At work:
- Social care engagement project: more scheduling and planning of sessions, mostly done better in person (it is not surprising that a relational approach works better for relational work)!
- Strategic service review: finished pulling together the draft session plan and materials, in time for a review meeting with the client.
Deliverables this week:
- Interactive EDI workshop (interim deliverable): client signed off on the content of the planned activities. It’s going to be quite a radical and … different workshop, I am glad that they are being bold and have run with my idea.
- Guest lecture on systems change at Black Mountains College: what a lovely group, and great questions and reflections. It was a really nice experience to work alongside the module lead and the other guest lecturer. Also, I quoted Kristie De Garis, not from her book Drystone: A Life Rebuilt (which I am reading and which is VERY good) but from this essay which she wrote in response to a lazy and dismissive review.
“Perhaps the politics of identity only feel frivolous if yours have never worked against you.” FUCK YES. - Facilitation skills for chairs follow-up session: back in January I did a day-long interactive workshop, and this week I ran a follow-up reflection session online. I was tickled that one person who had attended in January said they hadn’t changed how they chaired in any major way since the original training, but then proceeded to name a long list of small changes that they have implemented, which make their meetings run more smoothly! 😀
- Added some case studies to the blog, of projects I have finished and closed.
Development this week:
- Drafting a response to an invitation to tender for a co-design project, for the Co-production Lab Wales.
- The New Idea: the website copy is in development! Talking about it to some new people has given me the lightbulb moments and renewed inspiration to finish my draft.
- Noting that I am still not blogging thoughts in the New Stuff category. I am happy to be regular with my weeknotes, and semi regular with my reading, and from time to time I add a batch of case studies, but the fresh reflections keep staying at the bottom of the pile. I have a bunch of draft notes but not a strong impetus to turn them into something. Hmmm.
At home:
- It’s been an emotional week. The Cat had been increasingly unwell and was booked in for an emergency scan, which I convinced myself he wasn’t going to come back from. I cried in my car a lot on Monday. But he’s home with twice a day medication and he’s perked up, so we have a reprieve on this ongoing health issue which will eventually take him – but not yet.
- After a hiatus of at least a year, I re-opened the “painting the bedroom door” project. I have made progress over the weekend but had to pause it again and put everything away in order to have a functional room to, you know, live and sleep in. Painting doors is my nemesis, there are just so many phases and it takes so long and it’s bloody boring. When will I actually manage to complete this door? Who knows!
- I wrote up and sent the letter to my GP to provide the evidence for a referral to the mental health team to get me put on a waiting list for a full autism and ADHD assessment. I spoke to the GP on the 4th April and she said “what you just told me, put it in writing and send it over” and it’s only taken me 6 months to do. I actually cited this specific example of procrastination to illustrate the point about procrastination in my list of evidence…
- Learnt the term “time agnosia” which is a better and less ableist way to refer to what is otherwise commonly known as “time blindness”. (An inability to perceive, estimate, or orient to the passage of time, often associated with ADHD and autism spectrum disorder. People with time agnosia may struggle with estimating how long tasks will take, lose track of time during periods of focus, or feel unable to sense the passage of time altogether. This affects executive functions like time estimation and sequencing, leading to challenges with planning, transitions, and daily routines.)
- There’s someone I like who I met a few weeks ago. At the point when I’d known them for about 2 weeks, they left for a 2 week trip. They’re currently nearly halfway through their travels, and as much as I’m excited for them to be discovering new things and getting to catch up with an old friend and (presumably / hopefully) having a lovely time, relatively speaking it feels like a VERY long time. Also we can’t message because of where they are, so it’s zero comms until they are back in the UK. I’m counting the days. Either time doesn’t exist, or there is way too much of it.
Image credit: Kristie de Garis on X, 2nd August 2025.