Week 3: cheesy bread

  • This week has mostly been brought to you by Marks and Spencer’s Extra Mature and Red Leicester cob. Deeeeelicious.
  • My son is playing Undertale all the time. I think he’s on his 10th or 11th playthrough. When he’s not playing, he’s listening to the soundtrack.
  • I am still playing Trine 4, which is absolutely beautiful, very charming, and only slightly challenging, which is just how I like my games in 2020.
  • I have read The Maltese Falcon. It is noir with a capital-N, having a manipulative, selfish antihero who is completely lacking in human empathy.
  • Leaves are falling off the fig tree in scores, which means it is now officially autumn.
  • Friday was an INSET day, so I found myself eating flapjacks, drinking tea and listening to Radio 2 whilst my kids played a boardgame upstairs. Hello middle age and middle class.
  • SpaceX have now made 100 successful flights.
  • It’s now half-term, my family is all at home whilst I am, so there are some fun meeting backgrounds for other people to enjoy I’m sure, but for me, I’ll just enjoy not having to make packed lunches every night!

Week 2: horses

  • Hatches Open, Station Crew Expands to Six
  • Jo Whiley had an awesome interview with Skin from Skunk Anansie earlier in the week; one of my favourite broadcasters with an incredible singer and a great playlist.
  • I started playing Trine 4 and it is charming, very pretty, and so far it’s low effort and I love it.
  • I have 2 kids and each week one gets The Beano and the other gets The Phoenix – both comics are well loved in this house. They are both brilliant in different ways and I recommend them both.
  • The latest Morrigan Crow book by Jessica Townsend, Hollowpox, is out!
  • I spent some of my time this week smashing my face into custom Middleman templates. It was not fun, especially when they work differently (or not at all) on different platforms. Didn’t we solve these problems ten years ago?
  • Like so many other office workers I’m working from home at the moment, in particular from a desk in my living room which looks out of the front window. Because of where we live, most days I get to watch horses walk past my house whilst I’m in a meeting, as people learn to ride. It’s awesome.

Week 1: anew

  • One of the highlights of my week is Alice Bartlett’s weeknotes. Two years of reading later and I am going to shamelessly steal her format.
  • I do still read RSS feeds, and I use Newsfold to do so, with the feeds managed by Feedly in the background. American politics is starting to dominate the news again, and so I need more non-politics RSS feeds in my life.
  • The other RSS highlights are Simon Willison‘s ongoing Datasette explorations and the latest news from the International Space Station.
  • Before the our local libraries reopened they were providing a service where a librarian would choose some books for you to read based on some preferences you provided and your past reading history. My 11 year old got half a dozen books and I’ve started reading them, because that’s about the level of depth and complexity my brain can handle at the moment. They are all along the lines of “child discovers gods/monsters are real and faces challenges” and are of varying quality.
  • Ruby dependency management for executable applications is still just plain awful. Much screaming. Much loss of hair.
  • Every now and then my top-of-the-line Dell laptop just locks up for 10 seconds or so. It’s as perplexing as it is annoying. It happened just now.
  • We bought a new house! That’s exciting news. Most excitingly though we’ll have to buy a new sofa. I’m looking forward to a new sofa. My bum deserves better.
  • Also, it only has a small garden, so I will miss our oak, alder, apple and fig trees, and the bees and many birds who visit our current garden. We’ll have to plan out a design for the new, bare, grass-only garden and plant some of the things we miss the most.
  • New growth is good.