Weeknotes #245

As I’ve mentioned previously, I try in the weeknotes to only write about the events from the previous Monday to the Sunday past but I’ll bend that rule as we’ve just had two back-to-back long weekends. The one that wrapped up this Monday seems to have finally brought an end to summer and we’ve has a small cold snap as the maximum temperatures have dropped below 30 degrees.

On Monday, I took Emma, John and Rowan to Ueno Zoo so that Eri could have some time to herself (I was pleasantly surprised that she took the opportunity to see a play in Shibuya). In my usual unstructured way, I got the kids onto a Marunouchi train at Ikebukuro, realised that was a poor choice, but rescued the situation by taking the kids through to Tokyo Station where, after having McDonald’s for lunch, we boarded an E7 shinkansen and rode it one station up the line to Ueno. I don’t really have much to say about the zoo itself other than to marvel again that the children are free and my ticket cost ¥600.

I don’t know what Eugenia has done but I again found myself hungry for hot chips and I wondered if a cafe that’s close to our place made a decent plate of them and they weren’t too bad (and coincidentally, also ¥600). Indeed, they were good enough to lure me there late on Sunday night after the kids had gone to sleep. Some people have a local establishment they frequent for some alcohol. I have a local establishment I frequent for some salt.

On Friday, my new Apple Watch was delivered. As I wrote last week, I opted for the 42mm model even though that’s now considered the ‘small’ Apple Watch and I’ve always bought the ‘large’ model. The initial ‘large’ watch that Apple released back in 2015 was 42mm so I figured I wouldn’t have any problems and so far that’s been correct. The real test will be when I visit an Apple Store to see what the 46mm looks like on my wrist. I’ll probably do that next week.

I neglected to mention this last week but in addition to the new watch, I bought—at John’s instruction—The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as a ‘birthday present’ to myself. I’m not sure John’s connected with the game to the degree I’d hoped but we have been playing it on the weekends.

I don’t know if they’re going to be able to stick the landing as it were but this season of Only Murders in the Building has been excellent. My fingers are crossed intensely.

The recent Emmy awards to Shōgun got me watching it again and I was reminded again how enjoyable it can be.

Speaking of enjoyable, I’ve been enjoying the Charli XCX album, Brat, over the last week or so (Apple Music). I’m not sure if I could be a more 42-year-old man than by being intensely into the album after it’s had its big cultural moment but for whatever reason, while it didn’t click with me on its initial release (when I added it to my Apple Music library), I’ve been extremely into it recently. I did listen to ‘Von Dutch’ a disturbing number of times before deciding in the past couple of days that ‘Sympathy is a knife’ is probably my favourite song on the album.