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§ That cold that popped up at the end of last week? It got bad enough by Saturday that I canceled a scheduled haircut and booked a visit with a doctor instead. I was prescribed an assortment of cough suppressants and expectorants that either worked or were placebo enough that I was feeling noticeably better Sunday. Although by Sunday evening I was still coughing and sneezing and generally germy to an extent I didn’t want to expose my coworkers to so I took Monday off.
§ I was happy to go back to work on Tuesday. Sometime over the holidays a giant sinkhole broke through the earth and attempted to swallow downtown Cleveland. Needless to say this has put a bit of a strain on my commute. Otherwise, I’ve been excited to get back into the swing of things.
§ James Reeves believes “a snowstorm might be the last benign unifying event” which really captures a quality that I’ve come to appreciate about the winter:
There was a low-level thrum of anticipation as Winter Storm Blair approached, a subtle magnetic force that pulled us a little closer. Strangers smiled at one another.
The first half of the week felt like an endless silent accumulation of giant fragile snowflakes. The perfect type of snow that makes me want to try snowboarding again.
By midweek the quails seemed to realize that we aren’t through with winter yet and stopped laying eggs.
§ The tile puzzle of workplace office shuffling meant that I moved offices on Thursday. It is a bit disorienting but also, as changes of scenery often are, unexpectedly invigorating.
§ I make two plumbing-adjacent strides in pursuit of my tiny everyday improvements project: I replaced my bathtub’s trip lever and installed a built-in soap dispenser for my kitchen sink.
§ A multi-year quest was finally solved this week! Back in 2021 I got a single, super cool, all metal office chair that an old employer was throwing away. Ever since, I’ve been trying to identify it so that I could find more of them. Finally, I resorted to sending a photo of the chair to Claude which correctly identified it as a Jorge Pensi Toledo Chair”. My excitement at this discovery was definitely tempered when I realized that if I wanted to get any matching chairs I would have to shell out $1,500(!!) a piece.
§ Caroline and I watched the entirety of The Office over the past few weeks.
The density of memorable episodes in the first season is wild. Later seasons are plagued by the same problems all long-running shows have, like needing to pivot when actors suddenly become unavailable. Cough cough having a lead character unceremoniously disappear on a three-month long boat trip cough cough.
I think this may have been my first time watching the finale. I thought it was well done and sufficiently sentimental.
§ Before my Peacock subscription expires I took the opportunity to watch the Speak No Evil remake.
James McAvoy did an excellent job playing a charismatic asshole psychopath. Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy both played deeply annoying people but did so masterfully.
I have a hard time understanding why a remake was made just two years after the original was released but I have to say that it was much better than I thought it would be.
§ I made bagels for the first time last night. Apple cinnamon. They were particularly good and really not notably harder to make than any other bread recipe.
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§ Well hello there, welcome to 2025.
§ I started a bit of preliminary planning for this year’s vegetable garden. I think the soil needs a bit of a break from nightshades—I’ve watched our yields decrease and pests increase over the past few growing seasons. Instead, I want to do a deep dive on beans and peas.
§ Caroline and I cooked beef bulgogi bibimbap and three kinds of dumplings—beef with cabbage mandu, peanut chicken, and pork with Thai basil—for her parents on New Year’s Eve. The bibimbap has become a bit of a tradition—this being our third year in a row making it. It was our first time making dumplings, though, which came with a steep learning curve. They made for a tasty side dish but probably won’t be something we’ll make again for a bit.
§ I’m starting a new year-long project to settle a small curiosity of mine. I put together a Shortcut that used Collections to log: 1) the type of food I’m eating and 2) whether or not it is a meal I cooked myself. Frankly, it might just be an excuse to generate a bunch of charts and graphs.
§ Our quails randomly started laying eggs again. It feels way, way too early in the season for that but I don’t know maybe it was triggered by the weirdly warm weather we had last week? I have no clue.
§ That warm weather? It’s definitely gone now. At least I got to try the new snowblower which is, honestly, awesome.
§ I’ve been enjoying digging though folks’ favorite music of 2024 lists. Particularly James Reeves, Simon Collison, and Sean Michaels. A couple of new standouts that have grabbed my attention are Meaning’s Edge by Djrum, DJ Niraha’s incredibly titled album KorgMusic2024DemoEL-HELL-EΛ.
§ I downloaded the new-ish Mario Party game which turned out to be a surprisingly fun way to spend the last couple of days of my vacation.
The only annoying thing is that it seems to require using a single Joycon as a controller which is maybe the least ergonomic thing imaginable. I’m curious to see if the rumored “Switch 2” console brings any improvements in this regard.
§ Last year was particularly eventful:
- I visited Boston for the first time
- I saw the total solar eclipse
- I got married and went on a thousand mile roadtrip through Québec
- I took a trip to Chicago for the first time in years
I don’t expect 2025 will be quite as busy but there are a few big things I’m looking forward to:
- Week 14 — My first trip ever to the Bay Area
- Week 21 — The public opening of a huge project I’ve been cranking away at for the past year at work
- Week 29 — My one-year wedding anniversary
- Week 36 — A second trip to the Bay Area
§ I went back to work on Friday. Throughout the course of Thursday afternoon it started to become undeniable that I was beginning to come down with some sort of cold. There is something particularly annoying about getting sick immediately after a vacation but I guess it is better than being sick during my vacation. Ugh.
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Previously: 52 photos of 2023
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§ The week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve has become one of my favorite times of the year. With all of the holiday preparations out of the way and work projects buttoned up it feels like I can finally wind down and fully enjoy a few vacation days.
§ It was a book-heavy Christmas this year. Caroline gave me The Art of Play which helped feed my much-discussed dream to design a playground.
Caroline and I both got an electric snow blower as well. I have to admit that I’m now, for the first time in recent memory, looking forward to our next big snowstorm so I can give it a spin. Unfortunately/fortunately we have had unseasonably warm weather since Christmas.
§ I know I’m veering into way too much weather talk territory but it really has been bizarrely warm here the past couple of days. Yesterday was 55°f, today is forecasted to be 60°f, which is more than 20° warmer than the late-December average here. The warmest ever temperature on this day in Cleveland was December 29, 1889 which reached 66°. So close.
§ I think I’ve finally settled on a use for the Action Button: toggling the flashlight.
