thingsThisWeek
thingsThisWeek #120
Still pretty much in zombie mode. Can’t be bothered to do much. This one is out today because it’s Friday, and I’d love to get these back on track. Not a lot to report.
🎁 Festivities ended on Sunday, with a huge King’s Day (one day before the actual date) at Auntie’s place. All her daughters, and son, were present. Her ex, some of the grandkids, and us. The usual crowd. Loads of food, and good times. We played Sounds Fishy again, it’s becoming our default family game.
We then waited until after dinner, and drove back home. Life restarted the following morning.
☹️ Monday morning came, we dropped tinyMovieStar at kindergarten, then I drove movieStar to the office. They’re cutting down on work from home, for some stupid reason. A bit later I was ready to pick the little one up again, but had to wait, of course.
👑 King’s Day, the official end of the holiday period. After this, it’s really back to business, and all we can do is wait for Carnival. This year we went out with a BANG. Our musician friends organised another soirée, and we joined them. Along with another handful of musicians, a poet/writer, a couple of actors, and a few children. Fun times, as usual. Boozy singing, and playing. I even went back home for a camera, and shot a few hundred photos.
👨🏻💻 Worked on another of movieStar’s gigs site. A nice one. More on that later.
💻 Tried to edit the kindergarten’s Christmas party photos, but couldn’t. The lighting was SO poor on that, I don’t really feel like looking at them again. I have to, sure, but this was not the week.
📷 Also, no work at all during the week. Nothing lined up for next one as well. January is usually a tough one, but…
📺 Finished Black Doves. Would like a new season. Now. On to The Day of the Jackal. Pretty cool. Almost done with it too.
🍿 Ocean Waves. Took me a while to finish this one. Visuals are very cool, story not so much. That made it a bit painful to get through.
🤖 Also cool, on the results front, is Perplexity. Thrown natural language (sometimes very incomplete) at it, and it always delivers. Always. Things that would require a few more clicks with Kagi, are now presented immediately. Pretty neat.
🕵🏻♂️ Kagi is going at the end of the month. That’s it.
🌐 Still happy with Zen Browser. Feels lighter than others on my old computer, Firefox extensions (the small number I need) work flawlessly.
thingsThisWeek #119
Special holiday edition. We were away from home for 10 days, back for one, and off again.
🎄 Christmas came first, as it usually does. We spent the week with parents, in-laws, cousins, uncles, friends and family. Driving back and forth on the 24th, but mostly staying with the in-laws, and extended family.
💊 Minor disruption with kidney pain. Some pills, and I was almost as good as new a few days later. Thankfully we managed to escape a visit to the ER, always a chaos this time of year.
🍛 Movies. Food. Puzzles. Food. Games. Food. Drawing. Food. Quizzes. Food.
🛒 Visited Santarém, the biggest town close to the in-laws. Bought them lunch. Went to the supermarket. And back home. It’s a medium size city, felt good after a few days in a smaller village. Lunch was pretty cool too, at a very local taberna.
💍 We met our incredible friend Oxana, tinyMovieStar’s godmother, back in the country for a week. She’s getting married, and we celebrated the engagement.
⛸️ Went to Cascais and toured the Christmas Village. Ice skating for the little one. First time. She nailed it, and loved it. Before that we had lunch with my brother-in-law and (very) pregnant wife (due in less than a fortnight). Walked around. There’s a pan-Asian restaurant in the city that we love, and I can’t help myself when Green Curry is on the menu.
🪩 We then decided (movieStar did in fact, but I support her decisions) to stick around, and spend a couple of days in Cascais. A cousin was moving out for NYE, and we squatted at his place. Gated community, pretty pretty comfortable. We had a good time. We called my brother-in-law again, and they spent the final evening of the year with us. Calmly waiting for the time to sleep end of 2024.
🏖️ Woke up the following morning, in 2025 as expected, and went to the beach. Lots of people there too. Soon the tiny one was jumping around in the freezing water.
🛼 She was also missing her friends from school a lot, so we knew it was time to spend two days in the city. Afternoon of games with one friend, and skating with another one the following day.
🏰 And off we went again. To Alcobaça. My father wanted to make this trip for a while, and it took us months to finally get everyone on board. The monastery is awesome (as far as monasteries go), with an incredible pair of tombs at the end of the visit. Pedro and Inês is a very tragic love story we learn about in school growing up, and this is the place where the couple is buried, in the most exquisitely design sarcophagi. Cherry on top? There was an ice skating rink outside, and tinyMovieStar got to have another go. We then had lunch, visited Leiria castle, and drove back home. It was pretty late already, but we still managed to find the courage to keep driving, and ended up at my in-laws. Again. Final day before school starts, and we have to get used to seeing tinyMovieStar a lot less during the day.
