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§ Our garlic and allium bulbs are confidently sprouting and all of the neighborhood daffodils have bloomed. Still no sign yet of the asparagus I planted last year.
In previous years, our fig plant has only produced fruit in the autumn. Given the right conditions, it should produce two sets of fruit each growing season: a “breba” crop in the spring in addition to the main crop in the fall.
Last winter, I wrapped the fig plant in heavy burlap with the hope that shielding it from the coldest winds might help it get a jumpstart in the spring. Unwrapping it this week, it does seem like the young branches have gotten though the winter with very little frost-damage. Time will tell whether or not that has an impact on fruit production.
§ I’m glad I decided to take off work Monday and Tuesday for a mini spring break. It was windy and cloudy with temperatures in the mid-40s but I bundled up and still managed to spend some time outside. I found a skunk in my garage on Monday which was surprising, to say the least. On Tuesday, I took a trip down to my favorite tiny grocery store and found out that a nearby 130 year old bike shop had burned down last month.
§ I finally filed my taxes this weekend. It felt like I had really been procrastinating but, judging from last year’s notes, I didn’t file my 2023 taxes until the middle of April so this is progress, I guess?
§ From Jane Psmith’s review of Alexander Langlands’ book Cræft:
[Langlands] warns that “while some machines are clever, the net result of our using them is that we become lazy, stupid, desensitized, and disengaged” — it’s not that a thing made by hand is better as an object than its mass-produced counterpart… it’s that the making changes the maker.
The making changes the maker. This mindset is why I enjoy all of my silly projects like raising quails, building a waddle fence, digging a hügelkultur, and baking clay bricks.
I know what I’ll be reading next time I’m in the mood for nonfiction. In the meantime, I started watching BBC’s historic farm series which the author participated in. It is very British, very nerdy, and very good.
§ The Severance finale was more satisfying and less cliffhanger-y than the first season’s finale. I just hope I don’t have to wait another three years to watch the third season.
The long gap has made me subconsciously judge this entire season more critically than I otherwise would—since it took three times longer than most shows to make, it should be three times better than most shows, right? I realize that isn’t entirely fair but it also isn’t entirely unfair.
§ The Studio is off to a great start. It is a comedy that manages to capture a lot of the manic energy, tension, and anxiety of The Bear while still remaining incredibly funny.
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§ Happy Spring, officially. Why doesn’t this align with the beginning of daylight savings time?
§ Right on cue, I spotted my first crocus sprouting out of a neighbor’s tree lawn during a walk around the neighborhood last Sunday. Still no sign of any daffodils.
§ Another early indicator at Spring is temporary mass hysteria in the local robin population. One flew directly into our living room window as I was drinking my morning coffee.
By all indications, aggressively attacking windows is a common behavior during their early spring breeding season. They can get confused by their own reflection in the glass, thinking it’s an avian interloper. Hormones, huh?
§ Speaking of birds, Christopher Brown’s newsletter recently introduced me to the fact that Grackles came to North America by way of Moctezuma’s uncle who imported them to Tenochtitlán from the tropical lowlands of South America 500 years ago.
They are now frequent, striking, and strangely somewhat ominous presence in my yard each summer.
§ I just found out that my neighbor—someone my wife and I called “the knife man” on account of the fact that he always carried a six-inch knife on a belt holster whenever he went out to walk his Shih Tzu—is moving.
Who will be the standout neighborhood character now? The still-unknown neighbor that stuck an oddly phallic foxtail amaranth into one of our flower pots under the cover of night last summer? The older woman who delicately wraps a clear plastic bag around the head of her decorative goose statue each winter?
§ I’m a bit more than a third of the way though Brother Brontë and it has finally found its rhythm.
I was on the fence about it last week, but as I continued reading, it became clear that the strange dialog that was throwing me off has an in-universe explanation.
Overall, it is bizarre, evocative, memorable, and occasionally inspiring. I recommend it.
