Chris Martin

2026 W23: Fascinating & monolithic

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 07:25:09 -0400

§ As is tradition this time of year, I found a baby deer in my yard on Monday. This one was more skiddish than most. We can only hope less ravenous towards the tomato plants too.

§ At work I spent some time trying to emulate Tristan Duke’s fascinating and monolithic Aperture Lucida project, just at a much smaller scale. After making two different rudimentary jigs I dipped my toe into the overwhelming prospect of re-learning Rhino3D/Grasshopper so that I can eventually automate the process with a laser cutter. I had forgotten how unapproachable node-based visual programming can be, especially at first. Once I get into the flow of things, though, I find it to be a uniquely fun playground environment.

§ I finished reading the first installment of Septology. It’s one of the best examples of accessible experimental writing I’ve seen. It is just quirky enough that I considered giving it up right before it hooked me. I’m excited to continue in on the rest of the series.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W22: Hard pressed

Sun, 31 May 2026 08:33:54 -0400

§ The baby is almost seven weeks old now which is a fact I find hard to comprehend. In one sense it feels like he was born only yesterday, in another it feels like he has been a part of our lives for as long as I can remember.

§ In the garden I can see a number of tiny blackberry, raspberry, and strawberry fruits starting to grow. A couple of budding tomatoes as well. On Friday I bought and planted a few cayenne pepper seedlings which just might be the final missing element in the vegetable garden this season. The only mainstay I haven’t planted yet is squash but I’d be hard pressed to find any space for it at this point.

§ At work I continued my experiments from last week and started messing with some super black paint and LED lights to make a piece of hanging artwork inspired by James Turrell.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W21: Anamorphic

Sun, 24 May 2026 07:35:51 -0400

§ Almost exactly 14 days after sowing and at the first sign of warm sunny weather, the beans I planted all suddenly started sprouting.

Also, I found a lone breba crop fig on our tree. It’s obviously not much but maybe a sign of more to come in future years?

§ I went to another native plant sale yesterday and picked up a new black tupelo tree to replace one that I lost as an innocent casualty during last year’s oak tree saga.

§ I’m now over halfway through the first two-book installment of Jon Fosse’s Septology series. I was on the fence when I first started the book but now I can wholeheartedly recommend it. I still find the prose fascinating and weird but most importantly, unlike many “stream of consciousness” novels, Septology actually has a coherent and compelling plot line that continues though the book—at least so far.

§ This was my first week back at work since the baby was born. Getting back into the swing of things was a bit of an adjustment but far less than I feared. I started experimenting with different forms of anamorphic art for a possible future project.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W20: Free pockets

Sun, 17 May 2026 09:14:08 -0400

§ In the garden our raspberry bush is flowering and it looks like the blackberry will follow suit any day now.

I picked up some tomato, tomatillo, poblano, basil, and rosemary plants from the nursery and planted them in the few remaining free pockets of full-sun garden space I have left. I’m truly running out of suitable space at this point.

§ On Mother’s Day Caroline and I took my mom and the newborn to the Cleveland Botanical Gardens. The plants weren’t all in full bloom like they were when I was there last July. Still, it was nice to get out of the house for some springtime sun.

§ I got my new glasses on Friday. What a joy it is to once again be able to see things that are further than twelve feet away. Unfortunately they also arrived with a giant scratch across the left lens.

§ Later on Friday Caroline and I took the baby to Rockefeller Greenhouse to see their iris garden in full bloom—an event we’ve somehow managed to just miss every year until now.

§ Saturday was rainy but we managed to make it down to Hale Farm to see their annual plant sale. I got two more tomato plants plus a fennel, which we’ve never grown before. I’m excited to see how it goes.

§ I’ll be back at work on Monday after more than a month away. We will see how that feels.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W19: Hypnotic rhythm

Sun, 10 May 2026 08:43:00 -0400

§ It was a week of almost nonstop rain—the downside of the spring season that I always seem to forget about.

On Monday I planted ten small patches of different pole and bush beans. It’s a week later than I planted them last year but I hope the result will be just as successful.

§ As I mentioned last week, I got a new fiber internet connection installed Wednesday morning. The installation itself went smoothly enough but re-setting up my hodgepodge of smart home devices has been a nightmare that I’m still not entirely finished with. Sonos is the worst offender by a mile.

