• 👨‍🍳 Rather than cooking 2x-3x a day as we usually do, last week I did a bit more cooking either in advance (2 lasagnas instead of one) or also cooked dinner when I was making Leo's bento in the morning. It made the evenings so much easier and less rushed. I should try to do this every week.
• 🥖 I've been wanting a good chewy wheat bread for a while and I can't find it in these parts, so baked bread for the first time in ages. It turned out great. It's so easy to make bread that tastes 10x better than what you can buy in the store, why do I ever stop?  This time around Leo helped me weigh and mix the bread. I hope to continue getting him involved in baking so when he's older he has the confidence in the kitchen to give it a go...and maybe remember those days with Dad baking bread.
• 📘 I usually buy ebooks from Rakuten. The site's horrible and search sucks, but I can download the epub files (strip DRM) and load them into my Kindle. That way I'm not entirely locked into the Amazon ecosystem. I wanted something new to read and after deciding on the title, I thought how to get it. I briefly considered immediately sailing the seas to get it, but instead decided to buy it, expecting to be able to download it as I always have been so I'm "doing the right thing".  And for whatever reason they've removed the download button from the books page...so I ended up having to sail the seas so I could load the book I purchased onto my kindle 🤦. 
• 📕 Reading before bed has helped turn off my brain, allowing me to rest better. I tried to read some non-fiction ( Supercommunicators (the book purchased above)), but it kept me thinking about worky things. Rather I'm finding fiction (Lord of the Rings, currently) better to read before bed, even if it's just a couple of pages. I think this is important as I usually don't make time for reading fiction. That and I can slowly join the ranks of "people who've actually read the book and not just seen the movies", for whatever that's worth.

And what the latest swing from skinny to wide tells us about ourselves.

1. Tagged with
2. fashion

• 🌨️ The first day or so of this week felt like spring. 20 degrees out and sunny. It was great (except those days occurring in February causes worry). As if to make up for a couple of nice days, the remainder of the week was cold (2 - 8c) and wet. 
• 🌴 We had another 3-day weekend this week and it was cold and rainy 2 of the 3 days. On the first day Yumi was sick, so was in charge of boyo. We went to the local Ito Yokado so Leo could buy some balloons 🎈. He had learned how to blow them up a day prior at pre-school and wanted to show us. I'm loving watching balloons fly around the house....Sophie 🐶, less so.
• 📺 I finished watching Get Back and it was brilliant. Their approach to developing an album is quite similar to how I feel good software products should be built. It was blowing my mind the entire...8 hours...which is to also say I've got a blog post that I need to write.
• 📚 A couple of weeks ago, my old kindle stopped holding a charge. It was the base model (with ads on the cover) from probably 2015 or so...so not a surprise. I want to read more books and was quite happy I re-kindled (🥁) my reading habit last year...and having a dead-enough kindle was putting a hamper on that.
  
   I replaced it with the Paperwhite Signature edition. I went with the Paperwhite because it's (apparently) the best e-reader. It being lit allows me to also read it in bed / low-light conditions. Last night I read about 15 pages of Lord of the Rings.  I went with Signature Edition over the ads/non-ads version because we had a wireless charging pad I'd like to use it with. The plan is to leave my cellphone downstairs on the charger when I go to bed and just take my kindle (which is the opposite of when I thought I lost my Airpods and just went to sleep along with Leo, but reading feels like a better reason to stay up ~30 minutes, rather than YouTube (have you seen the algorithm doing its thing during a US election season...ugh, not before bed (or ever, please)))