A Belated Check-in

You know when you have something nagging at you, where it’s “I should be doing this, I want to do this, but I just don’t have any drive”? That’s been me looking at this editor most days for the last 2 months. Ennui, I think they call it. But not really through boredom in my case. Just the overwhelming sense of *waves arms at everything* getting on top of me a bit lately. So now that I’m managing to get some words out, what have I been up to?

Training

At the start of September I virtually attended a four-day, Microsoft-delivered training course, covering AZ-104: Microsoft Azure Administrator. The course itself was good, with great instructors. It was also a nice change of pace to the relentless project work I’d been doing. The one knock against it was there was too much content that could be covered in the four days that in reality we only covered a fraction of what could be in the exam.

As the instructors acknowledged - the course by itself is not enough to pass the exam; it needs more practice, reading, and knowledge. Which is to be expected, but I don’t think I appreciated just how much more would be needed.

Right now, I’m scheduled to take the exam at the end of November, but I’m not feeling like I have enough time with everything that’s going on in the race towards the end of the year. I’ll give it another week or two of trying to get into my groove with regards to study and revision, and if I’m still not comfortable then I’ll reschedule to early next year.

I should have attended an AZ-204 course at the start of October, and sat that exam… today, I think… but I rescheduled that one last month when I realised what was involved in the AZ-104 exam. I also felt that the project was too busy at the time to justify leaving my colleagues a person down for another week of training so soon after the last one. AZ-204 is still in my plans, it’s just been moved down the road a bit.

Work

I can’t go into my project work, at all, but the other things going on at work have been both weird and rewarding.

The first was I was asked to record a short (thirty seconds) video on the positive experiences I’ve had over the last year - a kind of “yes, this last year and a bit has been rubbish, but there were good points” feel good piece - my video was largely on training and personal development. It was combined with several others and played as part of a video package at the annual meeting which kicks off our new financial year. So a video of me in my tiny home office, talking quickly about how I’d achieved several certifications in the last year, played to several thousand colleagues in the UK. Even though I knew the video was coming during the livestream, it was incredibly bizarre to see myself onscreen.

In a similar vein I was asked to give a seven minute talk on training and development to a couple of hundred colleagues in an account-wide all-hands call. I seem to have acquired a reputation for thinking about this topic a lot while also putting things into action, and it was insights on this “doing part” I was asked to get across to my colleagues. I plan to write a blog post on this in the future as it’s something I’ve been mulling over in my head for a while and deserves a longer-form expression.

Delivering the talk itself didn’t make me as anxious as I’d expected. I didn’t stutter and uhm-and-ah as much as I might once of. So I’m getting better at this, at least. I did find it all went very fast though; I think we were running behind so the person controlling the slides sped things along at a clip, faster than I’d practiced. By the end of it I was quite out of breath. I think in part it’s because I’m highly conscious of breathing too hard while wearing a headset, so I breath quite shallowly when not on mute. But that’s something I can work on - my breathing while delivering a talk.

Hobby

Not much to report here, really. I started on an Armies on Parade entry, which is usually one of the hobby projects I’m most able to focus on and work through each year. But this year isn’t going to happen. I managed to get the barest base of a board created; just a 22"x30" board in a retro flocked style. I started on pieces of scenery to decorate the board with, and managed to get the army to parade on it built and primed… and then I just seemed to stop. I’m not entirely sure why, but every time I thought about painting or making progress I just… didn’t do it. So I’ve resigned to not completing Armies on Parade this year. Hopefully I’ll be back to it in time for next year.

I’ve also made a few small inroads into items in my backlog, and not *just* by adding to it (although I have done more of that than I’d like). Assembling the odd kit here, priming something there, maybe making small progress on basecoats. But never much of anything, and certainly not getting anywhere near finished. I said in the talk I gave recently that “even small steps add up” and I feel I need to remember that myself. The only real issue is I have so much stuff “in flight” right now it’s hard to juggle it all or store it conveniently and safely when it’s not being worked on. I think I’m getting to a point where some things are going to have to be packed away - not permenantly, but properly out of the way - to give me some breathing room. Maybe that will give me the headspace I need to make some proper progress. Or maybe some dedicated time off to work on things might be an idea? I’m not sure.

Wrap-up

So that’s the major events I want to get into from the last couple of months. Hopefully it won’t be another couple of months before I manage to get the words out again - I really want to write that personal development article, for one thing - but with the way things seem to be right now I can’t make any promises