Since getting this phone I’ve bounced between a number of less-boring options—adding a note to Obsidian, triggering voice dictation, opening ChatGPT, toggling a focus mode, activating Control Center—but every time I would forget to use it after a day or two.
Assigning the Action Button to the flashlight lets me turn on and off the flashlight super quickly without needing to fiddle around poking at the screen. If this doesn’t stick, I think I’ll finally give in and assign it to run my tea timer shortcut. A physical tea button does sound pretty great.
§ This year I decided to focus on the theme of curiosity. Was it successful? It is hard to say. Frankly, I ended up forgetting about the theme entirely for large swaths of the year.
Switching gears, I want 2025 to be the year of tiny everyday improvements. Here are a few right off the jump:
- Replace my crappy kitchen measuring cups
- Properly level my washing machine so it stops shaking around during its spin cycle
- Fix my sliding closet door that often sticks
- Everything related to my car
My hope is that “tiny everyday improvements” will be more clearly actionable than “curiosity” and that will keep it more present in my mind as the year goes on.
§ This year I started titling these weeknotes. Some weeks are harder than others to title but I do have a few standout favorites. I liked Millennial Americana, One or Two Wasps, Noisy Rubber, and Chilly Driftwood but I think we can all agree there is no topping 100 Screaming Macaws from back in March.
§ Ok, see you next year.
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§ Lots of buzzing around at work, getting ready to take a couple weeks off for the holidays. Aside from the usual wrapping up of loose ends, I also got our Shopbot CNC out from storage and re-assembled it in our shop. It’s bulky, loud, expensive, and super messy but nevertheless it has consistently been the most empowering shop tool I’ve ever used.
§ Reading through this week last year jogged my memory about the Screw Factory Holiday Market, one day before it ended. Unlike last year, I actually bought something this time: a cute little drawing of a trout lily, a tiny native flower that is an early spring mainstay of the wild woodlandy area of my backyard.
On Friday I stopped by 78th Street Studios’ “Third Friday” opening for some last minute holiday shopping. Cleveland’s network of enormous artist warehouses continues to be one of my favorite things about the city.
§ I finally watched Alex Garland’s movie Civil War that came out earlier this year. It was expertly directed and at times completely captivating, horrifying, and oh so stressful. It falls down in story is so mushy and vague that I had a hard time getting emotionally invested in any of it. This is one of the rare examples of a movie that might be better told as a TV series. I’m sure Alex Garland intentionally left the origin of the underlying conflict and details of the political factions vague as to not pigeon hole the film into a particular moment in time. I don’t think it worked, though. Taking more time to explore these themes in depth through a limited-run series may have helped the whole story land more effectively in the end.
§ My car has been acting weird since getting that tire replaced last Friday. The whole car—in particular the steering wheel—kind of…shakes a little bit? Stay tuned, I guess?
§ It is safe to say Moonbound was my favorite book I read this year so I’m particularly excited by the news that Robin Sloan will begin writing the next book of the series in January. The only thing tempering my excitement is the reality that it will probably be a while before it’s actually published.
§ Yesterday was the winter solstice. Slowly, slowly, the days will start getting longer. Today we will have three more seconds of sunlight than yesterday and tomorrow will add seven more. This is progress.
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§ The week began with a long-overdue defrosting under a bright, clear, early-winter sun, back from a long hiatus. Temperatures suddenly dropped Tuesday, ushering in a thick fog that rolled in over the lake to swallow up the afternoon. Further freezing overnight transformed the fog into fluttering fairytale snow flurries Wednesday morning. By the time Friday rolled around we were right back where we started: nature frozen in stasis yet again.
§ I made paneer again and this time tried making ricotta with all of the leftover whey. I have to admit it was not worth the trouble: thirty minutes of work for two tablespoons of cheese.
§ I’ve started playing with Micro.blog’s new Photo Collections feature. I’m not quite sure how I’ll use it just yet. Probably a collection of photos for each week? That might have to wait until Sam adds support for all of this to Mimi Uploader, an app that has quickly become invaluable to me.
§ The tire I got patched a few weeks ago suddenly went completely flat on my way to work Friday morning. When I went to buy a new one I was presented with a list of three options:
- A tire, $85
- A name brand tire, $120
- A tire made from rubber “engineered for quietness,” $240
I opted for the basic tire made from inexpensive noisy rubber. So far, so good.
§ My wife completed her graduate school program this week. Her professor let her know that she got the highest score the school has ever given out on her (absolutely hellish) edTPA test. I’m so proud.
§ I watched the Apple TV+ limited series Disclaimer. It was filmed beautifully and the acting was excellent but that didn’t make up for the pretentious writing that made the whole thing feel deliberately obtuse and self-important. Also, I don’t particularly understand the choice to use the Looney Tunes-esque iris out transition for all of the flashback scenes.
§ Weather, car talk, a little bit of bragging, and complaints about TV. Sometimes that’s all I’ve got folks.
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§ Our county has issued winter storm warnings each day since Thanksgiving and each day, without fail, would pass without a single snowflake falling. Some cities a few hours east of here got hit with wild amounts of snow but nothing reached Cleveland until Wednesday night when we got a weeks worth of snow all at once.
§ While waiting for the storm, Caroline and I decorated our house for the holidays. A new addition this year is a candle with a wooden wick—a technology I had never seen before. It makes a quiet crackling sound as it burns. Very cozy. Also new are dried orange and lemon slice ornaments. The hope was that the citrus scent would deter our cats from climbing up and sleeping in our Christmas tree, which has historically been one of their favorite holiday pastimes. So far, remarkably, it has worked.
§ I won two free passes for a local rock climbing gym at my company’s holiday party raffle. Well, technically, I originally won tickets for a neighboring city’s minor league baseball team which I was miraculously able to trade with a coworker for the rock climbing passes. I’ve always wanted to try rock climbing. I’ve long thought—based off of absolutely no evidence—that I would have a natural aptitude for it. Well, I guess we will find out soon.
§ Apple Music’s Replay—their answer to Spotify Wrapped—launched this week.
