What’s this? A Friday post? But the polar bear posts Mondays and Thursdays! Well, I’m doing Blogmas so there’s a winter/Christmas/ice/outdoors post every day until Christmas Eve. I’m going a bit old-school lifestyle blog today. This is a day in my life – and specifically, it’s a day in my life in winter.
Now, finding an average day in my life in November to talk about is a little tricky. I have Guides and Brownies so I’m ruling out Mondays and Thursdays. I’m away two weekends so I’m not doing either of them, because those aren’t average days either. I’m trying to pile things on to write about for Blogmas so those aren’t ordinary days either. And so there are only two “ordinary” days left in November. So today is Tuesday November 22nd.
8.30am
My alarm goes off. I start work at 9 and I work from home so there’s no point whatsoever in getting up any earlier. The heating is on – this is one of the benefits of still living with my parents at my advanced age. They have control of the heating and my mum’s tolerance for cold is much lower than mine. We’ve had the heating on for half an hour in the morning since late September, although it’s only really kicked in since early November. My bed is up beside the radiator in my room so I can lie on it in the morning. Admittedly, that has resulted in minor burns in the dim and distant past but now I’m more careful. So I lie in the warm, cosy bed until my alarm goes off and then I have to drag myself into the cold open air. Well, it’s not that cold but it’s a bit of a shock after literally lying against a radiator for the last fifteen minutes.
Downstairs, put the toast on and look for my slippers while they toast. They’re little soft fleece booties with no structure to them whatsoever. They’re from Cotswold who sell them as tent slippers – they still exist but the style of fleece is different these days. Anyway, it’s cold and I want something on my feet today. I eat the toast, I look out at the garden, the pigeon perching on the washing line and the starlings on the bird table and squabbling over the bird bath and then I go upstairs where it occurs to me to mist the orchids on the windowsill in front of me because I try to be a half-decent plant mummy.
9.00am
I’m sitting at my desk ready for work. Today is a Tuesday so I just get on with things. On Mondays we have a Zoom meeting – a catch-up, a “what did you do last week?”, “what are you doing this week?” and “what did you do at the weekend?”, just to remind us that while we all work alone in our homes across the country, we’re all part of a bigger company. I say “bigger”. There are nine of us. Three of us, the female part of the company, we live here in the countryside, within easy walking distance. We really should meet up for lunch more often than we do. The male part of the company lives in London and they sometimes go into the office, which is a coworking space, just to spend some time together.
But like I said, that doesn’t happen on Tuesdays. I run through Slack to see if there’s anything I need to do urgently, I say “good morning” in the #general channel (we pretend it’s a nice moment of connection, exactly as if we were walking into the office but it’s a register, isn’t it?) and then I start work.
Today I’m drawing city shapes for a colleague whose specialist subject is geospatial stuff and coding. I’m defining where cities are. This is a horrible question. It’s not even “where, officially, is this city?”. It’s “where would a person who lives in this country see as this city?”. You think it sounds easy? Yeah, where is the city is easy enough. Precisely where are the boundaries and draw a solid line on a map is the difficult bit, especially when it’s countries I’ve never been to and don’t know all that much about. Imagine if I told you you’re going to define London’s boundaries. Not “the city of London”. Not “Greater London”. Not “the London region”. Not “the ceremonial county of Greater London”, which is apparently different from plain Greater London. Not “the London metropolitan area” or the “Greater London Urban Area”. Where is London? Do you see the question now? And now I have to do that for fifty cities in each of 51 countries. When you know what those countries are, you may immediately see at least two cities where this is a particularly impossible question – they’re right at the north of the continent and right at the south
10.30am
A reminder goes off on my Echo Dot. One of the things I do is check the news alerts every day and pop anything relevant into the #news channel on Slack and I need the reminder, as my boss could probably tell you. Some days there’s plenty of news. Some days there’s nothing but for the sake of not looking like I’ve forgotten, I’ll pop in something that wouldn’t be relevant enough on other days. If you’re paying attention, you’ll know what region I work with but for the sake of this blog not accidentally popping into the alerts, I’ll just say it starts with “Af” and finishes with “rica”. I keep an eye out for news relating to retail, logistics, healthcare and startups, especially startups that do retail, logistics or healthcare. Sometimes my boss will ask me to write up one of them, which means reading the same story from six different sources, seeing if we’ve written about the company before so I can turn it into background info, and writing anywhere between 100 and 300 words on the subject. For someone who’s been blogging twice a week for several years now and is blogging every day until Christmas, I hate writing work. Luckily I wrote a news piece yesterday so it’s unlikely I’ll get a message today asking me “can you write this up this morning please?” Yesterday’s was about an investment fund investing in an agriculture company so they can build a new processing plant and add more smallholders to their supply chain. It was 256 words and only took me about half an hour.
