In case you haven’t gotten the news already from (tom)[https://tomstu.art/] - it’s warm. I like it but he doesn’t and annually I say “lovely weather” on my blog and he describes the tyranny of the oppressive heat on his. This is called free speech.
The queue for the Soho mayonnaise (soho-mayo?) pop-up was round the block. I sent a video to Lachie because he hates mayo. He’d probably dislike it a normal amount were it not so prevalent in cheap sandwiches.
Speaking of cheap sandwiches, I tried to grab lunch with a colleague, who was going to Tesco for a meal deal, but when I got there I thought, actually, I can’t ruin my lunch with this. I will take the rinsing for being posh and enjoy a nice sammo from over the road.
The kids are eating the peas, fresh from the pod, every day. They love the peas. I love them loving the peas.
No tomatoes yet, can’t wait.
I’m going to Saltdean Lido this week. I’ve booked tickets. You can’t stop me.
Please don’t “use AI to polish” your blog posts. It makes them sound like every other blog post on the internet and therefore makes them very boring to read. I like your idiosyncratic little voice ok? Your silly little grammars. You’re the only you there is.
I think with AI you’ve got to be building the software equivalent of escalators if you’re going to do it for prod. That way if the AI goes away you still have stairs, unless you’ve gotten too out of shape to walk up them.
On Saturday we went to see Shelf do “Kids Show 2” at a small parish hall in a hamlet outside Lewes. It was a weird place for them to be honestly - the last time we saw them was at the Brighton Dome so this not even sold out show in the middle of nowhere was a surprise. Per the last time though, they were amazing. So kinetic, so funny. Chaz was rapt, fully in the show with every fiber of his being. At the end we went to see them and he told them he still had the sketch he’d won from them last time he saw them.
After the show we had lunch in a pub and then walked to Ditching Beacon. There was minimal complaining from the children, particularly once I’d convinced an overheating 5 year old to take his t-shirt off.
Along the way we saw runners attempting the 100 mile run for the whole of the downs. It was pretty remarkable how comfortable most of them looked, having already run 60 miles in a race that started at 5:30am. Looking at the results, I can see that the winner cleared the men’s record by about 15 minutes, and the first woman finisher smashed the women’s record by 2 hours!
LeadDev week. As is tradition, I left feeling so incredibly tired. You could pour me into a bucket and tip me into the bog. Just flush me, let me travel through the sewage system and hang out with the fat bergs.
I gave a workshop on Engineering Strategy again. Gave myself a little thrill by discovering that my timers were all out by one minute in the 10 minutes before I was due to go on stage. There were about 100 people in the workshop which is a good turn-out but also gives me a sort of vertigo.
I’ve put all my envelope privacy patterns over here at https://alicebartlett.co.uk/envelopes. In some ways it is tempting to try to categorise them but when I look at other people’s attempts at these I feel very unmoved, so other than noting the origin of the post mark I’ll leave it at that.
My dad has given me an envelope from a letter he got in 1990 from the USSR to add to my collection. He refuses to let me call it “fan mail” but it is, factually, a letter, from a person expressing admiration for his work. So you’ll just have to decide if that counts as fan mail.
Cool thing I learnt from the Netfix Kylie doc is that Nick Cave convinced her to stop messing about and get back to pop music. Very cool Nick.
Made a sculpture of E as a baby. We’ve got this photo of her 1 month old looking at us with such contempt. I haven’t quite captured it in clay but I will probably keep trying.
On Tuesday, kid free, we took a walk on the South Downs. We walked from Devil’s Dyke to a youth hostel 4k away and had some dinner. I love youth hostels. So wholesome and they remind me of being a kid.
I took some basic bitch sunset photos.
Still dunno what a Fulking Enscarpment in, and I don’t want to know,
Identified a goldcrest in the garden with the help of the Merlin Bird App. Then as I was sat by the pond convening with the frogs and the newts it flew down, perched on an unfurled lily and washed its face in the water.
I also noticed we have some nesting blackbirds in the… wall plant… I should really learn the name of it. Anyway, very cool but you can look right into the nest if you grab a chair.
On Wednesday, as I was walking out of convent garden feeling so overwhelmed by all the commotion that I had to put on my noise cancelling headphones, a woman stopped me to tell me she liked my outfit (green jumper and green polo from MHL) and jeans I sewed myself. Because of the overwhelm I just put my hands on my head and said thank you several times in a row.
I was on my way to compère Interesting again. It was a really good line up this year and Russell does an incredible job of warming up the audience to be ready to take an interest in wherever the speaker takes them.
For the weekend the Posso family cane to stay. On Saturday we went to the beach and had a picnic. Please enjoy my novel way to stop people being confused about what is in the sandwiches. That is edible pen. I had a swim in the rather frigid sea. Then we got everyone back for a BBQ. On Sunday we went to the park and then to two of the gardens that are open for the Artist’s Open Houses - Cat’s Creep, which has an amazing bird house and a pond full of newts, and the Avant Garden, where we sat and made some sculptures with silk clay.
This week, we progressed the slow running drama of my youngest’s toof.
Avid readers of alicebartlett.co.uk/blog will recall when he got his first tooth (very early), and then the rest came in, and then when they started to fall out in a weird order about a year ago. Well, 6 months of waiting for the thing that pushed out that top tooth to emerge, it turned out it was a “supernumerary tooth” - ie one that isn’t supposed to be there, or anywhere in his mouth.
This week he went down to the specialist NHS children’s dentist (where all the dentists have those jazzy hats on) to have it removed.
The way they do this, is you get a nose mask that pushes NO2 into your nose, and you have to breathe only through your nose, with your mouth wide open so the dentist can get to work. For a laugh, why don’t you try opening your mouth as wide as possible and then breathing only through your nose. Not easy! Not easy for a five year old!
My guy has been practicing this a lot over the last few weeks. I kept catching him trying it. He mostly kept telling me he couldn’t do it and would never be able to do it (although I could see he could sometimes do it).
Once you’ve got some sweet sweet NO2 fuzzing your reality, they put some numbing cream on a spot in your mouth and then inject you with a local anaesthetic. Then they basically go at you with a pair of pliers.
When I asked the dentist… do kids actually let you do this? She said it worked about 70% of the time, and the other 30% they had to reconvene at a later date to do the removal under general. But the wait time for that is 5 months longer. “I’ll take those odds!” I thought.
So on Monday, equipped with the promise of a Shy Guy plushie and a day off school if he went through with it, my guy went down to the dentist with his dad. Both of them were very brave, I think Lachie was more anxious than Chaz. Chaz, apparently, just seemed very calm and focussed on the task at hand and determined to get this done. Not a single flap from him.
The tooth they pulled out was mega. Strangle little stump then a huge long pointy root. The tooth fairy has it now, in her kingdom of teeth.
The presence of this super numerary tooth has, according to the x-ray, messed up his adult teeth a bit so this is probably not the end of the special dentist trips.
I have call screening very enabled on my phone. I get so many spam calls about software and networking dinners about SASS and I DO NOT WANT THEM. Anyway, this week one got through and let me tell you how.
I am, er, making friends, with the man I sit next to at work. I’ve been insisting on borrowing his charging cable because he always has one and I don’t bring mine in. He pretends he hates sharing it. Last week when I left the office I put a post it note on it that says “Alice and Sam shared charging cable <3”. I got in this week and there was a new post-it that said “Fuck right off!!” and he had escalated the situation by raising a help desk ticket in my name requesting a charging cable for me.
Also, I need to be able to use the work printer because on the 2nd of June I am doing a workshop about creating an engineering strategy at LeadDev’s Director+ track and I want to do a print-test of the worksheet before I sent them off. So that is help-desk ticket number two. I should simply be able to print, but it doesn’t work for me.
So then I got a call screened, it was Jim calling about some tickets. “Brilliant!” I thought - the helpdesk man is calling me to fix my problems. I called him back. “Are you in soho?” I asked immediately. “Er no, I’m not, this is-“ I cut him off “Milton Keynes? Can you help me print?”. This man - Jim - is now very confused. “You… work for Rightmove…? You’re helping me with the helpdesk tickets…?”. Oh man. No this is just some random man who wants me to come to a round-table dinner to talk about Customer Experience with other nerds.
Bad news: still can’t print. Good news: Still legitimately allowed to share Sam’s cable. Follow-up: I did not take the man up on his dinner offer.
The other type of sales call I get is people working at US based companies that provide technology to scrape property websites, apparently not realising that we are the data. People want to scrape us.
I’ve bound the first weaknotes book. There are many stages to binding a book but I am choosing to do each book in serial because each stage requires a lot of precision and focus, and each gluing stage requires 12h in a makeshift book press, of which I only have one. Anyway, here are some pics of the first book, fresh out of the press. Every aspect of this is somewhat wonky, but it will do!
]]>Week 400: THEY KISS YOUR FACE2026-05-03T00:00:00+00:002026-05-03T00:00:00+00:00https://alicebartlett.co.uk/blog/weaknotes-400
Finally made it to week 400!
Cast on a jumper for E, chosen by her, and with the intention of making a mini version for her cousin so they can be matching.
This week I went to some leadership training at work. It was good - covered “situational leadership” which I hadn’t come across before. As per usual, my unquenchable desire to be the teacher’s pet came through despite my knowing that this is not a likeable quality.
The session was compered by a comedian who had some jokes about RM that got a laugh out of me at least, and he was accompanied by a woman on a keyboard who played music throughout the break-out sessions where we discussed various situations and applicable styles.
My book-binding project continues. I did a(nother) test print of week 100, but when it arrived it was (a) too many pages imo and (b) the font size was too big, making it look a bit too much like a kids book. Both of these problems do not require a test print to determine, I could have just had a little think and realised that without wasting my own time and money. However - that’s not really how I roll so. Even though the book is not quite right, I used it as an opportunity to practice some book binding techniques that I will need later.
Since last week was week 399, I decided to wait until week 400 was published before sending everything to the printers in one go. In the waiting week I found a load more minor grievances with how the books were laid out, all of which I think I’ve now fixed. At this stage I might as well do it properly.
I finished a pair of socks. 68 sts cast on, my fave cuff (picot). Used yarn from daughter of a shepherd which I find a bit too itchy for anything other than socks, but I am a massive baby about itchy fibres so ymmv. The green is some leftovers from from the first pair of socks I ever made.
I also managed to get my fizziest kombucha yet. And I bunged a load of grated ginger in there too, which made it even more delicious.
On Saturday we went to see the children’s parade, which is where children from all of the schools in the local area parade through the town with giant sculptures about a book chosen by the school. It was very impressive to see what the schools had built and as always I enjoyed watching the kids from Christ’s Hospital in their utterly bonkers 460 year old school uniform. (Breeches! Mustard yellow woolen knee socks! A frock coat! A cravat!)
After the parade we went to the beach. I spotted an area with not many people in it and headed there but on arrival saw that that was because it was strewn in litter. C and I sat at the edge of the large litter patch while we waited for Lachie and E to get ice creams. While I waited I observed loads of people comment on the litter patch as they walked through it or around it. Eventually it occurred to me that I could get a bin liner from one of the beach front bars and actually do something about all the mess. So I drove my San Miguel Zero into the pebbles and headed to the Fortune o’ War bar. When I got back to the beach with my bin liner and started picking up all of the rubbish loads of other people started to join in, and after about 10 minutes I had fully filled the (very large!) bin liner, so I went back for a second. After about 20 minutes the beach area was looking pretty good and I was able to relax.
Lachie said it was a “thing of beauty” watching everybody jump up and start putting litter in the bag. He was sat with our stuff eating an ice cream of course so could only observe.
On Saturday I spent a relaxing evening sorting my collection of envelope privacy patterns. I used a scalloped cutter to take a sample of each envelope and laid them out in a pleasing arrangement. I’ll probably frame them? And then when people come over I’ll be able to say “you must come and see my collection of envelope privacy patterns through here… you’ve hardly touched your home brewed kombucha?”
]]>Week 399: Silly little things2026-04-26T00:00:00+00:002026-04-26T00:00:00+00:00https://alicebartlett.co.uk/blog/weaknotes-399
Week three hundred and ninety nine!