I’ve listened to a total of 132 hours of music (so far) this year which is pitiful when compared to the 672 hours of podcasts I listened to over the same time period.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard managed to make it into my top three artist despite first discovering them at the end of September. At 365 minutes they just barely eked past James Blake’s 363 minutes. Charli XCX left them both in the dust though, racking up 747 minutes in second place. It truly was a brat girl summer, huh? Caroline Polachek, deservedly, came in first at 883 minutes. Desire, I Want To Turn Into You was the best album of 2024, even though it came out last year.
§ This week marks my two year anniversary of writing and publishing these weeknotes. I was evidently much more articulate this time last year when I wrote:
What I didn’t expect, and where I think they actually deliver the most value, is as a bulwark against the acceleration of time as I get older. Thinking back two years ago, for example, I couldn’t possibly pick out particular events from each week of the year—the past is all a big blurry jumble with just a handful of well-defined signposts. Over time I suspect I will get even more value out of these notes for exactly this reason. What, specifically, do you remember from, say, August 2012?
This still rings true. Additionally, as my archive grows I find more and more value in the ability to look back and draw connections between past events.
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§ Rabbit rabbit. Happy December.
§ Thanksgiving seems to get increasingly busy each year. Thursday was the 49th annual gathering of three dozen extended family members at an aunts farmhouse out in the far eastern rural badlands of Ohio. I brought my largest batch of cranberry sauce to date, made from scratch out of six pounds of cranberries.
§ Black Friday is one of those days that all of those old companies I never realized had my email address come out of the woodwork to really make that fact known. I unsubscribed from a lot of mailing lists over the past week. It feels good.
Each year Apple moves the line a little bit further in regards to how much advertising they’ll push to iPhones. This year they decided to send me a push notification through the Apple Store app advertising their Black Friday sales which feels like at least a step or two too far.
§ As mentioned previously, I’ve completed the daily crossword on Puzzmo for more than a year now. Before starting, I had close to zero experience with crosswords.
I finally went though the trouble—and it was a decent amount of trouble since Puzzmo doesn’t have a public API or any supported method to export personal data—to graph the history of my score over time. It confirms a gradual improvement, from an average daily score around 3000 points per game to almost 4000 today. It is less of a dramatic improvement than I feel like I’ve made but it is nevertheless nice to see.
§ Sure, yeah, the new season of Silo is pretty good but honestly I’ve really just been watching a lot of Limmy’s Show. Unfortunately, I can’t find anywhere online that I can officially stream, rent, or purchase it so I have to rely on random YouTube uploads.
§ I also watched Kiki’s Delivery Service after listening to the ATP special discussing it. It was extremely charming.
§ I very rarely buy myself clothes but I have a soft spot for sweaters which I bought five of this week. Five.
§ The wait is finally over: I got my film back. It’s hard for it all to not be at least slightly anticlimactic after waiting almost three weeks to see a few dozen photos, especially when the reality is that only a small handful of those will be real keepers. Still, it was particularly fascinating to run color film though my camera. I don’t think I’ve ever done it before?
Getting these photos back renewed my excitement to finish my current roll of Portra 800. My next roll after that will probably be something lower speed—a few of my Cinestill 800 shots were a bit too grainy for my taste.
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§ Well that was a brief warm spell. We had our first real snowstorm Thursday morning, three weeks later than last year. To celebrate, I cooked a big pot roast and baked a couple of loaves of fresh bread. Given that the garden was overall a bit of a flop this summer I welcome the start of the cozy season.
§ I’ve been trying to remember to make use of my vacation days at work. I had grown so accustomed to saving them up for the wedding and honeymoon that I’m finding myself still unconsciously hesitant to take time off now too. To that end, I decided to take Friday off this week which ended up being a nice opportunity to tidy the house up before the holidays.
§ I’ve been a big fan of James Reeves’ twice-monthly Midnight Radio series for a while now and his most recent mix is his best yet. I mean, come on, just listen to the first bit at least: a punchy bass-heavy Muslimgauze remix of a Ryoji Ikeda track. So good. Long live the MP3 blog.
§ I listen to a lot of podcasts, evidently. Overcast finally launched a “listening stats” feature. So far this year I’ve listened to 678 hours of podcasts, on track to match 843 hours I logged in 2023.
It should be noted that 134 and 249 hours, respectively, were spent listening to a podcast I almost exclusively play while trying to fall asleep. Aside from that, my second most listened to podcast was ATP I’ve spent 132 hours of my waking life listening to so far this year.
It also makes me feel better about my Stratechery subscription which I occasionally regret and temporarily cancel. Between the Stratechery podcast and Sharp Tech I’ve spent 128 hours listening to Ben Thompson.
§ I’ve decided to pause reading Polostan. It just never really ended up grabbing my attention. In its place, I started reading Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry’s charming but terribly named western. I’m already more than 200 pages in so clearly something has clicked.
§ Bluesky still seems to be taking off, continuing to get around a million new signups per day. I still haven’t posted there much outside of these weeknotes. Microblogging just has never really stuck for me. Nevertheless, I took the five minutes to set a custom domain as my handle so you can now find me at @chriswm.com.
§ Oops, next week is already Thanksgiving, huh?
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§ A late season warm spell has given our garden a bit more life. We picked four big brandywine tomatoes and a huge handful of Thai chili peppers. Our tiny raspberry bush has suddenly started flowering again too.
§ The upside of having so many maple trees in my yard is that one day, theoretically, I could tap them all for syrup. The downside is that each fall they blanket every square inch of my yard in an almost unfathomable number of leaves. Raking and bagging becomes a never ending chore through the month of November.
§ I started a fresh roll of Portra 800 film. Still no updates on the film I dropped off for processing last week but they did warn me that it might be a while.
§ I made paneer from scratch twice this week. It is kind of a pain and it requires a lot of milk but is undoubtedly worth it.
§ Merlin and John talked about King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard again on this week’s episode of Roderick on the Line. I still really enjoy the frenetic virtuosic creative energy of Flight b741. Their latest single “Phantom Island” carries at least a little bit of that energy forward which is a good sign. Ultimately, what I really want is more songs like “Hog Calling Contest” in the world.
§ Bluesky seems to be having a moment. For my part, I plan to be just as active on there as I am on Mastodon which is to say cross posting these blog posts there, idly scrolling though my feed every couple of days, and basically nothing else.
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§ Well, shit. Tuesday night, watching election results roll in, was extremely disappointing. Particularly here in Ohio. I was beginning to feel a bit of optimism about my state after passing Issue 1 and Issue 2 last year. It was a blow to see our ban on gerrymandering fail and our senate seat flip.
