I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, if anything, in terms of a report from my ADHD assessment. But I’ve now received it, and while there are repetitions, it’s actually far more comprehensive than I probably imagined. It’s a bit weird reading about yourself in this context. A lot to take in.
I’ve never mentioned it here before but this all goes back to around the same time that I got my anxiety addressed in 2019. I looked at the possibility of ADHD and largely dismissed it at the time but the thought never really went away. Over time I’d go back and forth on it; reading something about ADHD that resonated, park it, forget about it and back round again. But in the last couple of years or so I’ve become much more sure until I decided to talk to my GP in September. He was very supportive and referred me for an assessment. Three months later and here we are.
Category: Uncategorized
Yesterday felt like one of those late winter/pre-spring days where you want to be doing things.
Today is murky, not properly light and I just want to hunker down.
That’s how it goes this time of year.
Paid for a month’s subscription to Game Pass for the holiday period. Downloaded Atomfall as the cold war/rural England vibe is always a draw for me. Probably because as a child of the ’70s and ’80s growing up in rural England……
Only played an hour or so. One issue. No dynamic weather and always sunny? In a game set in Cumbria? The county with the highest rainfall. In a country that is noted for it’s rainfall.
I like a game that oozes atmosphere. Like the Stalker series. I think the developers could have done a lot better here.
Yesterday I had my final assessment of a process that I’ve been going through and was given a diagnosis of ADHD. There is so much to process that I’m not going to get into it now because I hardly know where to begin, let alone end.
Suffice to say that this is not the end of a journey so much as the beginning.
Heard ravens and spotted a pair mobbing a raptor of similar size to them. Sparrowhawk like. A goshawk? That would be something.
Or did I hear ravens and then see a pair of different, smaller corvids mobbing a sparrowhawk?
Back to work tomorrow. Enjoyed a chilled day off. More of the cold clear weather that seems increasingly a rarity in my neck of the woods. I like seeing the dog belting around in the frost. Makes me laugh.
Yesterday I got chatting with someone while walking the dog and learnt that hearing aids can now be connected to your phone so she was able to listen to podcasts through them.
Reading and enjoying Ukulele of Death.
A couple of months ago I heard a thing about ‘super recognisers’. People that can remember faces really well. It’s a bit of a family joke that I’ll see someone in passing and say something like ‘I recognise them. I went to school with them when I was 7’. Did a couple of online tests. University based, not click bait ones. Scored in the highest percentages. Going to register my interest in volunteering in further research.
So long 2025, and I appreciate the cold, dry weather while we are taking a break. Makes it so much easier to get outside on these shortest of days.
Am thinking of moving the blog back to Hugo. Not exactly sure why. Probably a digital self-determination thing. And maybe a bit of boredom with my WordPress setup.
I’m going to have to remind myself of the pros and cons of both. I know I got a very good deal on 4 years hosting with WordPress. But I was just looking back through old posts on the WordPress app and it couldn’t display some due to some Jetpack compatibility issues. Which is just the sort of thing that pushes me in the direction of doing things myself.
It’s just come to me now what the trigger for thinking about a change was. I have cloud storage with pCloud. This includes a public folder, a nifty feature that amongst other things can serve static websites. Hence the Hugo.
Sometimes I see blog posts where the writer hasn’t posted for a while and they talk about the why’s and wherefore’s. I’m not going to do that.
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I have a Garmin Instinct 2. The feature set is fantastic but I’m well aware I don’t use some of them as much as I anticipated. I make use of the compass, altimeter, climb features and GPS tracking the most frequently. Stuff for hiking more than those features for running.
Recently, Garmin introduced Connect Plus. Extra features behind a paywall. Is this the beginning of enshittification? Will free features slowly disappear behind the wall? Fair enough on one level that Garmin starts to charge for what is a pretty good platform that up until now has been free. But what if my data starts to become less accessible? That is a problem.
Last year I bought a second-hand Garmin Etrex 30x. In light of the above I’ve been thinking that should I get to a point where I no longer want to, or can’t, rely on Garmin Connect, I have tracking data from the Etrex freely available to me, without it being mediated through someone else’s platform.
Just recently I’ve dusted of my Python gloves to see if I can extract data from the Etrex’s .gpx track files. Of course I can. There are a couple of modules available to manipulate gpx data. I’ve been using gpxpy and it’s pretty straightforward to extract all sorts of useful data. And because .gpx files are human readable anyway, at a push I could look through the file to find some of the data manually.
Which leads me onto the other thing I’ve noticed about Garmin. Some of their newer handheld units are now using .fit files. I have no experience of these but apparently they are encoded, if that’s the right term. Not human readable. I believe they can hold a lot more in terms of health data but is this just another step towards limiting user’s ready access to their own data?
I bought the original yellow Etrex nearly 25 years ago. It’s very basic but it still works just fine. The Etrex 30x has more features and allows me to move files between the unit and a computer, albeit with a cable. I hope in another 25 years both units will still work (assuming GPS will still be a functioning and freely available system) and my own data will still be freely accessible.
Pretty much bang on the first day of February I actually feel more positive and energetic than I have done in months.
Psychologically, February signals the back end of winter for me. The days are noticeably longer and light levels are that much higher. And if it transpires that it is drier, as February traditionally is, I’ll be all the happier for it.