Every day I have gone out to look for weeds. Sometimes twice a day. I have been surprised at how fast they have shot up. Sometimes I weed in the morning and in the afternoon there are more than a dozen new weeds.
One of the problems is that the council seems to have stopped cutting roadside grass and the dandelions have taken over – the patch of grass outside my house is more yellow than green.
Today was another weeding day. My email provider has decided to close down the email address I have had for 25 years – and at very short notice (5 months before my current contract renewal date). So this means I have a lot to fix.
I have a number of email address books and I consolidated them into a single list of about 1000 emails. I went through and weeded that list into the people I might be in touch with in my non-work life. I went from 1000 to 200 on the list. As I went through I thought about whether I would ever contact people by email again – a lot of people have stopped using email.
Going through the list of internet sites where I have used the email address was another weeding exercise. Some places I had an account. Some places I just had registered for emails. Mailchimp was easy to sort out, but some mailing lists were impossible to change details on – I had to de-register then re-register with the new address. A lot of the sites I just deleted accounts – I no longer need them to have my details (it did make me think about how many companies have my email address).
I’ve been doing some light weeding in Facebook recently as well.
I got to thinking about the internet weeding in comparison to the garden weeding. The weeds compete with the plants that I want to see develop. I think there are a lot of contacts that I have that I would like to encourage more, but are being smothered by the growth of weeds. There are websites I would like to engage with more, but the large number of contacts from the “weeds” has smothered them.
Maybe I need to put as much effort in to internet weeding as I put in to garden weeding to keep the relationships I value most growing.
In other news – I ran out of yeast last night. I was going to try to switch to beer based bread but instead I decided to experiment with a more biscuit type baking with herbs and chili. Worked out really well – a mixture of two grains and a seed with a mix of herbs. The oregano came through really well. I always like savoury over sweet. Only one problem – too moreish.