Trying to digest the news while adjusting to the end of daylight savings time has made this a particularly exhausting week.
Out of everything—way too much—I’ve anxiously read in the aftermath of the election I found John Gruber’s reaction to the results most reassuring. His follow-up on tech CEO’s bootlicking was cathartic too.
§ The second season of The Diplomat was incredible. It came right in the nick of time too. I’m not sure how much of an appetite I’m going to have for political dramas for a bit.
§ I finished my roll of black and white film and shot through a whole roll of CineStill 800 and then dropped them both off for processing at Memphis Film Lab which is, despite the name, local to Cleveland.
Film photography is, of course, an exercise in patience. Not being able to review photos in the middle of shooting doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, my dream digital camera is a Leica M11-D which has no screen whatsoever. It is the long wait after I finish a roll of film and send it off for processing that is most difficult. Maybe I should try developing my own film again.
§ Against my better judgment—I’m still far from finished with Mason & Dixon—I started reading new book: Polostan by Neal Stephenson. It’s a bit too soon to give it a fair review but so far it is has been breezy, fun, and immersive. A nice diversion.
§ I grabbed Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language off of the shelf again. What an incredible collection of ideas and insights. I brought it to work. I think it can end up being a huge resource for interior design and exhibition planning.
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§ I took a work trip to Pittsburgh Children’s Museum on Tuesday. I particularly loved all of the interactive artwork—they even had one of Daniel Rozin’s mechanical mirrors!
A side effect of the giant honeymoon roadtrip is that the two hour drive from Cleveland to Pittsburgh felt like nothing.
§ I got to play with the new 26 TOP RaspberryPi AI hat. It is super fast! Live video segmentation happens more or less real-time. The Pi get hot though. I’ll need to look into serious cooling options if I want to use it in any kind of permanent capacity.
§ I joined Glass again after giving it a brief try last year. The photos page I set up here on this blog is still the best, more permanent home for my photograph but it’s nice to have a second place that is part of a wider community.
As a consequence I’ve also gotten back into film photography. After I finish my current roll of black and white I’m excited to experiment with color film next before the winter weather drains all of the color out of my potential subjects.
§ I’ve talked about how much I would like to design and build a playground on more than one occasion and reading about Linda Liukas‘ experience creating a playground in Helsinki definitely didn’t diminish that.
§ Longlegs was stylish and disturbing and one of the more interesting horror movies I’ve seen in a while. It has just enough Nick Cage.
§ We had very few trick-or-treaters this year. Two groups total—by far the fewest since moving into this house.
§ Daylight savings time ended today. Last year I used the opportunity to push my morning alarm earlier—from 6:00 to 5:30am. I’ve really appreciated the extra time in the morning. I think I’m going to give 5:15 a try for the time being.
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§ I’ve been continuing to try to spend some time drawing and painting this week. I’m very rusty but it’s a satisfying challenge and good exercise for my attention span. My biggest challenge has been ignoring the impulse to draw what looks good on the page instead of what I actually see in front of me.
§ Tis the season, I watched Beetlejuice and Halloween for the first time. I’m sure this isn’t news to anyone else but they’re both good movies!
§ Wednesday marked my 365 day crossword streak on Puzzmo. I would love to see a graph charting my “time-to-solve” over the course of the year. I feel like I’ve made huge improvements but Puzzmo doesn’t seem to have a good way to export my data to confirm.
§ On Thursday the museum I work for a received a surprise donation of a 1959 Wurlitzer Sideman—the first ever commercial drum machine. It sounds amazing and the mechanics are fascinating, it basically works like a huge motorized music box.
§ Backing out of my parking spot at the grocery store on Friday, my car made a sudden super concerning jolt and a Service StabiliTrak message popped up on the dashboard. I’ve been suspecting for a while my driver’s side rear tire might have a slow leak. Quick research into the “StabiliTrack” system tells me that one of the myriad reasons the system could fail is bad data from a particular wheel sensor.
I brought it in to the dealership on Saturday. They patched the tire and then mentioned the rear break pads were “basically gone” and a front pad was “falling off.” I got them all replaced. This seems to have fixed everything including the strange noises I mentioned last month.
I desperately wish Cleveland had better public transportation. I’m trying not to think about how many CTA trips I could take from the cost of this repair alone.
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§ Tuesday morning brought our first snow of the season. Well, technically a thick layer of freezing hail that stuck through til mid-afternoon. Still, an ominous reminder of the season to come.
§ All of this cold weather means that our figs are ripening all at once. We ate figs straight from the tree, we made fig ice cream, we cooked fig jam. Yum. It is quickly becoming my favorite plant of ours for how low-maintenance and productive it is.
§ I have two trips to San Francisco planned in 2025: one in late winter and another in early autumn. This will be my first time in the Bay Area and I can’t wait. The mix of technology and creativity, the environment, the weather. I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes the first city since Chicago to really invade my daydreams.
§ I got the opportunity to have lunch with a Cleveland photography icon on Tuesday. It was so nice to speak with someone else that views the city—and, in particular, The Flats—as such an inspiring subject.
§ An insight into the unwelcome tech consumerist side of my psyche is the impulse, after noticing that I don’t get much value out of the Apple Watch Series 4(!) I’ve worn since 2019, to think maybe if I got a newer Apple Watch I would find it more useful.
This is bad on at least two levels: 1) why would I buy another version of something I don’t particularly enjoy and 2) I don’t actually want to spend more time fiddling with my watch.
If I really wanted to fight against this consumerist impulse I would just stick with what I already have. Instead, I bought a $30 Timex.
I’ve been happy with the switch. The only trouble has been the few times I’ve reflexively tried speaking Siri reminders into my wrist, a move which makes me look completely insane.
Right now I don’t know—or, more importantly, care—about the difference between manual, automatic, and quartz movements and I’m afraid if I ever find out this could become an expensive hobby.
§ I’ve found Aaron Hertzmann’s recent posts about how he approaches painting inspiring. I’m fascinated by the prospect of being able to capture a moment in a way that feels more real than is possible with photography.
§ Somewhere in my memory The Diplomat became just another season of Slow Horses. But no, The Diplomat is its own show! And it’s much better than Slow Horses. And its second season is coming out soon.