§ Later that day I finally got tested for a new eyeglasses prescription, something I’ve been putting off for almost a year now. As part of the process they also, somehow, took a picture of the inside of my eye which is, understandably, pretty freaky looking.

§ I started reading Jon Fosse’s Septology series. So far it has been fascinating. The structure, with its lack of paragraph breaks, makes the writing feel dense and impenetrable at first but as you get into the flow of reading it breaks way into a sort of hypnotic rhythm on the page.

As interesting as it is, I have a hard time believing I’ll be able to keep up with another 800+ pages with almost no line breaks but I’m not ready to give up yet.

§ My birthday is next week. It’s a big one: my first birthday of my thirties and my first as a father. Absolutely wild to think about, honestly. But first! today is Mother’s Day so I better get going.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W18: Sleepy, drizzly

Sun, 03 May 2026 07:28:16 -0400

§ It is Sunday already? This week flew by in a sleepy, drizzly haze.

My paternity leave is more than halfway over which makes me feel a bit panicky when I think too hard about it. I haven’t checked my email since the baby was born and I’m dreading its inevitability.

§ Out in the garden I found the first signs of new growth on our brown turkey fig plant. So far it looks like the garden is growing a week or two ahead of where it was this time last spring.

§ I have installation scheduled next week for a shiny new fiber internet connection. It’s something I’m particularly excited about with all of the home server stuff I’ve been tinkering with recently.

§ Until next time—

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W17: Hubris

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 07:14:08 -0400

§ I’m risking hubris here but I have to say, when you average it out, the first nearly two weeks of parenthood have gone more smoothly than I feared. The highs are higher than I would have guessed and the lows are just about as expected.

Each day alternates between utter exhaustion and a kind of half sleep-deprived new-parent euphoria. I can understand why, years later, parents looking back at this time remember the euphoria and not the exhaustion.

I’ve taken off work for the next few weeks. It is quite nice to have my days dedicated to a single focus. I imagine juggling everything after I go back to work will be a significant challenge.

§ With 2500+ unread items in my feed reader, I’m officially declaring RSS bankruptcy. Having a newborn was also the thing that finally broke my ~900 day streak of completing the daily Puzzmo crossword. It was Inevitable and very much worth it, obviously.

§ On Saturday Caroline, Kieran, and I stopped by our local ramp festival. Encouraged by the ramps I planted last year coming back this spring I bought another pound at the festival, ate half and planted the other half.

§ In other news, the alliums and strawberries are blooming and I’ve started thinking through the vegetable garden for this season. We won’t be starting anything from seed this year but will take the trek over to a nearby nursery for seedlings once the weather warms a bit more.

I’m excited to grow tomatoes and peppers again after taking a break from them last year in an attempt to ward off pests and give the soil a chance to recuperate. It will be interesting to see if the break helped at all.

Last year we grew a variety of beans for the first time and it was a big hit. I’m hoping we can recreate that again this year too.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W16: Kieran

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 06:42:14 -0400

§ Hello. I’ve been keeping a secret from you for the past, well, nine months. I hope you can forgive me.

Early Tuesday morning my wife gave birth to a beautiful baby boy—Kieran. Mom is healthy, the baby is healthy, and the three of us have been nesting at home since Thursday afternoon, slowly getting acquainted with our new life together.

§ Some miscellaneous notes:

When you are forced to sleep in two hour bursts, a hospital bed is just about the worst place to do it. The nights got much easier when we came home.
I almost caved a mentioned the pregnancy here months ago just so that I could have a venue to complain about how unnecessarily complicated stroller/car seat “travel systems” are. In the end we chose an ecosystem more or less at random.
Speaking of the pregnancy, the first six months felt like six years while the last three months felt like three days. Time is silly sometimes, isn’t it?
Leading up to the birth I was excited to try the various newborn tracker apps. However, it turns out that at 3am that last thing I want to be doing is poking around at my phone. Pen and paper for me.
I finally found a use for my Kobo: convenient one-handed reading is suddenly super important to me
I’m lead to believe he has way more neck strength than he ought to for being less than a week old. I’m not sure what to make of that.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W15: Cracked rim

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 05:36:26 -0400

§ The museum I work at serves double-duty as one of eleven NASA visitor centers so this week’s Artemis II mission brought a lot of infectious, excited energy to the building. I’ll admit I wasn’t especially interested in the Artemis project previously but watching four humans slingshot themselves around the moon was decidedly incredible.

