On to day 2 of #500words.

I'm feeling quite tired this morning. I stayed up later than I expected to last night and for some reason did not sleep well, just couldn't seem to settle for some reason.

I have stuck to the rule, resisting the urge to dive into my phone after silencing its alarm this morning, and nor have I opened my email.

It looks like it is sunny outside. I think we are going to visit my parents later today so some pleasant weather would be good. We'll be dropping off presents for my niece who has her birthday this weekend and chocolate eggs for her and the rest of my sisters' kids.

Yesterday I'd mentioned how this might fit into another practice that I am working on and in fact it fits into two, although one of them I had lapsed from slightly.

I've never been a brilliant speaker. In particular when I was younger I suffered from stammering and while this has subsided as I have gotten older - I think in part due to being a bit more confident in myself - I do still have troubles with speaking too fast or not clearly enough, particularly when I am nervous or stressed.

What I have been doing to try and work on that is making short audio recordings, just a couple of minutes, of myself speaking out loud while I try to do so clearly and confidently. To that end I have a dynamic vocal microphone mounted on my desk where I've had an audio mixer as part of my sound set up for some time. Along with the computer this gives me a easy way to make recordings.

Up until now I have been mostly speaking about the recording process and any changes I had made to approaching it, along with reading from news articles that interested me on the particular day in question.

Yesterday I read out the first of my #500days posts, and I also experimented with video recording this as well, having figured out a way to use the mounting hardware I have to position my webcam alongside the microphone.

While not quite as strange as listening to my own voice used to be, probably because we're all long used to mirrors, there is something odd about watching yourself speak. I suppose I'll get over that in time if I continue with this.

Despite the aim of this being to create some space from the clamouring of social media it's not easy to not think about the news. I'd probably describe myself as a realist than a pacifist - I think armed conflict should be a last resort but I don't feel we'll ever live in a world where it is completely off the table. What I don't understand it folks, particularly those with power and responsibility, who would charge into war with gleeful abandon. Our history is more than littered with tragedies where all too frequently the success has paled into insignificance next to the cost in human lives.

That's me done for today, time to see what the morning brings.

(526 Words)

Saturday 2017-04-15 0733