When I handed my notice in during January, I knew that I had a 3 month notice to serve, and so decided that I would serve it in its entirety and then give myself some time off to study the "What next?" question. 

I’m now 2 weeks in to that time out, and I'm enjoying having some time to work through some ideas, catch up with friends, visit exhibitions and basically, gather up inspiration. 

During these first 2 weeks I've had a holiday, seen some exhibitions, read everything in my Instapaper backlog, started collating information relating to one of my ideas, written lots of blog posts - some of which are conclusions to things, others of which are just stepping stones along the way, but all of which are testament to me having the time to cogitate, work things out and react to them, rather than just ingest them.

From where I currently sit, the ability to quit, regroup and consider rationally the "but what next?" question, is very lucky. Several people have said they think it's brave, but it has never felt like I needed courage to do this. It has felt like the right thing, the sensible thing. How could I look for a job, whilst committing myself to the one I was doing? How can I guide and inspire a team whilst looking for my way out? One of my values is, and always has been, integrity, and this didn't feel like a very honest approach.

This time is important to me, has given me some head space, and as a result some of my answers to the "but, what next?" question have changed. So far I'm getting a lot out of it and I'm excited about what the next couple of weeks bring.

The Scott's Last Expedition exhibition at the Natural History Museum is wonderful. I popped along there last week, paid my entrance fee, walked through the door and found myself immersed in the 1910s. The exhibition is really well put together, leading through different aspects, from sourcing supplies, and funding, to crossing the seas to get to Antarctica, to the hut and the preparations being made, through to the assault on the pole, and then on to the scientific legacy left behind. I spent 2.5 happily absorbing hours there.

I think that this exhibition, for me, was so effective because of the way in which it provided the background details, the quantities of the foodstuffs taken (450kg of golden syrup), the social and environmental backgrounds, giving me a much deeper understanding of what it was like, not just what happened. It made the tale real, rather than just an oft-told story, and it took me on the journey with it through the different stages. I loved that it reminded me just how remote Antarctica was then with a once a year mail delivery/collection meaning that the menfolk wrote letter diaries to their loved ones - whole notebooks worth of correspondence which once per year would be collected and dispatched. Just imagine the excitement and trepidation that the folks at home would feel when there once yearly dispatch was expected, with the letters telling of the highs and lows of life in a wooden hut on a frozen land. Imagine how news would be passed around the family and friends who hadn’t heard anything for a year, how treasured these must have been, read and re-read until there was a danger of them falling apart. Some of these letter diaries are included amongst the exhibits and they strike me as precious, real (although possibly understated due to both the period of history and the desire not to upset and worry the folks back home) and amazing reflections of what life was like at the time, not just a reflection from a later time.

I’d heartily recommend the exhibition, but I would say that I think it benefits from having plenty of time to absorb all the information, watch the videos, listen to the audio and generally be fascinated and consumed by it.

From 1982 until the early 2000s Mum kept a daily diary. It's a journal style thing - what she did, who she visited, where she went to.

A few weeks ago I started ploughing through a couple of them looking for references to choir to help on the Music chapter of the storyline project (which was delivered the other day). In doing so I stumbled across some lovely quotes, which I tweeted. Two people suggested a ”Stuff my Mum said” twitter feed, and last week I set that up.

It’s called 30YearsAgoToday and I have used twuffer to queue up about 3 weeks worth of tweets, all from her 1982 diary. I've just selected one or two sentences from the entry, sometimes because the wording made me giggle, sometimes because it seems important or relevant or just because it feels pertinent.

I've scheduled them for around the 9pm mark as this seems to make sense for a daily update. They've been active for a couple of weeks now, and I love getting them in my timeline every day. My little bit of reflection into Mum’s life. For example, the day before my birthday is a reference to a cake that didn't go to plan, and ended up in a trifle. I remember a cake that went wrong, but I didn't know which birthday it was, or even whose birthday.

I'm finding this delightful - this bit of the storyline project is just for me, and I’m fine with that.

The Listening Project, which allows anyone to upload their own conversations, is aided by smartphones and computers with inbuilt microphones and audio software, and the ease of editing and placing sound archives online.

There are some absolutely lovely snippets of conversations recorded on The Listening Project site, some really moving stories shared in just 3 or 4 minutes of recording.

From a storyline perspective, the piece of "data" that I haven't digitised or worked with in any form yet is a C90 cassette. My neglect isn't because it's forgotten. Rather because it's remembered.

Written words, even hand written ones, are normal and ordinary and everyday. We encounter them in many forms - scribbled notes, shopping lists, birthday cards, notes. The same is true of photographs - there are photos in most rooms in my house, the faces, even of long gone family members are familiar and regularly in my eye-line.

Voices are notably different. At The Story Matthew Herbert spoke about the lack of audio recordings of our shared history, of ambient sounds. For many, many years, people would go to a photographic studio and record their images, but people rarely recorded their voices.

