Weeknotes 005
An eventful week of mixed emotions. For the first time in 18 years I’m not in traditional full-time employment, I am now a fully fledged, kicked-out-the-nest freelancer and it’s going to take some getting used to.
This week was the end of my time at TPXimpact. I had planned to go down to London for leaving drinks, but the combination of my eldest’s birthday, half term, halloween and some illness in the family I knew even if I got everyone’s blessing for a day away I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy it, so to make up for not going down in person I sent some stickers in the post, they appear to have gone down well.
So it was a quiet departure, mostly just a lot of video calls with people individually to say thanks and bye, and a final call with a big group where they put me through the ringer with embarrassing stories and awkward silences. I had some lovely messages from people on my card, and a wonderfully generous gift.
By the time the last day arrived I felt quite sad, a contrast from the general excitement that had built up over the months proceeding. Three years went extremely quick and i’m grateful for the people, both colleagues and clients I got to work with.
In keeping with my own established personal brand of not really planning in great detail, my last day, the 31st October, fell on a Thursday so I had Friday spare. I used it to round off the branding of the company I’ll be contracting through, as well as knocking up a single page website. I’ll write more about this when the time comes but while i’ve enjoyed getting to wake up some muscles on the visual end of the design spectrum, I remain my own worst client.
I enjoyed the hand coding bit a lot more than I thought I would, the joy and simplicity of HTML, CSS, and a web server has not lost its shine, and my coding skills, though rusty, appear to be perfectly serviceable. I’m just wrestling with some DNS and TLS issues. It seems in this new world I am the designer, the developer and the systems administrator.
I also bought a chair, a once-in-a-lifetime Herman Miller Aeron (refurbished, but still painfully expensive). I’ve put up with my Ikea chair for 11 or so years now and it’s only comfortable with two extra cushions so it’s overdue a replacement. I must have been feeling flush because I also bought a laptop. So the business starts deep in the red, but maybe that’s good because I’ve always worked better under pressure (and everyone deserves a nice chair).
Watching
We carried on with the spooky movie theme and watched Color out of Space.
One of those mad Nick Cage doing mad Nick Cage movies. Great first half, quite thrilling and scary, then it goes completely off the nonsensical rails, and differs from the book in a few fundamental ways. Based on online chatter about it we should have watched Mandy instead. Looked great in HDR though.
Listening
I’m still stuck on Dinosaur Jr. well, until now just their debut, You’re Living All Over Me, as my dips into later albums haven’t been super fruitful, that is until their 1993 LP ‘Where You Been’, which I’ve enjoyed a few times this week, and will dive into a few more times I’m sure.
Reading
Company of One by Paul Jarvis - A book describing a kind of company that avoids growth for growth’s sake, is highly intentional and maximises happiness and sustainability. This is exactly the way I want to build my own business and when I was a quarter way through I was all in on the concept, but now, as I reach the final quarter, it’s kind of killed it for me. I might go back and read the opening chapters but I’m afraid the survivorship bias is strong with this one. Should’ve been half as long at least.
