I didn’t write a post last week, so I’m doing a double post this week. I had a 26 week streak, but I knew I’d miss one eventually.

Trying out the newish Table of Contents block in this post!

Charlie

Charlie turned one this past week. It is incredible to think about how much he has grown and learned in just one year. He is so sweet, curious, brave, fierce, playful, independent, and snuggly. We are so thankful he is here.

This year Amanda and I were the most tired we’ve ever been, but also so deeply rewarded. We’ve been reflecting a lot on the past year this week. We’ve head to learn and grow a lot this year, too.

Some recent skills Charlie has learned:

• How to crawl up the stairs
• How to flush the toilet
  • It is a race… will you finish before he flushes?!
• Signing
  • He knows the signs for milk, water, more, and eat.
  • We are using Baby Sign Language Made Easy
• Expressiveness and talkativeness in general
• Opening and closing every reachable door in the house, and routinely emptying the cabinets
• Twisting lids/caps on bottles and the applesauce pouches he likes
• Really getting the hang of flipping pages in books on his own and while we read to him
• Independent play
  • His stretches of independent play are getting longer and longer. Recently he has enjoyed finding cups or bowls and then finding things to put in them, shake around, and dump back out again.

We had a small birthday party in our backyard on Friday, took it easy on Saturday, then put together a swing set on Sunday, then we got ice cream at Weir’s and went to the top of Bear Mountain. It was the first time in a couple years that I’ve seen Perkins Memorial Tower open!

Charlie’s second year got off to a tough start. One of his little friends who came to his birthday party gave him Hand, Foot, and Mouth. The poor guy started showing symptoms late on Monday and then had to stay home from daycare all week. Thankfully it was a mild case. A lot of my week looked like this (holding a sick, sleeping baby while working):

Garden

We had our first BLTs with our garden tomatoes on Friday!

The Romas are going to start coming in steadily this week, so I anticipate a lot of skinning, freezing, and sauce making next weekend.

Tomatillos are starting to drop, too. I’d like to make some tomatillo salsa this week if I have time.

We finally have some jalapeños and Black HungarianArchived Link peppers growing on our plants. All of my neighbors said that it is a bad year for peppers for them, too.

The okra is loving this hot weather! It probably won’t be ready to pick for another week or two.

Ideas

1. It seems like it was a lot hotter this summer than the last couple that we’ve been in Peekskill. I’ve been doing a lot of sifting through data at work, so why not pull temperature data for this area from the NOAA and see how many days each year are above 90F compared to this year so far?
   1. I’ll probably download a CSV then stuff the CSV contents into sqlite with sqlite-utils then connect the sqlite db to Metabase, which is what I’ve been using at work recently.
   2. Or I might try out Datasette or DataStation.
2. It is so hot that I don’t want to use the oven and heat up the house. Can I make a peach & blackberry galette or tart in the Ooni pizza oven instead? How about a frittata? I think so, as long as I am mindful of the temperature.
3. Is there a block in FSE for Pingbacks and Trackbacks? I’d like to show them in specific places in my Digital Garden. I need to look into this.

Work

I went to a meetup with part of my team at work on Monday. It was the first time I’d seen all but one of them in person in the two and a half years of working at Automattic, and I really enjoyed hanging out with them. You get a different sense of a person when you hang out with them in person for an afternoon than you do from months of Zoom calls.

We worked, got some pizza, went to MoMA, and then got some Mediterranean food.

Some standouts from MoMA:

• Thomas Bayrle
• Lee Ufan
• Ellsworth Kelly
• Bridget Riley
• Frédéric Bruly Bouabré
• André Derain
• Richard Serra

I also got some ideas for art projects to try with Charlie when he is a bit older. It is fun to explore and emulate some of the classics!

The rest of the week was hectic, as Amanda and I both timeshifted a lot to take care of Charlie. Lots of late nights and early mornings. I did manage to finish what I needed to get done this week on projects.

Food & drink

I made a tex mex menu for Charlie’s party because one of his favorite things to eat are quesadillas. The adults had chicken fajitas and the kids had chicken quesadillas. Salad, chips and salsa, and esquites for sides. A pitcher of margaritas and a pitcher of lemonade for refreshments.

I made the corn, fajitas, and quesadillas on a Blackstone griddle. I love cooking on the griddle, but unless it is for a group of people it is hard to justify the time investment to clean it afterward.

Amanda and I had a date sans-Charlie last weekend at The Bird and Bottle. We enjoyed ourselves and plan to go back and have dinner on the patio again.

I found out that a local farm in Fishkill is now making cider, so I went and sampled some this weekend (and also picked up some fresh peaches!). The dry stuff is really nice, so I got a couple bottles to bring home. They also have a nice outdoor bar and eatery there, so I think we’ll go back again soon.

Big Mouth Coffee in Beacon is experimenting with canning some of their coffee. They work with Snapchill, a company that brews coffee hot, cools it rapidly, and then cans it right away to seal in the flavors. The results are fantastic so far. Some of the best cold black coffee I’ve had.

We tried a new pizza dough recipe last week (the one from Ooni) and liked the results. It is a same-day dough that was easy to work with and shape. I’m cold proofing some right now, so we’ll see how that turns out.

Reading

I only read a little bit the last two weeks: Some of Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig and some of Odalisque by Neal Stephenson.

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That’s all for now. Looking forward to a week ahead with no sickness and a regular work schedule. Hopefully reading some more in the evenings, too. And cooler temperatures later in the week!