2026 Week 31

I returned to commuting last week. Oscar has been attending a science camp in town and this has meant jumping on the district line during rush hour. I do miss the commute. It was my chance to listen to podcasts, read a book, or just observe the world around me. The commute served as a welcome separation between activities at home, and life at work. For many, the commute is associated with rushing around, but for me it has always been a chance to slow down. This week though, it was a reminder of everything I disliked about the daily commute; the cancelled trains, the Tube line that is undergoing planned maintenance, and being crushed between bags and people in the stifling heat.

The screen on my eReader gave up. I may see if I can repair it, but in the meantime picked up Kobo Clara Colour. I’m happy with the device and the fact that Kobo still lets you download eBook files. Ideally I’d like an eInk screen that allows me to read (and annotate) articles from my RSS reader. I’ve yet to find anything. The Kobo Instapaper integration does’t include the ability to highlight passages.

Watched two movies this week:

Apollo 13 - we missed seeing this at EMF Camp
The Hunt for Red October - Oscar has been learning about submarines

We spent some time in the garden trimming the jasmine plant at the front of the house. I started off by trimming a couple of branches and the boys rushed out to help. One gathered the cuttings, the other piled them on top of the bin. Alicia soon joined us and we ended spending most of the evening pruning and tidying the garden.

At work there are murmurings around changes to the way performance is measured with a possible move from team to individual performance goals. Whilst there are many around me who support such a move, I’m not a fan.

In the evenings I’ve spent a lot more time iterating on a new theme for my blog. I’m not sure much will change visually but I want to try out a different approach to publishing photos. I’d like to be able to reference a photo in multiple places, and ensure that photos published in blog posts also appear in the gallery. Also, my first attempt at creating a photography gallery with Hugo relies on a number of deprecated Hugo methods and so I’m running on borrowed time.

We wrapped the weekend up with a saturday of coincidences.

Week in Pictures

A photo of a white, six story, building outside South Kensington Tube station, the bright sunlight reflecting off the building leaves the foreground in the dark — south kensington

a photo of a brick wall, the top half of the wall is a traditional sandy brick colour, the bottom half is a deep turquoise — in colour 1

a photo of a window, the window is made up of 20 square panes, 4 across and 5 hight, the colour of the glass fades diagonally from turquoise top left, through yellow, to green in the bottom right — in colour 2

a photo of the William Hogg memorial ground stadium in the midday sun, the dry grass in the foreground an indication of sustained dry weather — dry

a photo taken in a round mirror, much of the scene is dark but sunlight lights two indoor plants that can be seen in the reflection — sunlight

two boys stand in a kitchen making pasta, a long belt of pasta passes through rollers on a pasta machine, the elder opf the two reaches as high as he can to keep the pasta from falling to the floor — we want pasta - you can have pasta if you make the pasta

a balck and white photo looking out through the slats of a blind to the bright sky outside. — in the shade - the heat has returned, I haven’t quite covered the windows with space blankets