Part one is an irreverent, surreal, creative slurry. I still feel good about my description last week calling it a “fusion of Gabriel García Márquez with Ed, Edd n Eddy.” Right when everything starts to feel just a little too weird, part two arrives and suddenly flips everything on its head. The whole book becomes earnest and hopeful. A perfect counterbalance.
I’m looking forward to seeing what the third and final part brings.
§ A taste:
Mostly, she typed nonsense: Jazzmin Monelle had taught herself the art of letting go beyond a narrative and characters, even beyond cohesive language, before conjuring a discernible idea for a story. She switched the meanings of Spanish and English words for fun.
[…]
In the middle of writing an intense scene, a young boy stuck his head in amidst the loud typing and asked,
“What happens here?”
Jazzmin Monelle halted her typing, looked the boy in the eye, and said,
”Life and death and the womb of the universe happen here, young man.”
Life and death and the womb of the universe.
§ It has been a while, but I am still duty-bound to inform you that there is a new Longmont Potion Castle album out. It’s great, of course.
§ I haven’t watched the Severance finale yet but fear not, I certainly watched TV.
Adolescence seemed to come out of nowhere and was really interesting. It’s basically a bog-standard Netflix murder mystery with a unique affectation: each hour-long episode was filmed in a single take—no cuts. It took me a while to stop noticing it, wondering how the showrunners handled the logistics, and feeling second-hand stress on behalf of the actors, etc.
Once I finally stopped noticing it, though, I think it actually fits the genre well. Being able to gradually discover and process each new piece of information in real time alongside the characters added some realism to what could have otherwise been a contrived story.
The third episode, in particular, was a triumph. Two characters, one room, one shot, and I was completely transfixed for the entire 53 minutes.
§ I took off work next Monday and Tuesday. I’m looking forward to a tiny four-day weekend spring break.
§ There is snow in the forecast, of course.
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§ The start of daylight savings time last week caught me entirely off guard. I have to say, though, I’ve really been enjoying the extra hour of sunlight in the evenings. All of the extra light, combined with temperatures in the 50s and 60s all week, was a huge boon to my mood.
§ Really the one and only downside to warm weather this early in the year is that my office becomes an inferno. On Monday, when it was 60 °F outside, my office peaked at stale, humid, 90°.
§ I guess I slept through the “blood worm moon total lunar eclipse” (what a mouthful) that occurred overnight Friday. However, on Saturday morning I was greeted with an otherworldly pink sunrise. It’s the type of thing that is almost impossible to capture with smartphone cameras with their automatic white balance adjustments.
§ I’m of two minds about Brother Brönte, so far.
The world it’s set in feels rich, fully considered, and alive. There is a certain weight and physicality to everything that I appreciate. Now, while the world of Brother Brönte feels real, it doesn’t feel realistic. It’s a surreal dystopia-by-caricature. Honestly, the best comparison I can make—and I mean this in the best way possible—is that it is like a modern-day fusion of Gabriel García Márquez with Ed, Edd n Eddy.
The big problem is that the dialog really throws me off. So far, at least, it’s all a little too ”As you know, Bob” for my taste. I’m going to give it the benefit of the doubt, for now.
§ I finally got caught up on the last three episodes of Severance.
Episode seven—“Chikhai Bardo”—was a masterpiece. Possibly some of the best television I’ve ever seen.
The eighth episode was entirely unlike anything that has come before it in the series. I would love to spend more time exploring Lumon’s effects on the wider world.
This week’s episode was fine although it mostly felt like a preamble to next week’s finale. I never knew Christopher Walken could be so frightening.
§ On Friday, Caroline and I went out to visit our favorite 120 year old greenhouse for the first time in over a year. The whole building smelled like citrus blossoms.
§ A coworker on my team has been out all week with the flu and I’ve noticed an ominous cough creep up over the past few days. Will I get sick? Will my immune system persevere? Tune in next week to find out.
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§ It was 67 °F on Tuesday. Come September, 67° will feel like the perfect excuse to dig out all of my favorite comfy sweaters but here, in March, it means t-shirt weather. I took the opportunity grill some carne asada and take a good look at all of the garden beds. A few of the garlic cloves I planted back in October are just starting to come up.