In between Artemis activities I started experimenting with a few DWM3001 ultra-wideband development boards. I’ve had them for maybe a year but have been too intimidated to start until now. I still don’t have a concrete project in mind but it’s nice to get my hands moving and my brain spinning.

§ Remember that tire I finally replaced last week? Well it turns out it was probably fine all along and the issue was a cracked rim which is, of course, a much more expensive issue to rectify so my car was at the mechanic for most of the week. The crack was welded shut which should solve the problem for the time being. We’ll see.

§ That’s all I have for this week. It is not much but I’ll make up for it next week, I promise.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W14: Leafing out

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:26:40 -0400

§ Hi, Happy Easter.

§ Lots of warm, rainy weather this week. In between showers I poked around the garden. Trout lilies went from nonexistent early in the week to numerous and flowering by the week’s end. The raspberry bush is leafing out, and the asparagus has finally arrived.

§ Yesterday was the hottest April 4th since 1882, breaking a 144 year record. It was a treat. Caroline and I spent all day outside raking leaves, pulling weeds, and pruning bushes. I mowed the lawn for the first time this year.

§ Well over a month later, I finally replaced the tire that had a “slow”—although increasingly fast—leak. I procrastinated longer than I should have but at least I didn’t wait until it popped like last year. The tipping point was when I noticed a frighteningly large bubble in the sidewall.

§ This week marked the three year anniversary of when I started building my little backyard greenhouse / quail coop. If you were to tell me three years ago that the structure would survive increasingly frequent severe storms including a tornado I would be shocked. It was certainly not part of the design spec at the time.

§ I need to thank Alice Bartlett for introducing me to the wonderful world of security envelope patterns.

§ I finished reading Spring. It just might be the best entry point into Knausgaard’s autofiction although I still think The Morning Star is the best introduction to his writing in general.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W13: Low-stakes, high-drama

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 05:27:56 -0400

§ This week has been a bit of a blur thanks in no small part to temperatures ping-ponging more than 30 degrees day-to-day taking my sinuses on a wild ride. Last week when I mentioned how much I love spring I had forgotten all about this part.

§ After work on Monday Caroline and I finally—finally—braced the lovecraftian horror of our local Verizon store to upgrade her old iPhone 11 with a 17. I’m excited to finally get rid of all of our old lightning cables.

§ At work I finally finished a side project I’ve been chipping away at for the past couple of months: a large custom navigational sign that lists all of our daily events.

The main structure is a 6-foot-tall magnetic steel sheet and each event has its own custom magnetic tile loosely styled after various block-coding elements.

I wanted something that could communicate relationship and hierarchy while staying intuitive to read—a location contains various events and each event can have any number of times associated with it.

Each tile is magnetic so they can easily be rearranged each day and since they are made out of laser-engraved two-color acrylic it is easy to produce new pieces over time as events evolve.

§ I have to say that the new James Blake album I was harshly critical of last week has started to grow on me. My apologies to James. This tendency to rush to judgement is just one reason among many that I am not a professional music reviewer.

§ I’m obliged to let you know a new Longmont Potion Castle album has been released. This one is even better than usual.

§ I’ve been watching The Traitors (UK) which is, without a doubt, some fun low-stakes, high-drama television. However, I going to loose my mind if I hear one more person say “I’m voting for yourself” instead of “I’m voting for you.” I might need to borrow the program Tom wrote to track contestant’s egregious use of percentages so that I can make a supercut of all of the many “yourselfs.”

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W12: A meteor exploded

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 05:25:08 -0400

§ Hello. Happy spring, officially.

The daffodils are flowering and our honeysuckle vine is suddenly dotted with tiny green leaves. Most importantly, I found almost a dozen tiny ramp shoots sprouting up through the soil—an exciting culmination to an almost years-long wait.

My favorite stretch of the year occurs between now and the summer solstice. It’s a time full of optimism, new growth, and ever-lengthening days.

§ With that said, it snowed on Monday.