Occasionally I realise this technically makes me a professional writer.
What have we got today?
Well, there are only 45 alerts today. Usually there are 50-60. There’s a virtual card that lets shoppers split payments, there’s a new ready-to-drink brand, there’s a virtual pharmacy platform that’s raised $8m and there’s a supply chain & logistics platform that’s raised $3m. If I had to write one up, it would probably be the pharmacy – I’m not particularly interested in any of the news, really, but my ears do prick up a little bit at the healthcare stuff.
Paste it all into the #news channel and back to my cities.
1pm
Lunchtime! My previous company was quite strict about lunchtimes – you either go at 12 or you go at 1 and you take the whole hour away from your desk. It’s a mindset I’ve had, therefore, ever since I started working. I go downstairs, I have my lunch while reading either a Chalet School book or a recipe book (it’s the Christmas book today for obvious reasons) and then I sit with my phone or tablet or another book until it’s time to go upstairs.
For the sake of this blog, I’m “going to the pub”. That’s a thing I evolved during the first lockdown when ordinary meals just got too boring. A bottle of Coke, poured into a pint glass (although I don’t have any straight-sided pint glasses, so it’s an old-fashioned pint jug with a handle). A cheese sandwich – I rarely have a baguette on hand – with a packet of crisps sprinkled onto the plate rather than eaten from the bag in the traditional way. I’d like to finish up with a slice of fudge cake with ice cream but again, I don’t have any in the house and anyway, I’m a bit too delicate of constitution to be eating things like that at lunchtime.
Then I need to write. I’m doing the Rebel Badge Club’s November badge, Write Every Day. It differs significantly from NaNoWriMo in that 1) there’s no word count target 2) you don’t need to write a novel 3) you don’t need to be working consistently on one project. It’s very freeing. It also turns out I write pretty much every day anyway. At first I did some work on the Iceland book but the first draft of that is now finished. In fact, not only is it finished, I have a printed copy of it to scribble on in the hope of creating a second draft one day. But at lunchtime, I’m just going to run through whatever’s left of Vlogmas that I can do in twenty minutes. Today that means the post you’ll see in about a week on the BBC Wales docu-drama of the November 2021 cave rescue. I’ve been meaning to watch it but I was up at the SWCC this weekend and it’s spurred me into actually doing it at last.
2pm
Time to go back to work! This afternoon I’m going to put a podcast on in the background. I’m not really a podcast person – I’m just not interested in listening to people talk. That said, I have two screens and I’ll often put on a YouTube video on the screen I’m not using and let that babble along in the background, glancing across occasionally. Anyway, the only podcast I tolerate is one about Farscape, a relatively obscure scifi show that ran for four seasons and a mini series between 1999 and 2004, which I absolutely loved and still do. Oh, I’ve watched Voyager and Picard and had a go at Battlestar Galactica but the only one I’ve ever loved is Farscape. Every other Tuesday, So Farscape watches an episode and discusses it. I skip the alternate weeks where they’re stretching it out by reading old fanfic. They’re now up to season four, so the end is in sight. Today, specifically is season four episode five, Promises. Spoilers for something more than twenty years old? It’s the one where the crew finally reunite with Moya and Aeryn after the season three cliffhanger; it’s a significant one in a run of daft one-off episodes that you only really watch for completeness and not because you think it’s advancing the story much. It’s the serious episode sandwiched between several Monsters Of The Week.
