w/e 2024-09-29

We’ve both been home all week which has been nice and easy, getting back into the usual routines, plus a walk up and down Sugar Loaf.

§ No major music listening this week, although I’ve enjoyed Dance, No One’s Watching by Ezra Collective, Love is Overtaking Me by Arthur Russell, and SOPHIE.

§ In the several years I’ve been wearing an Apple Watch I’ve never used it for sleep tracking and thought I’d give that a try this week. Maybe it would reveal some hitherto unknown malady!

On the second night it took me at least 1½ hours to get to sleep but in the morning the watch told me I had in fact been in “Deep sleep” almost all that time, and that I’d only been awake for 11 minutes the entire night.

Maybe I so internalised Uta Hagen’s guidance for acting “being asleep” that I do it every night while trying to sleep and am convincingly sleeping, as far as all outside observers, human or otherwise, are concerned. Or maybe, if it can’t even tell if I’m awake or asleep, the Watch just isn’t very good at sleep tracking?

Either way, I’ll now rely on the traditional method of determining whether I had a good night’s sleep: waking up in the morning and thinking, “I slept well,” or “I didn’t sleep well”.

§ For years our WiFi has been a bit feeble at one end of the house. We can’t move the router so we’ve just put up with occasionally not getting a signal in bed or that end of the kitchen or when in the car on the drive. Finally, like Tom learning a lesson, we decided to do something about it and bought a range extender. The simple instructions made it sound like it couldn’t be easier to set up. In the end I was sitting on chat with some support guy for 90 minutes before it was working correctly. So now we can access our slow internet connection from the whole house. Cool story.

§ For a while I’ve been looking for some new trousers to wear instead of jeans. It’s not that I’ve grown out of the concept of jeans, they just didn’t quite feel like me as much as they have for most of my life.

I stumbled across some by the Canadian brand DU/ER in a shop in Abergavenny that hit all the spots: five jeans-style pockets, the right colour, fit me well, decently made, look alright, very comfortable. Having worn them for a while I thought I’d buy some more, because I don’t like having to make decisions about what to wear unless it’s for some special event. (I don’t go to any special events.) Unfortunately I appear to have bought the only pair of these trousers in my size in the entire country so to get more I’ll have to order from the US store.

I clearly have very discerning tastes.

On the other hand… 

I had my eyes tested this week and decided to get some new glasses – I’ve been wearing my current Mykita frames for 12 years and, while I love them, I’m wary of becoming an old man wearing glasses that only looked good decades ago. So with the help of the nice man I settled on a pair by Moscot.

The day after paying the deposit we met up with some friends/neighbours and I realised one of them was wearing the same frames, possibly in the same colour. In the decades I’ve been buying expensive glasses from fancy opticians I’ve never noticed anyone wearing the same ones as me. And now that’s happened before I’ve even got them.

I am merely one of the herd, easily swayed by whatever trends are currently being pushed by The Man.

§ We watched LOLA (Andrew Legge, 2022) on Channel 4 which was quite a fun low-budget alternate-history almost-time-travel movie set in the 1930s/40s, making uses of modified period footage. Belief had to be suspended quite a bit, which was fine, apart from when it came to the dialogue and performances which felt very 21st century, spoiling the whole thing a little.

§ That’s all.