week in review 2023-47
Wednesday, November 29, 2023
Something new! I enjoy writing, or at least I think I like writing, but friction is a killer. In an attempt to build a habit I’m going to try to keep a weekly log of general life stuff and interesting links (hat tip to Kev).
Notes on the week
Moving to Rotterdam a few months ago has been a big change. This apartment is the first place that Elle and I can truly call our own. It’s amazing. I’ll be forever grateful for how welcome I was at home during the pandemic, and the opportunity to live with friends again once the world started to open up, but there is something fundamentally different about having your own place.
A side-effect of having our own place is entertaining visitors! In the past few weeks we’ve had my family, Elle’s parents, her brother and two of our friends. Nothing will make you feel more loved than people using up annual leave to visit a cold, wet and windy Rotterdam in November. Now if we can nail down dates for the 2 remaining Wallace siblings to go we’ll have collected the whole set!
It’s impossible to write anything about moving to the Netherlands without mentioning bikes, and we are now the proud owners of two scrap heaps that cost a combined total of €150 from our local charity shop. The temptation was definitely there to go all out off the bat, but our apartment only has on street bike parking, and we were warned that nice bikes have a tendency to go missing when parked on the street, no matter how good a lock is used.
With all that said, we got both bikes serviced and honestly they’re not bad! I haven’t cycled this much in my entire life, and trips that left my legs burning (embarrassingly so, considering the pancake flat terrain) only a few weeks ago are second nature to me. It helps that the infrastructure is amazing (even if Rotterdam is apparently one of the worst cities in the Netherlands for cycling) and drivers tend to respect cyclists. I even rented a Bakfiets recently to help move some things to Elle’s studio!
Links saved this week
The Revised Psychology of Human Misjudgment, by Charlie Munger
The Rest of the World’s list of books
How to help people use a computer
What if Money had an expiration date
Some cats have an instinctual fetch response!
Preston Thorpe is a programmer, writer and prisoner
Reading update
Making progress with ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’. It feels right to take this book leisurely. It’s a total change of pace from ‘The Sunlit Man’, the last of Sanderson’s Secret Projects, which surgically attached itself to my hand shortly after the opening scene.