🍿 Grinch. Yes. Again. And again. And again. I stopped counting at 15. I’m sure it was on, at least, another dozen times. A man Called Otto. Finally. Great. Mr. Bean’s Holiday. We tried The Little Women, but it was a very lousy fit for the season. This one was ok. Loved the end. Charlie Wilson’s War, Daddy’s Home 2, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. We watched a lot of movies.
📺 The Black Doves. I’m doing this one, movieStar is not. I’m sure I’ll have to rewatch the whole thing soon. Also waiting for new seasons of a couple others: Theran, and SAS Rogue Heroes.
⌚️ Been using the Apple Watch for a couple of days now. Still hate the fact that I have to charge it so often. I will keep at it until I’m fed up again.
📱 Skeets for Bluesky. Not sure if it’s worth the subscription, the official app is rather decent.
🌊 Testing Surf, by Flipboard. Nice. Needs dark mode, or I can’t use it after 5pm. Need more time with it, for sure.
🐌 The other blogs have been updated a lot less often during the holiday season. I expect them to pick up speed in the next few days.
thingsThisWeek #118
Busy week, updates will probably feel incomplete. Dinners, parties, last minute shopping, Christmas break for everyone.
📷 On Saturday I had a concert to shoot. The musicians are friends of the family (the ones that spent a week with us on the island), and the son of one of them is tinyMovieStar’s best friend from kindergarten. We all went.
🍰 Sunday: birthday parties. Plural, because that’s how we do it. My brother’s son-in-law, and then movieStar’s uncle. Loads of driving around.
🥶 Monday was a rather shitty day, and it’s getting too cold for our taste too. We even had to turn the heating on, first time this year. It’s either that, or wearing layer upon layer. We won’t do that. Not at home.
😩 Tuesday came, I still had photos to edit, but couldn’t. I tried, but couldn’t. The light was SO shitty, photos are super hard to edit, I lack the energy at this point. I did get started, but it would take another day to finish it.
💻 I did finish them, on Wednesday. They were so so in the end. Not entirely happy with the final result. Like the photos, hate the color grading. Turning them all into black and white would be the best solution.
We then had another birthday party, a cousin turned 5. They live outside the city. We have to deal with the traffic of people going home. It’s a pain. Party was cool, though. Loads of food, and good conversation. We spent a week with these cousins in the Azores earlier this year, and it was good to see them all again.
🥰 Thursday was dad&daughter day. movieStar left before our baby woke up, and arrived after she was sleeping. She spent part of the day at kindergarten, but I walked her there, picked her up, had ice cream and tea, and made her dinner. We fell asleep after a couple of books, and a handful of stories. She’s very much into “how was your life in the ’80s”, and “tell me about my grandmother’s grandfathers” at this point in her life.
🎁 Friday came! Let’s end the shopping, please! I can’t stand anymore time spent at shops. Luckily we don’t have to drive anywhere, everything is walking distance from home. But, still, what a crazy couple of weeks! I bought the final gift for movieStar, and printed a few dozen photos. Done! Still a lot of wrapping to do, but we’re good.
tinyMovieStar decided to stay home, on the last day before the break. We messaged the teacher letting her know we’d be skipping school, and that’s when it hit the little one: she would not see her beloved teacher until the new year. Oops! I took her to school after lunch, and we stayed for a couple of hours. She’s at the perfect age to walk to school. Incredible conversations, and great company for ice cream. Funny as hell.
🎄 ElFofo is still doing the crazy stuff.
🧘 Zen Browser. It’s Catalina compatible. It’s Firefox based, and not Chrome as the one I’ve been using. It’s clean. It’s fresh. It’s… Sadly no iOS version, I’ll just try to use Firefox if I want any kind of syncing, but I don’t particularly like Firefox on iOS. It feels blocky. Arc Search is still my favorite there.
☕️ Ordered a couple of coffee cups from Perplexity. Free shipping, more than reasonable price.
⚡️ Changing power/gas provider. An adventure. Need to do it, or at least look into it, but can’t force myself into it. This will be addressed in a week or two.
🍿 The Grinch. Again. It’s the second time this year, and I believe we’ll watch it again. That Christmas.
📺 Almost gave up on the Lioness. Persevered, and I made it to the end. Before starting, I was afraid Nicole Kidman would be the one responsible for giving up. Turns out I actually liked her performance. I’m prejudiced, I admit it. But it was Zoe Saldaña or, more precisely, Saldaña’s character, who almost did it. I have nothing against the actress, but her character got on my nerves in every single episode.
🎵 I’ve been watching a few Tiny Desk Concerts, and also a couple of sets from the Austin City Limits festival. Loving the stuff that comes out of these two venues.
🎙️ The Rest is Classified. A new-ish podcast about espionage and covert operations. Tried a couple of episodes, along with the usual suspects: Hemispheric Views, 3x2, Core Int, Hacked, Underworld, Smartless, … I listen to too many shows. On top of these, I’m still trying to finish an episode of Lex Fridman’s Podcast, and interview with Perplexity’s Aravind Srinivas. It’s 3 hours and 11 minutes long, and both of them make me sleepy in under ten minutes. Aravind, in particular, has a very calm tone, and a rhythm that is sleep inducing.
thingsThisWeek #117
We switched things around this weekend, and went to the in-laws right after school, on Friday. movieStar had a Christmas Run (read Walk) on Sunday. We’re doing the same this week, we have a birthday party next Sunday. Busy week with Christmas creeping in.
🤧 Both girls got very mildly sick (sore throat for both, and a very VERY small increase in temperature for the older one). She did not attend the race. I’m not completely convinced she didn’t do something to that thermometer… Anyway, they both felt better soon afterwards, and I’m the one now with a scratchy throat.
🍺 We spent most of the weekend at the in-laws, and went to our friend’s place, where the ongoing beer making project is nearing the end. We bottled the stuff. I’m not too hopeful, but that’s probably because I actually know a brewery owner, and have seen him make his delicious beer often enough to have some doubts about this one. Very VERY different process.
😻 I got to see Gaspar again, my favorite weekend model, and gain a bit more weight. I spend most of the week trying to lose what I put on during these weekends. We also spent a good while looking at old family photos.
🎄 ElFofo is ongoing. I think we (grownups) are having a better time than the little one. I’m sure she’s aware he’s not going back to the North Pole every day, but just plays along. She likes the part of hunting him down, and seeing what he’s up to. We enjoy coming up with ideas (sometimes we get inspiration from others) and setting the Elf up after she’s sleeping.
🖕🏼 Oh! When we got home after the weekend, we found out our building had been graffitied! One of the letters of the tag is between our living room windows, so they were standing in our balcony to do it. Odd, and mildly unsettling. Turns it it’s a pretty famous French crew, but still very ugly, and uncalled for. The neighbours went to the police, but nothing will come of it, of course.
🍕On Monday tinyMovieStar wanted to stay home the whole day. We wanted that as well, but we had work to do. I walked her to kindergarten in the morning, after she said she wanted to go with me, as long as I took my box of stickers. And then we picked her up for lunch, and had wonderful pizza. Back to school after that, for a little while. We all had the most wonderful day.
💈 This was followed by two more days translating the website text (it’s a big website!), and a haircut. My last one of the year.
🧑🏻🍳 The kindergarten Christmas party was on Friday, but we still had to go through Thursday, a very important prep day. Every year the parents have a present for the school. We persuaded my father-in-law to use his unique skills to produce this year’s gift: wooden kitchens (the sink/countertop part), a mud kitchen, where the kids can play with water and stuff. I did have to drive to their place, and load my car with the finished product. My car is the only one with a trunk large enough for this kind of stuff, and it’s not our first time moving stuff. I actually enjoy this, as it’s an opportunity to drive, alone in the car, listening to a podcast or theee. Drove back to the city, and placed the kitchens at the school’s patio, after the kids were gone. Surprise for Friday. The kitchens look amazing, and the kids loved them. The parents loved them. The teachers loved them!
🕺 The Christmas party happened on Friday, today, in the morning. It was raining. We went to the venue, there was a show, singing and dancing, a movie with the kids, and then we all headed to school, and had the traditional Christmas lunch. All the parents, all the kids, all the school’s staff. It’s great, I’ll miss it when tinyMovieStar moves to a new one. We pitch in, bring food, organize stuff, have surprises for the teachers, and it’s as good as these parties get.
🎄 Regarding dinners. Christmas dinners. I have none of the “work” kind. There’s no “company” I work for. I did see an ad on Instagram, a “Christmas Dinner for Freelancers”, but didn’t get curious enough to check what that was all about. We did have dinner with friends, as a family. A couple, a close one. We spent almost a month with them this year, vacationing. We then moved on to the Azores, and the islands, and they went to Spain when we got back. Just like that, months had gone by without meeting them!
📚 Reading books. tinyMovieStar loves them. I love them. But I remember my father, when I was a kid, always with a book in his hands. I still read a lot, but mostly on the phone. That’s what she sees when she looks at me: me, with a phone. I wonder if that will make a difference.
🔒 NordVPN’s iOS app works great, as well as the macOS one, once I managed to find the last compatible version for my old Air. I think I’ll be alright for a year.
🧠 Perplexity is growing on me. After using it daily to speed the translation along (DeepL has nothing to worry about, except it’s crazy cost!), I’ve also been asking some questions a day. The fact that it’s up to date with current events, and provides links that allow me to double check the veracity of the information, is great. I like it. Not enough to justify the Pro cost, but, since it’s free for me, it’s good.
🦆 I’d been looking at Mountain Duck for a while, but couldn’t justify the license price. I know I’m not going to use it enough for the (fair) price, so I was hoping for a discount. Enter Lou Plummer, with his linkage.lol blog. Lou shared a post on social.lol, as he does, and I learned about Bundle Hunt. They had Mountain Duck for $7, a pretty good discount, down from the usual $39. Immediate purchase.
👾 There’s a lot of cool stuff on every edition of the hiro report. This time it had a link to a collection of camera apps. I got two of them. Mood camera, meh. Some of the photos look ok, I guess, but still can’t beat my usual workflow: Camera.app + Lightroom. That’s it. And BitCam. Fun. And fun is good.
🕹️ Monument Valley 3 is here. Glad my Netflix subscription is on. I wouldn’t be playing it if it was only available on Arcade.
📺 The Bear. Lioness.
🍿 Nutcrackers. Thelma the Unicorn. Polar Express. Yes, Christmas is getting close.
thingsThisWeek #116
Short, not a lot of stuff happening. But wanted to publish on time.
Friday, no disco in kindergarten, but tinyMovieStar spotted the mom of her best buddy across the street, when we were coming home. She yelled, and soon the boy was at our place, having fun and dinner.
Weekend with cousins at the in-laws. Moss picking, and visiting friends. The Elf showed up! When tinyMovieStar was asked about a name for the Elf, she didn’t even blink: ElFofo. The “cuddly” one. We’ve been having a ton of fun with ElFofo, in fact. Planning the day’s mischief, setting it up when tinyMovieStar goes to sleep, and watching her in the morning. She knows it’s all a lie, but she plays along.
The rest of the week was spent helping movieStar with the translation of a ton of marketing copy (will finish next week), and not much else. The usual: Picking up a few packages, taking the little one to Judo class, and sticking a few stickers.
No work.
We also visited an elementary school where tinyMovieStar might go in the future. Nice one. Rather expensive, but most of the kind are.
Must. Find. Steady. Work.
⭐️ Friday started as another messy day for Micro.blog. Odd that this is where everything (re)started for me, where I met 90% of the people I talk to online, made some real life friends, have other I would love to meet… And now it’s not doing great.
A lot of us have moved on, and are now also on Mastodon/Bluesky. Have been for a while. Conversations happen there, and not on M.b. The hosting part is still somewhat reliable, even though it has the occasional hiccup. But the big feature, the one that tied everything together, is failing a lot. Cross posting.
EchoFeed is amazing, configurable, and reliable. I moved the main blog’s cross posting there as well. Micro.blog now hosts my blog, and nothing else. For how long? Can’t really tell. I need to export everything I published in the past four (five?) years.
🎉 Better than Black Friday the Revolut Gift Bag keeps on giving, and it’s been a thrill!
We had dinner with a cousin who was raving about Perplexity, and how good Perplexity was over other AI assistants. He casually mentioned he had access to the premium version because it was Revolut metal subscriber, or some other paid tier. Back home, I decided to check if my own premium account would also be filled with goodies. Lo and behold, it was!
I’m now a Perplexity user, I have a brand new NordVPN account that will allow me to stop paying for IVPN (even though I love it), and save $60 a year. Perplexity alone is $22 a month. I wouldn’t pay for it, for sure, but it’s nice to have for free. There’s also Uber One, Headspace, and a few other subscriptions thrown in.
📺 Lioness. The Bear. We actually forgot we hadn’t watched season three yet. We’re doing it now.
🍿 Anthony Jeselnick: Bones and All.
thingsThisWeek #115
Stickers!! That was the thing this week. tinyMovieStar writing them, and my own getting here. We are having fun.
🎉 It started with a baby shower, one tradition we imported not so long ago. These were not a thing a couple of years ago, but it feels like they’re mandatory now. It was Saturday, we drove to Cascais. That’s where my brother-in-law lives. As this was a girls-only event, the guys just went to our cousin’s place next door, and made our own thing. We had tinyMovieStar, and another baby, with us. They were also banned from the party. We had a lot of fun.
Afterwards we picked the girls up, and watched the Christmas parade, before dinner in town. When that was done, we followed the path my in-laws took, and spent Sunday with them.
Monday. Nothing to do, nothing to report. Walked around.
Tuesday. Ordered a replacement part for the vacuum cleaner. That was definitely one of the highlights of the day. I also got an email asking about some photos from the islands, for a magazine, so I started getting those ready to send.
Wednesday, most of the day spent digging through the archive. My stickers got delivered, so I started placing them around town, with my tiny helper.
Thursday. Thanksgiving dinner, another one of the imported celebrations. We do not do this. But my father-in-law picked this one up a couple years back, in Miami, of all places. So now we have to do it every single year. Mostly for his entertainment.
I picked up tinyMovieStar from school, took her to judo class, and then we got mom on board, and went to dinner. I did the time math, and we do spend a lot more time together than regular families. We pick the little one up from school earlier than most parents, and she also goes to bed later. I’d say 3/4 hours a day more than what others are able to do. Multiply that by days in a week, and weeks in a month. By the end of the year, that’s a lot! We’re, all of us, pretty happy with this situation.
⭐️ Micro.blog failed again, in the middle of the night. Posts weren’t showing up, crossposting also failing. Vincent took care of it when he woke up, hours before anything would be fixed on the other side of the ocean. Hoping the hosting part will keep on working, I moved the crossposting feature to EchoFeed. I had 10 echos going, now it’s a cool dozen. It works, fast, and support is ALWAYS a toot away, on my timezone. First world problems, of course, but I grew tired. M.b hasn’t been the same since Jean left the gang. Discovery is still a tab on the app, but it goes without update for weeks. I miss the old days. Simpler, fuller.
Anyway, Bluesky and Mastodon are connected, Threads left out for now.
😎 Ongoing project: Fictional characters. A few more were plastered around the neighbourhood.
📸 Testing 65x24. Cool, but not sure it’s a format for me.
📺 Lioness. Showtime is having a decent promotion for a couple of months, so we’re taking advantage. This is the first one we’re watching. Pretty nice. We tried Ibiza Narcos as well, but it’s really bad.
🍿 Surveilled. Equalizer 3. Both cool enough.
thingsThisWeek #114
Busy, with out-of-the-ordinary stuff. Pretty cool week (and an extra day).
🌳 Weekend at the in-laws, but shorter than usual. We had to come back to the city, as both of us had appointments.
🧚♀️ Godmother in town, that means happy tinyMovieStar, happy everyone! I met her with the little one, we went out for an afternoon pizza, and came home to take care of the Christmas tree. A couple of days later she went back to London, and we miss her already. She’ll be back for Christmas!
🎨 The following day I tagged along with a friend, and we met another guy. He’s a graffiti artist. We crossed the river, and they went to work on a wall. Just killing time. It was pretty fun, and a great way to spend some time out of the house. Also, very cool lunch by the river, a delicious chicken katsu sando, and a very competent bacon burger.
📸 The week was going very well. On to the next day: T-Shirt shooting day. Another friend needed a couple of photos, wearing a shirt a sponsor had sent her. Of course I’m on call for these. It’s a 5 minute deal. No money, obviously, but gets me karma points, I’m sure.
Still time for some Christmas shopping, mostly decorations for the tree.
💻 And I finally got the photos edited (over a week to do so), and had another assignment. Things are looking pretty bleak at the newspaper, happy these other things show up, even if one every very once in a while.
🥵 This one was special too. I am getting old, and severely out of shape. I walk all over, but that’s hardly enough.
These days, the hardest exercise I do is walking with tinyMovieStar on my shoulders. She’s almost 22kg (48,5 lb) now. I carry her for long periods of time. She loves it, I love it, and I don’t know how long this will go on. I’m trying to make the most of it.
Anyway, on assignments, it’s usually a pretty calm environment. Gone are the days of fighting my way to photos, stuck in a melee, jousting for a good spot.
This time I had to run up and down many flights of stairs, trying to beat the elevator. Carrying two cameras and a load of lenses. And I did! But must have strained something, my leg muscles are still hurting, days later. 145 minutes of intense workout, according to the Garmin strapped to my wrist.
🧢 Next day I was taking it VERY slow. I visited my friend’s brewery, and got a new hat. I have a photo, but didn’t publish it.
👋🏻 I have also started sticking fictional characters names in the area. Open for suggestions.
I ordered a few stickers with the new avatar I did, and thought I should practice the sticking drill. It’s fun.
📺 The Diplomat. We struggled to find the time, but finished the second season. Damn!
🍿 Deadpool & Wolverine. Did not like. Oddly.
🤓 Still enjoying the Readwise experience. Very much so. This week I subscribed to a Substack blog (?), one I’ve been eyeing for a while. It’s very expensive (for me), but I really wanted to read a few of the paywalled posts. Coughed up the money for a month, and used Readwise’s extension on Orion, macOS and iOS, to add a ton of posts to my inbox. It worked brilliantly.
