July 2025: Work and wisdom teeth
Hello friends! July has been a bit of a rollercoaster: I started with a short holiday in Heybridge to celebrate my birthday, midway through I finished working at my job, and I ended the month with a triple wisdom tooth extraction (ow).
Heybridge is a village in Essex, about an hour or so from where I live. It’s close to Maldon, a town famous for the salt it produces (although sadly the salt factory isn’t open to visitors). Heybridge is close to the coast, and has a river running through it – the River Blackwater. I always enjoy being near water, and this trip was a relaxing break for my birthday.
After I returned from my holiday, I had the joy of a triple wisdom tooth extraction. The good news is that it seems to have passed without complication – I was a bit sore for a few days after, and I was on a diet of yoghurt and soup, but I’m gradually returning to solid food and I don’t seem to have any lasting pain. Hooray for modern dentistry!
Finally, the exciting work news I mentioned in my last newsletter is that I accepted a new job. I finished my old job last Friday, and I’m taking a few weeks of rest before I go back to work (which I desperately need; I was napping all afternoon). A lot of my working hours in July were spent working on handover notes, tidying up old projects, and generally getting my old team ready to carry on without me.
I’ve deliberately tried to keep my diary light during my downtime – it’s tempting to book in lots of social plans and activities, but I really want to rest. This is the longest break I’ve taken from work since I entered full-time employment, and I’m excited to let myself unwind before jumping straight into a new role.
What have I been writing?
My favourite thing I wrote this month was Slipstitch, Queer Craft, and community spaces. I’ve mentioned in this newsletter that Slipstitch is closing, and we had the final Queer Craft in the shop in July. Now the doors have closed, I wrote about what the shop and the meetup meant to me, and what happens when we lose this sort of community space. (Rosie’s closing gift is the time-sensitive craft project I mentioned in my newsletter – I had to finish it and get it to the framer so I could give it to her before the shop closed.)
A few days prior, I wrote a short post about my job change, with some quick thoughts on the nearly nine years I worked in cultural heritage: Today was my last day at the Flickr Foundation. I’m sure I’ll have more to reflect on later, beyond that quick announcement.
Finally, I wrote a couple of articles about some backend improvements to my website: Moving my Glitch apps to my own web server and Minifying HTML on my Jekyll website.
Plus a dozen “today I learned” posts:
Listen for the popstate event to see when the user clicks the “back” button
Some countries have "poison centers" as part of their healthcare service
Group nodes in a Mermaid flowchart by putting them in a subgraph
You can change the size of tabs on web pages with the tab-size property
Using zipstream to stream new zip files to object storage with boto3
What’s making me smile?
Despite the sore jaw, here are two small joys from July:
🎭 My friend Nish makes beautiful merch for musical theatre shows, and on Tuesday I got to visit her pop-up stall at the Ambassadors Theatre. Her handwriting is gorgeous and all her stuff is lovely; so between that and birthday presents, I have quite a bit of her stuff.
✈️ This month’s YouTube discovery is Noel Philips, a travel vlogger who recently took a bunch of remote flights in Alaska. I particularly enjoyed this video about remote mail flights – supply journeys to isolated Alaskan communities.
I hope you all had a lovely July, and that a restful August awaits. I’ll write again soon!
~ Alex