Weeknotes 8

Several years ago I felt faint on the way to work, so decided to head to my GP instead. Shortly after I was admitted to St. Thomas’s cardiac ward. After a couple of days of investigation they discovered I had a thickening of the wall of my heart. Although this causes a slight obstruction, with medication I no longer have any symptoms. Although we don’t know the cause of this thickening one of the possibilities could be inheritable so when F- was born they referred him to Great Ormond Street. We had our (video) consultation this week, and they’ve asked to see N- too when it’s safe to attend in person. It’s rare for there to be any complications, but I’m happy that they want to keep on eye on the boys as they get older.

In other Zoom call news, we had a fun 10-way call with our Colombian family to celebrate the marriage of A-‘s cousin. We had family dialing in from two cities in Colombia, Australia, California, Japan and the UK. Later in the week we also managed to catch my father-in-law in a WhatsApp video call while he celebrated his birthday. It was odd to see the familar COVID-trappings (face masks, painted lines 2m apart on the floor) in the restaurant where he was having lunch.

I love Ethan Hein’s hip-hop education blog. His recent post on septuplet swing introduced me to this wonderful track from Noname

I’ve played the whole album through at least half a dozen times this week, it’s great.

I found some time to get my sequencer/sampler project running on a Raspberry Pi. I’d attempted this earlier in the year and the MIDI-to-audio latency made it quite unplayable. With the Patchbox OS distribution the latency is much better (I haven’t measured it yet, but it is just barely detectable to me now). I only have a cheap USB sound card, and I think the pisound hat is likely to improve things a lot. I’m quite tempted.

N- and I have been talking about autumn and different types of tree on our way to and from nursery this week. Today we all took a walk on Hampstead Heath and he enjoyed climbing trees and talking about the colours of their leaves. We got confused by some larger acorns on what looked like a small oak tree. Google Lens identified it as a Northern Red Oak from a photo of its leaves. What a world, etc.