Outdoor swimming

Inspired by Kate Rew's book (Wild Swim, which is VG by the way) arriving from Amazon, I ploshed bodily into the local river today. It's broken my UK outdoor swimming duck this year. Here's that diary entry in full.

Cycled to sinuous bend in the Wey, just downstream of Godalming. Recce'd the scene at first : bright, sunny, nice breeze, occasional towpath users and the odd boat. Various fowl splashing about, cows on opposite bank being cows. Checked out the getting in and out place. Got down to shorts and read the paper for a bit, to gauge traffic, and to see how hot it was (quite, but not summer of 76 exactly). Stowed all keys, phones and things of economic significance away from casual fingers.

Waited for a quiet gap. Sunnies off. Hat off. Kit off. Walked in. It! Was! Cold!

Did a length or two. Didn't feel like dunking the head, given the (perfectly natural) detritus on the surface. Fingers gettting numbbbb. Quick get out.

Back to the towel. Sit there for a bit. Dried off. Waved to passing boats : oh look, a shivering naked person, titter titter. Cycled home.

五月二十一号

昨天晚上，我喝太多啤酒。不是有意地。

我有头疼从早晨到晚上。几个开会。

五月二十二号

起床很早。吃早饭了以后，上自行车到了邮局拿包裹。

Dear Diary and List Anxiety

So, last week, our long-suffering Mandarin teacher let us have an easy-to-do homework, since we were all so bad at producing anything like a regular series of essays for the last lot. So, "why not just do a diary?" Fine, that's easy then!

I did actually Think About It for a little bit, but nothing actually got done. Poor teacher! Worst class that she's ever had, I expect. This week, a new, hopefully easier to use, variant of the task.

Write whatever diary entry you want and send it to me.

I will interpret this rather liberally, and start plugging basic diary entries in this blog, in Mandarin. If I want to actually talk about something in more than a sedated toddler way then I may drop into English.

五月二十号

天气更好一点儿。上自行车到火车站。有很多人排队着。没有时间买车票、咖啡、报纸。

担心一点儿， 因为工作前进得不太流利。因为我有许多的设计，所以我慢慢进步。 今天下午有再一个会议，是e-learning的。太无聊了。我真忙，可能不去。

See, so many things to do. I have the usual trouble of being distracted by things off-stage, that is, projects other than the one I'm supposed to be working on. To-do list anxiety. Probably exacerbated by remembering the many times when tasks I'd forgotten about have suddenly become super-urgent.

At one time, I was using OmniOutliner to list everything, and to total the Number of Things. This got into the 300's quite easily, and was plainly ridiculous. It doesn't help that I've got about 5 jobs.

For the last month or two, I've switched to OmniFocus, and I'm trying to implement a Getting Things Done approach. This doesn't seem to be capable of adding up the number of open tasks, but I'm taking that as a Good Thing.

You can't drink the whole river, why should you know how many cups there are?