BERG’s last weeknote was 432. Really makes u think.
Tuesday I went for a 4k run at 6:30am and it was quite pleasant and had minimal impact on my family. Will probably do it again next week.
On Thursday I had a cosy breakfast with Russell at Bar Bruno, then lunch with Anna and Sarah at Tonkotsu, and then dinner with Debbie and Dimitar in Borough Market.
Local news from whatsapp - there is a new cat on the block. He’s white. He’s been breaking into people’s houses, going into their bedrooms while they are asleep, eating their cat food, terrorising their cats, vets bills are through the roof. I love cat drama because, as I have said before, ACAB. The black cat who smashed up my greenhouse has now shredded all of the gro-bags in there. Everybody thinks their cat is the victim but do you know who the real victims are? Birds, frogs, my greenhouse.
One of the silly little things I do is collect envelope privacy patterns. I don’t know what I’m going to use them for but one day I will do something with them. Recently Vinted has started advertising me old stamps, I’m not sure why, I don’t collect stamps. Ha ha I’m not some sad loser! God! Imagine! Envelope privacy patterns are way cooler. But it did occur to me though that old stamps are attached to… old envelopes. So when I saw 200 old stamps (on old envelopes!!!) going for £8 I thought in this economy that’s about the most fun you can have for £8 plus postage.
On Saturday I got a box of old envelopes. The postage marks are all Hull, and appear to have been sent to several different clumps of locations. Loads to Petersfield, loads to Norfolk, and loads to the David Cassidy fan club. The dates range from 1957 to 1976. Here’s what I am confused about… all these different destinations, all the same singular sending location, and yet these envelopes have all come back together as a set? How has this happened? What’s going on?
HULL - THE GATEWAY TO EUROPE.
Of course what you’re all dying to know is, did I get any new privacy patterns to add to my collection? Oh yeah. Loads. What a haul.
I now have quite a lot of old envelopes (that have plain internals) to do something with too… 🤔
The new batch of Kombucha has brewed and it’s very fizzy this time, probably because it’s been warmer in the kitchen. I think I’m going to do a second ginger brew next.
The peas are in the ground and looking good. Tomatoes, lettuce, beetroots, and squash have all germinated and are chilling in the conservatory. Massive pink blossom tree is doing its annual thing.
I read this thing about all the cyber attacks that have happened in the last 4 months. Both fascinating and terrifying in equal measure LINK. Absolutely love living through a paradigm shift!!!!
On Wednesday my previous ride-or-die WBF (work best friend) Debbie visited the RM offices for NOW/NEXT/PRODUCT and blew everyone’s socks off with what she’s been up to at Loveholidays. Then we went to Forza Wine and had a cocktail and some soft-serve. Then I got very stuck getting home because, as happens about 50% of the time when I’m getting a late train, the trains were wrecked by some unknown problem on the line. Did bump into Chetan though so… not all bad.
Please enjoy the Gnomes in the background of that photo of Debbie - when people have worked at RM for 10 years they get a “Gnomified” and put on that shelf.
Alex and Graham finally unsubscribed me from STATUSPAGE updates about the FT :((((
I still hate driving but this weekend I had to use the car to do a local errand and it made what would have been quite hard (getting the kids between play-dates and birthday parties) very easy, and I didn’t feel completely out-of-body anxious while I was at the party knowing I had to get back into the car to drive home.
[Book binding] The printed book pages arrived but I had gotten the page orientation wrong meaning they were completely useless. >:( Since I had to print them all again anyway I decided make some more adjustments.
Include some photos from Instagram at the corresponding weeks
Make it 100 weeks per book instead of one per year
Adjust margins so the side near the spine is wider
Render the PDF automatically, and do a conversion direct from Markdown to PDF instead of HTML to PDF.
Extract links to a list of references at the end of the week so they don’t clutter up the body text.
Resize and optimise images for black and white printing.
Swap out the emojis for a black and white version, which I hope will fix the fact that they didn’t print at all in the last print out.
This delay also gave me the opportunity to re-bind the very knackered Meera Sodha Fresh India that was falling apart as a practice.
