Bills Posts

This is a photo of Stanley Park, a walk I went on earlier in the week..the not doing very well bit is Walk1000. By the end of today, I should have completed 5.8 miles to be on target. I’ve managed only 1.6, and that’s only because I have been too lazy. Not good. I have to confess that I’m not massively bothered, I am sure that I will have met the weekly goal of around 19.5 miles by the end of the week. And it doesn’t really hurt to be lazy – occasionally. The trouble there is that I’ve had almost three weeks of being lazy, well that’s not really true, I should have a look to see how many miles I walked since starting my Christmas break.

Have you made any New Years resolutions? I think I have two; from which flow the projects. To be more organised – ah, now I can’t remember the other one. Not doing very well am I. Probably might have been to stick with it.

I’m having difficulty summoning enthusiasm for the 2022 Fantasy Holiday. It isn’t the principle of the holiday, or the location. It’s the rigour of the tour. I may make it more relaxed than FH21.

Even now at this stage I am trying to make my mind up as to the theme of the holiday. I have a thing about stone circles, without understanding why, I think they are fascinating.

There are places that I would love to visit. This is where I need to re-energise my enthusiasm.

I spent a bit of time today writing down a list of projects that I want to follow this year. There are ten of them. Some are of a reasonable size, others are quite small. I am going to go through a goal and next Action exercise for them. One of the projects, the model railway, is on the verge of a significant step forward.

The model railway wood for the baseboard is ready for collection, and I will have it by the end of the month. All I have to do is put it together. This is going to be a little bit of an exercise in tooling. I have most of what I need. Between now and getting the wood, I will have a think about what I and missing. I’ll keep you updated on them.

This was a pied wagtail that I had seen whilst out for a walk a few days ago. It was remarkably tame. I could almost have picked it up. Not out of the back garden though.

This time last year, I wrote a post celebrating the arrival of three sparrows in the garden. In bird terms, it has been a monumental year. Admittedly, mainly starlings and pigeons but lots of them. I’d definitely say that was a success.

Work has gone well, that’s all I’ll say about that.

We had a lovely week at Pagham and touring around the area. So much so that we may go back.

Sadly, Covid is affecting us all, this is the second Christmas & New Year where it has had a significant impact on our behaviour. To be honest, even with the vaccinations, I can’t see us reverting back to pre-covid activities for quite a while.

whatever happens this year, I wish you good health above prosperity, but I wish you that as well. In our own way, we will enjoy New Years Eve. I hope you will as well.

This is the Alverbank Hotel. This appears as Serial 1 (blue dot) on my Gosport map. I’ve been wanting to walk here for a while now, and managed to get out today. The walk was only about 5 miles but it was very pleasant.

So, why does The Alverbank Hotel warrant the No. 1 spot for blue plaques? Well, here it is;

when I started looking at the history of Gosport, I was very surprised to learn at the involvement the town had in the early days of the RAF. The training system saved a lot of lives during training. Then there was Grange Airfield, which is also known as RAF Gosport and was one of the earliest RAF / RFC stations.

The walk itself, whilst it was very grey and quite blustery was mostly rain free. I walked from the hotel, which is very close to Stokes Bay along the waterfront for a while and then changed course to pick up the old railway track back up in to town and head for home. It really was a good walk.

A couple of days ago I commented on the size of the chimney stacks on some of the houses here in Gosport. The header picture is one which shows the smoke stacks in question. It suddenly occurs to me that the smoke stacks of houses could become an obsession akin to pylons. But, that is not what this post is about.

This post is about my wishing to get a system in place for task management for when I go back to work in the New Year. An American, David Allen wrote a book about the system he has developed called “Getting Things Done.” I read the GTD book several years ago, and have had a couple of goes at sticking to the process he describes.

The GTD process isn’t massively bureaucratic and is fairly straightforward, it isn’t the process that is the problem, I think it is my fairly chaotic approach to things as they come in. It’s a lack of discipline and disorganisation on my part that I think is the root of my problem.

The New Year is a beginning a new start. One thing I really, really hate about work is somebody saying to me “have I looked at such and such” and my having to say “I can’t remember” and not having a mechanism for quickly referring back to what I have or have not done.

