#13 Holiday at home

Update #13 Published on 2021-01-30 update

What a week! I feel like so many things happened since last week.

Life peek: Holiday at home

This week was a bit special as both Robin and I took time off work without any holiday plans. We spent most of it having outdoor walks, doing pizza-related activities and working on our personal projects. Yes, I did spend a disproportionate amount of time working on my website.^[1]

I love adding new features to my website and learning to code. The problem is that this website should be a side-side-project at best. The reality is that it takes time away from things I would like to focus on.

Something I stopped doing is my routine of reading essays / working on my digital garden. Lately, I am learning a lot coding-wise but not much outside of that.

In that direction, The Knitting Club that Mirha Masala launched with two of her friends inspired me a lot. Every three weeks, they choose a topic, a skill or an activity. The three friends then share their experiences and discuss their learnings. I love this idea of having a learning club where you grow together and keep each other accountable.

Read & Watched

Kubo and the two strings (2016)

Beautifully crafted stop-motion by the Laika studio, combining traditional stop-motion techniques with CGI. It is funny and poetic with just the right amount of darkness. Kubo and the two strings is everything but just a kid movie.

Antilibrary

Defining Decade (2013)

The complete title is the very concise Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter And How To Make The Most Of Them Now (by Meg Jay). Mirha Masala recommends it as the one book that marked 2020 for her. We think that by avoiding decisions now, we keep all of our options open for later — but not making choices is a choice all the same.

T(W)IL

This week I learned a few new things:

To use an API

The Movies page looks pretty much like the existing Books page. The difference? I coded it all by myself and had to learn to use the TMDb API on the way there. I had been trying to do it for weeks, so I am quite happy to have finally managed it!

To make a sourdough pizza

Robin and I decided that this past week was going to be Pizza Week. We tried lots of good pizzas, made some pizza-related powerpoints and also learned to make our own with Andrew Janjigian's sourdough recipe^[2]. The result was delicious but it could definitely be improved — even with our tiny microwave oven.

Like that night I couldn't sleep and coded until 1am. ↩︎
Janjigian is one of these “cooking creators” who don't just give you a flat recipe — but also the story or science behind it. I just love these new cooking channels and blogs that go further than necessary. ↩︎