Eeeep! Back to work tomorrow for what is shaping up to be an insane couple of months.

I need to make sure I carve out time to do some me stuff and not stay at SML until some ungodly hour. Also, I need to pretty much immediately return to my lunchtime park reading – this was staggeringly good for my mental health last year.

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I sat down this morning and completed July-December on the 2015 dinners page. This is a somewhat time-consuming process which I’d been putting off.

I don’t know why I dithered because I really like creating datasets and I find it very interesting to see patterns in the repetition of meals and identifying what triggers us to bust out a bunch of new stuff (generally the acquisition of a cook book!), and also to note what may have slipped off the rotation and remedy that.

I’m going to sit down and do some analysis on the weekend – because that is actually my idea of a super-fun time!

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I sat on the floor last night with a cup of tea and my bargain phaidon archive of graphic design¹ .

I’m barely a 10th of the way through and I adore it – this is also my idea of a super-fun time! Best $20 spent this year! At the moment, I’m just grabbing a stack of cards out and reading through them, at some point I’ll file them in some sort of order.

My favourites so far (I seem to have a thing about red white and blue):

paul rand, thoughts on design cover – 1947:

rural electrification administration (economic stimulus project) – 1937

london a-z cover – 1972

I was delighted to learn that the London A-Z was designed by a woman! After losing her way using an elderly ordnance map, Phyllis Pearsall designed and mapped the A-Z by herself (23,000 streets, walking 3,000 miles, working 18 hours per day!) and when publishers rejected it, she had it published herself – in 1936! And it was, of course, a mad success. Go lady!

¹ ZOMG! on sale for AU$20 on the phaidon site – it’s $190 elsewhere)

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Brief pictorial Rye-an update:

Look at those bubbles! I’m pleased I’m waiting until the weekend to turn him into a loaf.

I have 140 blogs in my reader, 43 of these are in an “on hiatus” folder (this saddens me as most of them were brilliant) and there are 2 that I read for workly purposes.

I realise that I’ve added a good many of these as time-filler/wasters. There are a bunch that are not really adding much value and some that I was finding a teensy bit (okay, maybe a lot) aggravating – of course I’m not talking about your blog, dear reader.

I think this blog-reading is kind of like self-sabotage, because I’ll read these to avoid doing other things. It is probably more accurate to say I read them to avoid even thinking about what other things to do. I think the latter is the key thing here – I’m using all these distractions to avoid making plans to do things. I really struggle to come up with an Action Item list for the day (or hour). Just why this is, I’m not entirely sure!

So in the spirit of taking a good hard look at myself and my behaviours (and also decluttering!), I’ve been pretty ruthless and removed 20 of the active blogs. This is actually a situation where the Marie Kondo approach of asking yourself “does this spark joy?” really works well. That still leaves 77 blogs in the reader that are not on hiatus – yikes! I might have to have another crack at it.

I’ve also had a bit of a tidy of the links on the sidebar and have removed most of the dead ones and added a few more (maybe I should have added a “new” category?)

In a similar vein, I’m already in the process of weaning myself from the guardian and will stay away until I can convince myself I don’t need to read every single article every day. Likewise, I’m restricting myself to twitter and instagram twice a day and I’m funnelling all important email to a shiny new email address and checking my long-term gmail account only twice a day. I noticed this morning that I become totally distracted when I see shiny sale/bargain emails and I really don’t need anything new right now.

Then, I daresay I probably need some reflection (or therapy) to identify just what it is I am trying to avoid!

But Holy!Goodness! I need to go for a run to clear my head.