Denis Defreyne

Weeknotes 2026 W45: Moved in

November 2​–​8, 2026
 

Quick bits

  • This week, I walked so fast that my iPhone enabled the Vehicle Motion Cues feature. I must’ve been in a hurry.

  • I had a Brezel in London. It is the worst Brezel I have ever tasted, and I have tasted some genuinely terrible ones.

  • It is that time of the year where I make spiced coffee. Yum yum. And it works with reasonably cheap affordable supermarket coffee beans, too!

  • I love how quaint some of the DLR station names are. Pudding mill lane! Poplar! Mudchute!

    I also love how fully grown adults get excited about sitting in the front seats. It never gets old.

  • Spearmint trumps peppermint.

  • As an experiment, I switched my terminal to a two-row setup:

    denis@osmium ~/Documents/thing (main) 
❯

    That’s what it looks now. I used to strongly dislike two-row prompts, but I don’t remember why.

Shower thoughts

  • A good coffee shop has no ground floor — only a whole bean floor.

This week’s projects

My main focus:

  • Taking a 25-week acting foundation course
  • Settling in to my new place

My secondary priorities:

Moved in

The move was chaotic, much more so than the move from Berlin to London. I wanted to spend as little time packing as possible, so I ended up with unnumbered boxes, boxes with duplicate numbers, and boxes where I didn’t write down the contents. I also sort-of just threw stuff in boxes without grouping similar things together.

I’ve been paying the price during unpacking. I pretty much had to unpack everything before I could start using my kitchen. At least now it’s mostly in a usable state, and I’ve even got the office mostly set up, with large external display, office chair and the delightful ZSA Moonlander. The dining table still serves as, erm, storage space. Which it really isn’t intended for, but I suppose that’s hardly avoidable.

The new area is much nicer than where I used to live. I was confused, though, by the fireworks nearby:1 with the cold, dark weather, it felt like I was supposed to be celebrating the New Year. I’ll get used to it, no doubt.

Teaching, only by doing

I’ve been reading up on teaching. This is not a topic I have ever actively researched, even though I have (informally) taught and coached in the past.

So far, I haven’t found any books or other resources that apply well to acting. Is it because acting is such a hands-on topic? Just like learning how to act, is learning how to teach how to act also something you can only really learn by doing?

Maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong places, still.

Entertainment

Tech links:

  1. Guy Fawkes Night! Well, sort of… that was two days earlier. ↩︎

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