Showing posts for Leeds
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Now: 10 February - 16 February 2025
The week started out slow but ramped up in a major way. Tuesday we were at Scouts for the second half of my lesson on space. I was pretty nervous about it but it went well.
Thursday I was down in Leeds for an all-hands at work. I really like going down to the office and seeing folks face to face. I just know that if I lived within cycling distance I’d be down there multiple times per week. I think I’m going to have to come to terms with being an In-Person Work Guy.
On the weekend Sam and I went out to the Pennines: she started walking the Teesdale Way and I did a big loop over Cross Fell.
Spent Sunday recovering; I spent a while on the computer doing Administrative Tasks and then drank three beers and signed up for a 50k in the Lake District in May.
Reading
I liked this article on Dialectics of Decline, I feel it’s probably being shared around left-learning circles with nods and approval but there’s a lot of soul-searching that needs to be done on Our Side as well:
On some level we are all too comfortable. We in the heart of the empire have grown so accustomed to our endless flow of treats that it feels almost impossible to imagine the steadfastness of belief in higher principles, risking life and limb for a greater cause, that led to the American Revolution, to the abolition of slavery, to the militancy of the Black Panthers with their rifles and shotguns.
Still, a perverse voyeurism in “soy right” pictures shared by Max Read on the same topic.
In other widely-shared news, Kevin Kelly’s list of 50 years of travel tips got me wanting to get back on a plane and go somewhere:
Sketchy travel plans and travel to sketchy places are ok. Take a chance. If things fall apart, your vacation has just turned into an adventure. Perfection is for watches. Trips should be imperfect. There are no stories if nothing goes amiss.
[...]
Here in brief is the method I’ve honed to optimize a two-week vacation: When you arrive in a new country, immediately proceed to the farthest, most remote, most distant place you intend to reach during the trip. If there is a small village, remote spa, a friend’s farm, or a wild place you plan on seeing on the trip, go there immediately. Do not stop near the airport. Do not rest overnight in the arrival city. Do not pause to acclimate. If at all possible proceed by plane, bus, jeep, car directly to the furthest point without interruption. Make it an overnight journey if you have to. Then once you reach your furthest point, unpack, explore, and work your way slowly back to the big city, wherever your international departure airport is.
Gina Trapani’s Life in Weeks is a terrific high-level visualisation of life (that doesn’t make you go “oh my god I’m basically dead already”). This, along with the question on the citizenship application about tell us every time you left the country in the past five years, makes me want to build something like this for myself. See also Buster Benson’s Life in Weeks.
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Now: 13-19 January 2025
Quiet week, settling into the new year.
On Monday, I don’t think I really did much of anything.
On Tuesday, same. I sat by the window in the morning and tried to soak up a little bit of sunshine.
On Wednesday, I listened to an episode of Ezra Koenig’s podcast Time Crisis where he interviews Phil Elverum. I like Vampire Weekend and I like The Microphones/Mount Eerie (like every other millennial white guy) but holy smokes was this a rough listen. I think that maybe this whole podcast is just an opportunity for Ezra Koenig to cosplay as Joe Rogan? And maybe to try and get his foot in the door on these “parasocial relationship” things that everyone is talking about? I only got through the first, uh, 45 minutes of like a 2-hour show; it was 45 minutes of three guys trying to prove that each knew more footballers’ names than the other two. This is the masculinity crisis manifest!
On Thursday I rode my bike in to Durham to get the train down to Leeds for work in the office. I really like going in to the office and seeing all of my coworkers in person, but by bike it winds up being like a 2.5-hour commute each way, which isn’t sustainable. The weather was brisk but coöperative.
On Friday, the quick link on my bike chain failed out of nowhere. I said a quiet prayer of thanks for not getting stranded in frickin Sherburn Hill at 1am.