Shame the thing is on Substack, I’d rather not spend money over there, but this is a one time thing. I promise.
I should/will write a longer post about Reader. I’m really enjoying it. Using it on the laptop is brilliant, and also great on the mobile version.
🦋 Bluesky has been getting a lot of attention lately. I will not move away from Mastodon, but you can also check my posts at maique.eu. Post are sent there from the source, using Micro.blog’s wonderful crossposting features, and a few more things with EchoFeed. Those two cool services, and Croissant, make it really easy to have a presence, without actually being there. I do reply to all mentions, and browse from time to time.
I also ported the PhotoQuotes bot to Bluesky, meaning you can now get them over there as well.
thingsThisWeek #113
Fully in the city by now, but still trying to get up to speed. Past Halloween, on our way to Christmas. US election. And another week went by without an update. Sorry, again.
🇺🇸 FUCK! Fuck you, USA!
📷 I had my first two assignments since we got back. Thankfully. It’s not east to get work these days, and even more so since I’m freelancing. Mostly waiting for people to call me, and then we go away for months at a time. I’m aware a few people even think we permanently live on the island! We’re also getting to the end of the year, and client’s budgets have been spent.. Anyway, I did get a small shoot, and a nicer, bigger, one. Done.
🍰 movieStar had a birthday. CONGRATULATIONS! We were at the in-laws, so went out to Santarém for lunch. Nice Italian place.
📦 Picking up packages left and right. Clothes for tinyMovieStar mostly. They do grow up fast, yes, but feels like nothing fits her anymore, suddenly. It’s getting colder, and she had nothing to wear, poor thing. And shoes! All her sneakers, and boots, were small from one day to the other.
🚶🏻♂️ Journalist and husband had a layover in town, before flying out to Principe. We joined them, and walked around. Showing them the city, and figuring out what’s new ourselves. Every week a new place pops up!
☕️ Coffee with Ernst. Will there be a show in honor of our departed friend? Next year we’ll have the 10th anniversary, and Ernst (a dutch photographer) tought it would be nice to have a show. We’re figuring out if it’s something we can set up, and how to go about it.
🥁 We were invited to a concert, a couple of friends were playing close to home. Turns out a very old friend of mine was there as well, and I hadn’t seen him in ages!! He lived in Tokyo for a while, than came back but moved to the south of the country, and he’s back now. We’ve know each other since high school!
🥘 Went out for lunch this week, to a new-ish place. A chef from another cool restaurant left, and opened his own spot. Not far from home, but in an area I don’t go often. I was invited by a friend, and what an experience it was. We had a chef with us as well, and that is always better! The place’s name is Cerqueira (Instagram link), and if you’d like to try a traditional Portuguese tasca, with a twist, I can’t recommend this enough. Food was all delicious.
📺 Paolo fromTOKYO. Can’t stop loving the ones where he shows us how people work in Japan. Slow Horses, we finished the whole thing again. All four seasons. The Diplomat is waiting in line.
📰 Trialing Reader, from Readwise. Again. I know I’m not going to pay for it, I just enjoy the experience once in a while. Like renting a nice car from time to time. Subscribed to Readwise’s Reader! Got a nice discount, and jumped in. It is an incredible piece of software, and I’m glad I can finally use it without worrying about the trial ending. I don’t need a lot of the features, but boy do I love software with so many things to play with.
🔎 Murmel. Here’s another piece of software that does something I can use, for a fair price. I signed up. But found a couple of red flags almost immediately: blog hasn’t been updated in a long time. Mastodon presence feels a bit spammy. Very odd. Also couldn’t find a way to subscribe, and that is even odder! The site shows me logged in, but I still get a link to log in again. Emailed them, no reply so far. Sill is an alternative, free for now, but I don’t seem to like it as much. We’ll see, still a few days left on the Murmel trial.
🌐 Panda Pixels is still going, as well as sticker spotter. Finding a lot of new ones, actually.
thingsThisWeek #112
The End, and back. We spent three months away, I guess we had to come back. We’ve been to Menorca, then Chaves for a while, we went to the Azores, and made our way to Príncipe for a month and a half. It was not our longest stay on the island, far from it, but we’d never been there with tinyMovieStar for so long.
She learned how to swim on the island. That is the memory I’ll take with me. I spent hours with her in the pool, and in the ocean. I love her more every day. I’m so proud to be her dad!
Note: This particular update has our final days on the island, a lot of scattered notes. Sorry about the messy text, but it’s either this way, or the never-published-way. I’ll be back on track, hopefully.
🏝️ Friday!
