I'm back

Written May 24, 2023, tagged under post,music

Yesterday I performed the flute solo I've been working on these last few months, with my local orchestra the Misbourne Symphony Orchestra.

That was a draft I just found on my computer, dating back to late March and my concert. Since then, I've had a pretty eventful time!

The performance itself went well, and pretty well the whole family came along - my brothers and a various mixture of their partners and children, and my parents too. Also, it was lovely to see a number of friends in the audience too. I felt very seen!

Looking at the heart rate recorded by my watch on the day of the concert, someone could be forgiven for thinking I'd spent the whole day doing a workout - and at the time of the performance itself it went above 140 bpm. The following day was the extreme opposite - much of the day it was in the 50s-60s. There is a tale to be told about this transition, and its possible effects on health, but that's one for another day.

I've been feeling the urge to get back to blogging approximately daily for a while now, and finally find myself with a minute, so here goes. With some familiar themes of a lack of sleep prevailing, I've been finding myself a bit distracted by updating my technical setup, moving from Jekyll (which is great) to a similar one called Eleventy - but which uses technologies I'm trying to increase my familiarity with for work, so that would be a big win. You might therefore notice some changes around here for that reason.

Anything else to add? I've been somewhat infrequently using a meditation app called Balance, which I would really recommend. They are running a promotion at the moment to get a year's membership for free, so if this might be of interest then I'd recommend looking at it sooner rather than later.

Other than that, I will mention that my Achilles seems to be getting quite a lot better now, to the extent that I've been doing the running parts of my morning circuits, up to 2-3km, and so being back at ParkRun is now somewhere within range I hope. If anyone is in a similar situation, the general advice seems to be repeated slow heal raises and drops, and what has done the most for me (I think) is to do this with weights - eg a 20Kg kettlebell. The extra load seems to have really shifted things.

Anyway - time's up. Fingers crossed I'll be back tomorrow!