§ I finally figured out the name of my favorite type of tree. It is honestly nothing special all summer but after shedding all of its leaves in the autumn, it is totally transformed. Photos really don’t do it justice. It towers above everything else, standing stark, skeletal, with almost perfect radial symmetry.
It’s a dawn redwood!
§ Since I’ve started wearing my Apple Watch again I’ve noticed that simply knowing certain stats—like step count and walking distance—are being recorded is motivation enough for me to try to improve on them each day. Gamification works, especially on me.
§ The physical construction for that “steam boiler” project I mentioned last week is really coming along. I mean, just look at this monstrosity
§ After disappointing results the first time I made sourdough I tried a new recipe last weekend that is much more hands-off. The gist is:
- Saturday morning mix together 500g flour, 375g water, 10g salt, 75g starter
- Let it sit out on the counter all day, folding occasionally
- Saturday evening shape the dough and transfer it to the fridge
- Sunday morning preheat the oven, take the dough out of the fridge, and bake
Maybe it’s the new recipe or maybe the starter is finally mature or it could be that my expectations are lower than they were the first time around. Regardless, I’m far happier with the results here. I’ve already started making a second loaf.
§ I couldn’t wait and read Annihilation. I read it all in a few late-night marathon sessions, occasionally drifting in and out of sleep, which really accentuated Jeff VanderMeer’s disorienting, hallucinatory writing.
The central “where lies the strangling fruit…” poem(?) feels like something written by GPT-2. I’m not insinuating Jeff VanderMeer actually used generative AI to write it—Annihilation predated GPT-2 by five years—but I think there is something oddly prescient about it, given what the poem represents in the world of Area X.
Overall I think I liked the book although it wasn’t what I was expecting at all—I was hoping for a deeper exploration of the environment of Area X. I’m sure it would benefit from a re-read someday.
§ I also watched Alex Garland’s film adaptation of Annihilation. The visual effects were stylish, Natalie Portman was excellent, and it was fun to see Jennifer Jason Leigh outside of Fargo.
It was entirely different than the book. Like basically a completely different premise. I guess that isn’t inherently bad, just an odd choice.
After watching this, and thinking back to when I watched Civil War recently, I’m beginning to think I just don’t like Alex Garland’s writing, while still being a big fan of his directing. That made it all the more troubling to read that he is stepping away from directing to focus on screenwriting for the foreseeable future.
§ I was planning to read the sequel to Annihilation next but I think I’m going to check out Brothers Brönte instead after seeing Robin Sloan’s recommendation.
Now, keep in mind I still haven’t actually finished Lonesome Dove but I’ve noticed that this is a pattern that I frequently fall into: starting on a new book as I’m just about to finish reading something else. Try not to use this fact to psychoanalyze me too much.
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§ This week was warm and rainy here in Ohio. It is nice to have little hints of spring as we head into March even though I have no doubt we have more snow in store before the winter is through.
This week last year our quails started laying their first eggs of the season. This year, the quails started laying all the way back in January. Definitely odd but I won’t complain.
§ I spent most of the week building what has turned out to be my most complicated Arduino project to date. Basically, it is the electronic innards of what will ultimately become an interactive museum exhibit where people will be able to shovel fake “coal” into a “steam boiler” to simulate powering a steamship. It has a magnetic reed switch, lights, a servo motor, and a speaker, as well as relays that turn on and off a 12v fan and a smoke machine.
So Monday through Thursday was spent banging my head against the electronics and programming and then Friday I finally moved onto CNC-ing the cabinetry. There is something about seeing this monolithic, seven-foot-tall, mass physically take shape in front of me that I find much more invigorating than watching as a mess of motors and lights perform on cue.
§ I’m back using my old Apple Watch after switching to a Timex last October. I was beginning to miss some of the passive health features. How has my resting heart rate been? Has it been hours since I last stood up because I’ve been, say, zoned in on fixing some pesky Arduino bug? I turned off all of the notifications. If anything, that is what drove me away from the Apple Watch in the first place.
§ I’ve long wanted to build storage shelves for an odd, triangular recess in the wall next to our basement stairway. I finally designed it all out in CAD over the weekend. All seven shelves can be cut out of a single 4x8’ sheet of plywood. Now all that’s left now is to actually build it.
§ It has been quite a while since I last mentioned it but I’m still reading Lonesome Dove. I haven’t been particularly consistent, sometimes I’ll go a couple weeks without reading a single word while other times I’ll get through a hundred pages in a day. Regardless, I just started part three, some 600 pages in, and I still like it!
I’ve started to give some thought to what I’ll read next. I’m leaning towards the Southern Reach series—another series about an alien and adversarial environment, though one that is very different than Lonesome Dove’s chaparral desert.
I realize it’s, like, a double cliche to admit that I do judge books by their covers. I have to say, though, that the new tenth anniversary cover art by Pablo Declan was the thing that initially drew my attention to Southern Reach.
§ Ok, I rewatched the first two seasons of Yellowjackets. Contrary to what I said last week I don’t think the show actually fell off the rails at any point. In fact, so far, this third season might actually be my favorite yet.
I think my criticism about “lack of direction” in the writing was actually anxiety about whether the showrunners will be able to neatly resolve all of the mysteries they have introduced over the course of the show. I mean come on, the show is about strange things happening to a group of people as they are stranded out in the wilderness after a plane crash. It’s natural to compare it to Lost, for better and for worse.
§ None of my home appliances failed this week. Let’s all take a moment to be thankful about that, okay?
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§ The mornings are steadily getting brighter and the birds are back. The heavy winter silence is now punctuated by black-capped chickadee songs. I even heard my favorite pileated woodpecker once or twice.
§ On Tuesday, I took a day trip up to Toledo. The locals found it unacceptable that I had never been to Tony Packo’s, a restaurant famous for its frequent mentions in M*A*S*H, a TV show that finished airing -before I was born. It happened to be $2 hot dog Tuesday so of course I went. My favorite part was their big wall of autographed hot dog buns.
§ It has been a month since I started using a standing desk at work. The reason I got it was to test my theory was that staying standing would help me maintain inertia as I transition between tasks throughout the day. I was noticing that I would sit down at my desk to write an email or whatever but then inevitably stay there for a while afterwards, procrastinating getting up and leaving my office to start on the next task.
So here I am, a month later, maybe that theory has sort of panned out? More than anything else, I would attribute the bulk of any progress here to being more mindful of the pattern, not necessarily the desk itself.
§ As I’ve chronicled here over the past few years, raising quails for eggs has been a lot of trouble. However, if you consistently do something silly for long enough, there is always a chance you eventually end up looking prescient and that is exactly what has happened now that grocery store eggs are expensive and in short supply.
§ I’ve been digging through and digitizing old Great Lakes steel industry pamphlets for an upcoming project at work. My favorite so far is from the early-1960s: “flow map and location of iron ore pelletizing plants"—I truly love the graphic design. A close runner-up are these adorable line drawings detailing the mining process.
§ Matt Webb—one of the most consistently inspiring writers on speculative technology, art, and design—is celebrating his blog’s 25th anniversary:
…over time, I realized that keeping this open, interlinked notebook, accreted over the years, has its own value.
Indeed.
§ A few days after I posted the last update, my new sourdough starter finally sprang to life. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it’s because I started using whole wheat flour but also maybe an early period of inactivity is just part of the process. Who knows?
On Friday, I finally baked some bread with it. It’s probably at least a bit better than the basic, non-sourdough, bread I’ve been making but it was easily at least twice as hard. Worth it? Probably not. But at least now I have the starter, which was the most time consuming part. So what else can I make with it? On Saturday I made sourdough pancakes. Now those were good.
§ Hey remember when my water heater failed two weeks ago and I specifically mentioned that I hoped it wasn’t an omen for future appliance failures?
