Weeknotes #121

It was Golden Week and we were lucky to have really great weather. We didn’t go anywhere but we did take two trips to Shakujii Park to have a ‘picnic’. On Tuesday, I grabbed our picnic rug as we left the house, only half-expecting that we’d be able to use it. I’d taken the kids to the same park on the previous weekend and the place had been packed. I figured that it’d be even worse on an actual holiday. Surprisingly, not the case. It turned out there were fewer people than there’d been on Saturday. Where were they all? Maybe everyone went somewhere further afield? In any case, after nabbing a nice spot in the shade of a tree, I dashed up the road to the nearest convenience store to buy onigiri.

Assuming our luck would hold, we went back to the same park on Wednesday. This time we went via McDonald’s like true barbarians. I felt a bit bad bringing McDonald’s in to a park but we saw some people doing it on Tuesday and so like good lemmings, made sure only to jump off the cliff after we’d seen others do it, too.

Flush off the success of showing the kids Encanto, I tried to show them Turning Red. It did not go well. John in particular still gets scared whenever people argue in movies and watching the mother lose it at one point has made him scared to be alone which is both frustrating and very cute.

I sent in the application for Rowan’s citizenship. And paid the ridiculous $300+ the Australian Government charges you for the privilege. I realise there’s no constituency for ex-patriate Australians (literally, given you’re not supposed to vote if you don’t intend to return to Australia in the near-term) but one does wonder how much more they’ll keep squeezing. I’m not looking forward to the passport applications. In addition to applying for Rowan’s, Emma, John and I all happen to need renewals as well.

I bought the kids some cakes themed to Peter Pan from Ginza Cozy Corner for Children’s Day. This lead to questions about who the characters were and we started watching Peter Pan.

In more exciting furniture news, a very thin cupboard we’d ordered for the kitchen arrived on Friday. This time it was all assembled and while it doesn’t store as much as I was hoping it would, it has still freed up enough space that we’ve moved the most used crockery into the kitchen. I’m sure this sounds insanely boring but I’m noting it here because it’s remarkable how much more pleasant it’s made doing things in the kitchen. People talk about ‘death by a thousand cuts’ but is there an opposite to that? If there is, that’s what this feels like.

One of my favourite podcasts is Slate’s Decoder Ring. A recent episode used the classic satirical op-ed ‘Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades’ as a starting point to discuss the history of multi-bladed razors. My only disappointment was with the voice used to read excerpts from the article.

I watched the first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. That’s the latest Star Trek series (there are, exhaustingly, now five in production). This time the focus is on Captain Pike, the captain that immediately preceded Captain Kirk from the original series of Star Trek. This version of Pike first appeared in Star Trek: Discovery and there’s a good argument he’s the best thing that’s come out of that show. The episode wasn’t one for the ages but it did indicate this series would be much closer aligned to the original: more optimistic and less focused on serialised storytelling than Discovery or Picard.

Freddie deBoer had a recent post (paywalled) about Lana Del Rey where he sung (ha!) the praises of her EP Paradise (Apple Music). I don’t like it as much as he does but it’s the most interesting thing I listened to this week. I’ll leave that to the reader to decide whether that’s meant to be depressing or not.