Weekly Notes 11/2026
Week 11 summary - gym wins, toilet losses.
What's been happening
It's been a pretty good week. It started off with my swimming classes, which went better than how it went last week. I didn't panic as much. I was holding my breath in a better way. I used the paddle float to swim from one end to the other end, doing it in staggered approaches, unlike how I was doing last time where I was sinking to the ground and I was kicking myself up from the pool floor. This time when I reached the end I just stopped there. The intention is so that I need to stop the habit of kick-pushing myself in the water and just stop and then hope to continue my floats. I also got more comfortable breathing out with my nose in the water. Breathing in is still a problem but I'll get to it sooner than later.
I also realized that when I was doing things in a forced manner, for example, when my instructor asked me to practice breathing out under water, it would mess it up and panic. However, if I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it, I would naturally do it right.
The gym session also went pretty well. It was my instructor's birthday on Tuesday, so we had to move our gym session from Tuesday to Monday. On Monday, we ended up doing the usual warm-up with wall-sits and then a little bit of Romanian deadlifts. The main working session which was back squats. The session's aim was to reach our one-rep max sets, and I got to 70kg on the back squats. I've done 80 kg on the back squat prior but I wasn't feeling up to it, so we stopped at 70.
After the back squats, when we were doing the weighted dumbbell lunges, my knee didn't get any better so my instructor decided to swap exercises for me and got me to do box step-ups instead.
On Wednesdays we had the shoulder exercises, including bench press. Again, with the session target being to find out our one-rep max, I hit my PB for 65 kg of the bench press. I tried to go beyond that to 68kg but couldn't make it happen. Overall pretty happy with the gym sessions and with the swimming sessions. We'll see how next week goes.
The week has been pretty quiet. I was on call through the week but it was pretty quiet. On Friday, we were having lunch when I heard a major gushing sound coming out from the toilet. That's when I realised that we had a major water leak, from the water tank of the toilet. The first thing I did was hit the flush so that the water levels drop down and then I turned off the valve which was feeding water into the tank. I'm just glad that this happened when we were at home - I shudder to think what would have happened if this happened when we were out.
Something similar had happened in our Bangalore home when I was in Romania and Jo was at the office. Jo got a call from the building maintenance saying that there's water coming out from the house. Once she got home, the water was so high that they couldn't even open the door - they had to force push and let the water gush out.
For now, the water valve still remains closed so we are down on one toilet. Coincidentally, I had a booking with Sydney Water to do a water audit (they do tap/shower inspections and fix minor leaks and make recommendations such as more efficient taps) for next week. And if that was not bad enough we started noticing a little bit of heavier leaks in the ensuite. Now previously I had noticed there were some water leaks from the tap there but it wasn't too bad. It would sort of drip down slowly when there was water filling into the toilet tank. When I saw it this morning, I realised that the water was dripping at a higher frequency. I closed off the water valve for that toilet as well. I reached out to a plumber but unfortunately they were not available for a visit till next week either. Now we've got two toilets which are functional but at risk of causing some major leaks. Hopefully the fixes should be minimal because I think they're just some rubber gasket changes or in our main toilet case fill valve change.
After the move to the new house, I had dropped to two workout sessions From the previous three that I used to do. That, along with us doing fewer walks has meant that my weight is slowly creeping back up. Our gym trainer told us to be more active on the weekend. With that in mind, we went for a walk to Quaker Hills and on the way back, we just stopped at a coffee shop, had a coffee and a French toast, and that just destroyed all the gains from the walk 🤣🥲
With Thej visiting Sydney at the end of the month, he mentioned he was going through some of my weekly notes to make a list of cafes to visit. I had been wanting to make a list of all the places we had visited, along with what we ate and a rating. I fired up Claude Code to make a list of cafes/restaurants I visited from my weekly notes. Claude added some context (such as observations based on what I had written) and then when I asked for options on how to expose this data but in a self hosted manner, it pointed me to Simon Wilson's Datasette which generates this simple, but wonderful UI with filtering and I was pretty happy with the results for now. Thus, all my restaurant/cafe visits are now available at eats.sathyabh.at. The data is pretty minimal, so this is hosted on my homeserver with extensive caching from Cloudflare. Over time, I'll add ratings and an easier way to add data - for now, it's a manual edit to the SQLite database that has this data.
On Saturday, Jo was out almost all day checking out op shops while I got some more housework done. The lawn had grown back up, so I decided to mow it again. Our next-door neighbour suggested that I use the line trimmer on the edges first before using the mower so that the mower would pick up the cut grass when doing its thing. I’m not sure if that did what he said it would, but it did make for a nice time-lapse.
We also had the orange jasmines on our hedgerows bloom over the week and it was amazing to wake up and see the flowers all bloomed and the amazing fragrance that comes with it.
I’m looking forward to Sunday as we have Linkin Park playing here live in Sydney. I know it's not the same without Chester, but still - I grew up listening to a lot of Linkin Park, especially Hybrid Theory and Meteora. Those were the teenage angst days and Linkin Park was there to help us all along so really looking forward to it.
Path of Exile 1: I've been playing the latest Mirage League. I've been having a lot of fun with it. I decided to go ahead with a Minion build and I'm playing as the Necromancer so I've got a tiny little army of zombies, spectres, sentinels, and golems who are basically mirroring whatever I do. I didn't get a lot of time to play so I've just about finished halfway through the campaign. I'm hoping to get through the second half of the campaign and get into mapping by next weekend.
What we ate
The Corner Shop Cafe, Quakers Hill - Slowly becoming our go-to stop for a cafe, The Corner Shop Cafe is located Quakers Court shopping centre which still retains its old-style vibes. We ordered our usual coffees and shared a french toast. The French toast was absolutely delicious - very fluffy, not too sweet and just right. In my hurry, I took a very blurry photo of the French toast so for now you have to take it from me that it looked as good as it tasted. Worth coming back to the place!
Music of the Week
Death Cab for Cutie has been my earworm for the week and I have been listening to a lot of their songs. I had no idea Death Cab for Cutie has been performing for close to 30 years.. incredible. I found out about them "only" 20 years ago back during my Chennai days when I'd listen to the Narrow Stairs album while commuting. Here's a couple of incredible performances from Ben Gibbard over the years:
Death Cab For Cutie: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
Link of the week
Kai Lentit's latest video "Shipping a button in 2026" is a masterpiece featuring all his characters from the older videos
Chris Wilson dives into why releasing a classic version of your favourite online game is not just "recompile bro"
Now that F1 is back for the new season, Conor Moore gets a quick impression of the new season, cars, and regulations from the grid (/s)
Thanks for reading.
Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.