Well…
I woke up to a suspiciously cold house on Saturday, finding that my furnace had stopped working sometime around midnight. I spent the better part of the day sitting on the basement floor, with the panel off of the furnace, staring pensively at the circuitry, really convinced it might be a project I could fix myself. Finally by mid-afternoon I accepted the inevitable and called an HVAC company. The technician identified a dead inducer fan in less than a minute.
Ok, this has to be the last home appliance problem for a while. Please? Please?
§ I still think Yellowjackets fell off the rails after the first season. Still, I’m glad that it’s back and I’ve been enjoying the new season enough, even if it feels a bit directionless.
As an aside, Yellowjackets is one of the best example of a recent-ish movie and television trend that has become a pet peeve of mine: substituting emotionally affecting writing with long, slick, often slow-motion, dialogue-free scenes set to pop music. I like “Cherry-coloured Funk” too but it’s not a substitute for good filmmaking.
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§ Every winter I round up all of the plants that wouldn’t survive the outdoor temperatures and set them up under a few full-spectrum UV lights in an otherwise unused basement shower. The goal is just for them to survive through the winter but each year, it seems, a few of the plants actually do better down there—pretty much ignored by me—than they do outside all summer. This year our lemon tree started flowering and our small fig plant—that I had resigned myself to thinking was a lost cause when I first brought it in—is now growing a bunch of fruit.
§ Prompted by Merlin Mann’s recent blog post (side note: Merlin is blogging again!) I’ve been thinking about how I can borrow some ideas from desire paths and bring them into physical interface design. Like, if your bedside alarm clock dimpled and squished just a little bit every time you slapped your hand down on the snooze button, what would it look like after a decade? What about a video game controller made out of some kind of hard-but-malleable clay that slowly erodes over the course of years to perfectly conform to the shape of your hand?
§ To my own surprise, I’m still going strong using a little Field Notes notebook everyday. I flew through my first notebook and, taking a cue from Stephen Hackett, I digitized it before stashing it away. I’m well into a second book now. It’s nice to have a little scratchpad with me everywhere I go. Also, I’ve found it has helped me with my long-running and often ill-fated goal to draw more frequently.
§ For at least the past year, each time I ask my HomePod a question, Siri ends every response with an apology. This is not a joke. I can’t help but to think that it is some kind of midwestern impulse it learned from me.
§ CAM International Market has long been on my list of places you should visit in Cleveland but over the past few weeks I’ve been shopping there much more frequently. It is truly worth a visit if you happen to be anywhere nearby. I’ll admit that I cooked bulgogi four days in a row this week, ate upwards of 48 ounces of my new favorite brand of kimchi, and have been methodically exploring all of the different brassica rapas I can get my hands on.
§ My sourdough project continues. The starter mixture isn’t bubbling, rising, or really doing much of anything at all as far as I can tell. Nevertheless, I’ve been dutifully feeding it each morning like some featureless gooey pet.
§ For the past few years my wife and I made a tradition of having dinner at Amba on Valentines Day. This year, we saw that the same chef had just recently opened a new restaurant nearby so we decided to check it out. A surprising standout was the roasted broccolini with pickled kumquats, which I want to try to recreate someday.
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§ Caroline and I have been learning how to needle felt. It’s a nice wintery, indoor hobby that can be very meditative. That is, until you accidentally stab your finger with a bundle of tiny, barbed needles, which happens approximately every fifteen minutes. One day I hope to get good enough to make myself a pair of felted slippers.
§ Arriving home after work on Tuesday, I was greeted by a bursted hot water tank that was rapidly filling my basement with water. The tank was nearly 20 years old, so I can’t complain too much, but dang, it’s not like there is ever a good time for a major home appliance to fail.
In hindsight, 2024 was a good year for appliances, particularly compared to 2023 where we replaced our washing machine, fridge, stove, and dishwasher. Let’s all hope this water tank isn’t an omen for the year to come.
While waiting on a plumber to install a new tank I learned just how many giant pots of boiling water it takes to fill up my bath tub.
We got a new (larger!) water tank installed Wednesday afternoon so I can’t complain too much, I guess.
