It's been awhile since I sat down for a drink. A fair bit has been going on.

I'm 9 months into the first serious relationship of my adult life after being intentionally single for quite a few years. It's nice, feels surprisingly natural. We get on well and balance each other out, finding ways to help each other grow. And we're quite balanced in long-term life plans: not favouring casual relationships, no desire for kids, indifferent to marriage... It's an adventure I'm enjoying and learning a great deal from.

The last few months has also seen me learning to drive and I passed my test a couple of weeks back with 0 faults. Now I just need to find a car. A large part of the motive was so I could be more self-sufficient with getting out to kayak. I want to get some coaching qualifications and help out at the club, especially with coaching people who are held back by their mental game. That's an area I think I can bring valuable experience and learnings to. It's also nice to be able to help out driving in the relationship.

Progress on the album release is slow but still moving. I have officially finished all the shortlisted tracks and the label are now deciding the final track-list. Some tracks will inevitably get cut as they want it to all fit on one vinyl, but we should be able to release the spares as digital promo EPs. Exciting times. I've got a fair few friends in various creative industries, so we have some cool plans cooking on how to present and promote the release.

B2B sales is hard. The marketing I've been managing for family the IT business has gotten us a fair few leads now for our flagship product, but we just can't get anyone over the line. It's not like B2C where if you can just convince someone to click 'buy' for a second then it's job done. With businesses there's multiple layers of approval, contracts, security questionnaires and all this other random shit. I think we might have to change which product we push the hardest, as the current approach is just not viable for much longer.