream that disturbed my sleep would make an excellent screenplay or short story. It was a sort of dystopian, slowly evolving horror. There were insects involved, too, in a plot twist at the end.

I ate the last mince pie of the season. I don’t know exactly how many I ate, but I had one a day almost every day from late November until 8 January so it was probably about forty in total.

I was fooling around on a melodica, probably while waiting for a long, slow test suite to run, and came up with this, which is definitely a riff I’ve heard somewhere before. Let me know if you can work out where! It made me wonder about the feasibility of making all-acoustic rave music. I don’t think I could keep that breathing up for a whole track, though.

I really need to look at a better way to host these audio files than Soundcloud, especially considering its surely inevitable post-sale demise.

I spent several hours making a mandolin bridge to replace the temporary 3D-printed one.

When we moved into our house, the loft was full of junk including a table that was too large to fit through the hatch. I’ve no idea how it got up there! It wasn’t a style of table we’d ever want, but it was made of decent hardwood, so I broke it up into sections and saved the wood for future projects. This was the kind of project I had in mind.

I spent so long merrily occupied woodworking and listening to podcasts that I reached the end of the queue in my podcast app for the first time in ages.

Stuff I found on the internet: