Weeknotes #260

Happy new year…? It’s impossible not to feel trepidation about 2025, isn’t it? What will it be like to own a house? What will it be like for Rowan to attend preschool? What will it be like to experience another year of rising temperatures? And of course what will it be like to have Donald Trump as President of the United States again?

This week’s weeknotes are once again written on a plane. After almost exactly three weeks, we’re headed back to Japan. The trip was very consistent with previous visits in a way that I suppose could be characterised as boring and if I have one regret it’s that we didn’t ‘do more stuff’. Apart from various family activities, we did have the kids attend a performance at the Sydney Opera House, visit the Lego Store, watch a movie at the cinema and play at the beach. But we could have gone to more typical tourist attractions. For instance, I don’t believe we’ve taken the kids to any of the Powerhouse Museum, the Art Gallery of New South Wales or the Royal Botanic Garden (not ‘Gardens’ as I’ve been calling it erroneously for all these years). Something to consider for next time.

The biggest regret is that we waited too long to take advantage of the indoor pool that is one of the amenities in the complex where Mum and Dad live. I had intended to spend time helping Emma and John be more comfortable in the water and while we made some progress with Emma, John’s still very reluctant to go under the water.

If I’m making it sound like I had a terrible time, that certainly wasn’t the case and one thing it’s impossible to complain about is the slice of Sydney’s summer that we experienced this year. It was hot, but—at least at Collaroy—in almost exactly the way you hope for in summer and certainly not by the standards of the suffocating summers we regularly endure in Tokyo. I hope our luck weather-wise continues to hold for the next visit.

I did spend some time working on Grapple but not as much as I’d like. Mostly that was due to the fact I’d regularly fall asleep each night but I did spend a bit of time going down yet another rabbit hole: what would be the best way to architect a website that listed examples of the use of Janet functions? It’s true that janetdocs.com exists and largely fulfils this purpose but when has that stopped me before?

Last week, I lamented not finding time to watch more films and I’m sorry to say I was unable to rectify that at all. I made it halfway through a rewatch of WALL-E but stopped it once I realised I’d slept through two scenes.

After watching how Hank Green plays Connections (trying to work out all the groups before submitting any answers), I’ve started trying to play the game this way. It certainly takes a lot longer but does feel more satisfying when I’m able to answer in reverse order of difficulty.

Sometimes on the trips to Sydney, I’ll ‘discover’ a song of (my) summer. This year that wasn’t the case—just a painful amount of the theme to Batwheels at the request of a certain offspring—but last year or the year before it was Harry Styles’ ‘As It Was’ (Apple Music).