§ Here is how I would rank appliances by how long I would be comfortable being without them, from shortest to longest amount of time:
Fridge > Water heater > Stove > Washing machine > Dryer > Dishwasher
Really none of these appliances either existed or at least were particularly common 100 years ago so I suppose that says something about how well I would have done back then.
§ Over the weekend I tried my hand at baking a loaf of bread again. Past attempts turned out decent but a little flat with a dense crumb. This time I mustered up the patience to let it rise for the entire eighteen hours the recipe recommends. In the end, it didn’t seem to help with the rise much but interior texture was definitely improved with a lot of big, airy bubbles.
§ I realize I’m hopping on a trend here like five years late but also just I started making a sourdough starter.
§ Please excuse a rare, brief journey into meta-blogging territory.
With the extensive help of ChatGPT I created a calendar-type viewer for all of my past weeknotes. This is something that I’ve wanted to do for quite a while but was always more complicated that it seems at first glance. Particularly since I don’t have any metadata associated with each “weeknote” entry—they are just normal blog posts I publish here each Sunday.
The solution I—and by “I” I mean “ChatGPT”—landed on is to parse my sitemap and then use a bunch of date math and regex to extract links to each week’s corresponding note. I mention this mainly to illustrate just how brittle this whole approach probably is. That said, I can confirm it at least works right now so go and check it out.
You’ve gotta love seeing that 110-week streak laid out in a nice little grid.
§ If the first and second episodes of this season of Severance were a bit bogged down setting the stage, things really start to pick up with the third and fourth. I wouldn’t be surprised if the fourth episode—the ORTBO episode—ended up being the standout highlight of the season. It was refreshing to see the characters in a new environment just as the Lumon offices were starting to feel a little stale.
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§ I’ve been doing a bunch of CNC milling at work since getting the machine out from storage late last year. I still love using our Shopbot but it isn’t without its flaws: it is annoyingly loud and produces an ungodly amount of sawdust. I’ve found that using a 3/8” bit at a slower RPM helps cut down on the noise a bit. To help with the sawdust I ordered a new dust collector but I must be doing something wrong because, as it is, I’m still getting significantly more sawdust around the bed than actually in the dust collection bag.
§ Over the past few weeks I’ve been digging through historical photographs of Cleveland for an upcoming project. The Library of Congress is such a great resource. Just look at this incredibly high quality scan of a dry plate negative panorama of The Flats from 1901. Download the original 160MB(!) TIFF and Zoom way in—so cool.
§ Speaking of Cleveland, did you know one of the world’s largest salt mines is 1,700 feet below Lake Erie, and spans for miles? I didn’t and it’s been right here, practically right under my feet this whole time!
§ Whenever I listen to Cortex’s annual time tracking episode I get the urge to start tracking my own time. I’ve always dismissed the idea pretty quickly though. It sounds like a giant pain for something that will probably end up just bumming me out when it confirms that I often don’t use my time as effectively as I should. Regardless, I already have enough little ongoing daily projects.
§ Speaking of little daily projects… an update on the dinner tracking experiment I started at the beginning of the year. Throughout the month of January 90% of dinners were home-cooked, two were out at family members houses, and one was at a restaurant. Out of those meals, Mexican food was the clear favorite, making up almost a third of all meals.
I, frankly, don’t know how interesting this particular data is to me, let alone you, dear reader. Nevertheless, I’m going to continue collecting it. Maybe interesting trends will emerge over time.
§ I throughly enjoyed reading Cabel’s roundup of the 150+ snacks he tried last year. I found “Campfire S’mores” flavored ramen the most viscerally unappealing but there was one new-to-me snack on the list that I made a special trip to the store to find. I’ll leave determining what that is as an exercise to the reader.
§ My first Phillips Hue bulb finally died. It is from a starter kit I got in 2018 (2017?) and have been using daily since. A respectable run, really.
§ On Friday I found out that what would have been my first trip to the Bay Area in April has been canceled due to the NSF grant freeze which is a pretty big bummer. The one silver lining is that I should still have a trip to San Francisco in September, barring further political chaos.
