Weeknotes #86

It felt like the weather woke up on Wednesday (the first day of September), realised it was now autumn and immediately dropped several degrees. While that might sound like a nice change from the blistering temperatures we’d had in August, it also seemed to rain continuously for the entire week. As I write this the forecast for the week ahead isn’t particularly positive. All of which has made it difficult to get the kids out and exercising.

Speaking of which, the rainy weather also hampered my efforts to keep up a regular schedule for my running. I managed to go three times which isn’t too bad, I suppose. I still struggle to go for much longer than 20 minutes and my right ankle remains sprained.

The number of daily detected cases of COVID-19 in Tokyo kept declining (NHK News) but as has been the case since the start of the pandemic, it’s difficult to have a complete picture of how things are going. There are still stories about people having difficulty being admitted to hospitals and others of people recuperating at home who died after their mild conditions deteriorated quickly.

Prime Minister Suga announced he was not contesting the election for leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party later this month (Reuters). That effectively means the end of his premiership and perhaps the beginning of another round of revolving-door prime ministers.

Emma’s preschool went back but Eri and I decided to keep Emma at home for the time being. We remain technically under a state of emergency and the reports are that the state of emergency is likely to be extended past the 12 September end date (Reuters). Eri isn’t scheduled to get her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine until the end of this month so playing it safe seems like the right choice when we have a baby in the house. I’m grateful our kids aren’t older and the decision not fraught with more import on academic development (although it’s arguable how big that impact really is).

I didn’t make much progress with either my Lisp project or my Japanese study. However, I did finally work out how to extract the code from the continuous integration GitHub Workflows I’d been using with almost all my Janet projects and move it into a single GitHub Action that these workflows can all then use. This in turn means that if I need to fix something, I can edit just this action and not each workflow.

It was Mum’s birthday over the weekend and we had a call to wish her well. It seems she and Dad are continuing to hold up well and while the number of detected cases in Sydney has been trending in the wrong direction, Mum said the outbreaks haven’t been on the Northern Beaches.

Sunday was Father’s Day in Australia and that’s when we usually celebrate it. While we didn’t do much, Emma gave me a coloured-in drawing of the Bluey character Bandit (Bluey’s father) that Eri had found online. Supposedly my Australian accent became quite broad while Eri was in the hospital with Rowan and so now I both act and sound like he does. We also had a nice time eating dinner together in what’s become something of a rarity. Rowan tends to get a bit whingey around nighttime necessitating either Eri or I hold him. I bit the bullet and bought a replacement Baby Bjorn bouncer and it worked a treat (we still have the bouncer from when Emma and John were babies but the mesh fabric that holds the baby got mould on it and try as we might, we couldn’t get it clean).

One of the things that sucked me into Clojure were the terrific presentations given by its inventor, Rich Hickey. One of his most famous, ‘Simple Made Easy’, has been ‘remastered’ and is now available on (YouTube).

I watched the first ‘episode’ of Columbo (which at the time was a made for TV movie) and while the ending was rushed, I thought it was pretty good overall. I’ve started watching the second ‘episode’ and while it hasn’t grabbed me as immediately as the first episode did, I do intend to watch it and the rest of the first season. (Although regular readers will remember that that’s a category that includes Devs and that hasn’t been going so well).

I found a playlist of 1990s singer-songwriters and the first track was Sheryl Crow’s ‘Strong Enough’ (Apple Music). God, the mid-90s were great.