Paul Davidson
Weeknotes 021: Naughty Monkey Bum Bum
Yesterday evening’s wine tastes all the sweeter for being in the middle of dry lent.
I’d been good before then, sticking to the Nanny State. It’s odd to think it’s a beer I could drink with breakfast without breaking any social mores.
As noted by everyone everywhere, spring has sprung. Two weekends worth of gardening and bike rides have me feeling positively frisky. Which is handy as, after re-reading yearnotes, I realise how close I got to burnout last year. The Christmas holiday couldn’t have been better timed.
Counter-intuitively, I’ve staved off the return of burnout by increasing work. Now that I’ve 2 months of stable productivity, it’s time to reintroduce more life into the work-life balance. I’m aiming to couple the nice weather with some bike rides to different cafes.
Having inherited a collection of so-so kids books, when I suddenly discovered that Jon Klassen wrote a full hat trilogy I suddenly bought the lot.
One of the better books was a gift from the work lunch table. An A-Z of maths. Because we’re all dweebs. We repaid them for the gift by sending a video of Piglet reading aloud the Matrix and Null Set pages. Her “welcome to dweeb club” badge is on order.
Courtesy of that book, she’s a decent grasp of numbers and we’re moving on to the alphabet. Starting with English. Once she’s masters the 26, we’ll move on to the few thousand characters needed to read a Chinese newspaper.
She’s started investigating lying too. If she wants to be picked out of the cot after bedtime she’ll claim she’s filled her nappy. And when she’s bored of food, she’ll fake yawn and say, “tired.” I’ve been waiting for this development stage and glad she’s artlessly demonstrating her grey matter.
This video essay is on needle-drops in films is one hour long. And I watched the whole thing. Both the content of the argument and the constant snippets of great movies kept me hooked.
We cooked this beans and chard recipe shared in Nat Buckley’s yearnotes and it was delicious. Straight into the cook again pile.
I joined an Oh God What Now zoom and it was abundantly clear that no-one’s heart was in it. We’re all ready for lockdown and zooms to be over.
Like everyone other dad in the UK, I enjoyed listening to the new Mogwai album. While I’m happy that they’ve got their first number one album, I can’t help but feel a competition which is won with other people’s cash is biased towards the middle-aged. Pop and football used to be for the young.
A roofer visited and, for a very reasonable amount of cash in hand, left us with hoping the next storm stays outside the house.