This past week has been downtime for me. And given I'm currently unemployed, I have a lot of time to be down in. With the exception of a week over Easter I've not had any holiday this year, and yet it has been (employing some of that English understatement skill) somewhat stressful.

In fact, the period of September last year through May this year has been the worst period of my working life. And that includes the time I was working for a company and wasn't being paid (behind nearly two months on salary, and every day expected to turn up and find the door locked with a sign saying "Gone bust"). I have been stressed, unhappy, upset, angry and increasingly doubtful of my ability. Oh, and then to cap it all my arm played up and left me in constant pain for four months.

So I'm not currently doing anything specific.

Instead, every morning after my wife leaves I think "what would I like to do today?" If the answer is that I feel like watching TV, I watch TV. If I feel like catching up on some reading, I do that. I go wherever the winds of whimsy take me.

I've done a little programming. But not on flourish or my book, because just thinking about them makes me want to burn my computer right now. I've left them so long it feels like a mountain to climb, not a fun walk. Instead I've been working on a little django app to do with t-shirts. Which, if you follow me on twitter you'll know I like to track what I wear every day (for over 800 days and counting). And so far I'm finding it fun to do things like make my own custom user model and integrate "Sign in with Twitter" to it. So I've been doing that amongst other non-computer things.