Dan Q

Tag: travel

F-Day plus 12

It’s now twelve days since a flood struck my house, causing the ground floor to be submerged under a couple of feet of water and ultimately leading us to kick off an insurance claim process.

A home office with its floor stripped down to poured concrete and an industrial dehumidifier running.
My regular home office of the last six years sits stripped-down, with no flooring, skirting boards, or power (with the exception of the specialised circuit powering an industrial dehumidifier).

And man, a home insurance claim seems to be… slow. For instance, we originally couldn’t even get anybody out to visit us until F-day plus 10 (later improved to F-day plus 7). The insurance company can’t promise that they’ll confirm that they’ll “accept liability” (agree to start paying for anything) until possibly as late as F-day plus 17. Nobody will check for structural damage until F-day plus 191.

Oh, and the insurance company have advised us to look for something like a “12 month let with a 6 month break clause”, which is horrifying. We could be out of our home for up to a year.

Dan, a white man, stands with his arms raised outside a nicely-decorated converted barn.
Right now, though, we’re spending two weeks in this holiday let about half an hour’s drive from our house. It’s pretty nice, except that we have to commute over the ever-congested single-lane Burford Bridge to get the kids to and from school every day2.

Some days it feels like being stuck in a nowhere-place… but simultaneously still having to make the regular everyday stuff keep ticking over. Visiting the house- currently stripped of anything damp and full of drying equipment – feels like stepping onto another planet… or like one of those dreams where you’re somewhere familiar except it’s wrong somehow.

But spending time away from it, “as if” on holiday except-not, is weird too: like we’re accepting the ambiguity; leaning-in to limbo. Especially while we’re waiting for the insurance company to do their initial things, it feels like life is both on hold, and not-allowed to be on hold.

A nervous-looking French Bulldog in a teal jumper looks up from under a desk.
The dog gets it. I had to take her to the house for a while on Monday3 and she spent the whole time leaning against my feet for reassurance.

And I worry that by the time they’re committed to paying for us to stay somewhere else for at least half a year, they lose any incentive they might have to contract for speed. There’s no hurry any more. We’re expected to just press pause on our home, but carry on with our lives regardless, pretending that everything’s normal.

So yeah, it’s a weird time.

Footnotes

1 I’m totally committed to this way of counting the progress, which I started on F-day plus 3. I get the feeling like it might be a worthwhile way of keeping track of how long all of this takes.

2 Normally, the younger and older child are able to get to school on foot or via a bus that stops virtually outside our house, each day, so an hour-plus round-trip to their schools and back up to twice a day is a bit of a drag! We’re managing to make it work with a little creativity, but I wouldn’t want to make it a long-term plan!

3 And do some work from there, amidst the jet engine-like noise of the dehumidifiers!

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Sky potholes

Amusing announcement from the captain of my plane out of Tenerife South this afternoon. In place of the usual recommendation to keep your seatbelt fastened while seated in case of turbulence, he advised that there was a “risk of potholes”.

I’m sure the analogy makes sense to the Brits aboard, but I hope it translated well for the Spanish speakers on this plane!

Dan Q found GC45BDD Mirador La Paz

This checkin to GC45BDD Mirador La Paz reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

My partner Ruth and I are staying at the Meliá hotel down in the city, from which amazingly I was able to get a WiFi connection despite the considerable distance!

Dan and Ruth stand on an overlook, pointing at a seaside Meliá hotel in the distant city below.

As others have observed, the hint is misleading for this cache. Substitute the word “right” in place of the word “left” and the hint makes more sense!

SL, TFTC! And thanks for the great view!

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Dan Q did not find GC1PYFN Parque Taoro

This checkin to GC1PYFN Parque Taoro reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Ruth and I made several attempts today without success: a muggle was sat nearby in such a way that access to the GZ was obstructed. We took a walk to the nearby Anglican church – whose architecture, if you ignore the volcanic rock, is uncannily like that of Anglican churches in the UK – but then we returned the muggle had very much set up camp and was going nowhere. We attempted to find a way to the cache from the opposite side without luck, and eventually had to give up. 😔

Dan Q found GC9MCDM The Queen Of Mystery

This checkin to GC9MCDM The Queen Of Mystery reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

After solving the riddle yesterday, my partner Ruth and I came up from the seafront to find this cache today. What a delightful spot to hide the cache, and what a wonderful puzzle (and spot of local literary history) with which to bring us here.

Dan leans against a wall in a tropical park, writing on a log sheet.

SL, FP awarded. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK. TFTC!

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Without Bloganuary

In January 2024 I participated in Bloganuary, a “write a blog post every day for a month” challenge organised by Automattic. I wasn’t 100% impressed by the prompts made available and was – as an employee of Automattic – shuffling towards trying to help make them better in a future year. To be part of the solution!