Quite a long day today. In the morning we had our breakfast and then we moved to Romar for a slice of cake that tinyMovieStar baked the day before. We then went to the airport to get the tickets for the local flight. We got them and, again, they did not have change for us. We went and visited Francisco, the architect at his place and finally got to see his amazing house. Made of wood, but instead of following the traditional building techniques and designs, he designed his own place. So, it’s an incredible house. Really, really, really good one.
Ice-cream. Eggs are back, so are the omelettes, with malagueta and fries.
Saturday we went to Bom Bom, enjoyed the beach, and spent a long time in the pool.
South Africans in town. Awesome people! Terra Prometida, then Francisco’s place again. Omelette for dinner. Best ever. For real.
Sunday, zee Germans have arrived. Last group, then we leave.
Monday was all about underwater photos, and going to “the end of the beach”. tinyMovieStar wanted to take me there. We went. Photos turned out great.
Also, dancing in the street. There’s a grocery shop that has a very powerful set of speakers, and they set them just outside when business is mostly done for the day. People gather and dance a bit. We did as well. Fun.
Tuesday. It was a very (VERY!) rainy day, so we went hiking with the Germans. I wasn’t supposed to, but Joel said he’d go if I did, and vice-versa. We were silly. We got soaking wet. Never had I been so wet in my long life.
Wednesday, final day.
Rain, still. Dinner with family.
Thursday, we’re out! movieStar on the first flight to the big island, and the two of us a bit later.
I will miss Joel. A lot.
Leaving 45 minutes before time. Luckily we were early to the airport.
We got to the big island, movieStar waiting for us at the airport with the driver. We moved to the hotel, had lunch, a swim, and the little one complained about a headache. She had a fever! We were a bit scared, so off we went, a visit to clinic was needed.
Amazing Cuban doctor.
Car Rental is simple here. No contract, no driver’s license check, nothing. Just pay up, and get a key.
Flight home. Upgraded (thank you, Gu!). This time in a VERY comfortable A321LRneo. It was brilliant. Two movies, see below.
We played so much UNO!
🏙️ Back in the city. School. Dinner with friends who visited on the island. Then lunch with others. Back to mom&dad, back to in-laws.
Missing watch showed up. I did not take it in the first place. I should trust myself more.
Rain. And cold.
Weeks getting accustomed to life in the city. Still not feeling it.
🧰 Car in shop. Needed work, still not perfect. It’s getting old.
📝 No reply yet from job application, too many people applied.
💾 Found an old HD with a ton of photos, from the newspaper days, and personal stuff. Enjoying the trip back in time. Will probably post more in the coming days/weeks.
📺 Bad Monkey (the end), and Slow Horses (the end, and back to the start, we’re rewatching the whole thing). English Teacher, and Rogue Heroes added to list. Finished them all.
🍿 Perfect Days. Probably my favorite film this year. Maybe even my favorite for much longer. I then tried to follow up with Asteroid City, but was too tired, and getting bored to death after 10 minutes. Gave up. Not sure I’ll even go back, and give it another try.
🐼 Panda Pixels moved. This sort of project/site, meant as a pop up that stuck around for a little longer, can, in my mind, move around. It’s supposed to be shared on social media, I don’t think anyone will go back in time, on the site.
With that in mind, I moved this one to Scribbles. I changed the background color, and off it went.
💀 Omnivore died. Botsin.space is dying. My PhotoQuotes bot moved. I should have done it a while back, as Adam always has our backs!
📈 Got a new watch, a new-in-box Garmin Instinct 2 Solar. Mostly for the brilliant screen, but enjoying the stats as well. It still fails to measure my heartbeats properly, but it seems to work better than the Apple Watch.
thingsThisWeek #111
Week with no guests. Week with tinyMovieStar by my side all day long, while mom works at the office. Exhausting week. We spent most of the week in town.
🏝️ Started with a very regular Friday. We went out for dinner. We met friends. We ate. We drank.
It had a morning, afternoon, and evening. As most do.
I also spotted a sticker, something out of the ordinary here. There are stickers, but they are all on motorcycles, as the last posts confirm. That’s it for sticker spotting. I’ve almost stopped posting altogether, as even I am bored with them.
Then the storm came! A huge one, complete with thunder, for hours. The whole night. Thunder. Rain. We woke up multiple times. Storms here are very different, or feel very different. They feel more primal. Also, the fact that there’s no light at all during the night, with the power being cut off, turns the night into a very silent thing. No one is up, not a single radio on, nothing. Just the forest sounds, and the storm, with lightning. It’s beautiful.
