The first week back at work after prolonged time off (in my case three glorious weeks) isn’t the easiest. One of the benefits of having time off is being able to relax and wind down and view your life from afar. The downside is that you reset your rhythm twice: once when the holiday begins and you don’t have to get up before anything good happens – and then once again when you have to wake up early again. So I won’t say it was the easiest of starts, especially when my normal rhythm (my 4-day-work-week with a day off on Wednesday was disrupted due to other nice engagements), but by Friday I found somewhat of a rhythm again. Though I look forward to the time when there’s something resembling daylight when the alarm goes off…

Doggo

This weekend I got to hang out with Pablo, the cute dog that barks loudly sometimes. He’s nice and cuddly most of the time though, and he has nice eyes. But sometimes he barks really loud. When I was a child I was a bit afraid of dogs, so I’ve come a long way to sort of befriend an animal creature like this. But I still can’t get used to the (loud) barking. I remember going to see the first Lord of the Rings movie way back in the cinema. In the first half of the movie there’s a scene that made me jump up to such an extent that the whole row noticed in because their seats moved too… It didn’t have anything to do with orcs or Sauron. It was a barking dog that made me jump…

Watch

• I completely forgot to mention I saw Spider-Man: Into the Multiverse in London. It was absolutely glorious, poking fun at the many Spider-Man origin stories we’ve seen in cinema (and comic books) in the past decades, but also paying homage to different art styles and comic books in general. I don’t remember when I last saw an animated film that felt so fresh and unique. Whole-heartedly recommended, even if you feel like you saw one or two too many super hero films in recent years.
• My girlfriend made an animation (with her friend) which is available for your viewing pleasure here. I did some funny / weird voices for the philosophers. It’s in Dutch, mind you, so you might not be able to make sense of it. But it looks good, right?
• We finished the Netflix adaption of A Series of Unfortunate Events on Saturday. I thought the ending was rather satisfying and the last season brought some real depth thematically. Enjoyed that a lot.

Read

• Here’s a trainwreck of a column about a mother who wrote about her daughter, and then when her daughter asks her to stop, she says she can’t. Oh dear.

Listen

• Three albums I’m looking forward to: Rosie Carney’s Bare, plus the new Jessica Pratt and Cass McCombs albums. Yes I’m now on the Cass bandwagon.
• Andy Shauf and his band made an album under the name Foxwarren. I’ve only just discovered it, but it sounds pretty good. Check it out.
• A bit late, but I really enjoyed this Slate podcast about Christmas no. 1 in the UK. Besides racing past some nice, awful, weird, wonderful songs that made Christmas No. 1 in the United Kingdom (or nearly made it!), it tells some nice tales about how some of these songs came to pass. One of the songs included came to because of snarky comment by a mother… I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

Cook

• This recipe of sweet potato, spinach en lentil dhal worked out pretty well. Obviously we used way more garlic than the measly single clove mentioned in the recipe and I may have gone a bit overboard with the turmeric. But hey, it tasted good. Also I have no clue where to get Thai Basil here. So we changed it to parsley. Not the same I know, but that leaves something to be discovered the next time we eat it.

Journal

• I picked up bullet journalling again this week. I fell of the wagon last Autumn, and initially didn’t think I would start again, but then, suddenly, I did. So, yea, hopefully these notes will benefit from it.