Weeknotes #274

President Trump continued to do crazy things. The brevity of this observation should not be taken as evidence that things had calmed down. Rather, I am at a loss for the words to describe my dismay. Good luck to the Americans trying to improve things. I wish you the best of luck.

Rowan started pre-school. So far, it’s gone well. We went to his opening ceremony last Thursday and although he refused to sit with the other students, he sat with me mostly without incident. By the time of the class photograph, it had become a bit much so I’m not sure what that’ll look like but still, better than we feared a year or so ago. They had ‘class’ on Friday and Eri said that he’d apparently handled it pretty well.

As a reward, I took Rowan out on Saturday to visit Haneda Airport. We tried to combine a Keikyū train, a monorail and an E6-series shinkansen (Wikipedia). Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be. We arrived at Shinagawa Station just as a red airport express departed and then had to make do with riding an Asakusa Line train instead (a fact Rowan did not accept with the equanimity one might have hoped). Things started to look up after we watched some planes land and had lunch at the airport. We got the monorail to Hamamatsuchō Station without incident but upon catching the Yamanote Line train up to Tokyo Station were informed that the E6 would be an hour wait. We rode an E7-series shinkansen to Ueno instead and then came home on the Seibu Ikebukuro Line.

Speaking of trains, a couple of weeks back I put on The Simpsons episode, ‘Marge vs. The Monorail, thinking that Rowan would enjoy watching it given the titular monorail. Enjoy it he did but I was pleasantly surprised by Emma and John loving it too. As a result, we’ve begun a slow rewatch of the first seven seasons (i.e. the good episodes).

Emma broke her Apple Pencil. I remembered after this had occurred that I had been cognisant that this might happen and so had found the cheapest one I could last year. Nevertheless, it was still an unwelcome reminder that an Apple Pencil was not the best gift idea for a 9-year-old.

On the topic of gifts, despite talking to Mum weeks ago about my plans for Easter presents, I remembered too late that I had forgotten to purchase the Lindt Easter bunnies I’ve been buying for God knows how long at this point. I madly searched online for fall-back options; the best I found was this ‘spun’ chocolate egg from a fancy chocolatier. It hasn’t arrived yet but hopefully it’ll adequately fill the Lindt-shaped hole in our lives.

In a sign that my life is slowly settling back into a familiar rhythm, this week I once again started (1) playing Wordle, Connections and Knotwords, (2) studying Japanese and (3) watching Law & Order. Not sure how long that’ll continue.

I’m not sure exactly how long it’s been since I last watched Quark and Garak’s discussion of root beer and the Federation (YouTube) but it felt like I was due.

If you’re an Apple Music subscriber (just Brandon?) and a fan of Daft Punk, the ‘Daft Punk: Fitness+Spotlight’ playlist (Apple Music) will have you bopping around.