Weeknotes #5 — workouts, figure drawing, and small software tools
January 27 – February 2, 2025
Still taking a new portrait every day. Here’s Neil, a carpenter, and his custom van.
I just play around with ‘em. I’ve got another one that I’m gonna build out. […] The wife and I live on a boat, I’ve lost count of how many vehicles I’ve owned.
Working out three days a week with Kyle and Avvai has been top, and today I added a small bonus kettle-bell workout in the morning. Kyle swears by the kettle-bell and today it finally clicked why, it barely takes any thinking about and you can work muscles hard pretty quickly.
I’ve been wanting to get more drawing done outside of the weekly 90–minutes with Ania, so last week I plucked up the courage to ask everyone in the class — Ewan, Olga, Ondrej, Natsuki, Nasim, and Cesar — if they’d like to meet up once or twice a week outside of class and practice our figures. I’ve been anointed leader by default which is an interesting role for me. In a working environment it’s normal for me, but less typical in social organising. Wednesday (29th) was the first meeting of the imaginatively named Drawing Club. Nasim and Ondrej joined me, others were working. Surprised myself by drawing for five hours straight, which got me thinking, prior to that session I’d probably only done ~12 hours of figure drawing before, all of it over the last couple months with Ania. More practice feels good, and Nasim showed herself to be a great practice partner, always pushing for more challenging poses.
We met again after Saturday’s class,
Yesterday I proposed the Drawing Club meet again immediately after today’s class and I’m very glad I did. Ondrej couldn’t stay and Ewan wasn’t in class today so initially it was only going to be Nasim and I (which would have been very fine), but as the lesson wrapped up and I got talking with the new people, we found four new members for the club — Marika, Anju, Tori, and Lidia-Lucia. Lidia, from Peru, couldn’t stay today but Marika, 29, from Japan, Anju & Tori, two 16–year–old high school students, also from Japan, and Nasim all did, and we did 90 minutes of mostly 3–minute figures, but with time to talk and compare in-between.
In the classes we’re always against the clock so there’s never time to actually watch how others draw. We get to see the result, but not the work. These less formal practice sessions let us learn from each other a lot more, perhaps even more than the classes themselves.
Anju and Tori, here on high school exchange from Japan, are both very talented, almost scarily so! I levelled up just by watching Anju draw the first four lines of a figure on the page.
On Wednesday night I “treated” Kyle and Avvai to poutine, my first experience and I gotta say, pretty yum!
Project wise, it’s been a week of mini-programs. On Thursday I knocked up an interactive program for wrangling my old plaintext journals into structured TOML. So far I’ve converted this months, and all of last year. I’ll continue back to my earliest preserved journal (~2012). Once I had over a years worth in the new format I worked up a local webserver and viewer so I can read and search through the whole lot at once. Usually I just grep through my old journals, but for extended reading a proper UI is nice too. Ultimately I’ll add location filtering/plotting of my journals via an interactive map, and embeddings-based semantic similarity search, but this v1 has already been nice.
Friday, for my January review I wanted to include screen-grabs from Severance, Kyle and I just finished season 1. In the past I’ve done this by scrubbing through a film and picking out scenes, but because I wanted to cover a whole season of a show I opted to write a little program to extract a frame from each episode at 5–second intervals, from there I could scan through the whole lot very quickly and pluck out the frames I wanted.
I wrote a second script to stitch all the frames together into a video as an experiment in recap/memory-prompting ahead of starting the second season. The result was okay, but I have a feeling it might flow better with fewer frames (every 10th second?) playing back at a lower frame-rate (15fps? I chose 30 for the tests).
On Monday I knocked out a couple short posts:
I’ve almost finished my January reflections, which I’ve just now decided I’m going to try and do every month this year, in a very similar style to this, basically summarising what I’ve been up to. Not entirely decided on month vs week. This weekly scale feels nice, but maybe it’s not a broad enough view for more connective reflections, so I’ll experiment with both. The vague goal then is to have month-notes or week-notes, or a combination thereof, covering all of 2025.
Jamie is going through a particularly dark patch back in England, I’m trying to support him where I can. Kyle and Avvai have asked a few times if there’s anything they can do to support me, but I’m so used to coping with my family on my own, and so pathologically averse to being a burden that I haven’t managed to draw on them much. But tonight, unexpectedly, Kyle and I’s conversation drawing on his reading of Byron Katie’s self-inquiry method aka The Work, and my reading of The Book of Joy, led to some meaningful insights about what supporting my brother means to me. The iterative process of so called turnaround statements proved itself out, and Kyle’s capacity to synthesise — both the essence of everything he reads, and the truth of what I said — continues to inspire me.
A snow day! Sunday has brought the week to an end, and the city to a standstill, with 10cm of snow. I went out early and just wandered around in the blizzard in bliss.
Kyle is playing the piano and around midday we’ll trek across the city to Sam’s apartment for a craft day on the 24th floor, with a panoramic view of Stanley Park and English Bay under snow.
Safe to say, it’s been another good week in Vancouver.
