Sunday Morning Thoughts – May 5, 2024

My book has a preliminary release date.

Mark August 22, 2024 in your calendars. I will let everybody know when it’s ready to be pre-ordered. I’m not even sure if this option will be available. But hey, I just needed to have a goal to work towards. I’m super excited about it. It’s gonna be a book like none you’ve ever seen. It’s gonna be totally unique. It’s gonna be so totally me. And yes, I will overuse “totally” – that’s a given.

I also don’t know yet if there is a deadline to when the manuscript needs to be ready if I want to publish on August 22. Is that gonna stop me? Nope. Am I gonna check now? Nope. The aim is to have it ready. Proof-read and all by July 22 and then spend a month promoting it all over the place. Not sure when I will tell everybody the title. It will make at least one of my readers smile and a bunch of you will know EXACTLY who I mean when it drops.

I’m sitting here grinning because the title is so good. And it’s gonna be on the cover in bright red letters. I still need to properly design that cover, but I got this. I’m an artist after all.

Oh, did I tell you that I saw the original of that van Gogh painting I painted a while back? It’s at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands. I still prefer mine. Sorry Vincent.

Before I forget today is two of my favorite people’s birthday. I will see one of them later today – party! And I’m sending a big old birthday hug to North Carolina. So glad I met you!

This week was a real emotional rollercoaster. Back to work after the most amazing vacation. Important decisions were made. Responsibilities that were never meant to be mine were let go. I’m getting the opportunity to talk about hiking in Switzerland in 10 days. I’m very excited about that. I think it’s meant to be like 30-45 minutes, but you try and stop me. I’m even gonna try and hike a 60 km route in their area so I have some pictures and a local experience to share. I hope the weather plays along.

Hills above Magden, Switzerland

I did stage one of the route yesterday – I made a little video. The route is called the Fricktaler Höhenweg. As the name suggests it’s hilly. It was a gorgeous day. I was walking for my mental health on this occasion so I didn’t take as many pictures. I think you get the idea of what it was like either way. And, as ever, I started at a train station and stopped at a bus stop. This is how we do hiking here. I got to the bus stop one minute late but the bus had not passed yet. Lucky!

I’m following a series of trauma webinars. They are hosted by nicabm (National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine). Friday’s webinar was on abandonment and abandonment was exactly what had come up in Friday morning’s therapy session. It got intense super fast. I tried to put into words what happened. You can read it here.

Something from one of the trauma webinars that stuck with me was a researcher from Mannheim, Germany who talked about PTSD in female victims of sexual assault. He talked about a group of women who had no symptoms and were living normal lives. You know what they found the only difference between them and the 75% of women who do develop PTSD was? They were believed. That’s it. People believed them the assault happened and they got the support they needed. They now live normal and happy lives.

Let that sink in …

And then think about the bear or man question. For those who missed it – women were asked if they’d rather encounter a bear or a man in the woods. The answer is bear, no hesitation. Some of the replies included “at least with a bear attack people would believe me”, “nobody would ask me what I was wearing”, “if you yell at a bear to leave – they usually will”, “I can defend myself against a bear without fear of punishment”, “bears are more predictable” etc. etc. etc.

I think only people who haven’t been paying attention were surprised by this. Looking at what researchers in Mannheim found and women saying "at least with a bear people would believe me” – we need to do better! As a society. That includes all of us. Actually believing people when they say they were attacked, that’d be a start.

One last thing on this topic. Check this out. You can access it without an IG account.

I’m starting to warm to AI

Remember those people who were made fun of online for talking to a search engine like a person and saying “please” and “thank you”? Well, I just asked Copilot something and I did add a please, because that’s just good manners. Who’s laughing now?

Seriously, it’s insane what Copilot can do. I’m in a trial group at work and meant to test what it does, how it reacts and what it could be useful for. There are so many options. Yes, the human behind the keyboard is still responsible for the accuracy of the information and for not falling for fake information. Also, there are biases in the data that’s available to AI online. We need to keep that in mind of course, but if I can open a PowerPoint document and ask Copilot to create a presentation on a certain topic using information from a bunch of websites and it does it in a minute, I’m there for that 100%.

Summary of a OneNote notebook – just one click away. You’ve been on vacation and people have been emailing back and forth on a certain topic. Have AI summarize the key points for you. Saves a lot of time. Having it create task lists out of OneNotes or emails or minutes – simple. It did struggle with Excel a bit, but I’ll figure out how to give prompts that will make it work.

I was skeptical, but as a linguist reading up on large language models (LLMs) is pretty interesting. Stay tuned!

More random thoughts

I also went to an immersive da Vinci exhibit. I loved it but the music was a bit too intense for me on this occasion. Could have been that I went right after therapy. Could have been that it really was very intense and just not really something for highly sensitive people. I don’t know. I just know that I could feel the music vibrating through my entire body – and not in a good way. It’s a great exhibit in terms of what you learn. Well worth giving it a go.

Have I talked about cranberry Rivella before? Well, here’s the deal. Rivella is a Swiss soft drink and produced right here in my beautiful canton – in Rothrist. You can google it and read up on how that all started. What I’m gonna try and get them to do is to sell cranberry flavored Rivella in Switzerland. There is a Dutch subsidiary (not sure if that’s what it is legally, they might be independent) and they have way better flavors than we do in Switzerland. I can’t be importing cranberry Rivella every time I go to the Netherlands. They need to sell it here. Come on! Last time I tried they didn’t go for it. I’m just gonna keep trying. It’s too good not to.

Funnily enough, none of my Dutch friends had ever heard of Rivella before I told them about it. I have no idea how they make any money in the Netherlands.

This just triggered another memory from my trip. Yesterday, I took the bus to Frick. It’s a Postauto (those yellow buses) and it reminded me of one of them flashing a “Thank you very much” (instead of the destination on the back screen) when I let them pull out in front of me. It was on that very same route. It’s just such a nice gesture. Made me smile.

I’ve been having a lot of lovely experiences lately – more of that, please.

Hope you’re having an awesome day. Hugs all around.