Rest Day

I'm a little under the weather today. I'd normally just work through this in my basement office, but since my organization has started sending us back to the office 3 days/week (with 4 days/week announced for the summer), I'm going to use what my sick days are meant for and just take one. No point making others unwell, and God knows I have enough sick days built up.

This morning I let my dogs down to the basement (they like to lie on the old sofa there), made myself a cup of green/black tea, and sat down to work on one of my projects for a couple of hours. It's otherworldly outside: the trees covered in hoarfrost, a heavy fog everywhere. It's like the world's gone white. And inside I sipped my tea, worked on my forever-project, implementing a couple of features, debugging an issue, adding a few unit tests, just slowly adding to it, as I've been doing for the last fifteen years.

While doing this I was listening to some ambient music on repeat - today, loscil's "Ash" again - and I felt a real sense of peace and happiness. Lately it's felt like happiness is hard to come by, joy impossible. So it's nice to know I can lose myself and just focus on the enjoyment of coding again.

Feeling my age a bit, seeing it in the colouring of my beard, knowing that I'm now closer to the end of my career than the start. Hoping I can ride it out, knowing that when I do finally retire, maybe/hopefully in a dozen years or so, it's going to be good. Time to work on things. By then, the house paid off. A single vehicle to worry about. We never wanted nor had kids.

At time of writing, it's 11:28. Almost time for lunch. The fog has lifted. Time to take my dogs for a walk. We'll see if they'll want to go. The youngest is always game, the oldest a bit of a toss-up, not liking the cold anymore, his old bones aching perhaps (I can definitely understand). But I think it'll do the both of us some good.

gemlog