I have the tape in front of me. It's labelled as "Conversations" in my hand writing. On side A it says "Conversation with Gran - 26/12/98". On side B it says "Conversation with Mum & Dad - April/98". I don't know if I've ever re-listened to them, beyond, I hope, checking that it had actually been recorded. I don't think I had any form of script, or plan. I think I just made it up as I went along. I'm not even sure why I did it at the time - it was before I lost or started to lose any of them.

This is now much more significant to me, as none of these individuals has a voice I can hear anymore. Almost too much significance as I can't bring myself to listen. I'm not sure whether how much of it is because I'm worried about the emotional pull and that I'll find it upsetting and how much is because I fear disappointment, that I find it isn't audible, or isn't interesting or relevant.

One day, I'll take the plunge. Just not today!

I explained my storyline project to a few people the other week, and realised that I needed a much shorter, snappier, understandable explanation. Here's what I've got to so far:

"When Mum’s carers put her to bed for bed rest in an afternoon I'd like them to be able to choose the right thing to leave on her TV for her, the thing she’d have chosen"

Mum is entirely dependent on others to make her decisions for her. I make the financial and long-term care provision choices. The team at her home make the medical and short-medium term care choices. Her key-worker and other carers make the day-to-day small decisions. It’s these decisions that the storyline has the power to influence. And it's these that probably make the biggest difference to her. 

What I mean is that I know that if I'm somewhere where the TV is on, and it's on a channel showing a programme I'd never choose to watch, and yet the person who put it on has left the room and taken the remote control with them, I'm likely to get a bit frustrated or annoyed. I have the ability to get up and go somewhere else, or ask for the control, or do any number of other things to resolve this for myself. But Mum doesn't. Mum is at the mercy of others to choose wisely for her. So, what I want to achieve via this storyline project is to to give her carers enough background knowledge to help them make as many of these little choices in the most appropriate way possible.

When we chose our new car last year, one of the extra things that we were looking for was a good experience playing music, audiobooks and podcasts. We wanted to plug in our devices and for the sounds to be effortlessly streamed through the in-car sound system.  Our previous solution was via an FM transmitter. These worked, but were temperamental to say the least, and Richard used to get rather annoyed with the amount of retuning needed on any medium to long term journey.

So, we chose to have the Blue&Me option installed into our new car.

We plugged in an iPhone and got the following, somewhat arrogant, screen:

The car seems to have become a very expensive accessory. Once the device is plugged in, you can no longer control what plays via the device, instead the driver gets forward and back controls on the steering wheel and that is about it. So, if you want to change from a podcast to music, or to chose a new album to listen to, you need to disconnect the phone and start it playing before reconnecting the device. 

Richard recently gained a google android phone and decided to see what happened when it was plugged in. Like the iPhone, the driver gets forward and back selectors over what is playing. Unlike the iPhone we couldn't work out how to set something up to play. There are three or four different media players that we found on the phone, and setting anything playing via any of them seemed to result in a different song playing through the phone speakers to that playing through the in-car stereo. Totally baffling and we failed to work it out.

So, this is definitely an improvement - at least for an iPhone - but isn't good enough yet. 

Amongst my selection of lovely birthday gifts from Richard was a Mu plug - this is a normal 3 pin UK plug with a (literal) twist (the pins twist into a line so that the plug is much more compact for transporting). This is going to be incredibly useful for my train trips to the North to see Mum as I often plug electrical kit in on the train to get a bonus charge.

I decided that I'd make a sock style case for it. It took me 3 attempts to get it to the point where I'm happy with it and Richard did ask why I was doing this. Did I think it needed a case? Or was it more of a ”because I can” thing. I think it was mainly the latter. 

Ages ago I'd seen a pattern for an iPhone/iPad sock and it seemed simple. Obviously I didn't download the pattern, that would have been far too sensible, and I was in a holiday cottage with no internet. So I experimented and improvised.

It's made with Sirdar Snuggly baby bamboo DK (mainly tigger but also with a little bit of skittle) and has helped use up a bit more of my yarn stash.

I started off with a 4.5mm hook and did a foundation chain of 12 (initial attempts were 12 with 4mm, and 11 with 4.5mm before settling on this). I switched to a 4mm hook, and did a single chain and placed a marker here. I then worked into the back side of the 12 switches, and then back along the front side of the stitches to complete the loop, slip stitching into the marker. After that it was simple enough, single chain, single crochet into every stitch, measuring against the plug every couple of rows. The use of the marker was introduced on this, attempt 3, and made all the difference as on the first 2 attempts I couldn't quite work out where the starting point was which led to some really wonky edges.As the bag that this plug will mainly travel in is blue with an orange trim I decided to do this sock as orange with a blue trim.

And I'm rather pleased with it. I'm also quite pleased that I worked this out on my own, using trial and error, and a bit of logic. It would have been very easy to have relied on the internet or friends but instead I used my brain and that feels good. The only way I could explain this process to Richard was related to debugging an algorithm, when sometimes you just need to throw away what you had and start again building on what worked. And once you've got it sorted, you recognise it as being right (or right enough!).