57 posts tagged with "personal"

[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.

[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.

[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.

Inspired by Paul Battley (whom in turn was “inspired by Tom and Nat and Chris”) I’ve decided to start writing weeknotes. Specifically, around the end of last year I decided that I would write brief weekly notes and share them online.

To make that easier, and because I stumbled upon a nice 2022 calendar-diary template on Reddit (and because I'm usually eager to find new use cases for my loyal reMarkable 2) I would also start writing a page about my day, every day.

Unrelated to all that, I had been meaning for a long time to have a blog again (I have been “blogging” and “microblogging” on third-party platforms, but I always missed owning my content and being part of the IndieWeb like in the good old days).

Last month it all came together, and eight days ago, on January first, I finally managed to (re)launch this blog. (I started doing other new things, but those aren't relevant now, or I won't share with the world.)

So here go my first weeknotes for week 1, 2022 (plus a few more days, for context):

Miss Entropy​

Miss Entropy levanta la cabeza
me mira y dice: «up!»
«Up!», me ordena.

Ha estado apuntando su dedito
en direcciones inescrutables
señalando maravillas nuevas
desde hace un rato.