Weeknotes #249

What a wild weekend weather-wise. Saturday had a high of 31 while Sunday was back to the low 20s.

80% of the reason to begin the update like that was the alliteration.

I used an early morning rise on Saturday to write to Paul Battley, a fellow weeknotes keeper. Unexpectedly, he wrote back very quickly with a kind message. If you’re interested in reading about the lives of other people, Paul’s is a nice blend of his weekly ‘adventures’ (my word, not his) and links to interesting things around the web.

On Sunday I took Emma and Rowan over to Ogikubo with a little jaunt along the Chuo line before we returned to Asagaya and caught a bus home. While in Ogikubo, I took the kids up to the rooftop playground (website in Japanese) which Swarm tells me I last visited in January 2020 (!). I enjoyed the resonance of Rowan being the same age now as Emma was back then.

My weight was back up to 68kg on Sunday evening so I’ve decided to try to get it down to 64kg. We’ll see how that goes.

My Japanese study didn’t go well. On the positive side, I have been able to maintain the self-discipline to attempt to study daily. The key word there is of course ‘attempt’. Undoubtedly a result of being in my 40s, I’ve found myself repeatedly falling asleep as I try to work through my 45 minutes of study. Perhaps the discipline needs to extend to studying earlier in the day?

I was talking about not knowing the word ‘ablation’ two weeks ago and now here’s Brandon stumping me with ‘caltrops’. What are caltrops? They’re those spiky things things you occasionally see being thrown to the ground in action movies to blow out car tyres (Wikipedia).

Speaking of Brandon, in the weekly update linked above, he mentioned enjoying the BBC series Ludwig. I couldn’t find who else had been mentioned it in positive terms but I thought someone else had and, well, twice is exactly enough for me (he says hurriedly as he rationalises still not watching The Bear). In any event, I checked it out and am liking it a lot (unlike Brandon, I’m not bingeing it). I’m a little concerned that every show I like seems to need an overarching mystery so maybe I should give in and watch The Bear.

I somehow have neglected to mention over the past couple of weeks that I’ve been watching Avatar: The Last Airbender with Emma and John. We were watching an episode or two a night and so it’s taken us a bit more than a month to watch it all. Both kids loved it and I definitely see how it has such a devoted following. I do think watching it as an adult for the first time makes me less forgiving of its limitations (poor dialogue in places, painful narrative conveniences) than someone watching it back with rose-coloured glasses. But I do acknowledge that it genuinely wrestles with difficult questions in ways that more adult shows often don’t and that it deserves a lot of praise for that. It was also just fun watching a kung-fu epic with my kids. I tried to show Emma the night fight scene from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (YouTube) and was disappointed how difficult it was for her to maintain interest.

Robert Glasper (who I’m referencing as if I know who that is) has a cover of OutKast’s ‘Prototype’ that features Norah Jones and the jazziness turned up to 11 (Apple Music).