# I found out last Thursday that I have to cover in the office next week (8th to 10th of December), meaning I have to travel back down south again, and I reacted very badly. Every negative, self-debasing thought conspired to tell me how much of a failure I was that I hadn't yet found another job.
I just broke down, couldn't control myself, and didn't really know why.
We knew it was likely that this was going to happen but I think I had it in my head that I wasn't going to see that office again, that the only reason I would have to travel back was to work on the house ready for sale.
On a positive note, I've got the Monday off to travel down and should be able to travel back on the Thursday evening so that I can work from home on the Friday. It could be worse.
# Even more positive is that our landlord is happy for us to stay in this house. Rather than do an inspection or discuss it I just got a text asking "are you staying?" so she will organise a new contract for January when our current lease expires.
# We're mostly familiar with mobile apps offering mindfulness techniques and guided meditations (Calm, Headspace, et al) but apps offering courses of CBT is a new one on me.
# Tomorrow, I'm going to try to get up a bit earlier to do some more focused writing (or, at least, prep) before work. I need to knuckle down on something I've got on the back burner.
@colinwalker Colin, I’m seeing all of your posts twice in my micro.blog feed.
# It's a frosty start this morning, looks like we're in for a relatively chilly few days to welcome in December. Wow, December. Almost the end of 2020 - what a year this has been. We'll all be glad to see the back of it and, with the promise of vaccines and the end of political turmoils, 2021 stands to be a marked improvement but it's going to take time for things to settle down. As I've said on numerous occasions, things won't return to the old normal, they can't, they will always be tainted by the events of this year. The Pandemic will/should forever change how we do things and there are a lot of lessons to be learnt both on a personal and societal level. It's going to take time. In recent months "build back better" and "The Great Reset" have become prevalent, the idea that we can use the position we find ourselves in now to construct a better future, to rework economies and relationships as it is obvious the current ways don't work for everyone. That's why the phrase "we're all in this together" rankled so much during the UK's first lockdown, still does. Rather than being some kind of leveling event the pandemic has only served to exacerbate inequalities and we will likely not receive a more definite nudge to make changes. There are those who believe the great reset to be a cover for the institution of a new world order, a move to a more authoritarian society. Lockdowns are seen as the beginnings of controlling the populace on a more longterm basis while the catchy slogans employed during the Covid era are 1984-esque indoctrination. Whatever happens, things must change, we can't go on as we are and expect everything to be fine. Our economies are not built to factor in global crises and that should have been apparent after the financial crash of 2007-2008. Banking rebuilt itself with new controls and the need to maintain capital reserves but the crash should have been seen for the wider warning it was. Instead, it has taken almost one and a half million deaths for the right conversations to start but, even then, the cynic in me feels that this isn't enough, that until events actually start significantly impacting the daily lives of the "haves" as well as the "have nots" things won't alter. # Cheri pointed out that duplicates of posts were showing up over at micro.blog, maybe it's something to do with the way the service reads RSS feeds. I've not seen the same behaviour elsewhere (Feedly and NetNewsWire) but it might be something to do with the way dates were being handled. I've made a tweak so will see if that helps. # It's intentional that edited sections will reappear in the feed (the way I have things set up they are technically new items) but this shouldn't happen for those that haven't been touched. With any luck the issues should now be resolved and I will be able to re-add the live feed to micro.blog. # Before the recent changes the blog homepage displayed the number of posts for Today with a link to the most recent. With the move to a single, updated post this became redundant - it only displayed when there was more than one post. To restore the feature I have replaced it with a "section" count, the link going to the last update.