# My week 1 (CW 11 2025)

2025-03-16

🗓️ // March 10-16, 2025

🧭 Pretext

So why have I started my own weekly rewind? I‘ve never been a blogger because I always thought that online nobody would be interested in anything I have to say. I have never been into journaling as well. 
However, after finishing university, teacher training, now working as a fully trained teacher and especially after becoming a father to (now) two kids, I realised that I would want to structure my life more, to remember better and more sustainably. This week I also started treatment of my ADHD again and would like to combine both mindfulness exercises (for example while writing my weekly rewind or taking photos) with supporting my memory. And I would like to do other things more mindfully as well. I still didn’t want to write a classical journal, but rather combine weekly note-taking for myself for later retrospects with offering something for others to enjoy and engage on (or not).

Many micro-blog formats I have found over on Mastodon have inspired me to do this – especially structure-wise. Special thanks to Jedda over at @jedda@social.lol for super kindly allowing me to use her weekly notes as a close inspiration.

So here we go. I’d love to hear your feedback and to create interactions about topics like photography, movies & tv shows or books and music. But please don’t feel you are obliged to interact.

⏪ This week

• 👶🏼 This week has been all about balancing family and work life against the backdrop of our new situation, having been a family of four for five weeks now. My parental leave ended after four weeks on this week’s Monday and my wife has taken over the job of the family manager for the biggest part of the day, as I went back to working fulltime. After four weeks of our daughter going on a really exhausting kindergarten strike, she seems to have finally adapted to our new situation at home. This means no more angry tears after saying goodbye at kindergarten. Phew!

• 👨🏽‍🏫 I went back to work on Monday. A few days before I started my parental leave, I had been promoted. This involves a new field of work for me, I took over from a former colleague. And boy has my colleague left a mess for me. It’s all about getting used to a giant piece of software to manage inventory (back to Windows again, ugh) which hasn’t been properly cataloged. So I’ll have to do it again myself and have to get rid of all the errors that were made before.

• 🏡 Along with our urban house came a small garden which needs attention after winter. So together with my wife an my daughter I cut down some bushes, mowed the small lawn and distributed the last packages of bark mulch to prevent weeds from growing. I’m eager to see how our blackberry bush will turn out this year. We planted it in late 2023 and only got a small harvest last year. Regarding our strawberries, I do expect a great harvest as we were able to eat loads of homegrown strawberries last year. Maybe we’ll have leftovers to cook some jelly. But as we all love fruit so much, I don’t expect them to last long enough.

• 🍛 I’ve been longing for the Japanese meals my wife and me enjoyed during our stays in Japan in 2018 and 2019. However, with two young kids, planning for our next trip to Japan has been postponed for now. So the next best thing is eating through everything Little Tokyo in Düsseldorf has to offer. My favorite small chain of local Japanese restaurants is Takumi in Düsseldorf, especially their Chicken and Veggie restaurant (menu). I’ve fallen in love with their Chicken Keema Curry with Chicken Katsu. So I’ve tried to copy it at home as best as I could and I’m very happy with the result. So I’ll soon prepare a big batch for the freezer.

📸 Photos

I don’t get to take as many photos as I was hoping to take, when I decided to buy my new camera gear. Hiro’s Photo Challenge however really pushes me to go out and take some photos. At least on the weekends. This week’s goal was to focus on Subject Isolation & Contrast. I took a variety of photos this week, especially in Duesseldorf’s Derendorf district, which offers plenty of photo motifs due to its transformation from a typically industrial district. Old “Gründerzeit” police barracks were revitalized with apartments and right now, old prison grounds are being revitalized with apartments, offices and retail.

📺 Watching

• ⛓️‍💥 Severance (Season 2)  I’ve been watching Severance season 2 and I really dig it. I like its slow progress, the cold and depressing snowy landscapes as well as great characters and character progressions. Also: I’m always into good Sci-Fi. I’ve been a bit late to the Severance party, having just watched season 1 at the end of last year. The good thing is though: I didn’t have to wait as long for another season. And this week’s episode really punched me in the guts (looking at you, Irving!).

• 🍄 Common Side Effects (Season 1)  I really enjoyed the 2023 HBO show “Scavengers Reign” by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner. I was devestated to realise HBO hadn’t renewed it for another season – and probably won’t do so, even after Joe Bennett’s push by releasing a “what could have been” trailer for a Season 2. However, I was really happy to see Joseph Bennett producing another series, influenced by his drawing style, I really enjoy. It’s about a fungi scientist, finding a cure for all imaginable deseases based on a remotely growing type of fungi in Peru, as well as the governmental and pharmaceutical company forces trying to destroy this alternative to really profitable classical medical approaches.

• 🏪 Superstore As our “binge comedy tv show for relaxing evenings during the week”, my wife and I had been looking for something similar to The Office (US) – a show we really enjoyed watching in 2023 and 2024 (yeah, we were a bit late to the party). So it needed to be a work-place comedy. We found Superstore to be a good match for that, even though they are not fully on the same level quality-wise. It’s a comedy series taking place at a fictional Walmart-like hypermarket and includes funny and lovable characters – despite most of them having pretty bad personalities.

📚 Reading

I’ve never been too much into reading books. Early as a child I realised the internet had so much to offer to me and I was doing all my reading there. However, I would like to get back into reading, mostly non-fiction.

• Handmade Networks by Steffen Köhn & Nestor Siré This week I finished this really interesting book, published by the Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana. It explores how Cubans, in abundance of internet connectivity and most of western media, have created various networks of distributing information and other media. It’s a really interesting read, supported by photos and other graphics. Quite cyberpunky.

💿 Listening

I’ve been listening to a lot of new music based on recommendations from across the web, for example by @humdrum@social.lol. I don’t find Apple Music very useful for discovering new music. Still, I encountered Apple’s 80s Hits Essentials Playlist. Being a kid of the 90s I still listened to loads of 80s music with my parents back in the day. So some of the hits have been playing again and again this week. Our daughter especially likes France Gall’s song “Ella, elle l’a”. It’s really cute to listen to her singing the refrain.

🔗 Links

• Patpixels: Really nice pixelart by Patpixels from Bangkok 🇹🇭. I really dig their Missing Cat poster, even though I’m really not into cats. But love myself some really good pixelart. Maybe I’ll buy a print – despite buying stuff like this almost always comes with expensive shipping for me as European, as most artist I encounter are either based in the US or somewhere else outside of Europe.

• GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet by Richard over at @ricmac@mastodon.social. This brought back some memories. Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine, a few years ago I was still able to visit one of my old Beepworld-Websites from around the turn of the millennium. I still really love Web 1.0: simple websited, forums, IRC, ICQ/MSN Messenger, etcetera. Everything was something special and the internet was way more democratic and less dominated by big companies and narcissistic billionaires with fragile egos. I guess that’s the main reason I have found so much joy in Mastodon and other users there.

• THE FREE‑LIVING BUREAUCRAT by Michael Lewis is an astonishing read on a life-threatening case of Balamuthia in a young girl. Wow.