Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read, inspired me or just sparked my interest in the previous week, with a little background and my thoughts and other things that I’ve been up to in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.

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Life In General.

My Grandma’s funeral was last Friday (27th), the service was very nice and another family era ends. The past week has been a mixture of work and making the final arrangements for that service.

After the cold, bright days of the previous week, this week has mostly been damp, foggy and chilly, and thoroughly uninspiring on the weather front. Life has felt a little bit like the weather this past week, I’m expecting sunnier times in this coming week.

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Presidential Inauguration

Although I didn’t include it in last weeks post, I watched bits of the US Presidential inauguration, including President Trump’s speech, and also over the weekend the emerging attacks on the press, for reporting the facts or not the “alternative facts” that have been reported by the White House press staff.

As the week has progressed it seems to have become an ongoing train wreck, as one carriage after another slams into the buffers. More bizarre press conferences, the decisions on the Keystone XL Pipeline & South Dakota Access Pipeline, instructions to the EPA to take down its climate change pages (this was later claimed to be a misunderstanding with the media, and the pages are merely “under review”, at the time of writing the pages are still live, but it is unclear exactly what is going on), unofficial twitter accounts for EPA, NPA (seems to have stopped tweeting), NASA and others to overcome censorship or the alternative facts, mass resignations at the state department, the doomsday clock now at two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, the Mexican President cancelling his planned visit because of that wall and the closing of borders to immigrants and refugees and of course saying that torture was okay (because it works).

On Friday our Prime Minister met with Trump. It looks as though the meeting went without any major cock-ups, although it seems that the White House can’t spell her name correctly.

So far it looks as though Trump is living up to his promise of not being like any President before him, but that doesn’t look like a good thing, although trying to keep up with what is going on isn’t easy.

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Work.

My meeting last Friday has turned into something a little more than I was thinking it would. This is a good thing, but I’ll have to wait and see how this works out in the medium term. No guarantee of any paid work yet, but I do find the discussion quite stimulating, and it would be good to work with the individuals concerned again.

I’ve also been working on some of the outcomes from other meetings that week, so although light on meetings this week, there’s been quite a lot of phone calls, emails and other activity.

I was also expecting to hear about some other work, although as I write this, it doesn’t appear to have happened so that might track into next week, or at least I’ll be chasing them after this comes out to see what’s going on.

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Currently Reading

When the Trees Say Nothing: Writings on Nature by Thomas Merton [GoodReads]

A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk’s True Life (Journals Vol. 3) by Thomas Merton [GoodReads]

Wizard and Glass by Stephen King [GoodReads]. The next book in the Dark Tower series,  a book I’m reading for an online group.

The January Man by Christopher Somerville [GoodReads] – I finished this towards the middle of last week, but wanted to mention it here as it was such a good read.

Barefoot At The Lake by Bruce Fogle [GoodReads]

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Woodland Ownership

If you go down to the woods today [TheGuardian] – interesting article on what different people have done with the areas of woodland that they have bought. Although it looks like my part of the world is quite an expensive one to own some trees in, it’s not entirely out of the question elsewhere in the country

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Battery Storage

Although I applaud the use of batteries in the home to make better use of energy from solar panels i.e. use it when the sun isn’t shining. I’m still a little bewildered that this is still being described as “trials”. I know that this is exactly what it is, and in normal “on-grid” situations this needs to be explored to understand the impacts on the grid at a larger scale, but seriously is this really 2017, and we’re still only trialling this?

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The Week In Wildlife – In Pictures

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Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read, inspired me or just sparked my interest in the previous week, with a little background and my thoughts and other things that I’ve been up to in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.

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Life In General.

This last week has been pretty similar to the last with more arrangements around funerals and alike, also quite a heavy work week (see below).

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Work.

I’ve also been spending quite a bit of time on setting business goals and targets for this year. I’m a little late, as normally I do this in December, but my mind was elsewhere at the end of 2016. There are likely to be some changes to the blog or perhaps the creation of another website, I haven’t quite decided yet, and probably more content. My word of the year for work is going to be “visibility“, there are many reasons for this, but after a quiet year last year, I need to raise my business profile a bit, and get out there and hustle. I’m feeling quite positive about things, and I now need to go and find some clients to work with.

I also had an unplanned meeting on Friday that wasn’t in my diary at the start of the week. It was a good meeting, but on reflection I don’t think will happen, but we’ll see.

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This is a case of being damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Better to be accused of over reacting, than reading headlines about the number of deaths, or listening to people complaining that nobody did anything, and how let down they feel.

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Sharing this again, although i posted it separately last week.

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Currently Reading

It seems that I am reading an awful lot of books at the moment, but in reality the two Thomas Merton’s I’m only picking up now and again, and the Stephen King I’m only reading a chapter a week so that I can participate in the online discussion. I’ve set my target this year for the GoodReads reading challenge to 25 books, I already seem to be 5 books down (although to be fair one of these was started last year).

Yellowstone by David Quammen [GoodReads]

When the Trees Say Nothing: Writings on Nature by Thomas Merton [GoodReads]

A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk’s True Life (Journals Vol. 3) by Thomas Merton [GoodReads]

Wizard and Glass by Stephen King [GoodReads]. This is the next book in the Dark Tower series, and a book I’m reading for an online group.

Dead Pig Collector by Warren Ellis [GoodReads]

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 The Week In Wildlife – In Pictures

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