[14–20 Mar]

First week of work after my (second) (delayed) parental leave! I had been off for more or less three months, and although I planned to be in touch with colleagues etc, the truth is that I managed to do very little of that during my absence. I kept an eye on important communications and so on, but did not do any actual work. And thus on Monday I had a little mountain of mail and notifications from Slack, GitLab and Atlassian applications waiting for me.

In the days before resuming work, I had decided that I would wake up “early” (~7:00am) from Monday to Friday, and start work straight away (after some fruit and water). That hour is still quiet at home, and I can catch up with things without distractions before the morning rush with the kids. Also, my wife and I agreed that the best way for us to be productive at work without the kids staying at daycare for a zillion hours a day was to shift our respective working days by an hour or two: she would wake the kids up, go with them to the nursery school and start working “late” in the morning — and I would finish work “soon” to go pick them up and take care of them until the evening. And that's what we have been doing. Except for the days when one of the little ones has a bad night and we sleep poorly (and I don't feel like working at 7:20am), this arrangement works well.

[7–13 Mar]

Last week I took for test drives three of the EV's I've recently mentioned here: the Volkswagen ID.4 on Monday, the Kia EV6 on Wednesday, and the Škoda Enyaq iV on Friday. I'm probably the worst car tester in the world, and I insisted to my wife that it should be she going to those appointments at the dealerships. But me being still on paternity leave (last week of that!) and she at work in the mornings, I ended up being the tester.

I am bad at this because in general I don't like cars, and I care mostly (and almost exclusively) about the figures and the easily quantifiable stuff: price, power, range, storage, warranty, etc — and I am sceptical of looks and impressions. (Come to think of it, that last sentence defines me well in lots of other areas of life…) So I sat behind the sleek wheel of those three beauties, and my most sophisticated reflection was something along the lines of: “Wow, isn't this cool. Look at that huge screen over there! And the upholstery feels so soft…” Then there's the “inconvenience” that all decent EV's today have a comparatively impressive response when one really steps on the gas pedal, and so it's difficult to tell awesome acceleration from great acceleration from amazing acceleration (not that it matters much to me). In summary, I liked the three of them (but perhaps the Škoda more than the others).

[28 Feb – 6 Mar]

Two weeks ago was my last of paternity leave as such. Since last week I'm on a different type of absence: a shorter one that is given to parents of lactating babies to make it easier for them to feed the child while at work. In principle it's one hour less of work per day for a certain period of time, but I chose to concentrate it all in whole days, and that gave me an extra couple of weeks completely off work. (That's what most other parents choose to do too, for what I hear.)

Some days we had a few fights with Miss Entropy. Tantrums, noes, whims… Some days she's lovely, but others she links one annoying behaviour with the next, and it exhausts diplomacy and persuasion (and patience). On Wednesday, for instance, I had plans to go out in the evening to meet two different groups of people, each for a short while; but I was so tired from dealing with the kids that I ducked out in the last minute and didn't even go out. I was in a bit of a bad mood. Fortunately an hour or two of isolation late at night, when everybody else was in bed, made me some good. Thank $DEITY for the night! If only one didn't need to sleep…

[21–27 Feb]

As I hinted the week before, Breaker of Horses continued with his spell of bad nights for another four or five days straight. No fever, luckily — but waking up often in the middle of the night, doubling up and crying. One day for instance I had to wake up around 7:00am (yes, that's waking up “early” for us now), take him with me to the living room, and soothe and rock him to sleep. We don't know what it was all those nights (gas? teeth? digestion? nightmares?), as is often the case with little babies. We simply saw he had no fever or other visible symptoms, that whatever was wrong subsided on its own after ten minutes or a few hours at most, and that it happened only at night (and only for a few nights), so our heuristic was that it couldn't be too important, and we didn't even contemplate going to the emergency room or calling our GP in the morning. I guess not being rookies at the child-rearing game any more gives us some advantage. Some nights were tough and my wife and I were tired; others not so much and we functioned well during the day anyway.

