2025-05-18
• weeknotes • 564 words
Wow, the weeks are passing by incredibly quickly. Already, we are on week twenty!
This week, and the next one too, are very busy, booked out with many different events. This is partly to celebrate my birthday, and partly just how things have worked out.
I woke up late, worked from home, and then saw my friends of the evening.
I decided I would try to do the "tracking" again, but this time with a much more limited set of things (just: mandolin, exercise, diarising, and IF2/RHS study) to the end of rewards. So, if I get a full week (or, giving myself a bit of leeway, six days, say) of exercising, I can treat myself to a cake at the cafe.
I was good in the morning! I did some yoga, some weights, some mandolin, and then studied on the train. I've been reading La boheme, which has been good fun. In the evening, I bought some odds and ends from Sainsburys and went to the allotment.
I listened to some nice music both at lunch, and in the evening went to the Barbican/GSMD to listen to songs. The singing was really good - operatic style singing, about the colour blue. Interestingly, I found that when a song started I could never tell what language it was in or understand anything, but then partly through I'd pick up on a phrase and go "oh, it's in Japanese!" (or Italian, German etc.) and then could (mostly) understand it from then on.
I studied on the train like I tell myself I ought, and at work ended up collecting four items of Winnie the Pooh crockery in a kettle box (the office is shut for the next few weeks). I went to Fatto a Mano for dinner, reading more La boheme, and then to the opera house, where there was a Young ROH night on for the Romeo and Juliet ballet. The first ballet I've seen, it was actually really good! What I understood though I only understood because I know the story of R&J, and not because it was easy to understand. There was no dialogue whatever. Still, it was really impressive, and I even ended up crying (which happens a lot nowadays when I go to shows - I actually think it's a good thing as it means my emotional repression might be ever so slightly easing up) in the final scene where they both die.
The "kettle" was oddly popular: when I got it back out from the cloakroom, someone shouted out "he's got his kettle back!". I was getting stares on the tube (probably they thought it was a bomb) and had a quick chat at Bank station with a drunk couple when the man went "why does he have a kettle?"
Because I was tired after the opera, I woke up late and just started work immediately. I also didn't go into the city, because I couldn't really be asked to get the train specifically for the one show, and it was free, anyways.
I went to the cafe and studied, finished the IF2 book. I also read to completion the first act of La boheme. I spent some time at the allotment, too.
Feeling very lethargic, as a result I haven't done a great deal. A very small amount of mandolin in the morning, some blog writing, and a very good deal of sleeping, is about it.