§ I still really want to try a pawpaw, the largest largest edible fruit indigenous to the United States that also happens to be native to my area of northeast Ohio. Until then, I found the next best thing: blueberry pawpaw jam. Unfortunately, the jam mostly tastes like blueberry but maybe the pawpaw adds a sort of tropical banana flavor?
§ In the evenings Caroline and I have been decorating our house for Halloween. We still have a ways to go before we become one of those houses in the neighborhood but each year our decorations get a little bit more elaborate.
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§ I’m still feeling a bit gross and ill but much better than I did this time last week.
§ My Apple Watch hasn’t been connected to my phone since I upgraded to the 16 at the end of September. I only really mind it when when an alarm or timer is active on my phone and I instinctively try to cancel it on my watch only for it to not be there. Otherwise it is a non-issue. Maybe I should just wear a normal watch? I ordered a cheap Timex to try out for a week.
§ I’ve been shooting a lot of video with Kino recently. If this continues I’m going to really regret getting the smallest storage capacity phone. At least you can record directly to external drives now.
§ I finally saw Oddity, apt now that we’re in proper spooky season. It did have some decent creepy bits, particularly near the beginning, but overall it wasn’t what I expected. The fact that it’s mostly unlikable people doing bad things to each other didn’t help.
In order to watch Oddity I subscribed to a month of Shudder where I also watched Stopmotion which was really interesting!
§ I pulled up most of my sad, sad tomato plants and put down seeds for a winter cover crop. I’ve never grown a cover crop before and I’m sure random radish, broccoli, and alfalfa sprouts aren’t the proper choice for this but it couldn’t hurt, right?
§ I also planted a few cloves of garlic that I saved from the most successful plants I grew this year.
Last year I planted garlic early November. Maybe getting these cloves in the ground slightly earlier will make for an earlier harvest next summer.
§ You should give Taylor’s Guerilla Gardening Guide a read:
Vacant land is much more expensive than its opportunity cost. Dirt lots cause crime, reduce biodiversity, accelerate desertification, etc. Plus, they’re ugly as h*ck.
Every vacant plot could be a home, park, market, garden, farm – anything is better than that landowner’s sloth/greed currently parked there.
§ Yesterday Caroline and I visited the International Cat Expo which was exactly as cute as you would imagine.
§ Not just one but two of my weeknote pals from the UK had sudden and mysterious leg-related injuries last week. Here’s hoping the curse doesn’t make it to this side of the pond.
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§ I spent the first couple of days this week at the ASTC conference in Chicago. Despite having lived in the city for more than half a decade I never visited most of the city’s famous museums until this trip. The architecture alone of the Museum of Science and Industry, Shedd Aquarium, and Field Museum is worth the price of admission and that is before considering the seemingly infinite size of their exhibition halls all jam-packed with artifacts and interactives. I don’t know if Susanna Clarke had the Field Museum on her mind while she was writing Piranesi but I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised.
I took the opportunity to see Pissed Jeans at Empty Bottle while I was in the city. It was so much fun to see a punk show. It’s been quite a while.
On Monday there was a massive Verizon outage that knocked out cell service well into the afternoon. Apple’s messages via satellite feature didn’t work for me at all.
§ Back home in Cleveland I saw another concert on Wednesday: Lightning Bolt at Mahalls. Before this week, the last show I saw was Alice Longyu Gao more than a year ago.
§ The new season of FROM is out. It is starting to feel a little bit like the later seasons of Lost where it gets harder and harder to suspend disbelief until suddenly the whole show just sort of feels silly.
§ The essay “Too many places are STERILE and TORCHED — let’s make them COOL and FUNKY” has been rattling around in my brain nonstop since reading it mid-week. I agree on all fronts, particularly the bits about physical spaces.
§ On Friday the inevitable finally happened: I caught the cold everyone around me had. At least I was able to hold it off until after the Chicago trip.
§ But! On Friday I also got a big promotion that I’m pretty excited about.
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§ Hello, welcome to autumn, a whole new season ripe with naming opportunities from up-and-coming pop musicians.
§ All of the fruit on my brown turkey fig plant is suddenly ripening all at once. I took advantage of the occasion to make goat cheese and fig ice cream. I’ve made lots of different ice cream flavors this summer and this one might just be the best.
§ That previous link to the ice cream recipe was what made me finally realize that my Safari ad blocker didn’t automatically transfer over to the new phone. I have to assume the people who run these recipe sites view the mountains of ads as a necessary evil but jeez do they ever look at their own website?
§ I do, by the way, slightly regret upgrading to the iOS 18.1 beta so quickly. The very minor number of new features doesn’t make up for the instability.
§ I rewatched both Devs and Severance.
Severance was much better than I remembered. In hindsight, I wish I waited until nearer to the second season’s release date to start the rewatch.
Devs, remarkably, might actually hold up as my favorite show. It isn’t perfect—the first and last episodes, in particular, weren’t especially strong—but the six episodes in the middle make for some of the most thought-provoking TV I’ve ever seen.
§ I flew into Chicago on Friday. Baltero launched on Apple Arcade just in time. I can’t think of a better game to play while killing time in an airport.
I love this city so much. On Saturday evening a few coworkers and I joined an architecture tour along the river. From Marina City to Jeanne Gang’s funky skyscrapers the variety and experimentation on display is inspiring.
§ I’ve stayed the night in eight different cities throughout 2024. That isn’t a particularly crazy number to some but it is easily a record for me. I think its unlikely I’ll break it in 2025 but who knows.
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§ Every spring I’ll notice one or two wasps investigating particular area of cracked cement directly outside of my front door. Until this year I would always spray a little Raid in that spot as a sort of preventative measure. Well, earlier this year I went to grab my bottle of Raid and noticed it was empty so I just let it be. How much harm can a handful of wasps do anyway?
Now I have what feels like at least a couple hundred wasps living in a constant state of buzzing agitation inches from my front door.
Up until recently I’ve chosen to think of these wasps as a kind of Arakawa and Gins-style architectural intervention but I’m starting to fear our mail carrier doesn’t share this perspective.
On Saturday I finally called an exterminator. He poured some diatomaceous earth around the area and coaxed them out with a shop vac for a while and now it looks like we have fewer wasps at least? It’s too soon to tell.
