Still thawing out

Still thawing out.

This weekend has really breezed by. I missed a monthly meeting, of the local group for which I am secretary, so I am currently working through what feels like three months of paperwork. Thanks to a local councillor and the locality manager, we seem to be making some progress on the area regeneration, so it will be good to get our teeth into something substantive.

The reason for my frozen demeanour is that I was helping out with the local Scout Troop replacing a wall to their hut. Of course I was helping out in the sense that I came along, and did what I was told, with no useful skills to speak of. My wife also helped out, doing the teas, coffees, and sandwiches for lunch, which I am sure was vastly more useful than what I managed. Still hopefully with these things it is as much as case of showing willing, as what you actually manage to achieve.

Otherwise, the usual catching up with odds and ends, and playing with my computer. I've done quite a bit of refreshing of my website, with a lot of the old stuff being deleted. With RapidWeaver it is so easy to put up a load of content, that I am constantly knocking against the size limit for what I can upload with my demon account. I suppose I could upgrade my account and get some more webspace, but it does not feel like a major priority at the moment, and I always hate to commit to regular monthly/annual outgoings. While a lot of the subsidiary pages have been deleted from the website, the look and feel has been standardised with the same Kwix bouncy menu being applied to the main pages.

Things are all very turbulent in global matters financial. Reading through the financial stuff in the papers, they seem very gloomy on the future for some of the banks. Accordingly I have changed my mind about buying some more shares in Bradford and Bingley, and will instead start putting money into a European Investment Trust.

On the usual musings,

I wonder if we should be redesigning our housing to get rid of the gardens. Housebuilders are generally pretty canny about what people want, and nowadays the ones round here are giving people a small back garden, a large monoblocked front garden, with what is not monoblocked, covered in membrane, with fancy gravel, and a few exotic shrubs poking through. Net result, you look out your front garden to see an exotic combination between a jungle and a car park. Maybe local authorities should take some initiative in tarting up these sad looking council estates, with the same combination of monoblock and strategically positioned shrubs.

Also on council housing, instead of large estates, break it down into more but smaller units of housing. That would help prevent people being too isolated, lost within big developments. I don't think that poverty is really the problem for many people nowadays, it is more a case of being distanced from the jobs and lifestyle that others take for granted. I suppose that is the thinking behind the terms social exclusion, and social inclusion.

On the subject of project management, I suspect that recently I have been focussing to much on listing and completing individual tasks, such that I am losing sight of the actual project goals that they are contributing towards. I will therefore try and apply the higher level goals to the tasks that I am doing. The famous study of civil servants that talks about the degree of control that they have having a major impact on their health, might be capable of being subverted by applying more focus on the project goals than the individual tasks.

Just a thought.

And tomorrow is Monday.