2026 Week 29

Published

2026-07-23

This week is the first full week of summer holidays for Oscar. He hasn’t quite been able to ditch school with early morning swim training each day. This has been a good excuse for us to get up and get out of the house.

The weather has been baking hot during the day and has made concentrating on anything creative a little difficult. I’ve been prioritising work that is more mundane in nature. This is work that is no less important, but requires a different kind of focus.

With EMF approaching, I’ve spent a couple of evenings hacking on the badge from 2024. The badge is centred around an ESP32 microcontroller and runs MicroPython. I’m not a Python developer but it was fun to hack together a quick spider tracker. Unfortunately, packing meant I timed out before integrating this with EMF’s MQTT service.

I don’t know if it’s exhaustion, the weather, or what, but I started to feel really run down this week. Sore throat, stiff neck, stiff shoulders, and poor quality sleep. Just perfect timing to head off and camp for four days.

A real highlight at home has been the two boys deciding that they want to give us impromptu performances on the piano each evening after dinner. Oscar will get up and perform something he’s been working on or a piece he’s been practising. Ethan will then follow with a remarkably similar movement across the piano, mimicking his brother’s use of the keys and rhythm.

We’ve wrapped up the week by heading off to EMF Camp 2026 as a family. I’ll share some thoughts on this year’s event in a dedicated blog post shortly.

For now though, I have some camping gear to wash.

Week in Pictures

A family sits around an outdoor table in a garden. On the table is food and a glass of wine. A lady holds a glass of wine smiling at two young boys. — takeaway dinner - busy day for all of us and so we ended up with a rare takeaway dinner in the garden

A young boy sits at the piano in front of brightly lit windows. On the stool to his right, a soft rabbit sits next to him. In front of him some music, his hands on the keyboard. — daily performance - Ethan has taken to performing daily on the piano. His pieces tend to mirror what Oscar has been playing recently. His favourite part, the applause afterwards.

A photo taken through some wire fence. Behind the fence, in the shade, some wild grass. In the distance, brightly lit playing fields. A subtle rainbow appears in the spray of a sprinkler. — rainbow - the faintest of rainbows can be seen in the spray of the sprinklers, we loved watching the rainbow change as the sprinklers rotated

Two boys sit on camping chairs, the younger of the two is fast asleep. In between them a chair that looks like a dinosaur. — exhausted - I don't think Ethan knew what to expect; up at 5, four hours on a train, then a coach, only to arrive in field baking in the sun.

A nighttime photo looking up at a DJ booth above a dance floor. Lights shine towards the photographer. A screen on the front of the booth has the word greetings in white letters. — greetings EMF Camp 2026 - null sector opening night

A photo of a boy rushing to catch a small tiny robot that looks like it's about to fall off the edge of an upturned box. The box is on dry grass, outside, a tent. — Cosmic Bot Forge - Oscar enjoyed building a solar rover and testing it in the sun, quick to build, but a nightmare to debug, he had fun trying to predict what the gears would do.

A boy looks off to his right, in his hand a felt tip pen, in front of him an upturned tea-tail on the tea-tail he has been drawing a pattern — manky tea-towel