One (1) Thing A Day

Hopefully 2025 treats us gently.

I really wished they stopped marketing bright white LED lightbulbs as "warm light", because my living room definitely looks way worse now.

My cooking didn't quite go according to plan because it turns out my big stew pots don't work on induction hobs. So I've had to make my stew in a wok which is just barely big enough for it. Hopefully the dumplings don't stick to the lid.

So far the combination of new flat and new job have been successful in combating my seasonal depression, but I have to say this grey foggy weather is doing its best to reverse that.

Because of the weird way that rostering works at my new job today is going to be the last day I work this year. It's also the first time I work an afternoon so hopefully it won't be too crazy.

I have dispatched my first few trains today. Even had to blow the whistle a couple of times.

I got offered a free trial of BookBeat so I've been using it for the past week and, I have to say, it's pretty bad. It's an audiobook library app except you have to pay for it like a streaming platform, and you have a limited amount of listening hours included in your subscription. The search function is very clunky and algorithmically driven, so, unless you already know what book you want to read, it's very difficult to find something interesting. The app is prone to crashing and I can almost never get it to start on the first go. All in all I think I will stay with libro.fm and Libby for my audiobook needs.

A rat has been coming to the bird feeder for the past few days and he looks very sweet, but it does make me glad to have a raised tumbling composter because I've had quite enough of opening a composting bin and seeing rats in it.

I'm listening to We Could Be Heroes by PJ Ellis, which is set in Birmingham and I am just having a lot of fun with it. The author is clearly very familiar with Brum and it's just kind of fun not to have to imagine any of the settings because I know exactly where they are. There are also some jokes that I suspect you need to live in Birmingham in order to get which is a nice bonus.

My first proper day of training was super chill. They're apparently not bothered at all about me working all of my hours, because my mentor was like "if your first bus gets you here way early and you're having to wait in the station for ages, just get the second bus and come in late" and he also let me go home an hour early and said they do that while you're training. Also apparently everyone takes about 20 minutes more break than they're supposed to which is hilarious. This seems to be an inside the department agreement, because everyone, including my line manager, was like "if anyone asks, you have 40 minutes break, but just take an hour".