At the moment my social media feeds seem to be full of fairly negative news and so, largely for my own mental health, I’ve been tending not to read it too much. For the last few weeks I’ve been really busy at work and so, when I step away from that, I want to wrap myself in more positive things and, because the last few days have been good for me, I thought I’d write up some of the positives I’ve experienced too.

Work

Things at work have been busy and, at times stressful. Over the last three weeks my sister and brother-in-law have been on holiday and I’ve been covering a lot of their work. However they are back on Monday and this week I ended things on a high after finally finding the time to play with a Raspberry Pi Pico. I needed to create a device which could broadcast information over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to test how third-party devices can detect and react to that information. After weeks of not getting around to it, I finally did and it worked better than I had expected. This unblocks some great steps forward we can now make over the next few weeks.

Weight

2025 has been a year of change for me after I decided to change my lifestyle. A big part of that was to improve my diet and, as a consequence, reduce my weight. I do a weekly weigh-in and today I hit a mini-milestone in that I have now lost 20 kg (just over 3 stones) since I started. I’m about two-thirds of the way to where I think I want to be but I’m really basing that on body shape rather than just weight. And as my informal measure, I’m now on the smallest hole of my belt and getting ready to replace it with a smaller one.

Fitness and Exercise

Part of my lifestyle change has been to start exercising and, in addition to my new parkrun PB last weekend, this week I had two good CrossFit sessions where I noticed that I was able to work with heavier weights than I have before and I also took part in a Zwift race where I did better than I expected and also increased my FTP (a measure of your cycling power).

Down-Time

I’m not always very good at stepping away from work and making sure that I have good quality down-time. This week however I managed to engage in three things which helped me to decompress.

I started reading the third volume of Michael Palin’s diaries. I read the first two volumes late last year and at the start of this year and then I read his book about his Around The World In 80 Days journey. After that, despite having enjoyed all three books enormously, I couldn’t get into the third volume and needed a change and to read other things. Recently however I decided to try it it again and am pleased to say that this time it was no struggle at all to get into it.

As an aside, apart from being a big fan of Michael, his diaries cover the years of my childhood and, in the volume I am currently reading, the period when I went to university and then staying in London for a decade so there is quite a bit of nostalgia wrapped up in it all too.

This week I also started watching the TV series Blue Lights which has been great to binge watch at the rate of a couple of episodes a night. I’ve also been drawn into The Traitors which I’ve never watched before but a celebrity version was tempting enough for me to try. I have a feeling I might be catching up on some previous, non-celebrity, series soon.

Finally, this weekend I started playing Tunic which is a delightful game. It involves a lot of exploration and a bit of puzzle solving so it ticks a lot of my boxes. It feels like I’ll be consulting guides for it at some point but so far it has been great to discover hidden areas, shortcuts and general game-play mechanics.

The Run-Up To Christmas

It feels late enough in the year to mention Christmas, particularly in the context of time off work. During 2025 I have been really bad about taking any time off and I think I have been lucky not to hit any periods of burn-out. But I am now ready for a break and know from previous experience that if I just take a solid block of time off I will end up working since I will be at home. Therefore I’m going to enjoy long weekends instead. After next weekend I intend to work three-day weeks and have four-day weekends and this will last right up to the Christmas break.

Amongst other things, I am planning on using this time to try some Pilates classes to help improve my core strength and flexibility without having to do so during evening sessions and I will also be using the daytime to go for some runs (assuming that the weather isn’t too grim!).