§ All around me people are catching colds, covid, pneumonia. A coworker finally returned to work: “I feel fine except sometimes I can’t breathe.” I’m taking zinc religiously, determined to make it unscathed to my trip to Chicago next week.
§ I did some CAD work in Fusion for the first time in a while. Little by little I’m getting better about actually designing parametrically. It is incredibly satisfying to go back in the timeline, tweak a variable, and then watch all subsequent parts instantly update accordingly.
§ This week’s Roderick on the Line finally prompted me to listen to King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, at least their most recent album, Flight b741. It is a rare example of a combination of virtuosity and spontaneity that I always find electric. Frank Zappa and Geese both come to mind. You can tell each musician is totally adept at their instrument but nothing feels overworked or academic. Each song, moment by moment, is fun, unpredictable, and occasionally silly.
§ I got the 16 Pro. I didn’t pre-order it but instead went to my local Apple Store Friday morning and waited in line before they opened all the while trying my hardest, unsuccessfully, to project an air of cool detachment and not betray the embarrassing amount of excitement I had about buying a new telephone.
I immediately noticed that the phone feels way better than my 14 Pro. The weight difference is part of it but I think the updated case design with rounded off the edges makes a bigger difference.
I also immediately updated to the iOS 18.1 public beta because what is the point of getting new technology if I can’t play around with any of the flagship features?
Apple Intelligence, at this point, is honestly pretty disappointing. The new Siri UI looks good, summarization in Safari is unintuitive and doesn’t work particularly well, the Clean Up feature is better than I expected but not something I intended to use frequently. Siri now talks slower which is an odd choice.
With all that said, I’m excited to see what subsequent software updates throughout the year bring.
§ Decades ago, truckloads of soil were dumped into a local creek to build a soccer field. A few years ago our local park system bought the land with the aim to restore it back to its original state.
As of just a week or two ago they finally took down the fences surrounding the property and opened the land up to the public so I went by to take a look. The restoration work isn’t finished. In fact, it is still in a particularly fascinating early stage that I’ve never really had the opportunity to see before.
Mottled clay fields are busting with panicled asters, wild sunflowers, goldenrod, crunchy dried plume thistle, and thriving thoroughwort stretching shoulderheight. I passed a set of coyote prints circumnavigating a shallow makeshift pond.
Walking through the fields, I’m reminded of a particular large sunny plot of land walking distance from my house. It has to be the size of at least two standard city blocks and it has sat empty since well before I moved here, owned by the city holding out for the doomed opportunity to sell it to private developers. Meanwhile, nature has taken over with reeds, shrubs, and grasses filling every available nook. If you drive by at sunset you’ll often see a family of deer lazily grazing their way through. I’m still holding out hope that one day the city will turn this property over to our park system to open it up for public access and allow for a more intentional restoration.
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§ This weeknote is almost entirely tech and TV. Apologies in advance.
§ I have been on a two year phone upgrade cadence for a while now, starting with the iPhone X, moving to the 12, and finally upgrading to the 14 Pro in 2022. I think I’m going to continue the trend here with the new 16 Pro.
The biggest draws for me, in descending order: the lighter titanium body, the camera control button and action button, Apple Intelligence compatibility, USB-C, the new 48MP ultra-wide camera.
I didn’t pre-order on Friday, mostly because I want to both trade in my 14 Pro and use the gift card I still have from trading in my iPad last year so I’ll have to stop by an Apple Store. I’m planning to do that sometime soon after the new phones launch late next week.
§ The first couple episodes of Slow Horses season 4 are out. It’s still good! The momentum the showrunners have maintained is unbelievable: releasing four solid seasons in two years is seriously impressive.
§ If you like legal thrillers like Perry Mason and The Night Of then Apple TV+ has just what you need: Presumed Innocent. It is more of less exactly the same as the former two shows—it even has Bill Camp. I watched Presumed Innocent exactly like the previous two, over the course of a long Sunday afternoon, in the background while puttering around the house. A great way to inject some drama into an otherwise dull day of chores.
§ One last TV show: Sunny. I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone else talk about it. I think it might be the most original thing I’ve seen since Mrs. Davis. It even has a proper opening credits sequence, with a song an everything—an ever-increasing rarity.
§ I stumbled across architects Arakawa and Gins. Just imagine carrying an armful of groceries across this floor.
They posited that buildings could be designed to increase mental and physical stimulation, which would, in turn, prolong life indefinitely. An aversion to right angles, an absence of symmetry and a constant shifting of elevations would stimulate the immune system, sharpen the mind and lead to immortality.
While I don’t think architecture is necessarily going to grant us immortality, I feel like Arakawa and Gins were onto something. Increasingly, it is starting to seem like the high relative ratio of novel experiences is a major factor that contributes to children perceiving time more slowly than adults.
§ This weekend was Rooms to Let, an annual city-wide project where artists take over vacant storefronts, houses, and warehouses, turning them into art installations.
§ I finally made it back to my local nature reserve for their nature forum and native plant sale. Of course I totally missed my chance to pick the black raspberries I spotted last June. Nevertheless, it was beautiful to see the park in full bloom.
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§ We haven’t had a moon all week. I didn’t notice until Thursday when I was taking my garbage can out to the curb and looked up to see just a tiny sliver of a fingernail, only barely waxing. New moons must be just as common as full moons but I so rarely notice them. I guess it is difficult to register the absence of something.
§ Or it is totally possible that I just never think about the sky and it is only now top of mind because I’ve been reading Mason & Dixon and at least the first dozen chapters of which features astronomy prominently.
Somewhat contrary to my previous review, the longer our heroes are moored on remote island port towns, earnest grounded prose morphs into “conspiratorial hallucinatory” ramblings, as Pynchon is wont to do. I’m still enjoying the ride but, man, it is a long, strange, book.
§ I’ve spent the past few days learning all I can about culverts and bioswales and retention basins and stormwater runoff this week after last week’s visit to my local wastewater treatment plant. This is all in service of an enormous new exhibition all about water. Although we are still a year or three away from anything actually coming to life, the design phase is ramping up and that is honestly the most exciting part. Where nothing yet is set in stone and no idea is too crazy.
§ Looking back at previous weeknotes, it looks like I haven’t yet mentioned the rogue tomato plant that has been growing in my front flower beds, I guess out of an abundance of caution in the event any neighborhood deer reads this blog.
