Week 07, 2024
NOTICE: This is a late weeknote from Week 07, 2024. It was written on Week 08, 2024, due to reasons clarified below.
This week came in bringing a long holiday with it. Carnival is probably the most popular festival taking place in Brazil, with Rio’s Carnival being the biggest in the world, although similar gatherings happen in São Paulo, Salvador, Recife and many more Brazilian cities.
As for me, I don’t like it. Not a bit. It is not my cup of tea to go to the street wearing a costume and/ or make-up and dance to the rythm of samba, pagode and some regional variations of both. I just don’t get it. So, what I usually do is to enjoy my holiday… after all, it is not every day, even in Brazilian standards, that you get to enjoy 5 days off work.
Part of my holiday was dedicated to swimming. Yes, I went to the pool once again and enjoyed a sunny day there, doing some more exercises. Maybe moved by James Clear’s Atomic Habits principle, I’m trying to introduce the tiny change of swimming at least once a week – and I’m sure this will turn into a good habit.
Another part of my Carnival holiday was dedicated to changing things a little bit more in my site. Although I’ve just mentioned that I was learning to tame Ikiwiki, which, by the way, is a totally fantastic tool, I ditched it for the familiarity I have with Dokuwiki. **I know. Apparently, I can never make up my mind.**But I’ve done it again – throwing another site setup into the trash bin – and I’m enjoying it.
What I intend to do in the medium-to-long run is to have a wiki. Maybe a mix of digital garden added to it, accompanied by less blogging (what does NOT mean I’ll be writing less). So far I have already created a place for my weeknotes (that you can safely subscribe to if you want) and am preparing the wiki, which is nowhere near being ready (and no wiki will ever be, truth be told).
I barely read during the holiday. I’m still in Dune book 2, though, and don’t intend to walk out on it (so far). But I came back to watching animes: a bingey amount of One Piece episodes (even knowing that no matter hom many episodes of it I watch, I’ll be always behind my son) and three episodes of the second season of Spy x Family, welcoming back Anya Forger. Loved all of it.
On Saturday I went to São Paulo. With my son’s upcoming trip to Japan due next April, I wanted to do something different with the kids. So we went to the Morumbi Stadium so we could watch our team, São Paulo, play against Red Bull Bragantino, in a match valid for the 2024 Paulistão Championship.
This was not the first time we went to the capital to watch a soccer match. The difference, though, is that my older son had been asking me (for an eternity, I must admit) for us to go and watch a game from one of the stadium’s cabins. Now, the cabin tickets are usually way more expensive (some of them prohibitively way more expensive), but once in a cabin you get earlier access to the game venue and can sit in air conditioning, also enjoying a lot of food: soft drinks, juice, beers, hot dogs, popcorn and several finger foods… oh, and candy for dessert. That was the experience I wanted to allow my son to have before his trip. I didn’t want him to lack the sensation of the experience. And that mission was accomplished.
Now, the reason behind not being able to post this week’s weeknote was exactly this trip I took to São Paulo with the children. I normally reflect and write about my week every Saturday,but the game’s starting time was 18:00 (6PM), and I traveled to São Paulo much earlier, as I’m cautious of driving in the city: everything there is soooo far and takes time to get to. I also parked in a place I had never parked at before (so needed to locate it first) and needed to walk to the stadium once the car was parked. We arrived there and got into the venue at 16:00 (4PM), and enjoyed it a lot. But multiply my walking and driving by two, as I needed to get back home later. This made me arrive home later totally worn out – and in no condition to write these notes by then.