§ On St. Patrick’s Day, Tuesday, I took the backroads to work and drove along the cuyahoga river down past Irishtown Bend—the stretch of riverside land that was home to a major portion of Cleveland’s Irish population throughout the second half of the 1800s. It was a neighborhood built organically by waves in immigrants seeking refuge here in the midst of the great famine until it was unceremoniously razed in the early 1900s.

What remains today is a broad empty expanse of hillside covered in a uniform layer of smooth red-brown dirt littered with yellow bulldozers, cranes, and dump trucks all preparing the site for what will eventually become a park.

§ Later that morning a meteor exploded directly above Cleveland. Draw from that what you will.

§ Friday and Saturday were our robotics team’s first round of competitions. On Thursday afternoon the robot effectively couldn’t move but by the end of the competition the students got everything working well enough to rank ~20th out of the ~40 teams in the region.

§ Back in 2024 I described James Blake’s new-at-the-time album Playing Robots Into Heaven as an exhilarating collection of song “sketches”. In the intervening years the album has continued to hold up remarkably well. I still listen to it every few months and each time come away feeling newly inspired by the creative risk-taking Blake displayed on basically every track of the album.

Well, I was excited to see that he has a new album out this week: Trying Times. Unfortunately, this new album doesn’t quite capture the same creative spark that made Playing Robots so intoxicating. Instead, Blake is back to his formula of predictable melancholia. There is really only one song that feels truly fresh.

Despite the “sketchbook” quality I identified in Playing Robots, the album still held together well as a contiguous identifiable whole. Trying Times, in contrast, feels more like a loose collection of samey, uninspired tracks. It has a really great album cover though.

§ The first season of Small Prophets concluded. It was beautiful, sad, hilarious, and bizarre. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W11: Half-hibernation

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 05:40:29 -0400

§ The start of daylight savings time last Sunday means that the sunlight now stretches past 7:00pm. Bliss.

§ I finally finished reading Autumn and started, appropriately enough Spring. My reading pace is picking back up as the weather improves. I always seem to think that I’ll spend more time inside reading during the winter but that never ends up being the case. I think my body goes into a bit of a half-hibernation when the days are short and the weather is cold.

§ On Monday I spent the day visiting NASA Glenn with my team from work. It was a really cool privilege to get a behind-the-scenes look at some of the wild research they conduct there.

§ Friday afternoon brought dangerously high winds to the Cleveland area. At the end of my block I saw my neighbor’s mailbox on fire due a downed power line. Thankfully, my little greenhouse survived which is always a concern in these types of situations.

§ On Saturday Caroline and I spent all day working with our FIRST Robotics students. Their first competition of the season is next week and there is still more work left to do than we would all prefer. The robot isn’t done yet but it is coming together, piece by piece. The amount our students were able to accomplish in only nine weeks is commendable.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W10: Sticky smelly chore

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 05:31:20 -0400

§ I’m officially on ramp watch—assuming the ramps I planted last year survived the winter I should see them sprout as early as this month.

§ Aside from the garlic, which is still going strong, I found a mystery plant sprouting up in my vegetable patch. I think it might be ornamental allium?

§ I saw a rabbit lounging in the front garden and the chipmunks are out in full force. Can you tell I’m excited for spring?

§ At work I picked back up the LED project I started a few weeks ago. I hung them all up in a prototype lab at work. Now I need to figure out how I can programmatically address each of the individual LEDs so I don’t have to rely on the built-in animations.

We were also gifted a used resin 3D printer which is a little like being gifted a sticky smelly chore, not that I want to sound ungrateful. I got it working and made a little test print—so far, so good.

§ My winter side project of running a home media server has continued, mostly unabated by intermittent Linux frustrations.

It turns out moving everything to Proxmox was the right call. I’m now running ~15 docker containers across three virtual machines. Even after a few hard reboots (see my Linux frustrations above) they all reliably start on their own without any manual intervention on my part.

The big remaining puzzle piece is backups which I’m currently not doing at all.

§ On Saturday Caroline and I visited a gallery opening with my mom. It explores Cleveland’s various neighborhoods through the work of a handful of local photographers. It was good!

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W9: An inopportune moment

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 06:44:45 -0400

§ Rabbit rabbit. Happy March.

