• The eldest had an emotional meltdown on Monday because she lost the permission slip for us to allow her to attend her 4 pre-christmas choir performances. The kid has volunteered for choir, she has a violin recital and has lines in the whole school performance. The school end of year has no chill. But she did learn how to make basic origami dragon puppets and named one of them “Bob Strongbite” and she wrote a story about a Count called Bumface.
• Because of the end of year performance each night when we’re doing bedtime the littlest and I sing Angels by Robbie Williams and she does the actions to each line including “I feel that love is dead”.
• At University I read, at the recommendation of one of Sam Ellis’s tutors, Roger Pol Droit’s physical substack newsletter 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life. It’s not a book I recommend a lot because it’s quite “of its time”, and the experiment “See the stars below you” makes me existentially paralysed. But the two experiments “Look in vain for I” and “Be aware of yourself speaking” remember themselves to me when I feel I’ve been speaking a lot and need to listen more. It’s probably a good book for all of us to discover at university.
• We passed a “Yard sale” at Random International’s workshop on the way to pick up our Christmas tree and while we rummaged through the bins of pre-worn microcontrollers and Ivy repeatedly asked me “What’s this, what’s this” and for most of the things she pointed at I honestly couldn’t tell her. (We also bumped into Dev, Hi Dev 👋)
• This years tree is 6ft, not 5 ft. We have reached a new level in the game of middle class.
• Our tree was transported, as always, using the cargo bike, bungee cords and a lot of compromise.