The cognitive dance I am doing day in, day out continues to be pretty exhausting. 

Am I fatigued because of the heat wave or because my diabetes is running wild? Is that twinge in my abdomen a precursor to another bout of pancreatitis or because I am 53?

How can a diet as unchanging as mine cause such massive differences in my blood sugar day to day – my sensor chart looks like a kid’s drawing of mountains…and just how many times can I check the sensor app in a day without it being a problem?

Did I bring my insulin? Did I bring enough insulin? Did I bring enough needles? Where can I inject myself? Did I take enough? Should I take more? Aaarrggh why is my blood sugar crashing? Did I pack some sweets?

Is the fact I have lost all this weight – and thanks to the sun look pretty good by some accounts – a positive to be celebrated or is it just a reminder of the nightmare few weeks that caused the rapid drop in t-shirt and trouser sizes? 

Then there is the weird case of impostor syndrome at work where the person I am pretending to be is me. I think I am contributing and it is nice to be back in a lot of ways – mainly for the people – but I’m finding it very hard to engage with some elements of the work – or the work to enable the work really. It can all feel a bit peak Civil Service and my capacity for dealing with that seems seriously compromised. 

My attention is all over the place and that isn’t great when you are only doing 22.5 hours – there isn’t much space for distractions…but there are soooooo many! I just want to build teams, coach people, help them ship products/services and then blog about it all. Is that too much to ask? 

Should I be writing this down giving the impending re-org…heck the impending ending of my probation period! Probably not honestly, but I yam what I yam.

Huh.

Anyway the main thing I did this week was head up to South Yorkshire. I overnighted in Sheffield (though picked a hotel without aircon), caught up with a couple of work adjacent folks in person that was time well spent, did a few Teams meetings in the hotel lobby, listened to an interesting talk about the Service Standard work elsewhere in our bit of GDS and ate some (messy) tacos.

Then the following day I joined some GDS-Local colleagues at Barnsley Council for a really good couple of hours hearing about their work and challenges and sharing a bit about our ambitions for data assets and infrastructure at GDS.

Trains were challenging at every opportunity of course but in the end I got everywhere I was hoping to with only about a combined hours delayed and never ended up in one of the carriages with no air-con!

Over the weekend I wrote/published a post about my current AI mindset that has proved pretty popular.

[edit] Oh and Andy D has announced/admitted he is joining us in the GDS Government Data world – he is the person I have been hinting at joining who is going to take the product/delivery end of the Kickstarters etc on to free me up to be part-time and more focused on the product practice and partnerships. [/edit]

I also watched ‘The Boroughs’ on Netflix. Which is good fun even if it massively suffers from pacing issues. The first episode is brilliant but then it doesn’t really build much momentum to the final three (of eight) but it is never less than watchable and when it does get going it is fantastic. You’ll see it referred to as a ‘Stranger Things’ for senior citizens and that is not misleading. Alfred Molina and Gina Davis are particularly fantastic in it.

‘Is This Thing On?’ was fine. It takes the broad strokes of John Bishop’s well trodden story of finding comedy and moves it to NYC and throws some A-list talent at it. I liked it and everyone did a decent job but it felt pretty slight and ‘I’m Dying Up Here’ is a much better stand-up drama.

Oh and the latest/last John Krasinski ‘Jack Ryan’ landed on Amazon. A movie this time rather than a series but it retained most of the cast and as such was a perfectly enjoyable, if generic, way to spend 90 minutes or so.

I’m reading Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots and enjoying it a lot. It won’t survive the weekend.