While I’m listening to that, I’m going through a certain Slack channel – between April 2017 and March 2020, I worked remotely because the rest of the company (all two and a half of them) worked from a coworking space in London and I didn’t so we communicated by Slack and the occasional Zoom call. Now there are nine of us and we all work from home so Slack is for everyone’s benefit, not just mine. I’m a member of 39 channels (we have one specifically for pet photos, to be fair) and a few of them are just a non-stop list of stuff to add to various databases. At least once a week, I have to take at least half a day to try and transfer it across, so I’m taking a break from drawing cities to do that this afternoon and feeling the usual urges stirring to rewatch Farscape. You can do that in the new year, you are counting your spare time in minutes rather than days until Christmas.
5pm
Time to finish work! Again, this is an old, old mindset. You finish work at 5. In recent years, the company owner – well, the owner’s sister – had been working until 5 since her kids were too old to use the excuse of finishing early to be home for them and she’d be standing there, keys in hand asking “Are you staying all night or do you have your keys?” if I was still working at 4.58. By 5, mugs should be washed, computers should be shut down, coats should be on and feet should be out of the door. I know a lot of WFH-ers have trouble with this separation between work and home. Nope. Once in a blue moon my boss phones late and keeps me talking past five, or once in a lifetime schedules a meeting for after work and most evenings I have no objection to doing that – I mean, if I have to be at Brownies half an hour away for a 6pm start, then I need to be out of there pretty promptly but I can also tell him that and either I get to go or the meeting gets moved to a more convenient day.
Tonight is a beautiful clear night and I have no objection to getting outside for my daily walk immediately. I put on my heavy sheepskin poncho-thing (it’s from New Look ten-odd years ago and extremely unlikely to be real sheepskin) and I head out. I walk down the road and Jupiter is shining overhead right in front. I walk past the allotments, keeping an ear out for the tinkle of bells on the collars of the cats who play here. In summer I’d continue on the other side of the road down “cat alley”, a fence-lined alley between the gardens of the houses in front and behind but I don’t like going down there much in the dark so I hop up to the main road. Christmas lights are starting to appear. Over the next few weeks, they’ll come out in force but for now, there are a few. One of the houses puts a ribbon and bow on the front door to turn it into a giant Christmas present and I’m honestly surprised that’s not up yet.
I stop at the end of the road to look up at the stars. You get a reasonable amount of sky for being in town here and there are no street lights shining right in my eyes. They’ve all been replaced with new ones in the last five years – they give off less light pollution so you get a better view of the sky. From here I can often see Orion and Sirius, depending on the time of evening, and a few relatively obscure favourites like Procyon, Deneb, Menkalinan, Capella and Fomalhaut. I picked up stargazing in the winter so my beloveds are the ones that pop up at this time of year rather than the ones I have to go out for at midnight in the summer.
Up the hill to the big main road. This is all a lot less… well, romantic. I’m totally romanticising my daily walk. Now I’m on a main road, I’m going to pass a petrol station, a large pub converted 20 years ago into flats, a tiny convenience store, some traffic lights and a whirring junction box. Then, a kilometre of so further on, I reach the top of my road where I stop for more stargazing. There’s a particular spot about 20 metres down where the street lights don’t go in my eyes, where I can look up and see the Great Bear, Polaris, Vega, Capella, Castor and Pollux and there’s Orion off to my left. I walk down the road, following Fomalhaut and home.
The trouble with walking in winter is that although you might not feel cold, the moment you get home everything starts to tingle as the blood returns to it and my glasses steam up spectacularly the moment I get in the door.
