w/e 2021-04-11
I’ve been listening a bit to Hen Ogledd’s Free Humans this week which is, for me, an odd mixture: some tracks are not my cup of tea at all, while others are wonderful earworms. Trouble has been hard to shake:
The next track on the album is called Earworm.
§ The plumbers were back this week after replacing the boiler and water tanks in February, this time to do a bunch of work on the bathrooms, particularly the showers. They haven’t quite finished but they’ve finished enough that this weekend we could shower in a new, larger, shinier cubicle with a new, more powerful shower unit, then step onto a new floor, grabbing a towel gently warmed on the new heated towel rail that replaced the radiator. I felt exactly like I would in the bathroom of a swanky hotel: pampered and poorer.
§ If you follow my collected links (on Pinboard, Gyford.com or by RSS) you’ll have seen a few linocut printmakers I particularly like, because I’ve been reading some printmaking blogs. I’ve also been collecting a few individual linocut prints on Pinterest. There is a lot of very twee stuff around in that world but I was also pleasantly surprised at how varied the results could be from a very basic technique. Lovely stuff.
§ I’ve started dipping into Instagram again this week. I feel a bit dirty about it but if I use the website, rather than the app, I don’t see any ads, so I’m merely paying with my eyeballs rather than generating any advertising pennies for Mark Facebook. It’s extremely nice to see what’s going on in the lives of some of my friends and so that’s the deal I’m willing to make at the moment.
§ We watched Martin Scorcese’s The Irishman and I guess it was fine. I enjoyed it a lot at first but, for me, there wasn’t enough there to warrant its long longy length. Part-way through I was wishing it was a miniseries so that there would be a point at which I could officially stop watching and leave the rest until another day. Eventually all the stubborn, arsey men were out-stubborned and out-arsed by Jimmy Hoffa being especially tedious and it finally reached the inevitable conclusion. It wasn’t bad, but definitely OK.
We also continued our Netflix TV journey, watching all the things you probably watched years ago, by seeing the first season of Better Call Saul. Very good. Well, it was excellent for the first four episodes or so, when I wanted to keep watching it back-to-back all night. After that it felt like it couldn’t quite keep up the focus and pace and it became merely very good. I’m looking forward to more.
Belated update: I forgot that we also watched season one of GLOW. That was a lot of fun. Short episodes, not too clever, not too dumb, great to watch, jolly good.
§ Given I have no children, pets, commute, work, or social life it’s frustrating that I’m not getting through all the small online and offline tasks I keep meaning to do.
Sure, there’s the cooking, cleaning, reading the news, reading blogs and newsletters, dealing with email, keeping up with Twitter, Slack, Instagram, Flickr and Discord, yoga, exercising, going for walks, reading the backlog of magazines, reading fiction, learning German, practising piano, watching TV, doing life admin, and keeping various websites ticking over. But other than that I should be getting loads done. I don’t think I’m joking.
Have a productive and/or enjoyable week.