#oneaday Day 775: Perambulation

I've been for a walk out on the Common for the last three evenings. Tonight, I gave myself permission to take the evening off, because three days in a row is solid going, there is no need to go every single night, whatever the "sergeant major" part of my brain might say, plus my feet are a bit sore. Also I want to play Splatoon Raiders, which arrived today. However, I will be getting back out there tomorrow! You'll see that I will! (You probably won't. Unless you're stalking me, in which case please do not do that.)

I've been trying to get over a bit of a mental block for the easiest possible form of exercise, which is just going out for a walk. I do like walking around my neighbourhood — and heaven knows we did it a lot while Oliver was missing — but the unfortunate thing, as I'm sure I've mentioned in the past, is that we live on the top of quite a steep hill, meaning that whichever direction you set out from, you always end up having to climb said steep hill on the way back. Unless you do what I did on one excursion, which is to just keep walking and then catch the bus up the hill before walking the last little bit from the bus stop back to my house.

My trips to the Common are an attempt to get over that mental and physical block. The Common is relatively flat, you see, meaning that you can have a nice walk around it and not feel like any part of the journey is significantly more difficult than any other. There are a few undulations around the place — the route I've been taking is a slight incline on the way out, then very slightly downhill on the way back — but it's definitely manageable for someone in as poor physical condition as I am.

Also it's just a nice place to be. The Common has lots of different little areas within it — pleasantly secluded wooded areas (which I probably wouldn't go into after dark) and a nice wide open bit in the middle, which is where any Common-based events tend to go on. There's often a funfair or something in this big open bit, but right now, it's proper "big sky" territory.

One thing that is a little shocking, however, is how desert-like the whole thing looks right now after the heatwave. The grass is just dead. I've never seen it so bad, and I've always associated the Common with being, well, "green space". And to be sure, all the trees are still nice and leafy and green, but the ground… man, it looks more like what I imagine places like Arizona and Texas to look like than what I typically associate with England. (Important note: I have never been to Arizona or Texas and have also never really looked at photographs of what they actually look like.) It's a barren wasteland, and it's a little disheartening to see.

Still, I'm sure it's not the first time this has happened in recent memory — we've had similar heatwaves in the summer of the past few years, after all, and I actually haven't been to the Common for a while — so I'm sure it will recover as soon as we get a bit of rain. That isn't looking likely any time soon, admittedly, but as we pass through summer into autumn I'm sure it will get at least some of its green back. Maybe.

It is, however, a stark reminder of the fact that we are very much killing the planet. Seeing a desert-like park space would have been unthinkable when I was a child; I grew up with both my primary and secondary schools having access to large amounts of green space, and I welcomed that. It was nice to be able to be outside, and for the outside to feel like it had some life to it — without that "life" being, like, lots of bugs and spiders or shit like that. I have fond memories, both of my early childhood and my teenage years, of spending time just sitting on the grass with friends (and occasionally having farting competitions), enjoying one another's company and the pleasant environment that we were able to take advantage of.

At this point, there is just plain no denying that there are significant issues with the climate. "England's green and pleasant land" shouldn't look like a barren wasteland you'd expect to see dried-up tumbleweed rolling across. And yet that's where we are right now. It's scary stuff, and at the rate we're going I wonder if we'll be able to get things back to how they "should" be — whatever that might be.

Anyway, maudlin thoughts about the fate of the planet aside, I have been enjoying getting out and about. Although it's been pretty warm in the daytime, I've found going out around 7pm has a good balance between having some light left and the air just generally being a bit cooler thanks to the sun starting to set. I've even seen marginal improvements in my own performance over just those three days — not that I'm particularly caring about performance right now, since the goal is just to get out and do something, but it is nice to see that just a little effort can pay off almost immediately.

So yeah. I'm going to enjoy a night off tonight, then get back out there tomorrow. Now I have Salmonids to splat!

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#oneaday Day 763: My brain has melted

It's been unbearably hot again today. The thing I hate the most about unbearably hot weather is how lethargic it makes you in both body and mind. It has cooled off a fair bit now the sun has gone down, but my brain is still in a semi-liquid state, meaning it is proving enormously difficult to make myself do anything, even if the anything I choose to do is enjoyable.

skull with brain — Photo by Sami Aksu on Pexels.com

(That said, I'm here, aren't I? So maybe it's all starting to solidify again a bit.)

Patti, being a black cat with a fairly dense coat, has been suffering a bit in the heat, I think. She has taken to spending most of the day in what we call her "hole" — a little bit of the catio that attaches to the cat flap in the back of the house, and which is now a nice shady spot because Andie has put a bunch of seedling trays on top of it. She seems fairly content when she's in there, and she's up, about and active when the worst of the day's heat has passed by, so perhaps she just has the right idea — sleep through the worst of the heat and get up to cause mischief as the sun starts to set. And yes, she's getting plenty of water and the opportunity to cool off in the air conditioned bedroom whenever she wants.

Oliver, meanwhile, has been just fine. He's very much back to his old self: full of energy and mischief, and putting across the distinct impression that he doesn't even know what the word "sad" means. I am glad. I was concerned that his experiences living rough for three weeks might have traumatised him in some way — and perhaps they have — but he certainly seems to have adjusted back to life with us perfectly well.

