Lifenotes #42: May 2024

Thirty (five) and flirty 💁🏼‍♀️

6 min read

✨ Highlights

  • Got promoted at work 🎉
  • Went to All Day Hey! in Leeds, aka birthday conf, and had a lovely time as usual. The talks were excellent, I particularly enjoyed Hidde de Vries’ talk on building popovers.
    • Leeds is a lovely city, and this time I enjoyed going to a couple of new shops in the Corn Exchange with my pal Sophie.
      • Colours may vary is an independent bookshop filled with lovely things, I ended up buying a delightful zine about dumplings.
      • Giant kitten is an independent clothing and accessories shop. Their stuff is so fun! I bought a few t-shirts, pins, and some very weird earrings made with the eyes of those dolls that can open and close their eyes 👀
  • I turned 35 🎈
  • Using my birthday as an excuse, I bought myself a TP-7 audio recorder, I’d been fancying it for a bit, and let me tell ya, it’s a beautiful object and I love it already.
  • Went on some fun dates 💛
  • Got to see some auroras in Nottingham ✨
  • Went to a paint and sip with my friend Mark, it was really great fun! This is the second time I’ve tried painting, and despite not being very good at it, I enjoyed it a lot.
  • My friend Hayden came to visit, and we ended up doing an escape room at the Galleries of Justice museum with my friends Anna and Jamie.
    • I hadn’t been to that museum yet, and it was a fun way to explore, and the staff were great ☺️
  • Anna and I put on a Women in Tech Nottingham event for the first time in a looong time. The lovely Elle gave a great talk about UX, and we did some facilitated fun to get people chatting.
    • We were both nervous, but the event went really well, and it was lovely to have everyone come together after such a long time.
    • There were people that had been coming for years, but also a bunch of new people, which was really great to see.
    • So thankful of Mica’s support to help us put this on.
  • Juno and I went to Devon to see my family for a few days. It was lovely to hang out with them, and we got to go on a couple of day trips to Westward Ho! and Heddon’s Mouth.

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

  • Punch: As a sort of birthday celebration, I went to the theatre with my friends, Nisha and Rachael, to see this play. It’s about a real story that happened in Nottingham, where a young man - Jacob Dunne - from the Meadows got into a fight on a night out and punched another young man, who died from that punch. The play is about that kid’s life until the incident happened, their incarceration, and how towards the end of their incarceration, the parents of the kid who died got in touch and started a restorative justice process, and how that essentially changed their life. And now he and the mum of the dead kid do a lot of work to raise awareness to one-punch deaths. It was a great play, I enjoyed it a lot.
  • Her body and other parties, by Carmen Maria Machado: I loved all the stories in this book, but in particular I enjoyed the author’s writing style, and the way she connects you to the characters.
  • The mental load, by Emma: I remember reading the comic ‘you should have asked’ when it first came out a few years ago and really liking it, so I got the book from my local comic book shop - Page 45 - and the whole thing is really good.
  • How to shoot in Manual by Simon d’Entremont: I got a camera recently, and while I have not done very much with it so far, I’ve started to watch some videos so I can learn how to use the manual settings, and this one stood out as a good explanation.
  • Succession: I’d been recommended this tonnes of times, and I did in fact enjoy it. It’s a very good show. They are absolutely awful people, but it makes for very entertaining television, and the writing is just really sharp and funny.
  • The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier: This has been on my list for absolutely ages, so I listened to it as an audiobook, and it was a great read. I went into it mostly for the tech lead chapter, but I listened the whole way through, and learnt a lot about how other roles I interact with and how they operate.
  • Bonnie and Clyde: Went to see this with my friend Rachael. It was a really fun musical.
  • Indika: I saw a trailer for this a while back so I picked it up when it came out. I’m not very far in but it’s been fun and different, I’m enjoying it.
  • Marc Maron: From Bleak to Dark: This was a good watch, very on brand for Marc Maron, dark humour and well paced story telling.
  • Writing for Busy Readers by Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink: Given how much I end up writing at work every day, this caught my eye as an interesting read. It’s short and sweet, and it’s full of really great, well-researched advice. I think I already do a lot of the things they suggested, but it was an good read nonetheless.
  • On the drive down to Devon, I listened to a few podcasts:
    • The Dollop: Rupert Murdoch, Part 1 and Part 2
      • Given I was watching Succession, when these episodes came out it felt topical. And, oh god, it’s so much more depressing when you know that it’s a real person inflicting real harm on the world.
    • If Books Could Kill: Lean In
      •  I haven’t read Lean In, but I’ve heard a fair bit about it, so it was fun to listen to a dissection of the book on where it gets things right and where it doesn’t.
  • Official Competition: I watched this with my family when I was in Devon, it was an easy, fun-to-watch comedy.
  • The Birdcage: One of my work friends, Chris, recommended this to me a few months ago, so I put it on my list, and it was a really fun watch. I still haven’t seen the original, but I will!
  • Hades: While I was in Devon, I played a fair bit of video games with my nephews. I helped them in their games where they were stuck, and then found some time to play a game myself, so I picked Hades. It was recommended to me by my friend Sophie absolutely ages ago, and it’s such a fun game. I’m hoping this is the game that will pull me back into playing video games a bit more again.

📸 Pics

Collage of pictures from May: The stage at All Day Hay with the MC Phil Hawksworth at the lectern and the big screen has a picture of my friend Sophie who is about to get on stage to do her talk; A selfie of me and my friend Lex in Leeds, Lex is sticking out her tongue and I'm smiling at the camera; A shot of the interior of the Corn Exchange in Leeds, It's a really lovely white domed building with a sort of mezzanine and shops on both levels; The crowd at the Women in Tech event, we're all huddled in front of the screen that is showing our logo on a yellow background, everyone is smiling at the camera; A picture of the Aurora at my local park, the sky is dark and there is this sort of pink spray towards the camera; The beach at Westward Ho! in Devon, it's a rocky beach and you can see a blue sky with some clouds and the green sea; My local Hackspace, you can see a red table and then a workshop table next to it and a green wall at the back with a white circle and a green H which is the logo for the Hackspace; A picture of my TP-7, my new audio recording recorder, it looks a bit like a mini disc player, it's silver and it has square buttons at the bottom and a circular spinning disc at the front that you can use to pause and seek on the recording; A plate of noodles with charred broccoli and kimchi dumplings on top; The River Trent at Colwick Park, it's a sunny day, the sky is blue, there's some beautiful clouds and there's also a line of like buoys on one side of the lake; Me posing with the painting that I did at The Sip and Paint, I'm smiling and holding up the canvas and what's painted on is like a sunset scene in a park, there's an orangey glow in the sky, a couple of street lamps, colourful leaves around the sky part and a person dressed in black walking towards the sunset holding a purple umbrella; My nephew Manuel sat on top of a wooden lizard in Heddon's mouth; My dog Juno, a fluffy black German shepherd lying on the floor of my bedroom with his ball looking at me like he's not impressed; My nephew Bruno and my dog Juno playing in the river at Heddon's mouth stood on a rock; And then me and my dog Juno, I'm sat on one of those rideable lawnmowers and Juno is in a little trolley attached to the lawnmower looking a bit confused.

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