The best time I have had at this
I am enjoying this more than I have in years.
I do not mean the tinkering round the edges of it. I mean the work. A thing I start on a Friday evening is running on the box by Sunday, and the part in the middle is the part I like. I have liked nearly all of it.
The shape of a working day has changed under me. It used to be dull work with a good bit at the end of it. The dull work now gets done somewhere I cannot see, and what is left of the day is nearly all the good bit. That is a real change in how the hours feel, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
What bothers me is that I have started using it as an answer. Somebody asks how I feel about where all this is going, and I say it is the best time I have had at this, as though that settled something. It settles nothing. The pleasure and the trouble come out of the same place. What makes the work pleasant is the removal of the part I was paid for. I get the interesting half of a trade, and the dull half was most of what anybody was paying for.
I do not want to stop either. Nobody is making me use it, and I would not give it up. Not wanting to give it up is not the same as it being alright, and I have caught myself treating the two as the same thing on more than one evening.
I keep a record of my own judgement now. A text file, one entry for each thing I build: what I would have done differently, written down before I look at what came back. Sometimes mine is worse, and I say so in the file. Sometimes mine is better and I do nothing about it. Either way the comparison is the only place left where I find out what I actually think about a piece of work, rather than what I think of it after being shown the good version.
I have had worse years at this desk. I have never had one where I had to be this careful about why I was enjoying it.