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After Emma and John contracted colds over the past couple of weeks, I got hit by it in the middle of the week. I started to feel better by Friday and was back to normal by the weekend.
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Speaking of the weekend, we had some really lovely weather on Saturday and Sunday. I took advantage of it on Sunday to take the kids on a bike ride. Really, it was more about me ‘going’ somewhere than anything else. I initially thought it might be possible to ride the 15km or so from our house to Shinjuku but that turned out to be a hilarious overestimate of how fast I can pedal a bicycle with two kids on it. It took about an hour to go 6km and by that point Emma had had enough.
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Apart from being an excuse to get out for a bit, the ride also gave me an opportunity to see a bit more of suburban Tokyo. Our current plan is to move out of our place in a year or so and we’re still trying to work out where we want to live. Even though we’ve now been in Tokyo for five years, I still feel like I have a really poor feel for the city (as compared with Osaka). Part of the reason for that is that I haven’t had the opportunity to go for the long walks I used to take before I got married. (The craziest one of those was a 30km-late-night-sojourn from my old workplace in downtown Osaka to a house I lived in on the outskirts of Kyoto.)
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I spend a lot of the day listening to music on my AirPods that only I can hear. What effect is this having on my kids? So much of my early musical knowledge came from listening to the songs that I heard while my parents listened to the radio. Emma and John are missing out on almost all of that. Then again, I have almost zero musical ability so what good did that experience do me really?
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It somehow came across my radar that season three of Star Trek: Discovery had started. I’ve tried watching the show twice but decided that maybe third time’s a charm after seeing that they’ve finally taken the plunge and moved the franchise forward substantially in time. The season is set about 800 years after the end of the last real ‘new’ series, Star Trek: Voyager. Two episodes in and so far, so good. The best thing it has going for it is the fact that, by shifting things into a dystopian future where the Federation is all but non-existent, the writers can drop the tired cynicism of so much recent Trek and portray Starfleet as an idealistic institution that stands for freedom, equality and empathy. I think we need that right now.
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I alluded to this last week but rather than finishing Flext, I started a new project, Persimmon. Persimmon is my attempt to make persistent, immutable data structures available in Janet. If your eyes glazed over at that, fear not. I don’t really have much to report other than a partial implementation of an array-like structure called a ‘vector’.
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After watching Middle 8’s ‘How Seven Nation Army Became a Stadium Chant’, I spent a lot of time listening to ‘Seven Nation Army’ (Apple Music) over the weekend.
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Oh, and special shout-out to the actually-pretty-good parody ‘Seven Kingdom Army’ (YouTube). I wish the lyrics were a little more creative but the visual design is really top-notch.
