# My week 2 (CW 12 2025)
2025-03-23
🗓️ // March 17-23, 2025
⏪ This week
🏫 Work is a complete nightmare right now. Managing the school inventory with the new software, which is a task I took over from a former colleague, was implemented in absolute chaos. In our meeting, my bosses, who initially had decided to implement the new system (without having to deal with it later) on the one hand had no understanding for the amount of work that has to go into fixing everything as well as maintaining and operating the system. On the other hand they were not able to state the factual basis for changing the system in the first place – and for sticking with it even against the backdrop my former colleague quitting partly due to this system. Before, around thirty colleagues managed the individual inventory lending, assisting my former colleague. Now, I have to do each step alone. This incident is one of many of the past years, where both bosses have shown a complete lack of leadership skills. Talking to the one most of the time feels like talking to an emotionless robot while the other one is just incompetent and lazy. I feel numb thinking about work, just two weeks after coming back from paternal leave. For the first time, I’m thinking about leaving. The only problem is, that as a civil servant in Germany one cannot just quit and look for a job at a different place. I will have to try to use every possibility our German bureaucracy offers me – which is not a lot. Ugh.
🧑🧑🧒🧒 Family life however is just a complete joy. Having our daughter around, whose understanding of the world and language skills are rapidly evolving, is a blast. She’s constantly talking or singing songs and she’s just a genuinely happy soul. We are joking around and I hope she’ll continue to develop her great sense for irony and sarcasm. Our little boy is struggling a bit with his digestion system which is still in its early development and my wife is struggling with breast inflammation for the third time. But we’ll manage, as every family eventually does with things like this.
🔥 On Saturday, we were invited to our neighbors for our first barbecue of the year. The weather was great and the food was plenty, as were the laughs and cries of joy be the kids. It was a great way to end a stressful week and to recharge the batteries for the week(s) and the challenges to come.
🐠 Sunday was a rainy day and my wife was still struggling healthwise. So I had to find something fun to do with our daughter. When I was a child the go-to place for days like this was Düsseldorf’s Aquazoo. It has been part aquatic institute as well as a natural history museum for nearly 40 years. They’ve got plenty of species to explore and interactive knowledge booths (for kids). Our daughter really enjoyed it and me as well – it mentally brings me back to my childhood and it’s a place we’re going to continue visiting with both of our children regularly. I put some pictures in the photos section below.
📸 Photos
This week was all work and family. I found no time for Hiro’s Photo Challenge. And to be honest, I was completely confused by this week’s topic: The Golden Circle. So I looked through old photos to find something and I, once again, came back to some of the photos we took in 2018 and 2019 when we did our trips to Japan. Even though the weather was not perfect that day, we still enjoyed Awaji Yumebutai, a giant botanical and resort complex, designed by famous Japanese architect Tadao Ando. Fun fact: the complex was built into the excavation created by removing the material needed to build artificial Osaka Bay islands. Amongst them is also Osaka’s Kansai International Airport. You can find my entries here.
📺 Watching
⛓️💥 Severance (Season 2) This week marked the end of Severance season 2. And what an ending that was. The 75 minutes long episode gained pace over its course and ended in an epic finale providing closure to some of the central questions of the show as well as leaving me with something to long for in season 3. Yesterday I read an interview with one of the showrunners promising a more fulfilling show ending than Lost provided back in the day, which left most viewers with too many unanswered questions (though I still enjoyed Lost very much). So, let’s hope we won’t have to wait for too long for the final season of Severance.
🍄 Common Side Effects (Season 1) The only thing that leaves me a bit disappointed is the short runtime of this show’s episodes. Episodes of around 20 minutes are just not enough to keep me engaged with the action even though I really love the story. I’ll definitely continue to watch the next episodes and I hope, there will be another one or two seasons. Sometimes you just get these animated gems where people were brave enough to develop serious stories for adults. And I think they’ve become rarer after streaming services decided to be more cautious with greenlighting new shows or seasons.
🏪 Superstore We’re in season 5 now and the episodes have become a bit shallow and repetitive, but there’s still the odd laugh or two so we’re definitely going to continue with the rest of the show.
📚 Reading
I just dusted off my Kindle Paperwhite and started to read again.
- Life ceremony by Sayaka Murata Her previous books have left me with genuine speechlessness. To me it seems like she tries to condense the whole of Japan’s collective pain about societal expectations into her books. They are funny, but mostly disturbing for me to read. But something always pulls me back in – which in my case isn’t an easy thing to do.
💿 Listening
This week was mostly listening to podcasts in the car or children’s songs at home.
| Title | Artist |
|---|---|
| Echo of Youth (album) | Winterbourne |
| The Noclip Crewcast (podcast) | Noclip |
🔗 Links
OrgNote: GNU Emacs for aesthetes? Digital note taking is hard for me. Until now, I still haven’t found a note taking software to use which can reflect of my way of thinking. They are either too ugly (I just can’t use software with a bad UI, which is especially hard when it comes to open-source software in most cases) or too basic, not self-hostable or too complicated. I used Notion a lot back in the day, because I love their relational database feature. But they are online-only and for the last few weeks, I jumped on the train of the #UnplugTrump movement to get stop buying American hardware, software and services in favor of European alternatives. Check here and here for more information. So I at least would like to host everything with a peer-to-peer sync or to self-host it. I still have to get my head around AnyType.
KITTA washi tape & stickers. I love Japanese stationary and the fact that everything is designed with care, pastel colors and cuteness in mind just makes me smile. This series of washi tape/stickers really got my attention.
Seeing America by train by Christine Mi. What a fabulous read (archived now, but still accessible after registering or by using one of the many archive-services). Sadly, my wife and I won’t be travelling to the US under Trump or as long as his and the GOP’s policies, which are destroying so much right now, are in place.