§ 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?