§ The snow came back on Monday and temperatures dropped again but the early signs of spring I saw last week made it all feel more manageable. Indeed, by Friday all of the new snow was gone and temperatures were back in the 50s.

§ My car has had a slow leak in one of its tires for the past several weeks. A similar situation last April caused a tire to suddenly pop at an inopportune moment so I know I’m going to have to replace this one soon. For now, though, I guess I’m going to continue refilling it every few days.

§ At work I have been toying around with a project that requires looking up post codes globally. I did not appreciate how complicated post codes are—they might be worse than timezones.

§ The FIRST Robotics team I’ve been working with hit a big milestone on Saturday: a functional, moving robot. Their first competition is in two weeks and there is still a lot to do in the meantime but it’s satisfying to see the culmination of all of the work they’ve done so far.

§ I started watching Small Prophets after seeing Matthew Sheret recommend it. It is ongoing with only three episodes out at the moment but I’ve enjoyed them all immensely. Funny and bizarre. Excellent.

§ Somehow Yorgos Lanthimos came out with two movies since I last checked. I watched the most recent one, Bugonia, Tuesday evening. Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons were both excellent but the storytelling fell a little flat for me: somewhere between a really good M. Night Shyamalan movie and a mid-tier Yorgos Lanthimos movie.

§ One more movie while we’re at it. 28 Years Later is by miles the best entry in the 28 Days later film series. I wasn’t a huge fan of any of the earlier movies but this one is different with beautiful, weird cinematography and an interesting story that isn’t entirely zombie-centric.

§ We’re supposed to hit temperatures in the upper 60s next week. Maybe it’s time to finally move the quails back outside.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W8: Particularly portentous

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 06:28:05 -0400

§ Happy year of the fire horse. I can’t help but think it feels like a particularly portentous designation.

§ As the snow cover continues to recede the starlings and the sparrows and the robins all descend to comb the muddy lawn and fill their stomachs.

We have our first signs of life in the garden: eight of the garlic cloves I planted last October have started sprouting. Is it too early for them to sprout? I’m not sure but it sure is nice to see something growing.

§ After pining after it for a while I finally bought Chris Glass’s favorite tiny photo printer. It doesn’t have perfect color accuracy or anything but that isn’t the point. It has been fun to quickly print out photos to give away to friends or stick on the fridge. I can’t help but think that they have a better chance of surviving longer than any digital file.

§ Current is the first new interesting RSS reader I’ve seen in a while. I’ve been on the lookout for a new app ever since Reeder “classic” was sunset in favor of a reimagined app that doesn’t work for me.

The core principle driving Current’s philosophy is that each individual RSS feed has an inherent “velocity.” Personal blog posts should stick around for a while but updates from high-frequency news feeds should be more ephemeral.

The app is still immature—it is slow and is missing a few features I would like. Nevertheless, I’m excited to watch its development and I’m going to try to stick with it for the time being.

I have to say, the developer is super responsive. I sent him an email about a couple of bugs Thursday morning and he responded in less than an hour and released an update addressing them by the end of the day.

A small warning: Current automatically monkeys around with your RSS feed categories (thanks Phil) so maybe experiment with a new OPML import instead of logging in with a sync service if that bothers you.

§ Ok, that’s all for now. See you next week.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W7: A great relief

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 06:22:57 -0400

§ I had a slow start to the week as I gradually worked to get over my cold. During my downtime I caught up on the last couple of seasons of Stranger Things. Those Duffer brothers sure do know how to write a compelling hour of television.

§ I also started watching How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, a new show by Lisa McGee, the writer behind Derry Girls. Four episodes in, this new series is interesting though fall less comedic than I expected, coming from Derry Girls. It is tonally much closer to Bad Sisters.

§ We finally saw temperatures in the 30s and low 40s. A great relief in the middle of what is surely one of the harshest winters in recent memory. In a dream Monday night that I walked outside and saw daffodils spouting up bright green through the melting snow. When I woke up I remembered that we’re not quite there yet but spring will arrive soon enough I’m sure.

§ By Wednesday I finally started feeling better. Unfortunately, this is exactly the point my wife began feeling sick. Such is life.

§ At work we started a large-scale revamp of an 18 year old exhibit gallery. I’ve advocated for updates to this particular gallery since I started working at my museum almost three years ago so it is particularly exciting to see it all finally start coming along.

