Weeknotes: 2022, week 2
[10–16 Jan]
The week started with Miss Entropy recovering from a mild fever (she skipped “school” on Monday, out of precaution), and finished with her little brother having a couple of peaks of temperature himself for a day or two. Nothing serious; mostly one tiring night for him and for us two. Thank Paracetamol.
It is exhausting to spend so much time with two small kids — at least for me. There are tantrums sometimes, and moments during the day when the two of them are crying at the same time, or simply demanding your attention insistently. In so many situations, kids are amazingly incapable of understanding opportunity, proportion, or balance.
Still, almost every day presents one or more opportunities to discover something new with them, make them laugh, enjoy their crazy words and associations of ideas, squeeze them, dance with them, and take cute photos and videos… There are also the “diaries” my wife and I are writing for each of them (for when they're adults), and even these public weeknotes for posterity.
On Wednesday, the main errand I ran during my long walk with Breaker of Horses was going to the post office to send a bottle of our own olive oil to my good old friend who lives in Switzerland.
On Thursday I cooked a big Spanish omelette, which was enough for lunch that day, my breakfast the day after, and part of dinner too. I like to cook those from time to time, and eat them over the course of two days. This one was rather good — I noted the proportion of ingredients on this Pixelfed post for my future self.
On Friday morning I took Miss Entropy to her nursery school and managed to be back home on time for my team's weekly informal meeting (ie, coffee and banter). In these days I am barely keeping up with reading some work mail and a few notifications, so everybody was surprised to see me popping up. It was nice seeing the faces of part of the team, although I feel so disconnected. It's exactly eight weeks of paternity absence left now for me, so I'll be back to work soon enough, though. I'm hoping these weeknotes become more interesting when I resume work and other activities!
On Sunday I went to the local Carrefour hypermarket to buy groceries, diapers and a few other things. Since I often take long walks around the neighbourhood in the morning with Breaker of Horses, I usually buy what we need from local shops. It had been a while since the last time we resorted to a hypermarket, and so it felt quite weird inside the gigantic nave full of people, eg facing a wall of shelves stacked from the floor to well above my reach, extending for what looks like one kilometre, with the only sign: “BREAKFAST CEREALS”.
I spent €152, which is a very large expense for us (but again, we tend to buy food several times a week). Anyway, diapers and detergent are expensive. On my way back home, I was thinking that I could perhaps spend half the money on food if not for three circumstances: the kids, me being a vegetarian/vegan, and us two being mostly lazy and not much interested in cooking in general.
Toot of the week: