I was sick over the weekend, and Steph got sick from me during the week. We still were able to make it out a bit between me getting better and her getting sick. We did go on a nice walk to some art that is spread around King’s Cross. There was the Lethaby Gallery for student art on Granary Square and there is a corporate art gallery in King’s Place.

We went to Allegiance, the George Takei musical about Japanese internment camps in WWII. It was an interesting take on them, as some parts they glossed over, like the start of the internment camps and how they were created. They also embellished parts of it with more physical violence and military like camps than was actually reported in the histories Steph looked up. It is possible that happened, but the histories left it out. The ending was strange and rough, as the fight the characters had in their 20’s resolved by one dying of old age supposedly in their 60’s or 70’s. Steph waited after the show and got Takei’s autograph.

I got some bronchitis, but we had the extra antibiotics so I took a course of those and it helped a ton. I got better pretty quickly.

Saturday we went to Brixton and did some more climbing. We joined Nancy, Punit, and Roel at a small climbing gym there. We then went out to lunch and had some pretty good okonomiyaki.

Saturday and Sunday I got inspired to illustrate Alice in Wonderland using Lexica.art. I made over 3000 images with them and used 76 in the text. Here is one of my favorites.

Sunday Steph and I also went on a nice walk to and around Regents Park. We took a small detour out of the park to a cheese shop that had three of 2022’s cheese competition winners. They were good, but my tastes aren’t refined enough to appreciate the difference between those and the decent ones from Waitrose. I also decided to get all the tea biscuits, and they are all tasty.

Sunday evening we had a great bookclub discussion with Candice and Michelle on Cloud Cuckoo Land. It is such an interesting book with lots of great story. In addition to the story there is great narrative complexity with six main characters over four epochs. The parallels and differences made for great conversation, as did the ethical concepts.

We went climbing again this Monday with some people from work at the Castle Climb. I had a great time and we found out that we hadn’t even made it to the largest bouldering room. The other 5 bouldering rooms were small in comparison, but they weren’t small by any means. We joined Carla, Vytautas, and a friend of Carla, Diana. I found a few V3’s that were fun, but I wasn’t able to complete any of those. I did manage to get a good number of the V1-2 and one or two of the V2’s.

Tuesday I stayed at work and played a round of Commander MTG. I ended up playing one of David S’s powerful decks and won at the power table after a 2 hour game. It was fun, but challenging playing a deck where I hadn’t even read through all the cards (some of which were in Spanish and Japanese).

We had an issue with our house in CA later in the week, where a pipe connection broke for the guest toilet and flooded most of the house. It happened after the carpets had been removed and before the new floor was put in, so perfect timing on a bad situation. Steph has handled it all well with the property manager and contractors that were already working on the house. We don’t expect it to delay the construction almost at all.

Saturday we had a nice social day. A friend from work invited us to a mini golf outing, at a place called Swingers [insert inappropriate remark yourself]. The place was tucked away in the financial district and we were the first on the course in the morning. Steph did well, and won. She had the only hole in one, and also didn’t have as many holes where she had to pick up the ball on stroke limit. William and Mimi have been in London for a while (with a break in the middle back to the US). They had great pointers on interesting places to go. For lunch we went to one of the 10 oldest pubs in London, the Hoop and Grapes. It was a pub, and had lots of markings on the wall saying that the Great Fire of London stopped just before it reached the location where the pub now stands.

In the evening we got online for some games with Michelle and Michael. We played a game called The Crew: Mission Deep Sea. It was pretty good, and we had a few fails, but mostly we were able to win. We made it through the first 17 missions.