Making a big pot of soup and listening to John Prine on a Sunday night, things are alright.

I miss John Prine, though.

My Friday “day off” turned into a “well, I’ll work about half of it” day. But I got enough downtime after mid-day to end my work week pretty relaxed and on a positive note, having learned enough to solve an interesting problem and make mild progress on a couple of things. Among my weekend tasks so far is reaching out to the public radio station in my old town to cancel my monthly donation; it’s clipping one more tether to that place I lived for nearly 20 years, and it has me feeling kind of moody.

This week, Annie Mueller posted this beautiful piece. In reflecting on changing her blog platform, not only has she written something really moving about why she writes and shares online; she overcame the friction that the whole endeavor had got wrapped up in for her. When I think about why I continue to care about Writing On The Internet, I’m often torn between liking the systems, the machinery, and the actual things I’m saying, such that I think there’s much that I don’t actually put to paper because the tools aren’t satisfying, or the output doesn’t look the way I imagine it might.¹ I really love how Annie found the right landing place for her own why and how.

• 💉 I got my flu and COVID boosters yesterday. So far, I’m a little tired and achey, but not feeling the side effects too badly, which is a nice change. The prior COVID vaccs have really flattened me hard for about thirty-six hours.

• 📼 I rewatched Edge of Tomorrow in some evening downtime this week. You know what? It’s a really good, well-executed sci-fi banger and more people should be really into it. Also, Bill Paxton in this movie is amazing.

• 🕹️ Most of the gaming I normally do has felt really heavy lately, a combination of limited time to really get into anything, an absolutely wrecked attention span, and general dissatisfaction with … everything? I picked up Inertial Drift and it’s hitting the spot: It’s a fun and well-designed racer with cool twin-stick controls, easy to pick up and put down. It’s a perfect Steam Deck recliner, too.

• 📖 Molly White wrote a good article about POSSE publishing to own one’s online presences. She links to her software implementation, too! But, usefully, her writeup focuses on the reasons to do this, too.

🍁 I expect I’ll keep mentioning autumn in these roundups for the foreseeable future. Today being the autumn equinox? One hundred percent, talking about fall. We haven’t dipped below about 50º F yet, but it’s consistently cool enough that some of the neighborhood trees are already showing quite a bit of red or orange. I’m excited to see what our own trees do; they’re all still quite green.

📺 We’ve been watching Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, at suggestion of kiddo. It has some monster fights, but it’s mostly a really gentle, thoughtful story about an ageless mage re-tracing the steps she took on a ten-year journey with her adventuring companions who are now aged or passed.

🦵🏻 I had a pretty good spike of ankle pain this week from an injury a couple of years ago. Having old joints sucks, sometimes. It’s improved after a day, but persistently wondering how it’s going to feel day to day is pretty fatiguing.

I got a pretty good chicken sandwich this weekend!

☕️ I’ve become incrementally more insufferable about my espresso preparation, having adopted the Weiss Distribution Technique using this little wire tool. Verdict? I think it’s improving my coffee! More sip research sip is needed.

📚 I’m reading and really enjoying The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. So far it’s fun, interesting, and really engaging.

🎧 Don’t do the math, but Blues Traveler’s Four was released in September, 1994. It’s been reissued on vinyl for the first time in many years, and it’s a treat. (I bought this album originally on CD, from Hot Poop on Walla Walla’s main street.)

A couple more good things to read this week:

• I like this work in process from Hadley Wickham about R in Prod. The chapter outline suggests a lot of really good content to come.
• Dead Internet Souls by Vicki Boykis. Generative LLMs are filling the internet with garbage, resulting in the poignant shutdown of wordfreq. Vicki encourages us to continue to be live people on the world wide web, and I appreciate that. (Vicki is a brilliant machine learning and data engineer and you should be reading her!)

Happy week, gang.

Wow, nine years since I went out for this fun nighttime sky photography class at the foot of Mt Elden. These photos and short story still hold a ton of fond memories.

