Word of the week: dulae - take care

In my life: One very, very late set of notes courtesy of a bunch of things happening together. Initially around week 24, I fell sick and it has taken me quite some time to recover. While the initial flu like symptoms disappeared after 3 days, it left me feeling quite weak. I could barely walk a block without getting out of breath. Gym sessions left me feeling extremely weak and I could barely do the same sets I was doing before.

This too eventually subsided but I’ve been left with some weakness in my left leg. It often feels tight and cramps up and only having one gym session a week doesn’t help. While I knew some of it would happen (these are the side effects of a treatment I needed) it’s kind of discouraging to see your progress be shot to hell in a day.

After this was semi sorted I was finally unblocked on the story I was writing. I’d wake up head full of words but not enough time to get them out in a way that made me happy.

Work has been a bit frustrating as well. We’re seeing a lot of team departures and have had to move around things we can work on due to capacity constraints. We have a lot of uncertainty around who’ll be around in Q3 but the PO and scrum master are doing their best to plan for all of these.

All of that left no spoons for writing weekly notes or many of my to-do tasks. I just wanted to shut off my brain and veg on the couch at the end of the day. I told myself I’d be more consistent but I realise I don’t want this to be yet another chore that I have to do or I’m likely to drop it altogether.

On a more positive note, I’ve still mostly carried on with my walks except when we had weather issues (a bomb cyclone hit Sydney last week) or when I’ve woken up feeling completely uncomfortable. Sathya and I even did some nice leisurely walks to new-to-us locations on Sunday and I’ve made Instagram reels out of the videos I took on them. Eating is also mostly on track.

We also explored the nearby suburb of Lane Cove on one of these quieter weekends and had some good food, found an Indian store and visited some bookshops.

Guitar is going well for a change as we haven’t done improv in a while. We’re getting deeper into musical theory, chord progressions and learning how to play in time to the sheet notation all of which I’m thoroughly enjoying.

On the family front, my sister has now adopted a dog named Benny and I get a bunch of pictures and videos of my furry nibling which has made many of these days brighter.

So I guess while some of this has been tiring, it does feel like there’s a lot of good stuff happening too.

On my screens: Vegging out on the couch has meant I watched a bunch of stuff.

  1. K-pop Demon Hunters (Netflix, Animated): The song Soda Pop popped up on my feed and I was hooked. A great animated show with on point music, it has a simple plot with some deep thought (exploration of family trauma & expectations and mental health) behind it. Highly, highly recommend.
  2. Dept Q (Netflix, Thriller): I picked this up solely because of Mathew Goode as I have been fascinated by the characters he chooses to play ever since I first saw him in The Good Wife. Episode 1 reminded of The Girl With The Dragon tattoo and I realised this was based on a Danish book series. I loved the show and couldn’t stop till I had binged everything. Set in Edinburgh and following a set of dysfunctional cops solving an old cold case, this show is a brilliant at characterisation and atmosphere. I love how it strips down the victims history into pieces none of which is solely pity worthy or flattering. While it was a bit easy to guess the culprit, the actual way the crime was committed remained a mystery till the last episode. I do hope we get more seasons.
  3. Head Over Heels (Prime Video, Ongoing, Korean) - Yet another show that popped up on my feed and gave me Lovely Runner vibes. A high schooler who is also a shaman falls in love with a boy destined to die in 21 days and now has to try and protect him the evil that stalks him. While the main couple is pretty cute, I’m getting major SML syndrome while watching this.
  4. Marry My Husband (Prime Video, Ongoing, Japanese) - I’d watched the previous Kdrama version when it aired but the Japanese version just has a little extra edge to it.

Along with this I’m continuing with Reset from my last notes and DNF’d some other shows that I tried and didn’t much care for.

On my bookshelf: Not much reading this week except for sporadic spy fanfic updates as I was mostly focused on writing. I bought two books including one from an Aussie author but they’re still in my TBR pile.

On my pages: I wrote two more chapters over these weeks and have the next (also the final) chapter planned out. I usually only write short stories so ending up at ~11k words so far has been a big surprise.

On my playlist: I spent some time these weeks listening to videos talk about old K-pop hits. This one isn’t exactly new to me, but the videos mentioned it was Exo’s debut track. I hadn’t been known that that and it reminded me how much I enjoyed listening to this. So this goes in the list over the K-pop demon hunters soundtrack.

On my watchlist: Just posting the links to two videos I enjoyed watching.

  1. Hyperlapse of Bondi-Manly walk. This is on my list of walks to do in Sydney and shows how beautiful Sydney is.
  1. This short film on what you expect from life. Mainly makes me wish I could get my colour graded videos to look like this.

On my plate: We ate out a bit over these three weeks which Sathya has already talked about on his weekly notes, eating amongst other things - some fusion Indian, an amazing buckwheat porridge and sweet pancakes. Other than that I tried making crispy lamb mince (which might be a new favourite way to cook it), some home style egg curry, some lamb korma, crispy air fryer bhindi (adding some oil to the Besan mix makes a huge difference) and a Chicken Tandoori (marinated with kefir which gave it a very Malai Tikka like texture)

On my camera: Pretty light and an abandoned wharf near Blues Point Reserve.

Thanks for tagging along!