Paul Davidson
Weeknotes 045: C’mon beautiful
I needn’t have worried about Piglet. We went round Lǎolao and Lǎoyé’s and after hugging The Chef she glommed on to me and refused to leave me for more than a few minutes. When we got home she proved difficult to settle. At the point where I felt frustrated she sat up, beamed her biggest smile then lay back down to be patted to sleep.
We visited my parents for the anniversary itself. We couldn’t think of a gift to ask for, so they made us Sunday dinner instead. And gave us a bottle of champagne too. It was with a supreme feeling of contentment that we sat in our forever home drinking and radiating good vibes.
These were punctured in the morning by the return to work. I remembered my password, which was a better than normal start. We’re off-shoring one of my projects and I’m in meetings about it all week. Flatteringly, there are over a dozen people from different disciplines taking it on. I might not be 100% useless at my job after all.
Two weeks of holiday meant two weeks of wearing shoes. I’m sure that didn’t used to give me athlete’s foot, but here we are.
Piglet’s shoes and slippers fit on the shoe rack now, instead of falling through the gap. This wasn’t a milestone I was expecting to be in any way poignant, but again, here we are.
She struggled to get to sleep one night. She lay in bed scrunching her eyes tight and patting herself to no avail, before turning to The Chef, “I’m sad mama. I can’t do it. I want to sleep.” 🥺
She managed in the end, only for me to make her cry again in the morning when I confiscated a toy for her kicking me. It doesn’t feel pleasant, but it’s got to be done. Right?
I’ve completed the first level crown in Chinese Duolingo course. It’s not a good app by itself for learning Chinese, but it’s helped my unthinking grammar, which is an area I struggle with in class. I’m scarred by high school Spanish and instinctively go to Latin grammar, despite Chinese more closely following English word order. Counter to its reputation, only the characters and (for the musically illiterate) tones are hard. Otherwise Chinese is one of the easier languages to learn from an English starting point. And there are no irregular verbs to memorise.
RSV has been running through nursery and we kept Piglet out last week. It’s settled down enough that we’ve sent her back in after much circular fretting over our decision. The two weeks out led to a temperamental drop off. Which was soothed by an offer of toast.
The neighbours two up have a two and five year old. They walked past while Piglet was “driving” the car and The Chef was sat in the garden shelling peas for tea. Which was enough to pique the eldest’s curiosity and she asked to help. That led to the youngest having a go on our tree swing. And that somehow led to everyone doing Ring a Ring o’ Rosie. It’s a nice neighbourhood.
This week’s “new” music is the Ace of Bells. I played it to The Chef while she finished choosing her 20 photos in a swift three months. They’re ordered and now on to procrastinating over layout.
This article about the bleakness of Recaptcha has been doing the rounds. And it captures everything wrong about them.
It was Lǎoye’s birthday at the weekend and we celebrated with wine, more champagne, BBQ and blueberry cheescake. His highlight though was the video message from Piglet to say “生日快乐!”
That off-shoring project I mentioned. Well, I did it: I did a weeknote at work. Not sure how I feel about that to be honest.
I visited Giles Turnbull’s website for tips from the master on doing a work weeknote and spotted an unexpected link in his blogroll. That one exception aside, it’s a good list and I got another dozen high-quality feeds for my RSS. I’m through the 800 barrier and should make a blogroll of my own. I don’t know what I did to get on Giles’ list, but I’ll take it. This is my first shot at blogging, so getting linked by respectable strangers is still weird. In fact, you should stop wasting your time here and head over to read some better quality stuff.
15 August 2021