[14–20 Feb]

We don't believe in Valentine's Day here. But just in case, on the 14^th I bought a Häagen-Dazs, “Belgian chocolate” flavour. Think Pascal's wager! It lasted a few days (we love chocolate, but we never eat a lot of anything like that).

On Tuesday evening I rode my motorbike to Avenida de la Ilustración to meet someone who stumbled upon my post about “Mein Kampf” and had the kindness to write me an e-mail. He's D., a fellow admirer of many of my own intellectual heroes (Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Jonathan Haidt, Christopher Hitchens, etc). We had a coffee/tea, got to know each other a little bit, and found a lot of common interests. I think we were both excited to discover another human being who had listened to the same podcast interviews, watched the same debates on YouTube, read the same blog posts, and fallen in love with the same ideas, in Spain. Later I introduced him (virtually) to my rationalist and EA circles in Madrid. So, a new friend. In that way, this new old blog has served some purpose already!

[7–13 Feb]

Stuff that broke last week: the washing machine. Moderate consternation ensued — we use it more than once every other day, because we're four at home and it's not one of those machines with large capacity. Fortunately we managed to get it working again on the same day by cleaning a water filter that was easy to remove without taking the whole thing apart.

Wife and I went to yet another car dealer to see the electric Volkswagen ID.4. It's kinda what we need in size, cargo volume, and range. But we still have to polish our spreadsheets to see if the gains in the long term are worth the “100% electric” price tag. (Spoiler alert: at the time of writing this, we've made some progress with those estimates, and it looks as if a ~€13,000 gap between the prices of an EV and the “equivalent” internal combustion car would cancel itself out after seven years of usage or so, given our consumption patterns, etc.)

[31 Jan – 6 Feb]

Last week we had a couple of appointments to go and see apartments for sale in a town nearby. We had to cancel the first one in the last minute because my wife was too busy with work to jump in the car, drive there and do the visit (not that it's too far from where we live now). The day after I went to see the other one, only with Breaker of Horses this time. I liked the quality of the construction materials and the finish, and the residential area was very pleasant and well equipped (every corner was spotless). But when I told my wife about all the pros and cons, we agreed that it was too small for us: with two little kids growing up, and both of us working from home most of the time, we really need some room.

The problem with the ubiquitous five-star rating system is that you cannot assign negative value to things. (What would the opposite of a “star” be? A “black hole”? Something that sucks light instead of emitting it…)

I mean a negative rating as in this entirely fictional customer review:

“My rating: minus-⭐!
I bought this power drill back in August and I was so excited to use it.
Well, it drilled backwards and it trepanned my skull!
Very painful. Avoid this product.”

Or this one:

“My experience at the première:
The film was so disgusting that it made me dizzy first, then gave me seizures, and finally a voice in my head somehow convinced me to devote the rest of my life to gently tapping with a teaspoon the forehead of every person around me, incessantly.
That was six years ago.
Writing this from the madhouse now. Not too bad in here, actually.
(I still give the film five black holes for the damage caused! Four black holes, tops.)”

[24–30 Jan]

Now that I'm writing these notes (based on my daily pages, as usual) I realise that last week we met several people many times, and did lots of things (by our boring standards, anyway!).

[17–23 Jan]

The highlight of last week was my wife's birthday. She became a round number above 37 and below 41. Child-rearing, The Unspeakable and this 110% WFH have conspired to serve us two very humdrum years, with very little in the way of travel, social gatherings, cultural events, and the other serendipitous offerings that life usually has in store. All that is to say that this birthday deserved some fanfare.

We got to celebrate thrice over the weekend: with my family, with her family, and with a couple of friends; and so she got to blow three sets of candles, and received birthday gifts in all three occasions. Family and friends rock; table talk and home-made biscuits and hugs and friends' news and fabada and roscón de reyes for twenty people are A Good Thing. It's too easy to forget that.