I love the idea of using “winter” as a verb, eg. “I quite like the snowy mountains. I think I will winter in a cabin there.” It’s just a shame that the routine of life prevents us from being able to use the word that way very often.

Well, I’m happy to be able to say “I wintered at home this year”. Today is my last day of long service leave. I got to spend 6 weeks at home and I loved nearly every minute of it.

I made the commitment to briefly journal each day to stop myself from getting too lazy, and so that once I got to the end I could focus on the things I accomplished, not on the things I didn’t.

Here are most of the things I did:

  • Rode a bike for the first time in a million years.
  • Used dirac live to do room correction on my beloved stereo.
  • Cooked. Soups, steak/prawn tacos, chilli & garlic gnocchi, burger wraps, choc & dulce de leche strawberries, lamingtons.
  • Went to markets and op shops, picked up CDs, old video games, vinyl records.
  • Lots of walking around Penrith.
  • Celebrated a friend’s wedding.
  • Bucks weekend of the aforementioned wedding.
  • Spent a weekend with friends and cooked/ate delicious steak.
  • Fixed doors and gates around the house.
  • Put up shelves and guitar holders.
  • Ran cables down the wall behind the TV, and now feel qualified to perform colonoscopies.
  • Listened to a really long podcast about world war 1 (while I was bed ridden/sick last week).
  • Watched a long documentary about myhouse.wad instead of just playing the thing.
  • Ripped some of my OG Xbox games.
  • Studied my cyber security course (often at a local cafe of a morning).
  • Stayed up late watching the Olympics.
  • Played a lot of Gran Turismo (and Valorant of course).
  • Worked on our home assistant server. Got a zigbee coordinator and managed to get hue light sync happening without a hue bridge.
  • Test drove some EVs.
  • Spent time gazing at our peaceful bunnies.
  • Lots of house cleaning and gardening. Turns out it takes nearly 2 full days to properly clean every window in the house.
  • Reorganised and decluttered a few areas of the house.
  • Made a new bunny home by cutting holes in an Ikea storage box.

Things I started but didn’t finish:

  • multi-camera setup with OBS, recorded a youtube tutorial video (which I’m not gonna publish).
  • this website
  • digitising my record collection. I did a few records to test, but I want to find some ways to improve the workflow.
  • repairing my Creative Zen MP3 player. The hard drive died. I got a replacement but a piece on the replacement broke. So now I’m going to try and get a compact flash card installed instead.
  • rewriting a google workspace automation tool in python (currently it’s a shell script).