“Michael, I make no apology for turning your venue political but I am now of an age where I am confident to say what I think and sod those who disagree.”
Feel free to leave any comment on any of my emails. You can do that by hitting the speech bubble icon at the bottom left of every email.
And if you know anybody who’d enjoy my musings, please press the Share Decompression button at the bottom. Everybody reading this email is reading it due to word of mouth.
But coming back to the message left on one of my emails, whilst not political, I would like to address the absolute fucking idiots who went to social media to express their racism and hatred on the three England footballers who missed their penalties at the Euro 2021 finals.
I am continuously astounded by the hatred some people are happy to express, and can only assume that they have had very upsetting lives.
And it truly baffles me as to what they think they will achieve by doing it.
With a bit of luck a very heavy fine, some prison time and police monitoring.
But before my soapbox gets too high today, and there are times when it may well, I am going to step off it.
Despite it only being Tuesday, I have to work very hard to remember what I did over the weekend.
I’m not sure if this is a sign of getting older, doing too much, drinking too much, all three or neither.
But it’s definitely something that happens.
Regularly!
With a bit of digging around, I remembered that on Saturday we went to a friend's birthday BBQ. I’m still not sure what we did during the day leading up to it, but we definitely did that in the evening.
The reason this is interesting, is because this BBQ was delayed due to her husband having possibly come into contact with someone who had tested positive for COVID in a meeting.
What I don’t understand is this:
Her husband got an alert that someone he may have been near had tested positive for COVID.
He works in a big environment, with a lot of people. It’s possible he was sitting next to this person in a meeting, it’s equally possible he didn’t even enter the same building as the person.
However, because the person decided not to declare that they had tested positive, everybody in the company that could possibly have come into contact with them had to go into self-isolation (because nobody could be sure they’d come into contact without the infected person declaring it was them).
He now had to do lateral flow tests every day and isolate for ten days
He is fully vaccinated, and his lateral flow tests were negative every day. Fine… he still has to isolate, but…
His wife, and anybody else in his house, can go out normally because his lateral flow tests are negative.
I literally don’t understand how this makes any sense. If his lateral flow tests are negative, he’s fully vaccinated, his wife (who I assume sleeps next to him, but may be wrong) can go out and mingle normally, why can’t he?
If I’m missing something obvious, please hit the speech bubble below and let me know what it is.
**** emergency update ****
Holly has just come in and we’re going to have to take Lyra to the doctor. She’s had a temperature since last night, and Calpol has done nothing to stop it. It’s now just gone over 40 degrees, and we’re on our way to the doctor.
Which means I am going to have to pause this email here.
But I will come back shortly, both with an update on Lyra, and a continuation of this week's decompression. And there is much to tell.
********
Business is a funny business.
There are so many ways of doing things, none of which are right or wrong, just decisions.
I’ve been talking to a lot of project management software companies recently. What’s amazed me is the majority of them who don’t reply to their support requests, and the number who won’t do a video walk through.
This is despite charging anywhere from £20 to £90 per user per month, and the company I will be having moving about 40 users into the platform.
That’s around a £40,000 a year contract, which will be long-term because it’s very hard to move once you’re bedded in, and most of them can’t be bothered to get on an hour long video call to show me how their software works.
What the actual?
They must be in the enviable position of having too much business.
I appreciate they may have been used to having a lot of people waste their time, but then they should be doing proper checks upfront before taking the time.
Anway, it’s made my life simpler because anyone who won’t make a call gets scrubbed off my list. There’s no way I’m going to put the requirements of a 40+ company only into paper and move their entire project management system without someone showing me around the software and best practices.
That’s taken the list from eight to two.
And I really like the look of ProofHub, but I’ve got to do some background checks on it to find out more about them. I also don’t want to move a company and then find the software shuts down, or is unsupported, a year later.
If you’ve had experience with them, or heard anything about them, then please let me know.
On a personal level, it’s exciting to know that I’m an excellent dog trainer. I’ve managed to train Ivy to nip me whenever she likes. It’s taken me at least a week to get her to the point where she has no qualms about it whatsoever and sees me as an oversized bone.
She’s actually doing very well, Max came with me last night to her puppy training class, and despite being thoroughly bored for most of it, insisted he loved every second because it meant he got to stay up later than normal.
But get this…
On leaving the training, it was pouring with rain, I mean biblical type rain. I had a puppy under one arm, an umbrella in the other, Max was trying his best to walk in every puddle, in the middle of the road, and not stay under the umbrella.
We managed to get back to the car, semi-drenched, where I put Ivy (the puppy) on the ground to, I don’t know… take my keys out, open the boot, put the towels in, get Max into the car.
You know, the kind of stuff you try and do as fast as possible when wondering whether the car will float or not.
In the midst of this pleasure, some guy opens the window from his apartment and calls down to me.
I turn my face up, rain making it very hard to see what he looks like, or here what he wants. But I do hear six words very clearly.
“Get your dog off the grass”
What a knob.
There was so much grass it could have been a playing field, and there was a puppy shorter than the length of my arm on it, clearly while I was trying my best to get everybody into a car in a storm.
Oh, and there were no notices requesting dogs to stay off the grass.
I did pick her up and move her, but was sorely tempted to take a piss on the grass myself before leaving.
Of course, I didn’t do that. But it would be a lie to say that the thought didn’t flash through my mind.
(or maybe lingered there for a bit!)
Going forward this week, I’ve made a decision to get back to training Ivy for thirty minutes a day, and doing thirty minutes of exercise a day.
I had to weigh Ivy this morning, so that meant weighing myself first, then picking her up and weighing myself again to see how much she added.
It was the first bit that was upsetting.
So it’s time to shake those pounds, and start getting fitter and healthier again.
If you’ve got any advice on how to be disciplined enough to do it every day then please let me know.
In some areas I am very disciplined. Exercise is not one of them!
At this point I will bid you adieu.
Have a wonderful week. Stay healthy, safe and happy.
Michael Wilding
I have many of the same dilemmas (just in different clothes) but with regards to walking half an hour a day, think up a point to it, ideally a pleasurable point. Like a magazine or a coffee or even a half somewhere. It's not about the calories, it's about keeping moving, I think. Not sitting down all day every day. Which is what us internet types do. So your fat doesn't turn into its own organ with its own metabolism that attracts more of the same. Says a fat bird who knows she's got to start working on it.