I am hoping to have in place a system, which I will try to force myself to stick to. Let’s see how it goes.

If you look at the fronds of the tree, they are being blown horizontal in the westerly wind, around midday ish. I really needed to get out for a walk. I was determined to go regardless of the weather and a bit of wind wasn’t going to put me off. As I reached the tower blocks, the wind was really whistling around the building.

The Gosport weather site recorded gusts of 40.3 mph mid morning, and I don’t think it was much less when I was out. There weren’t many people out on the promenade, an old couple walked past me as I was taking this picture, they said “we aren’t the only mad people out today then”. I responded along the lines of “I enjoy being out in this”.

I had decided to not go out on to the Haslar Marina Pier Wall, but as I was walking up towards the ferry terminal, I saw the Commodore Clipper coming around the North turn, I don’t see her that often so I rushed back and out onto the pier wall to get a picture of her;

I took a walk along the high street. It was quite a bit busier than I expected it to be, and as it was Tuesday, there were even a couple of market stalls out.

It was very nice to get out.

We got up sometime between 8 and 9, and managed to force some breakfast down. We had to go and do a little bit of shopping, mainly getting Christmas cards cheap for 2022. As they say prior planning prevents a poor performance. (Well, that’s the clean version).

After shopping, we sat down with a cup of tea, the tub of roses and an episode of Silent Witness. We followed that with another cup of tea, and another episode. Then we thought we’d have a bit of a break, so we watched Peter Rabbit 2 (spoiler – sorry) – Not as good as the first one.

By then we had finished the roses, and had started on the Pringles. We thought we had better have a proper tea, so turkey sandwiches were produced and consumed – very nice. I’m doing a zoom with some old friends at the moment, and then I might watch the second part of the very British scandal which is running on the BBC.

In fact, I think I will. I may have a snack as well.

Tomorrow, I will go for a walk regardless of the weather. It has been chucking it down today. Next week, I will start weighing myself again. I have up last week.

The plan then is to get to 1000 posts. Let’s just see how things go. Yesterday was the day of over-indulgence that it should have been. I hope that it went as well for you, as it did for us.

We had a bit of a problem with the bread machine, which two goes to produce two not quite right loaves. We aren’t sure what wen wrong with them, but they didn’t go to waist as you can see the birds at the cockle ponds thoroughly enjoyed them.

today’s walk wasn’t very long, but it did get us out for 40 minutes or so, and I have managed to get my 10,000 steps in – just. It was a strange walk, a fair bit of the conversation was around the chimney stacks on the houses that we passed. I should have taken a picture, there was one house which seemed to have an inordinately high stack. When I think of it, I’ll do that. It was very pleasant to get out for a bit.

Christmas Day 2021 is coming to an end. We have had a lovely day, and were very fortunate to be able to get together with family. I sincerely hope that you have had a lovely day, and that the coming year is good for you.

Wishing all of you a very Merry Christmas, have a good day tomorrow. We certainly intend to try. We’ve just done a LFT that both came back a strong negative. Which is good, as I’ve had a fairly persistent headache for a fair portion of the day.

I have to confess, I am a little conflicted. You can’t have avoided noticing that today’s post is Number 499. I had no idea on the date that I started 366, which is where all this began, and when I started it on the 14th of August 2020 |I had no way of knowing that I would complete the 366 project, let alone that I would go onto complete 500 posts.

When I decided at the 366 point that I wanted to continue, I had not worked out that I would complete my 500th post tomorrow, Christmas Day.

Since starting “The Project” I think it fair to say that I don’t think there has been a day when I really have not wanted to write something – even if only a paragraph, there have been times when I have struggled to write something, It’s not so much writers block, it’s just thinking about something that I need or want to say. I stay away from sensitive subjects. I simply don’t want to get involved in the arguments or discussions they entail. But beyond that I am only left with innocent things that I am interested in. How much of a message is that?

Many days ago I asked myself (and have done so on numerous occasions) why I am doing this, writing on the internet, when I could do a private diary. I guess it’s the technology and the environment, accompanied by my desire to write. So that’s why I am carrying on with it. I’m not intending to change anything, I may add to the topics that I write about, and I my run a sequence of blogs about a particular topic, but my plan is to write. I think my next target is going to be 1,000 posts.