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Now - February 2024

·3 mins· from Ottawa

This is my now page - it's what I'd tell my friends if they asked me, "What are you up to right now?"
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Reflections on France trip #

In November last year, I booked a digital nomad trip to France for a couple of weeks in January 2024, primarily because it was cheap and I figured I would enjoy it. It wasn’t quite my favourite digital nomad trip ever: I felt a little unsettled as the trip came up on my calendar and I don’t think I enjoyed it quite as much as I had thought I would. More on that later.

I was very happy to make time to hang out with Mi Yen in London for a weekend: we got to eat at some awesome restaurants like BRAT and Humo - Humo got a Michelin star after we went there, and deservedly so!

I had a mishap with a cancelled flight and ended up changing my plans from a city-hopping tour of Marseille -> Montpellier -> Toulouse -> Bordeaux to a more simplified itinerary, spending one week in Bordeaux and one week in Toulouse. It was a pretty good time overall, and especially great to spend some time in Toulouse (seeing the game vs Lens with Julien from the Toulouse analyst desk was incredible stuff). I also got to check out Carcassonne, which was every bit as awesome a medieval city as I had hoped and so cool to walk around.

I think in hindsight, I wasn’t able to strike any sort of balance: I was unhappy with how much time I spent working instead of exploring, and I was unhappy with the progress I did make on the work I was doing - it’s just harder to work when away from your usual setup and timezones. I wish I’d taken one week fully off, rather than changing scenery for two weeks but not getting to fully enjoy it.

I also came down with covid on the trip home and it proceeded to flatten me for nearly three weeks. Another part of the frustrations is that I had felt like I was restarting good eating and exercise habits in January on the back of new year’s resolutions, and between the trip and covid I’ve lost almost a whole month of progress and have to fight my way back through inertia on all of the things I wanted my year to look like. I’m frustrated with myself, a seemingly perennial feeling.

Working on #

Drowning with work deadlines, mostly, and balancing a couple of freelance projects on top of it. I want to work on rebuilding physical habits and getting back into some side projects but I’ve been ever so exhausted and just flat out lack the energy and willpower right now.