As part of this project I made what I think turned out to be some particularly fun signage using laser cut translucent acrylic layered on top of CNC-milled PVC board.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W6: Thundersnow

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 06:21:04 -0400

§ Little by little each day the sunset creeps back towards 6:00pm. On Monday temperatures rose into the 20s after being in the low single digits for the past few weeks. The roads finally thawed.

§ Winter is the one opportunity I have to see all of the paths the various neighborhood animals take through my yard as they leave their imprints in the snow. Stray cats mostly meander around shoveled paths while deer trudge from point A to B in long straight lines, indifferent to the deep snow.

If I look out of my kitchen window into my backyard I can see long well-worn tracks that intersect diagonally every so often and lead all the way through to the property of the neighbor that lives directly behind me. Next door, however, the snow is almost untouched save for a few delicate bird prints.

§ My home server tinkering continues to take up more of my free time than I care to admit. This week I started messing around with Proxmox which has the biggest time-sink potential yet. An attractive nuisance if there ever was one.

§ It feels like my attention span has been increasingly frayed as winter trudges on so I’ve started reading Autumn, Knausgaard’s collection of bite-sized essays while I build up the endurance to start in on another longer book.

§ On Thursday the inevitable happened: I finally caught the seasonal cold that has been ping-ponging through all of my coworkers since early January. It has been more than half a year since the last time I got sick which is a good run, especially for me.

§ On Friday evening, in the middle of a snowstorm I suddenly saw a bright blue flash of lightning crack through the sky. For a few minutes I racked my brain trying to figure out if what I had just seen was some weird illness-induced hallucination. No, it turns out it is a real phenomenon called thundersnow—a great bad band name, by the way.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W5: Stressful & strangely magnetic

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 06:20:29 -0400

§ Rabbit rabbit. Happy February.

It has been seven months since the last time the first day of a month fell on a Sunday. Now it will happen two months in a row. Calendars, huh?

§ Winter storm Fern hit between Sunday and Monday, dropping eleven inches of snow on my town in the span of 24 hours. It was definitely disruptive but could have been worse.

The most annoying part is that sustained cold weather all week ensured that any snow that wasn’t immediately dealt with turned into a thick permanent layer of ice. This includes basically all of the roads in my neighborhood.

§ Lux launched a public preview of their updated Halide camera app which includes a couple of advanced color grading presets they’re calling “looks.” It is basically what Apple’s photographic styles should have been.

In this gross winter weather I’ve been finding fewer opportunities where I want to bring out my big mirrorless camera so it has been fun to play around with phone photography again in the meantime.

§ Speaking of photography, Jasper celebrated a 365 day streak of daily photo blogging this week, joining ranks with Florian, Chris, and others. There are times that I find it hard to flesh out these weekly posts so I’m all the more impressed that there are folks publishing great photos and thoughtful posts daily.

§ I finally got around to watching Boiling Point, the 2021 film directed by Philip Barantini who you probably know from Adolescence. The entire 92 minute film is shot in entirely one take, creating an atmosphere that is intense, stressful, and strangely magnetic. It’s an interesting side by side comparison with The Bear.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W4: Below zero

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 06:26:04 -0400

§ Last Sunday I moved my quails inside in anticipation of an impending cold spell. I made them a cozy outdoor coop that is protected from the wind and warmed with heat lamps but it doesn’t quite cut it once temperatures drop below zero. I’m glad I did because this week was cold with wind chills often dipping double digits below zero.

§ Monday was MLK Day. One of the ways the holiday is celebrated around Cleveland (and other cities across the country I imagine?) is that all of the local museums offer free admission to the public all day. Consequently, that means it is generally the busiest day of the year at my museum. This year broke records, with the most people I’ve seen at our museum in the three years I’ve been working there—as long as you don’t count the total solar eclipse back in 2024.

§ Setting aside Monday’s mania, this week consisted of lots of digital work with very little physical output. It all feels so engaging in the moment but is ultimately fleeting. As the week was wrapping up I was beginning to feel like I accomplished very little.

Finally, to try to counteract this, on Thursday I started a small side project that involves grid mapping a large set of individually addressable LEDS. I don’t know where exactly this project is going to go but it helped settle some of my earlier antsyness.

