It’s not been a good week overall, so I’ll start with something a bit more positive.

The idea behind the work-based podcast Maximo Bite Size is to create a series of short episodes that will help someone to prepare for the new Maximo functional certification. I felt I could justify writing some of the transcripts for these episodes as part of my work activity and this week I have written the first ten, two per day.

I’ve created a new page on Maximo Secrets called Maximo Bite Size and the articles are now visible although I have not publicised it via LinkedIn as I do normally.

Each episode will be around 5 minutes, so truly bite sized, but I am now wondering whether this is too short, and whether the articles should be merged. From a learning perspective a written article of 4-5 minutes is short enough to take in most of the information it is providing. The articles are packed with information there is not a lot of waffle, so short is best. But in podcast form is this too short? I’ll have to see whether a podcast naturally moves to the next episode when you have listened to the previous one.

It should have been a good week, but frost has decimated our large white magnolia by the front porch to a brown mess, and just as it was beginning to look really nice. It has damaged the two camelia bushes, the vibrant red is more like a dark burnt orange and by the end of the week there was a litter of petals on the gravel beneath. The daffodils which had flopped almost horizontal did survive and became almost vertical again a few days later.

The big news story for us this week was the addition of a marble fireplace and slate hearth in the playroom. Colin came to sweep the chimneys on Monday and the fireplace arrived the same day, as expected. Rod from Glowing Grates came on Wednesday to install and as they were dismantling the wood burner, they found a broken slate stuck in the flue bend. Then, when they shone the torch up the chimney, they said that they couldn’t continue with the install because the chimney needed sweeping. “It’s just been done”, I said, “well not good enough” they replied. The issue is that cleaning the chimney through the wood burner does not provide enough movement to get easily to the sides and there is a build-up of hard pieces of soot.

I agreed to them providing a register plate with a hinged opening for sweeping and after they had dismantled everything, they left to return late the following week if we could find a sweep with a spinner that could do a thorough clean of the chimney and provide a certificate. “We will also need a photo of the chimney after it has been cleaned”, they said.

I found a sweep who calls himself ‘The Big Sweep’ who could come the following Tuesday and if everything checks out OK Rod can come back the Thursday before Easter. But now we were left worrying, what if after a second sweep it is still not to the satisfaction of Glowing Grates? We could end up with the already high cost of adding a marble fireplace escalating with the potential that we might have to add a liner with the additional cost of scaffolding or find someone else to install the fireplace. That evening it decided to turn colder and all we could do was stare at a wood burner that stood on the hearth with no flue attached.

Bridge online on Tuesday was another up and down event, with Alan announcing, “that’s another bottom for us on that hand”. The result wasn’t a disaster, and we were still above 50%, but not at the 55% that I think we could achieve on a regular basis. I do need to use my digital scrapbook for writing about areas that I want to improve, but there is no way I’ve found of creating the suit symbols, so I’ll park that idea for a while.

It was Reggie’s 2nd birthday on Tuesday, 5th April. By Friday we noticed that he was beginning to eat a lot of grass and over the weekend he became lethargic and was sick and with loud rumblings in the tummy area he eventually succumbed at the other end. He went on a diet of chicken and rice, then chicken and pasta, but was now off his food completely and was not attempting to drink any water either. On occasion he would chase Badger around the lawn, and we would think that he was now improving, but our hopes were premature and by Sunday morning we had taken him to the out of hours vet service.

Our insurance allows us to call a vet, which we did do a few times, and this was particularly useful and reassuring. Reggie was suffering from Gastroenteritis and was put onto a couple of medicines, let’s hope they do the trick.

No golf for me this weekend as Peter is away. I spent time trying to catch up on some of the missing weeks to My 2022 Diary and My Podcasting Journey finding it difficult to recollect what had happened on days when I had not completed my diary, I really must get into the habit of writing this at night before going to sleep.

I was back onto Canva again to try and develop a podcast episode image that would work for the Maximo Bite Size articles that have no image. I was trying to leverage what I had developed for the Maximo Application Maps and eventually found a solution that would be quick to create. I will also now use the Excerpt area to sit alongside the image with the excerpt being a brief description of what someone will learn from the article.

This all looks as if it will work well, but some of the module colours I have used for the Application Maps may have to change, a dark blue on a cobalt blue background will hardly be noticeable. Most of the module colours are pastels, so they should be OK, I guess I won’t know if the colours clash or get lost with the background until I draft the articles for those modules, but I won’t worry about tomorrow’s problems this week.

The Fitbit weekly progress report showed that I scraped past the 30,000 steps for the week, less than a third on the previous week. A bad week, except for the Maximo Bite Size articles.