With this I have finally caught up with my weeknote backlog. I aspire to be like Nika who (1) has a very snazzy layout for weeknotes that’s styled like a calendar and (2) is very consistent. Fingers crossed that I actually do sit down on Sunday nights from now on. Accompanied someone who was serving as a witness to court (anticlimactic as the fella actually being prosecuted didn’t show up and somehow got hospitalised the night before trial)....

A picture speaks a thousand words, so this will be my longest post yet. This week covered my final 3 days in London and the long trip home. I have learnt that getting film hand-inspected when taking the Eurostar (St Pancras or Gare du Nord) or at Heathrow Airport is a real pain because they say it has to go through the machine as long as your film’s under ISO 800....

Week 24 comprised of many things but mainly the wonders of time with long-distance friends, IKEA hanging trays, quiet museums and watching a bunch of folks play petanque. Listened to a lot of brat. Over the past week and this one, I visited a few of my friends who are based in London/Paris. We rarely get to hang out in the easy and pointless way that most friendships are made as kids/students, so whatever time we have to pointlessly hang out, cook, and wander about is precious to me....

[updated 2 Jul with an additional photo] I got the Raynox ME-606 in a random Hard-Off junk section (more precisely, Hard-Off at Hirata in Matsumoto) for the princely sum of 300 yen, with no real guarantees about whether it would work. This was before I wisened up and started bringing my own batteries for thrifting cameras, so all I knew was that it had corroded battery contacts and a battery flap that wouldn’t shut....

It’s evidently been a while. I think I procrastinated a lot on weeknotes because I felt like I had nothing to say. Realised I practice a lot of unnecessary self-censorship. In the past few weeks I’ve started helping someone out with filing a claim with the Small Claims Tribunal (I’m basically someone’s Computer Guy because he doesn’t have access to a laptop and also is not fluent in English), and also finally updated my review of classes I took for a graduate certificate after much procrastinating (bit of a running theme)....

In 2023, I spent 6 weeks leading a section of about 14 people hailing from China, Brazil, Germany, India, Japan (and more countries!) as part of Code in Place, and got to experience the joy of seeing people write their first for-loops :) We met for an hour a week on Zoom, but my personal estimate for how much time I spent on Code in Place including preparation + writing weekly recaps was about 4-5 hours a week (including class time)....

Double bill this time, because I’ve been kind of tardy. Week 17 I took a silversmithing class with my university flatmate and got to interact with flux and solder in a non-electronics-related setting :) It was very calming to just focus on: annealing the metal marking out where to cut it sawing it and filing to ensure a smooth join actually joining it by applying flux, and then solder to the joint shaping it into a rounder shape by hammering it on the mandrel grinding the ring down to create a wavy shape polishing it (done!...

Spent a lot of the week marinating (I prefer this term over “ruminating”). I think I’m still adjusting to freedom - so much time gets taken up by the work week that its sudden absence creates a vacuum of sorts. I realise that I’m used to taking work given to me by third parties very seriously, but am suddenly at a loss when it comes to my own goals and projects… guess I’m actually not used to prioritising my own interests and taking myself seriously....

This week, I made a ring using a baby tooth I found while unpacking from moving. I kept most of my baby teeth in a ziploc bag (not sure why I did that, but I was pretty weird even as a kid). Google says people have 20 baby teeth, and I have 18 still with me, so that’s a pretty good yield. Molars are good for rings because they’ve got quite a flat base and a rectangular shape....

This marks the first week of being temporarily free-range. I haven’t figured out the right term for it yet. I joked about this a bit 2 weeks ago, but “temporarily free-range” is my top contender for now. I’m avoiding calling it a sabbatical because it reminds me too much of tenured faculty, and “microdosing retirement” sounds a bit too laid back. What matters (and what’s kind of scary) about this time is that nobody can tell me what to do....