Category: General (Page 2 of 2)

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (Stephen King)

The Green Mile (Stephen King)

The Hobbit (J.R.R Tolkien)

The Bullet Journal Method (Ryder Carroll)

Really enjoying my reading this year, but still need to keep the discipline going.

I’ve been a fan of Stephen King for over 40 years, but I sort of stopped following his books in my late teens/early 20s. It’s been great rediscovering them through Audible – and I’m now slowly catching up. I’m focusing on his novels rather than novellas, collections or non-fiction work – but I will get to them in time – especially The Dark Tower series, which I hope to do in succession. Nearly finished The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, so I’ve lined up The Green Mile next.

My son said recently he was looking to start The Lord of the Rings. I remember starting it in my teens, but I got bored quickly. Too much scene-setting (and I was too much into Stephen King). I thought I’d try again, starting with the The Hobbit. Reading it on Kindle, and really enjoying it!

I’ve been keeping a Bullet Journal and a personal long-form journal for the last 6 months. With the bullet journal, I want to get back to the original ideas and philosophy, as I’m keen to track habits and use better collections. I’m slowly splitting my work life and home life, and need my journal to reflect that.

So. The start of the 25/26 season and a frankly dreadful start against newbies Sunderland.

What’s worrying is that we had a reasonable summer transfer list, and good pre-season results.

But the 3-0 opening day defeat at The Stadium of Light doesn’t bode well for what has been a horrid couple of seasons since David Moyes left.

As usual, it’s time to keep the faith and hope that Graham Potter can turn things around. Best we can hope for I think is mid-table this season unless there is some dramatic and frankly unexpected revival.

I’ll also be rooting for my birthplace team Dagenham and Redbridge as they try and do something after demotion to the National Conference Southern League at the end of 24/25. A loss and a draw thus far. 21st in the League.

It’s gonna be a fun season! Got to keep the faith. COYI! COYD!

I’ve decided to get rid of social media. Again.

X/Twitter is pure vitriol. Bluesky is seemingly heading that way.

The only account I really thought of keeping was LinkedIn, but Meta have messed me around with requesting driving licence/passport verification despite me having had an account up for a few months. So out it goes.

Other Meta-related accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) are going that way also. the only Meta app I’m staying with is WhatsApp, purely because family/friends/work colleagues are using it.

I’d prefer to use Signal…. maybe I’ll convince them all one day.

I’ve also removed Medium and Goodreads – no beef against either, I’m just not using the accounts enough to justify use of my (frankly precious) time.

The one site that’s staying? That’ll be YouTube. I’ve got a nicely curated range of channels (on subject relevant to this blog!) that I subscribe to, so that’ll do me. I might even have a go at making my own YouTube videos in the future.

My current channels I’m subscribed to are : Bullet Journal, Cal Newport, Carl Pullein, Gardening with Alan Titchmarsh, GTD focus, JashiiCorrin, Learn Horticulture, Next Action Associates, Rachelle in theory, Rewilding Jude, The Grey Gardener.

After a year or so pointing my blog domain name at Medium, I’ve come back to WordPress.

Why?

Well, editing posts on WP is just more flexible. I’m more in control of how things should look and can easily faff about with CSS/HTML and arrange as I want. I’m also fully in control of the content I post.

I’m not going to diss Medium, however. It’s an extremely valuable site – with great articles from talented writers – and if I find that I can devote more time to writing and, perhaps get good at it, I may look at it again.

I’ll keep “The Dunn Thing” publication going on Medium – for now it’ll be to duplicate some content from this site just to see if there’s any interest or traction.

Any hoo. I’m really pleased to be back with my WordPress site and hope to make some interesting posts, armed with my lovely Canva and SketchWow apps to hopefully make content interesting for y’all.