I seem to have forgotten about last week entirely. I was trying to jog my memory by talking to Amber about the activities we might have done together, and I now I have made him late for his haircut appointment.
S’pose the event was that I went back to work after a fortnight away from it. I’m grateful for a mellow re-entry. My big hope for my time away was to update my work website. A task that remains unfinished because of Squarespace 7.1’s shitty way of dealing with responsiveness, which has left several pages looking less than great. I’ve given myself a new deadline now: to publish before I travel for Burds of the Brush later this month.
It was another week with lots of video chats: with Prateek and my Mom, with Amber’s brother and sister-in-law, with Lipi, with Lipi and Aadarsh, with Harshay, with Ratik, and with Aadarsh again. And that’s aside from the 2–3 hours of work calls, and attending bits and pieces of Fonts and AI virtually. So many humans on screens. Some humans in person too: I went to Unity Bookshop, which closed the doors on its current iteration this week, to say thank you to Aurore.
My nightly reading hit a roadblock because the Phryne Fisher novel I was on broke away from the setting and structure that the series usually follows. I’m pretty miffed at my own stubbornness. I did finish the book, and started reading Four Thousand Weeks in the meantime. An interesting time to do so since I recently finished writing an essay about the finitude of character sets in typeface design. Only one movie in the theatre this week: Notre Salut. We had the surreal experience of watching the movie’s protagonist watch a film in the same room that we were watching this film in.
My shopping for the winter continues in fits and starts. I am the tentative owner of two more pairs of jeans now. I had stopped wearing jeans altogether in India, so this has been a strange reacquaintance to make. I spent Saturday afternoon with Amber to find a jumper or two, and came back sadly disappointed. Too much synthetic fibre, not enough structure in the garments. Oh well. I need to visit one of the better vintage clothing stores in the city.
Our washing machine stopped working, and we got a new one. More about that here, in my day note that I tried as an experiment on Wednesday. I’m afraid this washing machine situation will repeat itself in Noida in December/January.
My favourite meal this week was tuna burgers, even if they weren’t filling enough to be a proper dinner; will add an omelette to them next time. This time, though, I had to drink a glass of milk before I went to sleep. Roasted sweet potato and red pepper soup was pretty good too, ditto the chili lime salmon tacos. I made tawa pulao with Shan pav bhaji masala, instead of the usual mix of spices I use, and it was different. Not good or bad, just different. Amber made kottu roti. I have such fond memories of the kottu parotta from Madras Café sustaining me while I wrote my dissertation and worked full-time that nothing, however delicious, ever lives up to that ideal.