This afternoon I have escaped the confines of the junk room for a couple of hours to visit the café where my daughters work. A break from staring at code for an hour.
After sitting down with a coffee for a few minutes, the owner’s dog - the most well mannered Labrador you can imagine - that usually dozes quietly in the corner of the café - started crying. It would appear it’s body clock had “gone off” - telling it that the owner’s other half should be appearing any time soon to take it home.
In short order the café manager appeared - and knowing I wouldn’t mind, asked if she could re-locate the dog from the corner of the café to my table - attaching it’s rope to the table leg. What followed was quite comedic, given the dog could obviously smell the half-eaten sausage roll on my table. A jump up for a fuss was in reality an expertly planned and executed reconnaissance mission - to scope out everything that might be stolen.
Thankfully I grew up with several dogs in the house, so stayed a couple of moves ahead in our game of dog / food chess. The dog eventually realised it’s attempts were futile and collapsed onto the floor to resume crying - refusing my best efforts to distract and placate.
A few minutes later the other half of the café owner arrived. Oh the excitement.
We laughed about the accuracy of animals body clocks - our cats become enormous pain in the asses when their usual feeding time rolls around - I swear they do time and motion studies to figure out the most awkward place to sit - until you feed them, then they are nowhere to be seen for several hours.
(Ten minutes pass while I check a minor detail in some source code I checked in earlier today - this happens to me quite a lot - where something occurs to me while doing something else. If I was clever I would build distraction into my daily work-flow.)
I’m aware the café shuts in about half an hour. I’ll get out of their way in a minute. I don’t want to be “that customer” that orders something messy to cook within half-an-hour of close-down.
My calendar has tomorrow marked out as a “development day”. I’ve never had one of those before. I need to find something to learn about - something to do with work obviously - something hopefully useful. Or I suppose I could use it to tidy up notes, and take a look at how I’m storing and managing them - the eternal debate between OneNote, Obsidian, and Notion (I’m tried them all before, more than once).
Just for the record - in recent days I’ve been back using a bullet journal, but wonder if it’s time has come to be consigned to history. While it has undoubted benefits in terms of mindfulness, it’s far easier to search a computer based solution.
Anyway.
Time to go.