Ireland day 0794. Friday 01 December 2023- Underachievement *

Ireland day 0794. Friday 01 December 2023- Underachievement

Today’s summary	Worked from home but didn’t achieve much. Kept getting distracted and spent ages unsuccessfully trying to send my first invoice out. Eventually I gave up and went on a walk to look for the northern lights but didn’t see them either. “Succession” in evening when Val got back from Wonderlights
Today’s weather	Cold, bright and dry. Moderate north westerly wind. Appx 5c

Today’s overview location (The grey mark shows the location of my route)		Close-up location (The orange line shows where I walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Not the Northern Lights

Commentary

(Summary blog only. Last full blog was Day 0368).

More and more, I’m coming to the conclusion that if I really want to get anything done, work-wise, I have to go into the office.

I had high hopes for today – a day free from meetings meant that I could get on with lots of reading, writing and thinking – as well as doing practical things like sending out my first invoice, for the work I did in November.

In the end, I kept going down rabbit-holes which was all very interesting but quite uninteresting and totally un-billable. I did, however, manage to get almost all the information I needed to prepare the November invoice. The only thing I lacked was an address where to send it. So it is currently languishing in my drafts, just waiting for the vital bit of missing information. That will have to wait until next week.

Eventually, I gave up and decided to go for a walk. By this stage, it was dark outside and a friend had just texted from the Lake District, back in the UK, saying that from where they were, the Northern Lights were putting on a fine display. So I thought I would walk down to the Broadmeadow lagoon – which is reasonably dark and has a clear view of the northern horizon – to see what I could see. As it turned out, all I could see was cloud and light pollution, so that, too, was a bit of a waste of time. Anyway it gave me an excuse to walk along the shore as far as the Centra store, which I really enjoyed.

I’m just waiting, now, for Val to get back from Wonderlights, so we can catch another episode of “Succession”. It seems to be winding up to some sort of grand finale, and it’s quite interesting. Val, by the way, has been moved from Wonderlights check-in to Santa Claus management. A real promotion which will doubtless look good on her CV, but she was quite apprehensive. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it went well!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Looking over the Gaybrook estuary	It would be nice to think the lights on the horizon were the aurora. But actually they are just the glare from Donabate

The Broadmeadow embankment catching the distant streetlights of the Donabate Distributor Road	Down where the bullrushes grow, on the way to the Centra stores



Fallen tree completely blocking the path above the Gaybrook stream. It was actually pretty nearly pitch black, so it was quite tough scrambling a way through. The camera does an amazing job of stacking multiple short exposure images to produce single blended images like this one