The only real change we've seen in him — aside from all the weight he had lost when we first found him, which he's mostly put back on again now — is that he seemingly wants to be near one or both of us the vast majority of the time. He doesn't necessarily have to be interacting with us directly — sometimes he just wants to sit on the floor in the hallway near where we're working, or lying on the floor in the spare room next to my study, knowing that I'm there. He also follows me around the house even more than he did previously, which is adorable, but I do worry that one day I will trip right over him!

Andie is also suffering a bit, as she's on some medications that make it difficult for her to regulate her temperature, which I'm sure you can probably appreciate are not ideal to be taking in the middle of a heatwave. I am… kind of sort of OK, aside from the melty brain predicament I described at the start of this post. I often catch myself just sort of staring into space, wanting to go and do something fun, but having great difficulty mustering up the energy and enthusiasm to do so. Still, acknowledging that I am doing this thing, much like I acknowledge elements of my self, thoughts and feelings in therapy, is a helpful step towards breaking out of that cycle and going to do something.

The next challenge I need to tackle is exactly what to spend the remainder of the evening on. I could play some more Soul Blazer, or some Final Fantasy XI, or some Rhythm Paradise Groove, or some Star Fox, or…

Oh dear. I think my brain melted again.

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#oneaday Day 718: Melting

I cursed it. The other day, I said to Andie, "oh, it hasn't been obscenely hot this year yet, has it?" and literally the day after, it became obscenely hot. The air conditioner for the bedroom has come out, the fans are on full blast, and just general existence is suffering right now.

a city during sunset — Photo by Fatih Turan on Pexels.com

Naturally, all the usual arguments are taking place over whether or not people from the UK really have a right to complain about it being hot, given that certain parts of the world are far hotter than it gets here, and they get by perfectly well without air conditioning, what happened to that stiff upper lip and all that, eh what? To anyone having thoughts of that nature, I say a hearty fuck off, it is boiling here and we, as a people, are very much Not Built For That.

We are a people built for overcast days, where the weather just sort of exists in the background without doing anything. We don't mind an occasional rainstorm, because that means we can complain about it. But when it gets hot — and for a good few years now, the summers have been getting real hot — it is actively unpleasant, and quite possibly dangerous for some people. One of the people I work with said that the temperature was almost 40 degrees C in his office today. That is not any sort of condition that a human being should even be attempting to exist in!

But still. At least it's a good opportunity to get the ice out, have some cold drinks, enjoy an ice cream or ten and occasionally sit in the garden if you think you can get away with doing so without irradiating yourself beyond repair. Maybe even have a barbecue! Some people in the nearby vicinity have been having barbecues over the past couple of days and they have smelled delicious. We have not, as yet, planned to do one, because neither of us fancy standing over a hot thing on a hot day, and with only a couple of weeks left until we go away on holiday, the opportunities for socialising before we head off are limited. Maybe when we get back.

Anyway, aside from the heat, today has been relatively unremarkable. I have done some work, I have played some Final Fantasy XI, I enjoyed a chicken sandwich with some Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce. The cats have been yelling at us, and all is, it seems, mostly well.

It's just too bloody hot, is what it is!

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#oneaday Day 386: Suboptimal creativity temperature

It is somewhere in the region of 27-28 degrees C here today. I know this is laughable to people who live in the actual desert or tropics or whatever, but it's bloody boiling here in the land of no (well, more like very little these days) air conditioning.

The heat is exhausting, but it's also quite nice. With the stuff Andie has done in the garden, it's really nice to just go and sit either out in the catio or on the nice garden furniture down at the bottom of the garden. We bought a nice parasol from Ikea the other day, so we can sit in the shade when down at the bottom of the garden, and the catio has a certain degree of shade by virtue of it being enclosed.

Trouble is, with it being quite nice to just go and sit in the garden and bask in the heat, it's not exactly conducive to getting anything done. I feel like I want to make some videos, but summoning up the motivation to do so is proving exceedingly troublesome, because doing so will mean locking myself in my study, and there's not much in the way of ventilation in there unless I blast the fans up full (which interferes with voice recording a bit) or have the window open (which brings in outside noise).

It's not so much the practicality of the situation as it is just the sense of lethargy that this heat brings. My brain is saying "let's go", but my body is just going "I want to melt into the sofa". So I think what I might try and do is spend a bit of the daytime scripting some bits and pieces, then once the sun goes down, maybe record into the evening tonight. Then I can spend the remaining daylight hours sitting by the fan doing very little.

The other problem is that the mental lethargy brought about by this heat is it makes making any sort of decision difficult. Do I want to continue with my playthrough of The Sword of Hope? Do I want to do some Atari ST stuff? Do I want to do some Atari 8-bit stuff? Do I want to do some Evercade stuff? Part of the problem is that the answer to all of those is "yes", but from a practical perspective I should probably just pick one or two and be content with that, rather than feeling like I "have" to churn out two, three, four or more videos.

Anyway, when I'm done here I'm going to make that decision, make some notes on what I want to cover, then once the sun dips behind the horizon and things get a little cooler, I might just go and record something. Or I might just leave it until tomorrow. I guess it doesn't really matter all that much.

In the meantime, Xenoblade Chronicles X is a-callin'.

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