Weekly Head Voices #251: Week one fun

Welcome to the first regular Weekly Head Voices of the year folks!

This, the 251st edition, looks back at the week from Monday, January 2 to Sunday, January 8 of the brand new year 2023.

Figure 1: Blue waters of Betty’s Bay main beach. The weather was amazing.

Figure 1: Blue waters of Betty’s Bay main beach. The weather was amazing.

You might recall from the 2023 transition post that appeared a mere week ago, that I really wanted to try to post more regularly here, even if it meant that the posts might be less substantial.

Well here we are: A short post that is on time!

(The proposed blogging pipeline improvements that were also mentioned are still in progress (AKA I have not yet started).)

GOU #1 is back from .de!

The biggest news of the week is that GOU #1 has returned from a month-long FSA exchange visit to Essen, in Germany.

We really missed her, but she’s back after an experience-packed four weeks with an amazing host family, living her best life as she has this obvious talent to do.

A tonne of fun in week one

Due to possibly debatable life decisions, I returned to work on Monday, January 3.

There are perks to starting up so early in the year, primarily that it’s quite peaceful, and there’s a bit more headspace than normal to think about bigger plans for the year ahead.

Sadly, I have not yet made any break-throughs in this regard.

Partially this is due to a substantial number of my mental cycles having to go into a data-science project that requires my attention, and partially because I have not yet taken that deep-thinking-walk.

I’ll get on that walk tomorrow!

In spite of work, we did manage to fit in a whole bunch of fun in this first week:

  • We squeezed in a sneaky but sublime school night sunset dinner at Millhouse Kitchen on Lourensford Farm to celebrate our anticipation of GOU #1’s return the next day.
  • We made a family outing of a trip to the V&A Waterfront on Saturday to return an Adoozy powerbank that they saved abovementioned GOU’s phone with at OR Tambo airport in Johannesburg. Their rental powerbank concept looks interesting, and the people were really super helpful, but their network in Cape Town is a bit anaemic with the main issue that you can’t return your powerbank at Cape Town airport!
    • During this outing, we had lunch at Den Anker where we always enjoy culinary and cultural echoes of our other home. In my case, this includes the taste of my favourite Trappist beer, namely the Rochefort. On this beautiful sunny day, I opted for and limited myself to the lighter #6. (I and some of my friends have been known to enjoy all of those even numbers in sequence.)
  • On Sunday, we (famjam) made use of the absolutely fabulous weather and spent a glorious day in Betty’s Bay, mostly on its main beach. I’m currently reading Liu Cixin’s Supernova Era and the story, with its pretty inventive premise, has just switched up a few gears.
    • The ocean views from Clarence Drive were truly breath-taking today. They were so over-the-top beautiful that GOU #1 exclaimed at least once that they “look like a rendering”, which struck me as a really remarkable compliment. (This was followed by some joking in the car about all of this being a simulation.)

Have a great week friends, I hope to see you again on the other side!

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