Also on Friday (morning), I realised that I forgot my computer charger, a big, unwieldy, 170W brick with two thick leads coming out of each end, at the office, so—
On Saturday, Sam, Ghyll and I made a day trip back down to Leeds on Saturday. We meandered around the ruins of Kirkstall Abbey and then went for a long walk along the Leeds & Liverpool Canal. Lots of narrowboats lined up in a little, well, if it were a railway or a road I’d call it a layby. Like a canal layby. Then we stopped in at the Leeds Industrial Museum, housed in a big old woollen mill and decked out with all of the Victorian-era gins and looms and mules that would have made that place a real cacophony a hundred years ago. There were little placards alongside some of these machines with testimonials from the workers, all of whom seemed to be among the most miserable humans ever to walk the Earth. It makes me wonder what life will be like a hundred years from now: whether they’ll gawk at all of the horrible facets of our own lives, like having to brush our teeth or get colonoscopies or exercise.
On Sunday I slept in, did the groceries, pottered about the house, and then did not write this blog post.
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Weeknotes 24 July
I kicked off the week by taking Ghyll out for a couple of runs and going to a Striders speed practice. My dogs were barking to wake up the neighbours the morning after. Probably not a great way to get back into the swing of things after a triathlon. Since then, I've not felt quite myself: slightly sore, slightly achey, nose running a bit more than it usually does. I can't tell if I'm ill or just tired or if this is just what life feels like now.
The malaise usually passes by like 11 am, depending on how many hot drinks I have in the morning.
In Leeds
Suitably rested (or not), I headed down to Leeds on Thursday morning for a work-related event sponsored by Salesforce. I've never been to one of these before. The novelty of receiving a little tote bag full of branded goodies excited me, and the room service carts of sweets that they rolled into the room at precisely 9:45 got the better of me for a solid 90 minutes before I could no longer look at a fizzy cola bottle, let alone consider another handful down the gullet. The workshops were interesting and the free rein that Salesforce gave us with their API-building tools encouraged hackery and exploration.
Here's a crummy picture of the Aire running in torrents under the train station. I thought it was neat. Afterwards we all headed down to the Head of Steam, where a tab had been graciously opened for us. I proceeded to down pint after pint of the highest-ABV Trappist ales the Head had in their tall refrigerated cabinets. I played shuffleboard with a colleague and, however improbably, met another McGill grad. It was a fantastic day and a fantastic evening, and I wasn't even much worse for wear the following day.
At home
By the time the weekend arrived I'd finally built up the courage to tackle the neglected chores that had been accumulating throughout the week. In the midst thereof, I knuckled down on a project to mount Sam's bike on the wall and clear up a little space in the garage, cribbing extravagantly from our bike-repairman neighbour from a couple weeks ago.
The result of my handiwork: look at all the space it frees up In Durham
Sunday, Sam and I ran (well, I ran and Sam rode her bike) down to the iron railway bridge in Hart—a solid 20km round trip—to try and tire Ghyll out ahead of a date night we'd planned in Durham. We've left him for a few hours on his own before, so we knew he could take it.1
Ghyll tucked in and snoozing away, we stole into Durham for dinner and a show at the Durham Fringe Festival. The show was a play called Chance, about a kid growing up in crushing poverty and the ways that he tries to cope with it. Dinner was at Zen, an Asian fusion place with Thai-inspired curries right up my alley.
Sam took this picture of me, in which I look maybe 15% too stern for this picture to really be optimally funny Stray observations
On the train to Leeds on Thursday, I finished Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger, and it was: alright. B+ material, I think. A proper book report is forthcoming.
I also watched this video by Van Neistat (learning, only just now, that the brothers Neistat have a bit of a homebrew online empire) and was swept away by his sanguine vision of organisation at work. I've resolved to go out and buy myself a bunch of hooks and shelves.
I'm generally pretty suspicious of characters like Neistat (any of em) who sell a lifestyle to a particular genre of white man, and I'm certainly not going to pull a Van and start writing my blog drafts on a typewriter (I left that period of my life back at uni!), but there's a certain comfort in having someone else definite your value system for you—especially when that imported value system looks so cool on YouTube!
- Heck, the last time we left him on his own, he wasn't even at home! ↩︎