A Triumphant Return

The wilderness months are over. I’m back.
I lost my blogging inspiration back in the latter stages of 2015 and this blog was neglected. It evens turns out some people miss it. But suddenly it’s late spring of 2016 and I want to write. If this blog was a TV show (an unsettling thought), this is the start of a new season after a hiatus. Like a new TV show season, there is a slight change of direction. It’ll still be ostensibly the same but I’m thinking that the blog will focus less on what I’ve been doing and more on my opinions on things.
On which note, time to talk about what I’ve been doing. For a start, I’ve written a novel. An actual 50,000 and a bit word story that you can actually download as an eBook anywhere in the world. I still find it a little odd that I can actually say that. I wrote a short post about the book and how you can get it here.
I am still in the same job, a teaching assistant working with children who have autism. If anything it’s more fulfilling than ever. It helps that we now have a strong team of staff but it’s mostly good because of the wonders of autism. Yes, there are many challenges that come with autism but the incredible memory and way of looking at the world our children have never ceases to amaze me. I read a book about the history of autism that was really inspiring fairly recently. The author speculated that the human race needs people with autism to survive and wondered how many steps forward in science have and will be made by people with autism. It’s an incredible thought.
Meanwhile I find myself fitter and healthier than I have been for some time. This has largely come about thanks to buying a Fitbit device.  It’s a wristband that measures your daily steps and other statistics about your activity. I have managed to achieve the recommended step goal of 10,000 steps a day every single day since I got the device on the 27th April. For someone that used to barely move outside of work I think that’s pretty impressive. The app also allows you to count calories, something I’ve never done before, but it’s actually really useful for eating less. I’ve lost nearly a stone in weight thanks to all this which is great.
My latest hobby has also helped me to get some more exercise. I’m now a geocacher. Geocaching is like a treasure hunt on a grand scale. Essentially you look online or via an app and locate a cache. It’s usually a little box and when you find it, often using a GPS device, you sign the logbook which is found in the cache. It’s been great fun so far and has taken me to all sorts of exciting places that I probably wouldn’t have visited normally.
I did say caches are usually a little box and whilst that’s what many are there are plenty of others. Some are so tiny they are extremely hard to spot and others, like the one below, are just plain sneaky.
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If you’re lucky you might find a really cool one like the one below. To get the cache I had to use the attached screwdrivers to lift the cache up the drainpipe and out of the top! The possibilities seem to be endless!
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In general, life is a little better then it was before. I still have bad days but I think the number the proportion of good to bad days is much healthier than it was not so long ago. I am still in the ongoing progress of finding out who I am but I feel I’ve got at least a little closer.
OK, the blogging plan: new posts most weeks, usually on a Wednesday. I’ll share new posts on Facebook, if you are friends with me there, as well as Twitter. You can also arrange to have new posts e-mailed to you in the box on the right. Next week: a remarkable true story about a cat…

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