§ Yet again, Saturday was filled with robot prototyping. We nailed down a revised prototype of the intake mechanism we started last week. This one is both mechanically simpler and more effective.

§ My workplace and most local schools have already signaled their intention to close next Monday in anticipation of another extremely nasty storm. I apologize for the larger than average weather talk in recent weeknotes. This winter has undoubtedly been the worst one I’ve seen here in quite a while.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W3: Something in the air

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 06:24:53 -0400

§ Hello there

§ On Tuesday I gave a presentation about exhibit design to a nearby school group. This required creating a slideshow deck which is a task I find surprisingly rewarding—probably because I only have to do it once a year at most.

Here are some personal guidelines I try to follow:

Choose a font size that feels uncomfortably large and then double it
This will necessitate using fewer words per slide. That is a good thing.
Make bespoke hand-drawn diagrams whenever possible

§ On Thursday, the Cleveland area more or less shut down after a nasty overnight snow storm descend on the city. It was the most snow I’ve seen since 2022. I’m thankful that I have a job that lets me easily work from home on occasion.

§ I spent Saturday morning with the FIRST Robotics team I’ve been mentoring. We made good progress in just a few hours building a working prototype of a rubber ball intake mechanism.

§ My recent self-hosting experiments have been successful enough that I took another step and installed Navidrome, a server for hosting my downloaded music. Coincidentally, James Reeves has been working on an MP3 player app of his own recently. It must be something in the air.

For the time being I’ve successfully resisted getting a NAS to store all of these files but it is basically inevitable if this hobby continues.

§ Don’t worry, I promise this will not become a technology blog.

§ Speaking of music, I’ve been listening to two particularly interesting indie R&B albums from late last year: “The Passionate Ones” by Nourished by Time and “Baby” by Dijon. Even if you, like me, don’t consider yourself a particularly avid R&B fan I would encourage you to give these two records a shot—there is something special going on in the Baltimore music scene right now.

§ I’ve also been really enjoying two specific acoustic Latin albums this week: “Cancionera” by Natalia Lafourcade and “Los Ángeles” by Rosalía. This is another entirely new-to-me genre. Maybe there is something about the quiet and contemplative atmosphere of deep-winter that makes me more receptive to new music.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W2: Unexplainable bout

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 06:20:59 -0400

§ Little by little, Christmas decorations have been packed away and I’ve slowly started getting back into the swing of things in the new year. The days are still short but the sun sets after 5:00pm now which is an important milestone.

§ Last Sunday I accidentally made double the amount of bigos I indented—more than six quarts full—so I’ve been eating it for both lunch and dinner for most of this week. I think it’s going to be a while until I can look at cabbage again.

§ On Wednesday our quails started laying eggs again. Basically right on schedule—only a week later than the last two years.

§ On Friday temperatures rose into the low-60s and I went for a short hike around a nearby nature reserve park before work.

I finally looked it up: walking from my home to the park is the same distance—1.25 miles—as my old apartment in Chicago was to my favorite neighborhood restaurant. Back in Chicago I made that walk frequently without a second thought. Here in Cleveland, though, I’ve always driven to the park. I’ll try to remedy this come springtime.

§ Following a sudden unexplainable bout of motivation I picked back up on a stalled prototype project from a couple of years ago and made some nice progress this week.

It’s a prototype exhibit that makes use of a high-quality color sensor for a color matching game/challenge.

I simplified everything dramatically by getting rid of a flaky web serial connection to a separate Arduino and moving all of the electronics and UI code to a single RaspberryPi. I also built a nice CNC-milled enclosure for everything.

§ Caroline and I started volunteering as mentors for her school’s FIRST Robotics team a couple of months ago. Saturday morning was the official kickoff of this year’s challenge which begins this season of the competition in earnest. I see a lot more busy Saturdays in my future.

§ I caught the tail end of an episode of This Country when I was in Ireland last summer and have been trying to find more of it since. Well I finally watched the whole first season and I can confidently say that it is the hardest I’ve laughed in recent memory. Definitely recommended if you are a fan of the British mockumentary format.

§ Also, the second season of The Pitt started. The first season was a surprise hit even though I’ve never been a fan of medical procedurals. We will see if this second season can replicate the magic.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

2026 W1: Rough around the edges

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 06:42:57 -0400

§ Hello there. Welcome to 2026.

