Week 140: Padam Padam

I set up a new mortgage as my current rate expires later this year. It’s not ideal to be paying ~£350 more per month 😬 really wish I’d gone with a 5-year fixed term back when I could get a 2.79% interest rate.

On Thursday we saw Charlotte’s brother, who’s back from Iraq for a few weeks, as well as the rest of her London-based family. It was nice to catch up.

We booked annual leave for our trips to Japan, Australia, and the Philippines later in the year. I’m gonna be off for a lot of Q4 but I’m super excited for it all!

We took Friday off work and headed up to Birmingham to stay with Ari and Chibs, who recently moved into a massive house slightly out of town. We had basically an entire wing to ourselves.

We mostly chilled out and chatted but went to Godiva Festival in Coventry on the Saturday. It was lots of fun, I felt very old until we found the place where all the other adults were hanging out. I got a little bit sunburnt like an idiot.

I created a Lemmy (a federated link aggregation/discussion platform) account after going cold turkey on Reddit a few weeks ago. I was never a super frequent user but I was missing a place to endlessly scroll through memes and bad takes. Lemmy has been great for that so far and it’s growing loads while Reddit semi-implodes.

The more goes on with the major/VC-backed social networks the more I’m convinced that I’ll never hand my data over to one again (including BlueSky in that definition).

I’ve been obsessed with Padam Padam by Kylie for a couple of weeks. I can’t get it out of my head, and why would I want to?