After this week I am on summer hiatus for a few weeks. I may post here or not, I’ll see. It was a regular week, but with a focus on finishing some stuff, and otherwise avoiding new stuff until I will be back. Y was at home a few days, so that limited both E’s and my working time somewhat.

This week I

• Did most of the monthly invoicing
• Had to rebalance the week a bit, as Y was home ill for the first half
• Participated in a risk management session with a client
• With our team did the monthly financials call, and discussed our work during the summer
• Discussed our teams participation in one of the BEtreats, organised by Bev and Etienne which I’ve known for a long time. Originally I thought to ask one or two of our team to participate in a CoP oriented one early September, but that didn’t work out. It looks like our entire team will participate in one next spring though, oriented on systems convening.
• Had the weekly client meetings, and a meeting with a client’s client to discuss overarching elements of my work
• Had the car checked as it made rather more noise since the recent tire change, which turned out to be an alignment issue.
• Prepared and planned a range of conversations and meetings later in the summer, after our upcoming hiatus.
• Did the 2nd quarter bookkeeping and VAT returns. Earlier than usual as we’ll be way on the due data by the end of the month, so I thought to get it out of the way immediately
• Wrote a project proposal for all Dutch provinces on data and digital ethics. Received a signed proposal on our ongoing support of citizen science groups around measuring air quality, and a signed proposal on helping implement open data policies for the Dutch national flora and fauna database. That database holds all observations of plants and wildlife, and is sourced from many different stakeholders, ranging from government agencies to individual volunteers reporting what they see in their gardens. The database is set to become part of the national data infrastructure but various stakeholders have differing opinions and concerns w.r.t opening that data or seeing it re-used under specific circumstances.
• Picked up Y from her last day of her 2nd year in school. After the summer she’ll start group 3, which is the first proper year of primary school, in a different part of the school building. She’s looking forward to learning to write and read properly. We celebrated the start of the summer holidays with lunch together at the fishmonger’s, and later had an icecream with the three of us in the garden
• Took Y to her swimming lesson
• Extended the garden’s irrigation system to include one more section
• With E wound down all our activities so we can take a three week break.

So begins our summer hiatus.