§ I worked on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day for the first time in a while, trying to save up some PTO to use later this year. As a result, the holiday felt a little less pronounced.

Nevertheless, Caroline and I continued the now four year tradition of cooking a big bibimbap dinner for her family to celebrate the new year. Meanwhile, Cleveland was hit with another big snow storm, this one even larger than the one on Thanksgiving. An overnight 40° drop in temperature also brought an abrupt end to the strangely warm end-of-year weather I mentioned last week.

§ On New Year’s Day I posted my third annual mosaic of weekly photos from the past year. As an extra bonus, I also put together a giant annotated image of all of my weekly photos from these past three years combined. It is interesting—if a bit existentially disconcerting—to see the past 156 weeks of my life laid out all together like this.

§ The meal tracking project I started at the beginning of 2025 has finally come to an end. With all 365 dinners accounted for, here are some final stats:

I cooked 78% of meals at home last year. Out of the remaining meals, 7% were eating at friends or family member’s houses and 15% were from restaurants.
Throughout the year I ate somewhere around 150 unique dishes. “American” food was the most prevalent cuisine at 38% followed by “Mexican” food at 29%. Apparently I cooked tikka masala 21 times, which feels like a lot.
My favorite dish that I cooked for the first time last year was either harissa roast pumpkin or Indian cabbage curry.

As I mentioned recently, I’m not going to be continuing this project into 2026—I found quickly diminishing utility from the project as the year progressed. Still, I’m glad I stuck with it for the entire year.

§ The rapidly declining quality of streaming services finally prompted me to take the take the plunge and try out Jellyfin. Like many self-hosted open source projects, it’s a bit rough around the edges and requires more time messing with Linux filesystem permissions than I would prefer. Nevertheless, getting it configured and organizing all of my media has been a fun side project this week. Now I just need to exert the necessary self-control to stop fiddling with and tweaking everything. I’m not doing a good job at this so far.

Previously: 2025, 2024, 2023

52 photos of 2025

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 15:05:23 -0400

Previously: 52 photos of 2024 and 52 photos of 2023

2025 W52: An odd sight

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 06:20:43 -0400

§ And here we are, the last weeknote of 2025. A good year, all things considered. I’m looking forward to 2026 which is shaping up to be even better.

§ We had a warm, if slightly rainy, Christmas this year which was a pleasant surprise given how snowy Thanksgiving was less than a month ago.

For a Christmas morning treat Caroline and I made a variety of morning buns which required making a laminated croissant dough for the first time. We went with ham & cheese, apricot, fig, raspberry, and chocolate. I couldn’t possibly choose a favorite so I won’t try.

Caroline gifted me a new backpack which I’m incredibly excited to use. My dad made us a handmade broomcorn broom he wove from scratch which is beautiful and one of the most unique gifts I’ve ever received.

§ I also caved and got Kirby Air Riders for my Switch. The gameplay is all a bit too chaotic for my liking but I really appreciate how much unnecessary effort the developers put into aesthetic vehicle customizations. It is especially odd considering how deeply buried in the menus the feature is.

§ A few days of warm weather brought out my favorite pileated woodpecker and a gaggle of dark-eyed juncos. An odd sight in late December. If 2025 and 2024 are any indication, our quails should start laying eggs again sometime next week. We’ll see.

§ The Pluribus finale didn’t end on a cheap cliffhanger like I feared it would, so that’s a plus. Overall, I think the season was slow—probably too slow—but promising.

After the episode aired, Apple released a 23 minute long behind the scenes doc that offers good perspective on the show’s production process. One of the executive producers interviewed literally called the Carol Sturka character “an insufferable hero.” I was already beginning to warm on the series and the level of self-awareness exhibited in the doc gives me even more faith in the direction the show will take in future seasons.

§ My annual “themes” for the past two years been abject failures so this year I’m taking a note from Carl Barenbrug and cataloging my “ins” and “outs” for 2026.

In:

Family
Craft
Balance
Intentionally

Out:

Restlessness
Undeliberate screen time
Feeling guilty about relaxation
Buying things I can make myself

§ Until next year—

Previously: 2024, 2023, 2022