Word of the week: wan-jan - Monday

In my life: It’s been rainy few weeks here in Sydney. The rains usually mark the end of winter and the arrival of better weather, but it feels pretty dang miserable when you are in the thick of it. Thankfully these weeks were also marked by some good moments.

At work I finally found the root cause of the incident I talked about in my previous notes - a combination of user error and silent failures. I’m now helping a colleague look into Redis Cache timeout issues. I wasn’t very familiar with Redis outside of the basics so I’ve been doing a lot of reading and picking Sathya’s brain. It’ll be fun to know the root cause for this one.

I’m also going into office twice a week. It has been fun to meet my fellow colleagues in person, and I love that the office has standing desks (albeit with manual levers) with multiple monitors. Most of my immediate team is still in Melbourne/Brisbane though, so my usual routine of being on calls hasn’t really changed but I’ve been trying to make the best of it.

It has been nice to get dressed formally and experiment with my makeup (Summer Fridays skin tint is great for office wear) before heading into the city. One afternoon, I took the light rail and went down to Town Hall so that I could have Anjappar biryani again after more than a year - it’s only open for lunch on weekdays so I couldn't have it after moving to North Sydney. I also went in and returned along with Sathya one day - something I don’t think we’ve done since our Murugeshpalya days.

On the fitness front, I finished my extra sessions and I’m back to the two a week. The weights have increased for my front/back squats, we’ve added pendlay rows and I’m also finally getting better at bicep curls but man do the walking lunges wear me out. Every time I do them I’m out of breath and have to take long rests. My PT trainer says this is normal and I have increased weights/steps on this but it still feels like I have a long way to go.

Sathya has been asking me to join him in the group classes and I’m considering it as I like having three sessions a week but I also wonder if I can keep up with other people in the group. Morning/evening walks have also reduced due to a combination of schedule being disrupted by travel and the weird windy, rainy weather.

On the travel front, we went to Hunter Valley the first August weekend for a pre birthday trip. A combination of Sathya being unable to drive and a rainy weekend meant most of the time was spent in the resort. That combined with the frankly terrible internet speeds (I couldn’t even access text websites sometimes on the Wi-Fi) meant that we spent a lot of time just chilling. We did a wine tasting one day but mostly we ate some good food, took long naps and I read a whole book from their library. It was a welcome change of pace from our usual life in Sydney where I often feel that I should get out & do more. Eventually our return train also got cancelled, so we had a little mini adventure getting back into the city.

The second week marked my birthday and as we’d already gone away the previous weekend we decided to keep it low key and just grab dinner in the city. Sathya surprised me in the morning with a birthday brownie and some cute video montages and I got to open some much delayed pressies from a fellow K-pop friend.

I went in to work and Sathya joined me in the evening. We bought my birthday presents (decided against the Meta Raybans and splurged a bit on a nice pair of Chelsea boots) and then we went to a Brazilian BBQ for dinner. It was an interesting experience with servers carving the meat in front of you. They had this lovely garlicky lamb BBQ that I loved and a cheesy corn bread that reminded me of eating something similar as a child. We then had gelato and took the ferry home - one of my favourite things to do in the city.

We spent the next of the mostly quiet week with our usual schedule, went on walks and for breakfast some days, trying to soak in time together as Sathya had to travel to the US this Saturday. I felt unusually clingy and sad this time around, probably because he‘s travelling for two whole weeks.

After he left yesterday, I did the usual guitar class and produce market run before heading to Neutral Bay. I bought some records from an op-shop, grabbed a late lunch and did some pending grocery shopping.

Today (Sunday) I went to Chatswood for some ban chan. I originally thought I’d catch a movie as well but there wasn’t anything in particular I wanted to watch. I walked around a bit, popping in and out of shops, grabbed some Indian for lunch, bought some kimchi and pickled cucumbers from Yangga deli to use as sides for the week and then got a long pending manicure before coming back home and preparing for the week ahead.

On my screens: I’ve finished Reset (such a good ending, especially with all the lakorn scenes) from last time’s notes. I’ve also watched more episodes of Boys II Planet (I still feel confused on who to root for) and watched a few episodes of North Shore (British-Australian murder mystery with a lot of twists).

I also finally started properly watching Leviathan. It’s an anime based on a set of my favourite steampunk/biopunk books from way back when and I had been really looking forward to the adaptation as it involves many of the tropes I like.

I actually tried to watch episode 1 when it came out in July but realised 5 minutes in, that the original was actually in Japanese. This meant the subtitles often did not match the translated dialogue, which is a huge pet peeve of mine. This combined with the artwork - I expected it to be more like the art work by Keith Thompson in the books but it was much softer - meant I was really jarred by the whole experience and I put it on pause.

I came back to it last week, watching it with Sathya and with a more open mindset and thoroughly enjoyed seeing all my favourite characters come to life. We finished I think 6 episodes and I’ll wait for Sathya to come back so we can finish the rest together as well.

On my bookshelf: I stumbled across the first book in a series, The Glittering Court by Richelle Mead in the resort library. I hadn’t really read much by her since the Vampire Academy series - which made for compelling reading but was hugely problematic on the romance front. This one isn’t that bad, and I like how she weaved in things from the history books - discovery of North America and the religious, logistical and political issues around settling the land but I probably won’t be picking up the next two in the series.

On my pages: My last chapter turned out to be longer than planned so I edited and published the first half. Now to write the actual the ending.

On my playlist: Fuji Kaze’s “Shinunoga E-Wa” has been on repeat on my playlist for quite a while. So when his latest song Love Like This from his all English album popped up on my feed it was a no brainer to listen to it. While the lyrics are simpler compared to his Japanese works, his voice gives it a rich depth and something about the song background reminds me of 80s pop/love songs.

On my plate: As previously mentioned we had some Brazilian BBQ and also tried a newish Vietnamese restaurant. I also had Anjappar biryani one day and some nice Japanese omelette & chicken katsu curry rice for lunch this Saturday. We also went back to BTB Kirribilli one day and I had their winter porridge again.

On my camera: One of the few times the sun came out during our rainy Hunter Valley weekend.

Thanks for tagging along!