I mentioned The Big Door Prize in my weeks’ notes. We finished the season last night, and I would like many more people to watch this show, for all the reasons I previously mentioned and because it has a delightful set of John Prine Easter eggs that I want to appreciate together.

Enjoyed this nice early afternoon treat of cappuccino and pear cake – the pears from our tree.

It was a pretty full week. Work is happening, five days out of seven, at least, and a few of the “things to do before the end of the year” items are starting to feel a little bit tightly compressed into the time we have left in 2024. Signs of autumn are intensifying, too! It’s cooler, rainy and gray; I’m taking my vitamin D.

• 💿 I went to the dentist this week. I had to have an old filling drilled out and replaced. I have much anxiety about dental work, and for the first time brought along my own big headphones. I listened to Nick Cave’s new album, The Wild God. It’s a beautiful, remarkable piece of music, and I utterly zoned into it through the dental work.
• Driving around this week, it felt like my neighborhood, like landmarks are becoming familiar and comfortable. It’s a really nice feeling. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve barely touched the surface in terms of actually checking out shops and destinations, but as I make a mental map of this new town it’s soothing for it to begin to feel familiar in its big and smaller shapes.
• This article about the fish shell by Julia Evans captures so much of what’s great about it. Fish is so smart with completion suggestions and history! Unlike Julia, I’ve tinkered with a bunch of plugins and other configuration, but she makes me wonder if I could strip a bunch of that out and run it more simply.
• I got into a bit more solid routine on the bike this week, combined with hitting all my scheduled strength workouts on time. That feels good! I’m working intentionally against the inertia I often feel when the work day is done, or in the morning before getting to my desk. It has been really tough, the past … several months? … to feel motivated to focus on it. So I’ll take this small couple-week stretch.

media this week

• We’re watching The Big Door Prize (Apple TV+) season 2. This show deserves so much more love and attention. It’s thoughtful, sweet, and funny. I just learned that it didn’t get renewed for a third season, which is a shame.
• I enjoyed Rebel Ridge (Netflix). Pretty good action thriller about civil forfeiture and race, with some truly menacing corrupt cop performances.

🍅 garden haul this week

• A whole bunch of cherry tomatoes!
• Once again, the starlings wrecked the ripening figs before we could get to them.
• We made a cake out of a bunch of the pears we’ve harvested
• Another couple pounds of grapes in the freezer
• Radishes and greens are ready: Lots of kale and spinach in our future

(Don’t call it a weeknote? Maybe it’s a weeknote?)

It’s beginning to feel like autumn and I’m reflecting on passing through a full season here in our new home. I’m excited to see colors change and to feel the mood of the city change to fall and wintertime. This sense of transition is strengthened by school starting for our kiddo – new school, new town – a very big milestone, that one. (Parents, please note the New School Year Drop-Off and Pick-Up Rules.)

Here are a few items:

• RIP, Steve Silberman
• I’m trying out Reeder. I like the change-up in interface. I’m not sure about the “no unread” tracking, though I appreciate the intent and the way it allows for technical simplification.
• I’m kind of restless with my various blogs and web sites. Longing for a little more camaraderie in it all, maybe?
• We watched The Bear season 3 this week; I can’t believe they ended the season that way! I think it made a very successful season feel a lot less satisfying than I would have liked.
• First visits with new dermatologist and new dentist this week, and I got to keep all my weird moles and all my teeth. Parking in this city is something else, though.

I’ve set my sights on making a cappuccino at home that approaches the quality of Anchorhead’s, which has a deep, sweet, flavor. Fortunately I like the practice, because it’s going to take some time.

Got on the bike for impromptu ride #200 this morning! This was my first live ride in quite a while, and was a lot of fun – and a good amount of work, too.

I’m getting a feel for the new Fuji, appreciating the range of jpeg settings and having fun finding looks that I like. The neighborhood pea patch provides a lot of opportunities to try things out.