When morning finally came, I went out looking for a special kind of banana. tinyMovieStar loves those apple bananas, but they’re not always available. Some stalls have them once in a while, and they’re impossible to find at the market, unless you get there before 6AM. I’m not going anywhere before 6AM. Sometimes, when we’re driving around (and we did not this week), we find them being sold on the side of the road, out of the city. Cheaper too.
Before that, I needed money. So I got some more. It involves sending some euros to a Portuguese account.
Found the bananas, and awesome Joel while at it. He invited me for a beer. Why not? It was almost noon already.
Back home for a little while, and then we took the little one to Book Club. Nice initiative by one of movieStar’s colleagues. For kids. On the way, more photos.
We spent the rest of the afternoon at home, and then I went out for take away.
One of the new restaurants in town is a pizza/burger place. It’s very close to home, in the same spot one of our friends used to have a clothing/accessories boutique, mainly catering to tourists. Of course, she went under, since tourists aren’t nearly enough to support these shops. She employed a couple of people, they produced the items with African themed fabrics, purchased locally. Another very cool handicrafts store also closed after being opened for only a little while. Sad, but predictable.
Anyway, burgers and pizza are new here, and every kid in town is begging their parents to take them there. The restaurant is very fairly priced, and always packed. A success story. Cater to local, not tourists.
Sunday arrived, and with it the damn church bells. I couldn’t go back to sleep after that, and no way to have coffee at home.
This Sunday was a little different, as it was Cup Final day. I got to spend a couple of hours with the nice guys from Porto Real, the best team on the island. They did, in the end, lose the game. They were, understandably, sad. The friend who invited me over (one of the players), was very disappointed, and messaged me later, apologizing for inviting me for such a sad show. He felt embarrassed, and it didn’t matter how many times I told him I had a great time, and still loved it.
In the evening we finally got to have some ice-cream. The shop is, normally, closed. When it opens, there’s no ice-cream. This time we were lucky and they did have vanilla, and were open for business. Had a caipirinha next.
Caipirinha: 1.2€. Ice-Cream: 1€. Decent.
Monday morning… La La La La La …
Belo Monte visit. Pool, and overpriced lunch. It was a national holiday, movieStar was almost having a day off. Nice dinner at Cruz, the spot where we are having most dinners.
Days without guests/journalists are mostly all equal: movieStar at the office, and the rest of the family alone all day. Since there’s only one cafe, no library, no movie theater, no beach in the city, only one decent mini market, we’re a bit stuck. We struggle to find different ways to keep the little one entertained. I struggle to find ways to keep me entertained.
Then there were no eggs on the island. Thankfully that one was solved after a day. At the same time, another rainbow. Mood on the island sways with these little events.
This was also the day I rode Francisco’s Chinese motorcycle, in the night, after dinner. Small ride, but I’ll do it again. Francisco is a good friend, the architect who is almost permanently on the island, tasked with implementing the vision of the chief architect, who visits once or twice a year. We have dinner with him almost every day. He’s usually driving his pickup truck, but also owns this cheap motorcycle.
I also got a haircut, on a rainy day. The day was a bit depressing, but it ended on a good note. One of our favorite restaurants is now open, after more than a month with closed doors. tinyMovieStar helped bake a yummy orange cake for dessert.
More journalists are coming, and then we’re off. By this time next week we’ll be flying back to Portugal, after a day in São Tomé. It’s been six weeks since we left, and we’ve been mostly away since July. We’re all missing home, but we’ll miss this place. A lot. We always do. This time around even tinyMovieStar will miss it. She’s old enough to remember all the things she experienced in a month and a half.
☕️ My buyMeACoffee account saw a LOT of action last week. I’m very grateful. It was very strange, but very welcome.
💸 Purchased some Envijon presets. Not many, not expensive. They look good. Also, there’s a black market for those, I found out! Someone will source dozens of these, and sell them at a discount.
📹 I thought about setting up another blog, for short video clips. I did. Not sure how long I’ll be able to keep motion.maique.eu alive. Editing, reducing file size, endless upload attempts with under par internet, … it’s all too much trouble. Some hate it, but Instagram, both Stories and Reels, are great for that. I gave Ghost a shot, and the videos look amazing over there, just not sure I want another bill. I have Bear, and Pika, for a year, and both are very poor at handling this. Very small maximum file size means a couple of seconds of video only. I ended up with Scribbles. Still a super service.
🍿 Wolfs. Meh. I love the guys, and that made it tolerable.
📺 I watched every available episode of Bad Monkey**, and I’m now waiting for the weekly releases. Same with Slow Horses, of course.
📚 Arriving Today, by Christopher Mims. I should enjoy this one. I am liking this one.
📱 New apps on the block: World Clock Widgets. The awesome OK Video. And Croissant, another app I don’t need, but that didn’t stop me from subscribing.