The Good

• 10k a day steps challenge – Completed for another month. There were some tricky days. Some extremely tricky days where I was just stressed beyond belief and somehow managed to fight fatigue to stay on target. Probably the hardest month to be fair. The idea of hitting 22 active minutes a day was mostly out the window due to the stress and disorientation of the month (see below).
• Audiobooks – I completed the Rama series of books this month. Overall I really enjoyed them. The first one for the mystery. The follow ups slowly peel back the mystery and then leave you with a tale of growing old that absolutely rings with me at the moment. I have never felt the aging process so much as I am now. Autumnal thoughts and all that. I would highly recommend this. I then lightened it up a bit with the Alan Partridge: From the Oast house. I was recommended this by Mr Paul Mason in our final conversation and I admit I am chuckling along knowing exactly why he loved it. Hand in glove with the aging thing. You do start to think a bit more Partridge the older you get. The writers and acting play an absolute blinder with this character every time.
• I moved house – Most of this blog post is going to be dominated by this lets be honest. At its basic level I moved from a flat to a house and gained myself a little garden, and an office space which is outside of my bedroom again. In terms of lifestyle going forward this should be major. Given lockdown(s) are going to continue for a while you need to be more comfortable with the space you have. Now I have options. I can walk away from work, close the door and be done with it when the task is over which is nice. I can play PC games at night with a microphone since I am at least not at the foot of the bed where my partner is trying to sleep.
• It has a garden – I have completed the majority of my 10k steps a day challenge in a corridor of my flat which was about 1 metre wide by 8 long. The garden is an upgrade and gets me fresh air at the same time. It also has one solid step to elevate the heart rate on before getting onto the light jogging I am capable of. It ain’t much. But as of the 16th of October I have cleared the space and found all the running stuff from the myriad of boxes and am set to get back to the “lets get 22 active minutes a day” side mission.
• Good weekends – We managed a pretty relaxing weekend or two at the end of the month which helped me recover. While hard to do we built 3 new flat pack beds on a Sunday. A great thing is building furniture with the eldest. They want to help but have been “far too silly” until just about now (I have tried). They got to thwack things with a hammer and screw in screws until they were thoroughly bored of it. We did some Halloween drawing with the kids, we played some board games. It was overall pretty decent.

• Borat Subsequent Moviefilm – I mean. An absolute stunning work this one. They had a point they wanted to make about #MeToo and politics in general. They went after it and it is as fascinating as is it funny to witness. Making it part of the “freely” available content on Prime instead of charging a fortune for new content shows they wanted to make the point land on as many screens as possible. A truly fascinating project and absolutely worth a watch.
• Left4Dead 2 – I played a round of L4D2 on Halloween eve. I really like that game when you have a squad to play then it is a satisfying online gaming experience since it rewards teamwork and not lone wolves with sniper rifles. Great times.

The Bad

• Loss of a friend – The legend that was Paul Mason sadly died the same weekend as my house move. I have covered this a lot already as he was worth his own blog entry and more.
• Panic Attack(s) – I have not had one in a long time this year fortunately. As this monthly blog tracks them I think the last entry was pre-Glasgow Defcon in February. The month has been a total blip of panics which I have mostly been fine about as the effects are more easily mitigated. However, I the stressors are now removed so I hope we get back our regular schedule of hardly any a year. Classical cause reason: poor sleeping patterns.
• They say moving home is stressful. I have never really experienced that before as it was mostly fun to pack stuff up and cleanse your life from unnecessary possessions and go on a new adventure. The problem with that rosy attitude is I had never experienced the full lawyer experience. If you both have to SELL a property and BUY one you get both barrels of them.
• There is definitely a blog post in me only about the experience I had on this with a slant on incident management brewing. I may calm down enough to let it lie.

Highlight of the month

I would say actually getting moved and starting to make a new place our home.