It has been fascinating to watch. What started as a silly sprout from a haphazardly tossed cherry tomato fruit has turned into an absolute menace. It has numerous stalks growing in a six foot radius out from the original stem, greedy for sunlight, climbing up any and all available vertical affordances—other nearby plants, the railing of my front porch, a shepard’s hook.
It is, by far, the most healthy and vigorous tomato plant I’ve ever grown and I haven’t touched it all season. I am trying my best not to read into that fact too closely.
§ It has been just over one year since I last took my car to the mechanic. Since getting it back it has made an increasingly concerning metallic grinding sound whenever I turn left or, especially, break hard. I know next to nothing about cars. A coworker thinks it might be worn-down rotors. I’ve been putting off getting it all checked out until after the wedding and, well, here we are. I don’t feel particularly comfortable driving it in its current state throughout the winter season so now is the time.
§ I’ve been—somewhat reluctantly—watching Chimp Crazy. It is pretty much exactly what you would expect but I’ll admit that it is super impressive that the guy that made Tiger King was able to do it again.
§ After some recent nudging from Matt Webb I added Cursor Party to my website—the one you’re reading right now! If anyone else happens to be visiting this site at the same time as you are, you might see their cursor zooming around your screen. If you just want to see what it looks like, it also works if you open this page in two different browser windows.
§ I guess this is the in-between times. We have a few weeks left until autumn although Brat summer is officially over. Temperatures dropped below 60°f yesterday. I put on a roomy fisherman’s sweater and made some chili con carne.
§ The Cleveland Air Show was, again, a lot of fun. This year the Blue Angels performed with their first ever female pilot.
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§ Rabbit rabbit. Happy September.
§ Some quick follow-up on last week’s fall foliage dispatch: I woke up Monday morning to a backyard covered in fallen oak leaves.
§ I’ve talked about this a lot throughout the summer so I know you will be happy to hear the saga is finally over: I finally picked a tiny ripe cherry tomato from our sweet aperitif plant we grew from seed. With that milestone out of the way I think I’m ready for autumn.
§ It was an unexpectedly jam-packed week at work which concluded in a four hour tour of our regional sewer district’s largest wastewater treatment plant. It was a fascinating and let’s say sensorially rich experience.
§ Speaking of work, I’ve noticed that I’ve recently unintentionally picked up a particularly annoying piece of business lingo: “let’s pick this up offline.”
To be clear, I’ll say this during in-person discussions. I guess what I’m trying to convey is that I would like to discuss a particular topic at a later time? It is crazy how easy it is for these god awful phrases to sneak into everyday speech.
§ Our very first coturnix quail, Earl—short for “early” owing to him being the first bird to pip out of his egg—died yesterday. All signs point to the cause being old age. We hatched him in 2021 so that definitely tracks. The end of an era.
§ Let’s balance things out with some happy animal talk: Labor Day weekend means it’s once again time for the county fair. The goats, as always, stole the show. There was a pygora for the first time this year which, come on, so adorable.
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§ Temperatures were in the 60s and 70s for most of this week. It made it feel like we are in the waning days of summer. It didn’t help that the leaves on a neighbor’s tree are turning orange. I’m desperately hoping it’s shocked from the storm and that we’re not already creeping into autumn. For the first time in a while I saw the family of deer that lived in my backyard this spring. The two babies are almost as tall as their mom now although they still have all of their youthful spots.
Much of this summer was taken up by anxious anticipation, celebration, and travel—and that’s okay! Even if we are on the slow creep towards autumn my hope is that before the end of the season I’ll have the opportunity to pick at least one ripe tomato from the garden.
§ I know all of the cool kids were at XOXO this week but I just got my tickets for ASTC in Chicago next month and I can’t wait. It has been more than two years since I’ve been back to what I still regard as my favorite city on earth.
§ It has dawned on me that, out of maybe half a dozen phone numbers I still have memorized, one of those is Mike Jones’.
§ I finally build up the nerve to try to recreate my favorite breakfast from Québec City: poutine with scrambled eggs and hollandaise over potatoes. Finding poutine in northeast Ohio was the first challenge. Aldi ultimately saved the day there. The biggest obstacle was actually making the hollandaise sauce. I tried the blender method this time which actually worked out great. I think the key was getting the butter ridiculously hot.
§ I had a nice conversation with Barry Hess who first introduced me to Leif Enger’s writing. I read I Cheerfully Refuse in June and absolutely loved it. Now I’m nearing the three-quarter mark in Peace Like a River. It has been slower going than I Cheerfully Refuse. If you zoom all the way out and look at both of the novels from space they are both about a road trip during the midsts of pursuit. I Cheerfully Refuse is fast-paced with anxiety and danger around every corner. Peace Like a River is slower, more contemplative and careful. That isn’t a bad thing but it is certainly less propulsive.
Ever since reading I Cheerfully Refuse I feel a little emotional twang whenever I see a certain type of cozy little sail boat. Now, reading Peace Like a River, I’m noticing the same thing happens when I pass old Airstream trailers on the highway.
§ I also started reading Mason & Dixon by Pynchon. I’m not 100% sure why I started it in the first place and I’m not positive I’ll see it though to the end but sitting here, ten chapters in, there is something undeniably compelling about it.
It took a while for the faux 18th century language to not be a chore. After maybe half a dozen chapters it suddenly clicked and it became a lot of fun. It has almost none of the frantic conspiratorial hallucinatory energy of other Pynchon books. More than anything else, it is warm and optimistic. Almost cozy.
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§ Throughout July our squash plants were all healthy and productive—the pattypans being a particular standout this year. Almost as soon as August hit all of their leaves began to get covered in white powdery mildew and fruit production slowed to a snail’s pace. This feels like a pattern I see each season. Maybe I should just accept cucurbits as early season vegetables. I’m noting this here mostly so that I can check back next August and see if my theory holds.
§ Now that the wedding and my summer travel is over I finally installed the iOS 18 beta. I have an iPhone 14 Pro which ineligible for any of the new Apple Intelligence features. Barring those, this is a pretty minor update.
The photos app was completely redesigned. I really like it. It offers a few new ways to surface buried photographs from my ever-expanding back catalogue.
