Last week I had a week off from work. I am fortunate in that in my line of work we get 9 weeks of annual leave and can apply to purchase another up to 4 weeks of what’s known as ATO leave. I was approved for 2 further weeks leave, which comes out of my pay, but gives me 11 weeks off for the year - which I like to spread out to approximately 1 week off per month.

This gives me ample time to spend with my family and kids, and of course, my own down-time for personal hobbies which helps in distressing, re-grounding and resilience.

Anyway, with the week off, I managed to do a lot around the home to take pressure off my wife’s regular hours where she can only clean and do any house chores on weekends. So why not get those out of the way, to clear out the weekend so we can use that time for family time.

Apple Ecosystem

I have posted before on my blog about making a move into the apple ecosystem. And something that comes with downtime is the ability to invest, for lack of better word, time into reading reviews on products and convincing yourself that you need certain latest tech.

I already spent a lot of money on a new top tier camera and lenses, which I keep to good use in my photography hobby (https://samuellison.photography).

I made the switch from desktop computer to full apple ecosystem by starting off getting myself the latest iPhone 17 Pro (in orange), and then convincing myself that I also needed the latest Apple Watch Ultra 3 which I could use in my hiking and reduce the amount of notifications I got and manage my screen time that way. And, I also wanted to get myself the MacBook M4 Pro Max - which I did.

Do I regret these purchases? Not the the least!

I have formatted my desktop PC which was a beast in itself, and donated that to my brother, and replaced that with the MacBook setup to power my setup.

I have pretty much everything Mac now, including a very old iPad which serves as a platform for social media, YouTube, discord and other apps I don’t trust as much with my data and don’t want on the device that I take with me everywhere. You see, I have to make a conscious decision now to grab the iPad out of my office when I wish to get on social media or to procrastinate on anything else. And, I get not a single notification about those apps on any other device, due to the way I have set things up.

The MacBook is being used for my photo editing and video editing needs. And I have even gotten myself software called Ulysses, which I am using to write this blog article, but also as I wish to use it to start writing a fiction book which I may share with you later down the track, if it eventuates!

The phone, I consider my digital ID, like a wallet. It gives me access to my car, it contained my personal documents, like drivers license, government ID, bank apps and the cards themselves in Apple Wallet as well as any authorisation apps for 2FA, and my encrypted messaging, which consists of Apples iMessages and Signal (I use to have my own Element server for encrypted messaging, but not enough users to justify the cost of running it, so switched back to Signal).

If you’d like my personal thoughts on Digital ID and Social Media Bans (under 16’s) and the likes, feel free to let me know and I will consider expressing those thoughts in words for you to read.

Anyway, with minimal apps on the phone, it means I have nothing to really procrastinate with when I am out and about, or to give myself reason to be checking my phone every second or doomscrolling. It puts me in my element - and allows me to experience boredom.

The Apple Watch is even more minimalistic. Actually, I use that device for my car access, as I found the phone as a phone key was keeping a connection to the car at the home when in range, which was draining its battery - the watch respects background activity being OFF when you close an app.

On the watch, I only allow notifications from main apps on the phone. Keeping it to messaging from family and alerts from apps that I find important. I also love using the watch for the fitness side of it - closing the rings with a competition between myself and my brother, and using it for sleep tracking as well.

I use to have a #FitBit and I let that go flat and never used it again when #Google purchased it and took over the data.

Anyway, all in all, I’ve enjoyed the purchases. They have kept me off the screen longer (reduced my screen time, believe it or not) and when I do decide to get on the screen, it is usually for productive purposes and nothing else.

Gardening

I’ve never been one for gardening. I love nature, love hiking and getting out there, but I have never been able to find much enjoyment in gardening - to me, it is tiresome and back breaking work.

Our local council have been hard at work putting in new footpaths around our streets and I used this opportunity to hire someone to come and remove all the overgrowth and plants that were hard to manage from our side garden. We live on a corner block, and the plants at the side of our home were annoying to maintain. They would grow over the path and also grow out some spikes that would spike people in the legs as they walked past.

Because I don’t like having to get out there and trim them myself so frequently, I made the executive decision to just have them removed.

I also got a gardener to trim the front garden and our hedge by our garage.

I’m thinking of replacing the plants that were along the side with more hardy species like Nandina’s and the likes.

I’ll wait on a little bit more of the pathway to be completed before making that decision, so that the work that gets done on the garden doesn’t get damaged by the council contractors doing their work.

Photography at Brimbank Park

Nearing the end of the week, I made the decision to go to Brimbank Park with my camera setup to have a go at filming video instead of just still photography. I’ve been wanting to try and capture some of the local wildlife and birds on video in slow-motion style footage to share on social media.

I got quite a lot of good footage with my Sony A7RV which I’ve been happy to share with my followers.

I brought the laptop along to this occasion at the cafe there (shoutout to Lumbar & Co) and enjoyed a meal while working on some of the videos. I’ll have to get out there and do that more often.

There’s something appealing about bringing a laptop out to write or do productive work. Even the majority of this blog article was written within my car, while waiting on my daughter to finish her piano tutoring.

Peninsula Hot Springs & Cape Schanck

For the end of the week, and on the weekend, since we cleared our time by making sure I completed most chores around the house during my free days off to myself, we decided to drive to Mornington Peninsula for a day out.

Starting the morning off with the Peninsula Hot Springs at an early bird session of 7:30 AM, we enjoyed a morning of relaxation and beautiful views.

We stayed there for the majority of the morning before heading to lunch at Portsea Hotel.

Portsea Hotel had nice food. But what amazed me the most, was the beautiful views.

Something I normally enjoy to do when down that part of Victoria is make as much use of the day as possible, and we did just that.

After lunch, we made our way to the London Bridge lookout. I tried taking some landscape photos that I wasn’t able to last time I was there with my camera setup, as it was too bright, and to be able to get a milky look on the ocean, requires the shutter speed of the camera to be slowed down, which allows even more light into the lens for longer.

This time round, I had an ND filter on the camera, and I was able to slow the shutter speed to half a second and even 1 second to get a nice milky look on the waves.

I’m still not really happy with my landscape photography. But I’ll keep on practicing and getting happier with where I am at.

We then drove East along the coast and stopped off at another place known as the Dragon Head Lookout. It’s a rock formation just along the coast that looks like a dragons head.

I didn’t get the shot at all. It was a misty day and I was on the wrong side - check out this other photo from someone on location scout:

That’s beautiful!

On the way back out, we got to see an Echidna out and about looking for ants. This one wasn’t shy of humans at all and perfectly fine with me taking a nice close up photo of it on the phone.

Anyway, we finished off the day over at Cape Schanck. This is an exciting walk down a board walk to the rocks below where you can see some interesting wildlife.

On this occasion, we got to see some large pacific gulls, as well as some little crabs and starfish as the water receded and created rock pools.

I have some more photos from that location, but they require editing as they were shot on my full frame Sony camera. I think I will probably use my phone a lot more for memory style photos and use the camera for the bird and fungi photography as they really do require specialised lenses and methods. Phones are getting so good!

Conclusion

Once again, I hope that you enjoyed reading this weekly recap! Feel free to comment as I enjoy seeing others words and replying.

Until next time!