Tales from Lockdown: Part 2
As I head into week 5 of my personal covid-19 lockdown experience, I am increasingly finding the days are blurring together. My mental health is up and down, although my hormones are partly to blame this week.
Since my last post on lockdown, the kids have moved into official Easter Holidays territory. Normally this would see me moaning on twitter about the demands of juggling work and childcare, but actually, we’ve had the easiest days since I took the kids out of school. Why? Because Easter hols equals guilt-free screen time where the kids are free to distract themselves however they see fit, and I don’t feel pressured into delivering a full curriculum. As long as I can tune out the incessant Minecraft / Stardew Valley / Pokémon questions, I can actually Get Shit Done (albeit a continuous backlog). It’s funny how the things that cause us ‘pain’ are relative to so much of our external circumstances and how adaptable we become when the shit hits the fan.
The perennial parental-work juggle aside, we are incredibly fortunate to be maintaining some normalcy at home. Gaz is still employed, I still have work to do, and things go on as they always do.
I took the opportunity this week to make a couple of changes to the front page of this blog, updating the logo to bring the ‘branding’ in line with my professional site, removing a couple of unnecessary frills and dropping back to Arial for the body font for that extra little speed kick; I am becoming increasingly bored of ‘fancy’ fonts on websites, which is surely a sign that I’m getting far too old for this game? I’m contemplating weeding out old posts and rewriting some of the more useful ones, but am (as always) torn between keeping things exactly as they always were as a ‘homage’ to my early days of blogging vs providing actual use to readers. This isn’t a dilemma that I’m likely to find an answer too this side of Christmas.
The 12 month anniversary of my exposé on UK WordPress theme provider Pipdig came and went without too much excitement, although I did pull a winner out of the hat (so to speak) for my pipdig re-theme competition and hope to talk more about that in due course. I confess myself disappointed that pipdig managed to duck the consequences of their frankly incredible levels of maliciousness and total incompetence by simply pretending nothing had happened, which sets an unnerving precedent for anyone cheeky enough to follow in their footsteps, but there we go.
Talking of pipdig, one pleasant side effect of the whole shitty business was that — as certain people questioned my knowledge and experience, and others stood up for me — I got to have some fantastic conversations with amazing people involved in WordPress from all over the world. This has lead me down some interesting avenues of self-development over the past 12 months. I’ve been addressing some bad habits of mine from a work/coding perspective, as well as taking moments to be introspective; to look at my future, how I define myself as a businessperson and where I want to take my skills over the next 5 years. I don’t have any concrete plans at the moment, but I know what I don’t want: to be sat here in 5 years time with everything exactly as it is now. Watch this space…
Lead photo by Joanna Kosinska