If you thought rearranging Home Screen icons could be fiddly and frustrating just wait until you try customizing the new Control Center. Nevertheless, all of the additional functionality might make it my favorite change of this cycle. I added a static grid of all of my HomeKit lights, I added a shortcut that sets a four minute timer for steeping tea, it’s great.
§ In perfect contrast to my critique of Fallout, the new season of House of the Dragon is so packed with high drama and life-or-death stakes that it could really use some element of levity, no matter how small. As is, it can be kind of tedious to watch. It might be perfectly executed—the epitome of its genre, even—but it still can be a heavy lift to consider when settling down to relax in the evening.
§ I signed up for Peacock this week after the olympics ended to watch replay footage from the games. I’ve never been particularly interested in the olympics and I wasn’t even necessarily curious about this year’s olympics until just a few days ago when I finally got the itch to see what all of the fuss was about.
One immediate problem is that none of the events set to music are available on Peacock anymore. Notably that includes breaking and gymnastics, two of the sports I was most excited to check out. On the flip side that made for the opportunity to watch other, less famous games. Did you know badminton is an olympic sport? It is, in all honesty, thrilling to watch. Table tennis even more so. Pole vaulting is mesmerizing.
§ After trying bigos for the first time in Montréal I’ve made this recipe three times over the past two weeks. I’ve substituted the pork stew meat with ground pork, I’ve left it out entirely and doubled the kielbasa. It has turned out great every time.
§ Yesterday Caroline and I stopped by a flea market in our favorite tiny town nearby. We bought some delicious sourdough and talked to an artist that carves little birds out of driftwood. What more could you ask for from a bright Saturday afternoon?
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§ Last Sunday Caroline and I went to the zoo for an event organized by her school to “celebrate” (commiserate prior to) the impending start of the academic year.
You might remember we went to the zoo together last month for the opening of their lantern festival too although we didn’t get the opportunity to see any animals at the time. Other than that, I haven’t been to a zoo since high school? Middle school? The black squirrel monkeys were particularly fun, the sloths were silly, the ghost jellyfish were a surprise hit.
§ The vegetable garden is beginning to bounce back from all of the deer chomping that occurred while we were out of town. Still no ripe tomatoes yet but the plants all have new growth and flowers. A far cry from the sad spindly stubs they were a few weeks ago.
§ I was hesitant to watch Fallout because video game spinoff media is generally pretty bad and, unlike Last of Us, I’ve never played any of the Fallout games. Well Matthew Sheret reminded me it exists and gave it a good review so I thought I may as well give it a try.
I don’t know—and I’m not sure the writers quite know—whether they are aiming for a serious drama or irreverent comedy. The tone sort of just bounces around from scene to scene.
As with Last of Us, the set design is incredibly impressive. In this case, again, it can be kind of jarring to see live actors in such an over-decorated cartoony environment—it gives off 21st century Who Framed Roger Rabbit vibes at times.
All of this isn’t meant to say that I didn’t enjoy Fallout. It has a great cast that had me asking “what do we know them from?” multiple times each episode. I think season two has the potential to be really good especially if the writers manage to strike a balance on a consistent tone.
§ On Tuesday during my commute home my notifications lit up with half a dozen tornado warnings in quick succession. I pulled into my driveway under clear blue skies but within fifteen minutes the clouds darkened ominously enough that Caroline and I shepherded the cats with us into the basement.
Huddled underneath the basement stairs we watched the lights flicker on and off before the electricity finally gave up. Cellular service quickly followed leaving us in the dark listening only to the growing wind outside and the tornado sirens as they made their way up and down our street.
Finally, after a half hour or so, we received an SMS from a friend saying that the storm had moved past our area so we went outside to survey the damage. Our tall tomatillo toppled over, our hammock somersaulted halfway across the yard, the most shocking thing was seeing the polycarbonate roof of our greenhouse in a neighbor’s tree. I managed to retrieve and fix it in a frantic dash. Overall, we were super lucky.
Electricity throughout our neighborhood remained out all night and into the next morning. Finally, more than 24 hours later, power was restored. Internet service came back later in fits and starts.
Later, the National Weather Service confirmed at least four tornadoes touched down in the area.
I’m not going to use this as an excuse to buy an anemometer although I’ll fully admit I’ve been tempted.
§ On Friday morning I noticed an electrical transformer and telephone pole actively on fire at the end of our street. As you might imagine, we lost power again soon afterwards.
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§ It is that brief part of the summer where all of the cicadas and katydids have emerged from the soil to spend long evenings desperately calling for each other. Where, if you’re outside on a warm night, you almost need to speak up to be heard over the buzzing cacophony. In a week or two you won’t notice their calls anymore. Maybe because the cicadas and the katydids all met their matches and found peace or because the constant trill has faded into your subconscious from overexposure.
§ My wife and I spent a sunny weekend staining all of the outdoor wooden furniture we’ve made over the past four years at our house. The picnic table, the pergola, the lattice fence, the raised beds, the greenhouse-turned-quail-hutch. Everything looks much better.
§ During rainy reprieves from staining, we picked up Tears of the Kingdom again after a year-long hiatus.
Breath of the Wild remains one of my favorite video games period. Tears of the Kingdom is, if nothing else, BOTW but more. So why have we held off playing it for so long? I think it must be a subconscious response to guard against finishing it too quickly. The wait from BOTW to TOTK was six years. We very well might have to make this game last until 2029.
§ At the farmers’ market I bought some ramp salt from a friendly father and son duo. They broke the news that I unfortunately missed our nearby ramp festival in late April. I’ll go next year—it’s already in my calendar.
They may have also convinced me to try to grow ramps. I have a shady little wooded area in my yard that is covered in trout lilys each spring it seems like that could be an great environment for a ramp colony.
§ I finished reading Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. What a wonderful, strange, immersive book. I found the first third the most compelling. I loved reading about the day-to-day activities of Piranesi as he explored the House, mapping distant corridors, embarking on various projects. The central conflict introduced later in the book is almost unnecessary and predictable in comparison. It is a book I’m going to be thinking about for a while, certainly.
§ As promised, I tried a beautiful Standard Ebooks copy of Moby-Dick but bounced off of it after a handful of chapters. I finally settled back into Peace Like a River by Leif Enger. The world’s Enger writes seem to rhyme with Clarke’s. Grounded but magical; gritty and innocent. With protagonists that share a unique wonder for the world.
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