anchorhold

The weather is very solidly autumnal, but still unexpectedly warm... I'm going through the usual season change delight of waking up every hour or hour and a half because the temperature is wrong, and not enjoying the concomitant insomnia. Last night I actually only woke up three times, which was a lovely change, but I started out under my duvet, switched at midnight to the thinner blanket, at four had to ditch that and go back to the sheet I spent the summer under, and then at just before six woke up cold again.

During the day I'm putting extra layers on regularly, and having to thaw my feet before bed so I can fall asleep at all, but at night: TROPICAL PARTY. I don't know what my body is doing to produce so much heat in the night (it's not hot flushes or anything, I just apparently run super hot!) but probably I could personally solve the energy crisis if I could harness it.

Mostly though I'm hibernating, eating delicious food, reading lots of novels, and trying to go to bed early enough that I can get an adequate total number of hours despite everything.

Miss H and I have just finished Babylon 5 S3, which was very satisfying! She still thinks "Severed Dreams" is the best episode, and really who can argue, but she had to admit that it was an excellent cliffhanger, especially when you imagined having to wait three months for the next episode. And of course we heard yesterday of Walter Koenig's death - though, unlike far too many of his B5 co-stars, he reached a pretty good age. Hard to argue with 90.

We'll only wait a week or so before season 4 - we usually watch a couple of films between seasons, so it's time for the Halloween-themed section of our to-watch pile. Stardust tonight!

I have had both my flu and COVID jabs! With no more side-effects than a sore spot on my arm from the COVID one that lasted a few days, so that was nice, although it didn't make up for how appalling I felt on Tuesday (some sort of unholy combination of sleep-deprivation nausea and headache, rogue menstrual cramps breaking through the medication that keeps my periods away, and a roiling stomach unhappy with something I ate). Relieved to be only normal levels of rubbish today, honestly.

Instead I have been wallowing in the toils of New Outlook. We all know that change is hard, but I do try and give things a go before writing them off - but this time I don't think I've found a single thing that is an improvement, and every noticeable change so far has been for the worse. I keep enabling it and then having to go back because I can't deal with something. Half the time it loses all my secondary mailboxes (this was particularly fun last month, when I was dealing with an issue that generated lots of notification emails to one of them).

But the bigger problems I'm having is with places where Microsoft clearly feel that I'm interrogating the text from the wrong perspective. For instance, in old Outlook you have a little notification pop-up window, which comes up ahead of meetings and other calendar items, and then the items sit in it until you dismiss them. This is something I use a lot for, like, recurring tasks - I put into my calendar that I need to send the bulk email every other Tuesday, and then on Tuesday morning it looms up to spoil my whole day. But in new Outlook, it pops up in the corner of my window fifteen minutes before it's due, and then disappears forever. There is now an entire "notification pane" in the right-hand column, but I have no idea what it's for, because it's permanently empty and even if you have it open as a notification pops up in the corner, it doesn't show anything. After a bunch of web searching, the conclusion appears to be ¯\(ツ)/¯ don't use your calendar for reminders. But I can't tell where Microsoft thinks I should be putting recurring items so that they can remind me when they're due - like, is there another MS Office product that does that? It's not any of the ones I know! Do any of you who use Office have any insights into this mystery?

That's my biggest annoyance, but there's a whole bunch of little things - like, you can no longer look at the bottom of the screen and see a count of how many emails you have in the inbox you're looking at. The official recommendation is that you can mark everything as unread and then see the unread count on the folder list, but a) that's annoying and b) sometimes I don't want to mess up what is or isn't marked as read?? And you can't open several emails at once; you can open emails one after another until they're all open, but I regularly have scenarios where I want to open twenty emails at once in order to transfer information from all of them into a spreadsheet, or find duplicate / chase / follow-up emails in a batch so that I can delete the rest of the chain, and both of those are much easier to do with a series of open windows than when I'm scrolling up and down a big list, and it's so much easier to select them all and click "open" than it is to individually open sixty-four emails from the folder of shame. And I get a bunch of notification emails that sometimes have to wait for action until a new person starts, so I edit the email to specify the name and start date at the top, which means I can see at a glance why it's in my inbox... but new Outlook doesn't allow you to edit received emails any more.

Every day is a delightful opportunity to explore fun new frustrations!! At the moment I can switch back to old Outlook when I get too annoyed, but who knows how long that will last...