Week four with my left wrist stuck in a cast done.

As far as I can tell from the wrist being stabilised underneath the cast, it has gotten stronger this week. The cast only reaches the knuckles, so I can and am using my left hand from time to time, and it feels like I was able to use it more this week. The left knee pain has fully subsided, and the right wrist is almost back to normal too, with only a small amount of pain left in very particular movements.

Years ago, I saw an explainer video on how cast saws cannot cut your skin, it’s because they use an oscillating, instead of a rotating blade, and the soft fleshy material like your skin just oscillate back and forth together with the saw. Is it weird that I’m somewhat excited to see one in person, I guess it is.

New Year’s eve came and went, we tried doing a raclette over tealights, it wasn’t able to fully melt cheese, but still impressive to the degree it managed. The day after we popped the rest of the potatoes and cheese in the oven under the grill (and V’s lovingly roasted onions), with much more success.

We’ve had days of treacherous black ice on the streets earlier this week, and while we were queueing in a supermarket, the person behind the counter asked if my broken wrist was from slipping on the black ice. I told her it was from earlier in the month, a bike accident. Turned out the person behind us also had their arm in a cast, also from a mountain bike accident, albeit so severe that he had surgery done. Get well soon, buddy!

We tried more non-alcoholic drinks over these days, some N/A white wines are getting surprisingly good without tasting like it’s just fancy grape juice, although isn’t that what wine is. Technically, though, they start out as normal wines and have the alcohol removed through either reverse osmosis, or vacuum distillation.

For New Year’s Eve we drank a bubbly made from Kombucha. A great alternative that is delicious in its own right, not trying to be a N/A imitation.

Another week of daily Gongfu tea brewing. I only started properly keeping track of the teas yesterday, but there was at least a Zhang Ping Shui Xians, a high-mountain Alishan, two Chinese black teas (a Jin Jun Mei among them), two Tieguanyins, and probably a few more teas. It’s become a tradition now to spend the afternoon brewing tea. I hope to keep this up even when I have to start working again next week.

I also got a handmade Gaiwan from Aleš Dančák, a Czech potterer. It’s wood-fired with a brown, rough, unglazed outside, but glazed on the inside. Unlike with the fully unglazed Yixing pot, I can brew any type of tea in it without it imparting any flavour (or without the pot keeping a memory of the tea, as it’s endearingly said).

With the cast coming off tomorrow, I’m should be back at work from Tuesday. While it sucked to have fractured my wrist, and especially not being able to cycle, this month off work distinctively felt like I was back on my sabbatical, my year of unwinding.

I wasn’t sure I had enough material for a Weeknotes, but my mum wrote me that I shouldn’t forget to write them (hi mum!). So yeah, I guess there was enough to write about, and I didn’t even have to resort to the awful world events.

Be well, everyone.

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