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I recognise it’s a bit odd to begin one of these updates by talking about podcasts but I made it to the end of my queue! For as long as I can remember, there’s always been another episode of some podcast in my queue so this felt like an achievement of sorts. One of the things that I’d like to do with all this newfound free time is engage more with ‘deeper’ forms of media (mostly books). The obvious way to do that is Audible but I don’t especially like its app and so I’ve been wondering whether it makes buy audiobooks in a format that Overcast can understand (e.g. MP3) and bring the books to where I am.
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Eugenia sent me a photo of some hot chips she was enjoying for dinner on Wednesday and that set me off on perhaps one of the saddest evenings of my life. I left the house around 10 once everyone was asleep looking for a late-night snack of hot chips only to realise upon getting to the station that I was too late to get to either MOS Burger or KFC before they closed. Having headed in the direction of the station, I was too far away from McDonald’s to get there before they closed. Running low on ideas, I walked around the nearby shōtengai looking for somewhere that sold hot chips (none did) and then checked two different convenience stores (they sometimes sell hot chips). I eventually resorted to buying two bags of microwavable chips at a 7-Eleven. I regret to inform you that they were not worth the money. On Thursday, I walked to the Irish pub, Craic (Google Maps), from the office and got about the best approximation of what Eugenia had had the day before.
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If you treat the Gregorian calendar as the marker of seasons (as I do), then the Summer of Shinkansen is already over but I put that quibble to one side on Saturday to take Rowan to Tokyo Station in the hopes of seeing the white (yellow?) whale of Japan’s bullet trains: Doctor Yellow (Wikipedia). The schedule for Doctor Yellow’s runs are secret but there are websites that purport to ‘guess’ the times. One that I looked at said there was a departure from Tokyo Station at around 11 and while we arrived on time (and got to see a lot of N700 variants coming and going), there was no Doctor Yellow. In the end, we got an N700A down to Shinagawa and then caught a Keikyū train to Yokohama.
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I realise that while I wrote last week that we’re in negotiations to extend our lease, I didn’t say where we are in the negotiations. As I implied, Eri and I are interested in a lease for another 12 months but we’d like to avoid paying the lease renewal fee (which is a standard aspect of residential leases in Tokyo). At the very least, we’d like to pay half of it. Given that the suggestion of extending the lease came from the landlord, that seems reasonable to me. I’m still waiting for a response so hopefully I haven’t committed some unforgivable negotiating faux pas.
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This is obviously a silly thing to do but I started working on a parsing library for Janet that I could possibly use in a Janet Language Server. Wait, wasn’t I already working on a Janet-based editor tool for the Conjure plugin? Yes!
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I started watching the new season of Only Murders in the Building. As soon as that theme song started playing, I got right in the mood. Keep your Bear love, everybody: I have the Arconia (née the Belnord). (I think I read somewhere recently that people might have cooled on The Bear this year so feel free to update that with a more contemporary reference that makes me sound hip and with it.)
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Of course I just want to link to the Only Murders in the Building soundtrack but I’ve done that before so instead let’s look really cultured by linking to mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina’s debut solo recording, Aigul (Apple Music).
