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It feels like it’s been ages since I last blogged. There are a few reasons for this: Moved house! # Finally did it! Me and Hannah moved into our lovely new house in Manchester. It was insanely stressful though but we’re here. I’m just waiting for new sofas to arrive now. It’s so nice not to be scared to go home now, to not have to deal with noisy neighbours and just being able to relax.

I sent the following email to the CEO of Northern Rail this morning after over a month of frustrating commutes to work. Hi Alex, I’ve recently moved to Swinton in Manchester and I knew in advance that the area was serviced by Northern Rail so my expectations were lower than what I was used to on First Transpennine I wasn’t quite expecting it to be this bad. Here are the examples of things that have happened in the 1 and a half months since i moved:

I’m tired, I’m exhausted. I’m mentally fucked. I had my first “official” appraisal today and I still can’t shake the feeling that I’ve fucked up. That I’m not good enough and everything is my fault.

Since moving to a new house I have an proper office for the first time so I’m determined to get it right. I asked on twitter what remote workers would suggest, here are the results:

I fucked up and I fucked up badly. A few months ago I went cold turkey on propranolol (against all feedback) and after a few weeks the side effects went away and I was fine.

I have a finite amount of energy. My energy comes in a few different forms, all important to how I feel on a day to day basis. I find myself applying energy in the wrong place now. Energy that I put in often doesn’t yield the results I expect or frankly deserve. I’ve found myself questioning more of my decisions recently and the outcome of that has been eye opening to me.

The past three weeks have been crazy. Week 1 - Barcelona Week 2 - Packing house Week 3 - PHPNW Now - Moved in So lets just recap, I keynoted at Barcelona, packed up my flat, spoke at PHPNW and then moved house the day after.

For a long time I wanted to contributed code to Drupal, I have a few times but no where near as much as I thought I was going to do.

This week I’ve found out I run a ridiculous amount of chat apps. Here is a run down of what I have on my macbook: Hipchat - for work Skype - for dad and freelance work Airdroid - for my phone Pidgin/Adium - for hangouts, mostly to contact Hannah and Eli Slack - for NWDUG community Limechat - for #drupaluk and #phpnw Steam friends - not often used All these apps fall into specific categories; work, social and play. It seems very excessive.

This has taken me way longer to work out than it should so I figured I’d write this up so people can use it while they wait until Rocket League comes out for linux.