Weeknotes #63

Work has a policy requiring employees to take at least five days off each financial year (which ends in March in Japan). I’d only taken four and so they asked me to take Monday off. I obliged.

Thinking that my local barber might not be as busy in the middle of an otherwise ordinary Monday, I ducked out and got a haircut. I’m not sure exactly what happened as I’ve been getting haircuts in Japan for more than ten years but I somehow asked for a buzz cut. In his defence, the barber did double check that he’d heard me correctly before coming at me with the electric razor. Long story short (I’m sorry), I got quite the trim.

I wanted Eri to prepare the kids before I got home but they were still amazed. As John said upon seeing me, ‘Papa, you don’t have hair’.

I started reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to Emma and John as they go to bed. It’s slow going as they tend to fall asleep very quickly once in bed (lucky us!).

After watching Into the Spider-Verse with Emma and John last weekend, I commandeered the television on Saturday night to finish watching The Empire Strikes Back with the kids. We’d watched about half the movie when we last stopped it so this included the big reveal that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father. I’m not sure if they’d forgotten too much of the story to be surprised but they didn’t have much reaction to the revelation. Have I ruined this moment for them? I know that I never got to really appreciate this twist; it was just something that I always remember knowing.

I discovered that Luigi’s Mansion 3 has a co-op mode that becomes available once you gain access to the Gooigi character. Emma, John and I have been playing it together (well, I’ve been playing it while they watch) but this meant Emma could actually join me in the game. She’s still very scared of the boss battles but we progressed up to the tenth floor.

My latest attempt to lose weight has devolved into sort of a vague intention to… I’m not even sure. Not each too many carbohydrates, I guess? So as to give myself something to eat, I’ve become quasi-addicted to these throat lollies in Japan that contain, well, I’m not sure what exactly. If you’re curious, the official website is its own thing.

I invested a decent amount of time over the past couple of weeks working on a CommonMark parser. I have the Markable library that wraps GitHub’s fork of the CommonMark reference parser for use in Janet but I’d prefer something more extensible (and that doesn’t require compiling C source code). I’m not sure if the performance will be decent enough but I’m investigating a pure Janet parser. Progress is slow.

I’m now up to season three of Law & Order and Jerry Orbach has joined the show. God, he’s good.

I wouldn’t know my Chopin from my… some other composer whose name sounds vaguely like Chopin but for what it’s worth, I enjoyed Abdel Rahman el Bacha’s recently released Chopin: Scherzi & Ballades (Apple Music).