Went out with the X100VI in a break between rain storms yesterday.

The view from my desk is pretty great, sometimes.

🍁 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.

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

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.

This was a good early afternoon cappuccino.

We had a nice walk in the evening. There’s always something to see at the neighborhood pea-patch.

Our new home has a long fence that has been increasingly hidden by unruly grape vines this summer. This week, the grapes are ripe enough to eat! What a treat.

We used to make the road trip between Flagstaff and northern Utah several times a year. We’ve done the drive so many times for so many years; I know every turn, and I know how far I am from my destination at every point along the way. Maybe it’s something about the season that’s making me think of it now — it was frequently and end-of-summer ritual, so late August feels like the time to be packing and driving through that long stretch of central to southern Utah highway, across the Grand Staircase and the descent from the north rim of the Grand Canyon, to finally cross the Kaibab plateau.

We’ve moved, so I don’t know when or even if I’ll ever make that trip again, but those highways and vistas are like smooth, familiar grooves in my memory, a very specific part of many years of my story.