I didn’t participate in January 2025, because I was on sabbatical and – as well as it feeling a little “close” to work! – Bloganuary intersected with a winter-sun trip to Trinidad & Tobago, where – despite a state of emergency being declared – Ruth and I unlocked a geohashing graticule, experienced small-world serendipity, and generally explored beautiful and remote places.1

View of waves crashing into a bay on a rugged island coastline.
There’s definitely something in this ‘winter sun’ thing that seems to help me stay sane in the cold dark months. This morning, I’m blogging from a hotel balcony in Peurtro de la Cruz, Tenerife.

Of course, two significant things changed since then:

  • As part of a sweeping range of redundancies, I was let go from my position at Automattic2, and
  • Automattic ceased running Bloganuary: I’m guessing that the folks responsible for making it happen were among the many that Automattic decided to axe, or else their shifting priorities – reflected by their waves of layoffs – are no longer compatible with providing that service to bloggers.

Ah well, I figured. I’d just do my own thing. I can write something for every day in January 2026, can’t I?

Generating a chart...
If this message doesn't go away, the JavaScript that makes this magic work probably isn't doing its job right: please tell Dan so he can fix it.

Turns out that yes, I can. 53 posts over 31 consecutive days, so far this year. This year might be my fastest run at 100 Days To Offload yet.

In general, I suppose I’ve been blogging more-frequently lately. Why is that? I guess it’s been a realisation that a blog post doesn’t always have to be polished to perfection. I still write long-form posts which require research and planning, like setting up a network of Windows 3.x VMs just to get screenshots of what programming then looked like or making that podcast episode with the music in it… but I’m also feeling more-free to just express myself in the moment. To share things I see that look interesting or funny or pretty, or just whatever I’m thinking. I’ve been using “kinds” to categorise my posts so it’s easy for people to avoid my more-inane stuff if they like, but that’s a secondary consideration because ultimately… I blog for me.

I’ve also been trying to make blogging more social. Over the last year I’ve made an effort to (visibly) “follow” more personal bloggers and correspond with them (including in new – by which I mean old – ways like exchanging postcards!).

Anyway… all of which is to say that I’ve been writing more and I’ve been loving it. The best way to read more of what I’m writing, if you’d like to, remains: by subscribing via RSS.

But regardless of how and why you’ve come to find this post – thanks for dropping be: drop me a message and say hi and let’s be friends.

Footnotes

1 I’d anticipated having a lack of Internet access, but in fact 4G was widespread throughout both islands and overall I managed to post something on every day except three in January 2025.

2 Based on friends I’ve spoken to, there seem to have been a lot more folks let go since; the company seems to be shrinking quite a lot, which might go some way to explaining my second observation too.

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Dan Q found GC9PVXZ EL CRÁTER DE LA RAMBLETA

This checkin to GC9PVXZ EL CRÁTER DE LA RAMBLETA reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

My partner Ruth and I were disappointed not to be able to hike any of the trails up here today – they’re all closed – but enjoyed finding both the nearby Virtual and this Earthcache geocaches. The evidence of lava flows (that remain to this day!) are really quite impressive.

Dan stands by an information board in front of a broad volcanic crater.

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Hollandaise Sauce

If I’m on holiday and a hotel offers me eggs benedict for breakfast, I’ll almost always order it. But I’d never make it at home.

I tell myself that this is because hollandaise sauce is notoriously easy to mess up. That I don’t want to go through the learning process only to make something inferior to what I eat as a holiday treat.

But maybe it’s just that my brain wants to keep eggs benedict as a signifier that I’m on holiday. That I can unplug from the world, stop thinking about work, and enjoy a leisurely breakfast with some creamy eggs and a long black coffee.

Maybe eggs benedict just has to remain “holiday food”, for me.

Airborne RSS

RSS readers rock. Having a single place you connect for a low-bandwidth bundle of everything you might want to read means it doesn’t matter how slow the WiFi is on your aeroplane, you can get all the text content in one tap.

(I’m using Capy Reader to connect to FreshRSS, by the way.)

Time to catch up on some news, blogs, etc.!

Invisible Dog

Our dog has decided that the perfect place to lie down at our holiday accommodation is… on a staircase whose carpet is the same colour as her!

I’m grateful for her very-visible blep… or I’d have tripped over this camouflaged pupper several times already!

A champagne-coloured French Bulldog lies on a step of a staircase carpeted in the same colour as herself, u her tongue in medium-blep.

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Note #27758

Obviously I wasn’t planning on going to the US anytime soon, but if I did… they might struggle with my visa application when I put every “email address I’ve used for the last 10 years” on, because I actively use a variety of catch-all domains/subdomains.

I’ve probably missed some addresses (e.g. to which I’ve only ever received spam that’s since been deleted), but a conservative estimate of the number of personal email addresses which I’ve sent mail from or to would be… 7,669 email addresses. 🤣

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