6pm
This still feels weird but my latest YouTube video goes live so I pop a link on Instagram Stories. I didn’t mean to end up with a “latest YouTube video” at all, let alone “oh, now it goes live!” but after making six in a row for my Iceland trip in the summer, I kind of felt like I wanted to keep going. I’ll be making more for my glamping and Germany trips which are coming up scarily soon and so I’m trying to fill in the gaps. This is from Sparkle & Ice 2021, which didn’t happen because of the lockdown. But it’s my favourite Girlguiding event and I wasn’t missing it just because it didn’t happen, so I did it myself in the garden. I filmed it and to be honest, there’s not really enough there for a whole video but I’ve at least stitched it together into something. Sparkle & Ice 2022 is this weekend, so I wanted this video out today and that meant I had a deadline to get the six Iceland videos out before it.
Time for some food and then to watch House of Games. I don’t watch a lot of TV. YouTube, yes. I have phases of Netflix and Amazon Prime but actual TV, not so much. But I do like House of Games. This week is a House of Champions week – all the contestants have won at least one day before. I’m a fan of Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who is intimidating the other contestants a bit by being a “space scientist”. We had Haus der Spiele today, which is one of my favourite rounds – it’s in six different languages! Generally they’re not as difficult as you initially think. I jump up and down and shriek “Pick the Icelandic! Pick the Icelandic!” and as usual, today they didn’t.
Then I go up to my desk and finish off this blog so far ready to publish in a week or two. I’ve been taking far more photos of my day than usual and they need slotting in. I hope you’ve liked them – I tidied my office specially and I’ve put on suitable “I’m a winter blogger” clothes and jewellery for the occasion! Well, the clothes in question are a knee-length knitted hoodie in influencer biscuit-beige, which is both wintery and bloggery but the jewellery is good – it’s my Swarovski Polar Bestiary set, matching polar bear earrings and necklace. I don’t save them for special occasions but I don’t put them on to sit at my desk very often.
And now everything is done, I’m going to have a bath and because it’s a special occasion that I’m photographing, I’m going to put a bubble bar in it. I do a Lush order three or four times a year but I generally go for bubble bars – they make bubbles and you can get two baths out of most of them, whereas a bath bomb is one-and-done and doesn’t even make bubbles. But today is a winter day in the life and so I’m using the Frozen bath bomb for the photos. It’s a Christmas one – a silver-blue star/snowflake which smells so strongly of spearmint that it’s drowning out the smell from the neighbour’s woodburner wafting in the open window (it has to be open otherwise the humidity makes the ceiling go mouldy) and turns the bath blue.
I’m taking my phone and tablet in its waterproof case in because I like to scroll social media and watch YouTube but also I need to do a little more blogging. I’m not going to bother washing my hair. I work from home! I do it on Sundays ready for the work meeting and for Guides and again on Wednesdays ready for Brownies – and my boss is coming down on Thursday so two reasons to wash it Wednesday this week! – but it doesn’t need washing every day.
I also do my daily Finnish lesson on my phone in the bath. It’s a good time to power up my brain for 20 minutes. Today I’m on Unit 11, which is about forming negative sentences and talking about nature and specifically, I’m on a lesson about negative sentences. It’s packed with words like “forest” (metsä) and “camels” (kamelit) and “the rock is over there” (kivi on tuolla). This is the last day of month 5 of my six-month Finnish project… but I’ll talk about that later on. For now, suffice it to say I’m in the Obsidian league and finishing my lesson in second place on 427XP. It’s only Tuesday. We’ll see how it all goes by Sunday. (edit: I finished in 7th place, which means I stayed in the Obsidian league, and I hit my 30 day streak and got a custom app icon to mark the occasion.)
Then out, dried and bed. I meant to take my hot water bottle but it’s still in the car because I took it to Wales and haven’t unpacked properly yet. My pyjamas are quite warm and quite suitably wintery: they’re covered in pine trees and reindeer! I also planned to be good and read a book in bed but we all know that I curled up with my tablet and scrolled Instagram until midnight.
