Weeknotes 2026-W39

It has been another quite decent week, and I've been busy each day which is good I guess.

The website

Like the past few weeks I've continued work on the website:

• I added /daylog which is to have a quick, short log of the things I've done each day
• I added art of the week, which is so that I can try to learn more about art and see some more. So it's more of a discovery thing for me too!

That's about it for the website itself. In terms of blog posts, the only one I wrote was one on Fender which was a μblog entry referring to Mary Spender's interview with the Fender CEO. In hindsight it's just an ad hominem, and I'm not sure I'm proud of that.

Opera

On Monday, we went out to the opera house to see Don Giovanni, which was very enjoyable. There were no really catchy arias though, and sadly they did the thing that a lot of operas do and repeated the lines a lot. Still, a good production.

Beforehand we went to Thai Pot, a small Thai place just outside of Covent Garden (on Bedfordshire Place, I believe it was called). It was really good! The prices were lot and the portions small, which was much appreciated. I had a tofu and ginger with mushroom (not sure what type of mushroom as they looked very weird) which was very pleasant.

Movies

I have seen three this week, which is fairly impressive as I almost never go to see movies.

On Wednesday, I saw Resident Evil in the cinema with my brother. It was quite good and I enjoyed it. I have never played the games and have heard it has no relation to the games, however as a film by itself it was well produced and enjoyable.

On Thursday, I watched Tonari no Totoro at home, in my quest to watch all the Studio Ghibli films (detailled here). The theatre show ends in January so I should book tickets in before then to go see it live.

On Sunday, me and my mum went to go see Sense and Sensibility. Both of us cannot stand the book, and neither of us enjoyed the film either. It was fine to begin with, but very soon grew tedious (just like the book!) and in the soundtrack, the amount of strings-crossing and arpeggios on the violin was intolerable. They also didn't play authentic music at the balls.

Diet and Exercise

I didn't go to the gym at all. This was largely because I had other occupations at the times when I would have expected to go to the gym, and my work days were very busy, so I didn't really get the chance to.

I also was a bit unsystematic about tracking my food and exercise, so I don't really have any figures for that. What I do have is that I do appear to be losing a bit of weight - starting at about 79.5kg I now seem to be closer to 79.0kg or maybe 78.9kg ish, so I'm definitely a bit less fat. I'll carry on over the coming weeks I guess and with any luck be a healthy weight soon enough...

Mandolin

I have been lent an octave mandola by one of the members of the Phoenix mando group, and have played around with it and do enjoy it. I also stopped by Hobgoblin last week to have a play on their octave mandolas, and have found one I want to buy. I think next week I will buy it. It is a Paul Hathway instrument and feels very enjoyable to play. I played about with two, one with a larger body and one with a normal sized body, and think I prefer the larger body both in tone but also in how it feels against my chest.

We had a meet-up on Saturday for the LME, which is our penultimate meet before the concert in November. There are a few pieces I still need to practise more, but overall I do feel fairly comfortable with the pieces. I can also just not play segments I am unsure on, as the group is fairly large anyways.

Afterwards we stopped by the pub for a quick drink: I mainly chatted to one of the guitarists, and only stayed a short while. I did have one drink of Aspall, but I think it's fine as it's keeping to the rules I set out in my detox (basically, I can drink but no binge-drinking).

Mandolin is going quite well though, and there's plenty to practise.

Next week

I have Monday off ...

Mando on Tuesday. Got to print the mandola music off and do some practice.

Don't think there's too much else for the rest of the week.