§ In between episodes of Severance I’ve been re-watching Sopranos for what must be the third time. I realize it isn’t particularly controversial to say that Sopranos is a good show but I’m honestly just shocked by how well it mostly holds up. “College”, in particular, is just sort of an unbelievably good episode.
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§ Okay, I have to say using both “polar vortex” and “arctic blast” in a single headline is a little bit silly. If you add in “lake-effect” that’s what I’d call a midwest trifecta. There is no denying it has been a particularly intense winter here, though. Historically, Cleveland averages around three inches of snow throughout January. So far this month we’ve had twenty-five.
§ Moving into a new office a couple of weeks ago gave me the opportunity rethink how I want to use the space.
- I got an enormous chalk board. No, not a dry erase board. A chalk board so large that I started second guessing myself while waiting for it to arrive. The size means that I can stretch out and work though an idea without worrying about space and it’s wide enough that I can comfortably collaborate with someone else with enough room to breathe.
- I replaced my desk with a standing desk. Over time I’ve noticed that I would often go over to my desk to accomplish some small, quick task but almost as soon as I sat down I would get distracted and demotivated. My hope is that the standing desk will help me hold on to the momentum I loose in those instances.
§ If it were up to me, I would have released this week’s episode of Severance alongside last week’s episode. On their own, neither episode was particularly attention-grabbing but together they seem to set up the important themes of the season to come, first from the “innie’s” perspective and then, this week, from the perspective of the “outies.” With this table-setting out of the way, I hope the pace picks up in episode three.
§ Over the weekend I continued my bagel experiments by making egg and sea salt bagels. The egg bagels were disappointingly dry but the basic sea salt batch turned out great.
§ Yesterday I found myself excitedly visiting a new grocery store that recently opened down the street. This has to be an obscure side-effect of aging, like suddenly having an opinion on the best way to load a dishwasher. If nothing else, it is certainly a preview of the kinds of exciting new things my thirty’s will surely bring.
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§ I’ve never seen Lake Erie as frozen as it is now. Just about every day I’ve noticed people stepping out onto the ice, exploring, setting up lawn chairs and ice fishing for god knows what out of the frozen harbor.
If I’ve grown to appreciate winter as “the last benign unifying event” it is the retreat of nature that has started bothering me the most. On Monday I noticed a strange sounding car alarm off in the distance. It took me a beat before realizing it was actually a Tufted Titmouse, the first bird call I’ve heard in at least a month.
§ I was inspired to start carrying around a Field Notes notebook again after reading about the 20th anniversary of their original ‘Kraft’ line. I carried one in my back pocket for my entire time in college and for a while afterwards. I’m not sure what made me stop.
In the intervening years Obsidian has mostly taken its place but there is something I miss about being able to flip back through old notebooks. It is the best way to instantly travel back to my headspace from years back. Markdown files can’t do that.
§ I stumbled across Thomas James' A-Z Every Street project where he, over the course of a few months in 2021, embarked to walk and photograph every street in his hometown of Bath, England. It inspired me to dig up an alphabetized list of all of the streets in my town. Now, my particular Cleveland suburb isn’t quite as interesting as Bath but who knows, maybe it will turn out to be more interesting than I thought. That is kind of the point of this whole exercise, isn’t it?
§ On Friday I watched the first episode of the new season of Severance, of course. I can already tell Miss Huang is going to be a new favorite character. Something about her feels particularly Lynchian—what timing. The set design and props are as good as ever. I particularly love the bizarre Lumon projector.
§ My department at work has been without a direct supervisor since early September. This week was the first full week of our new vice president. A big adjustment but so far, so good.
§ On Friday I gave a talk about my job to a visiting class of high schoolers. It’s an activity I’m basically predisposed to dread. In the past I would have spent the proceeding month stressing about it.
In this case I had a couple of things in my favor. First, I didn’t know about it until Monday which put an upper cap on the length of time I could possibly spend overthinking the whole thing. More importantly, though, I’m feeling more confident about my job than I’ve felt in quite a while.
In the end, it was completely fine. Even something I would consider doing again.
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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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