Week 5: Mon 26 Jan – Sun 1 Feb

“Inside myself is a place where I live all alone, and that’s where I renew my springs that never dry up.” Pearl S. Buck.

✈️The week started a bit frantically, with a quick overnight trip to Auckland to help Mum get on her long journey home. Thirty-nine hours later, she arrived safely, and I could breathe a sigh of relief knowing she is happy back home. My sister and her children are certainly happy to have her back (they live close by) after almost three months visiting me in New Zealand.

🖥️From Wednesday onwards, I made a conscious effort to go into the office instead of working from home. I sometimes get more work done at home, but being around people really replenishes me (as well as drains me). Either way, I’m realising more and more that my mental health takes a hit if I don’t have regular, in-person interaction during the week. I feel there is a blog post coming about this.

📺I finished season four of The Morning Show (still excellent), and we’ve started watching Foundation together as a family. I watched the first two seasons on my own, but it’s a great show and I want to share it with the family.

My husband is not a huge sci-fi fan, but usually, if I force him to watch a few episodes, he’ll get into it, like he did with The Walking Dead (he refused to watch a “zombie show” at first). That became the highlight of our COVID lockdown. We ended up watching all the seasons.

RELATED: What I Learned from Watching the Nine Seasons of The Walking Dead During the Covid-19 Lockdown

👩‍💻I read this blog post about free time and hobbies that really resonated with me-spending lots of time on hobbies and things you enjoy isn’t a flaw or lack of discipline, but the point. It made me think about my blog and my memory keeping how often I treat it like something I need to justify and do in stolen pockets of time.

🤖Thanks to this post about AI privilege I’ve been thinking about how embedded AI has become in my life, not just at work, but personally as well. I sometimes listen to Cal Newport’s podcast, and he talks about the unsustainability of generative AI models: the huge expense versus the revenue, and what that might mean long term. I’m so used to having AI there now that I genuinely worry about it being “taken away”. It always makes me think of that Broken Mirror episode where people are kept alive through subscriptions that keep going up and up until they can’t afford it anymore. It’s a really freaky episode, and it comes back to me every time I think about losing access to AI.

🎥Last year, I tracked (journaled). all my movie and TV watching and got some interesting (surprising!) results out of it. But I decided to stop doing that now. They aren’t entries I’m going to read again. I might mention in my journaling what movie or TV show I’m watching, but I don’t think I’ll keep a separate journal or list just for that. I think I’ll just delete it.

⛱️My husband’s brother was visiting, so we all gathered for fish and chips at his parents’ on Thursday night and decided to take a trip to Hanmer Springs soon and spend two nights, renting an Airbnb. It’s one of my favourite places I’ve visited in New Zealand, quite touristy, but with that Swiss alpine village vibe (I lived in Switzerland, so I know).

🩱If I were to retire in NZ, I think that would be my place of choice, a nice house within walking distance of the hot springs so I could get up in the morning, have a cuppa, walk over to the springs, soak up the warmth until lunchtime, then walk back home for lunch and whatever else I’d be doing in retirement. Go for walks, people-watch, write this blog…

🏡Planning to spend this weekend away from my laptop, doing physical things like walking, maybe going to the beach, reading in the garden (which totally counts as physical), and some tidying up, decluttering, and rearranging at home (I relax this way).

🏕️We’re off camping next (long) weekend, and I’m really looking forward to doing nothing but reading and swimming in the river. Hopefully the kids won’t be too bored, I’m craving a slow, boring weekend away from home.