It is week 273, which will be forever known as the week that I finally got my first ikenobo ikebana diplomas. I'm like a legit flower arranger now. My name will be forever in some 500 year old ledger somewhere in Kyoto.

I got a new phone, which is literally the most exciting thing that happened this week, so take of that what you will. It's a Pixel 3, so of course, the main thing is having to retrain my thumb to do whichever arbitrary change their UI designers have made to task switching. This time, it's removing the whole button. Joy. Also, turns out some folks don't know that you can control a lot of things about Chrome by using chrome://flags - like, for example, getting rid of the bloody news feed and recent bookmarks. I do like the wireless charging, though, this feels closer to the future I was promised.

I picked up a book a couple of weeks ago about felting (it's in Japanese, I can't read it). I'm not intending to get into felting - I simply bought it because the photos were so cute - but then I accidentally bought some felting wool. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yesterday, I went to a conference for the first time in ages (HeavyBit's DevGuild) and it was actually professionally useful to the problems I'm facing at work. I'm not sure why this is so shocking to me, but maybe for the first time I'm actually in the right place. We announced our series B funding on Tuesday, so lots of congratulations all around.

I had another crafternoon with Monica, and made a small bee embroidery hoop that I'm quite pleased with. Starting to get the hang of satin stitch.

My Anki Vector robot arrived and it's honestly adorable (I was a KS backer, so I had a pre-order). I'm looking forward to the updates they plan for it - especially hooking it up to Alexa or Google home so he can be come the cutest robot butler.

Also, from a kickstarter this week is a little QSun UV tracking device. It's rubbish. I mean, yes, it tells me how much UV there is via some lights, but it feels physically awful (maybe for some technical reason I don't understand, it's surface is made of a material that feels like black grit that flakes off) and the app doesn't seem to be able to remember my location or who I am. I can't even be bothered to write about it for my under-loved IoT blog. C'est la vie.

And of course, some flowers.

This week started off with Alex's birthday. We went to Alameda for a daft brunch and a walk around a piece of shoreline we have newly discovered called crab cove.

We did pick up a bunch of comics and graphic novels, the most interesting of which I read this week called "Wytches", which has a beautiful art work style. It's very ink heavy and dark, and uses layers of watercolour over the top to add extra grit and texture.

For ikebana this week, I made this moribana freestyle arrangement.

A slow week in terms of things to show for it, but felt busy regardless.

Things I made

Embroidery. I don't recall ever having done any before (maybe cross-stitch?) but I had bought this little jellyfish kit a while back and had some friends over on Saturday afternoon for a bit of a crafternoon, so I made it up. It's a really relaxing thing to do. I drew up my own pattern yesterday to start another.

Ikebana follows the seasons - the plants you work with change over time, reflecting the year. Autumn definitely arrived this week with a green to orange two material shoka.

Things I saw

There's a podcast I listen to that was recommended to me by Jake earlier this year called All Killa No Filla. It's by two women who chat about serial killers, but actually mostly just talk nonsense to each other about their lives. I love it. Not least because I miss the pub-like banter of British people, so it's very homey for me. On Wednesday, Alex and I went to see them record live at Cobb's Comedy Club, and it was rad.

Things I've been doing

Mostly meetings. It's the end of a quarter and we're embarking on the OKR process for the first time at this company.