This week flew by.

Last Sunday after my weekly post, getting pizza at Hudson & Packard didn’t happen. After an hour drive with a toddler who didn’t want to be in his carseat, they were sold out. We’ll try again in the future. We did have dinner somewhere else in Poughkeepsie, then got ice cream in Wappingers Falls, where Charlie had a lot of fun riding his bike around the parking lot (it basically lives in the car these days.)

Amanda was off of work on Monday. I had to work, so we still sent Charlie to daycare and she was able to do some projects with the Cricut machine she just got. Tuesday, and Wednesday were pretty work-heavy for both of us, so I don’t have much of note to report. We opted for easy dinners and after dinner walks with Charlie.

Getting Charlie to bed seemed more difficult than usual this week. Not sure what is going on there.

Thursday was our 10th anniversary! We celebrated by making a nice dinner at home together (double cut ribeye, sauteed greens, side salad), then having a fire in the chiminea on the deck after we got Charlie to bed, sharing a bottle of wine, making s’mores, and writing down some of the big things from our first ten years of marriage. We’ve shared and grown a lot together.

Yeah, I overfilled the chiminea. It did burn down pretty quickly and was soon at a more reasonable level.

As I like to jokingly remind Amanda, our wedding anniversary and the day I started this blog are both on June 22. I’ve been blogging here for 15 years! On June 22, 2008, I was holed up in a hotel room in Tarrytown, NY, (not far from where we live now!), eating pizza, and learning how to install WordPress on my cheap shared hosting, writing my first post, and figuring out how to customize my theme. The rest is available via RSS.

I caught up with Jeremy Felt on Friday afternoon, which was nice. I’ve been enjoying our catch up calls once every couple months. It is nice to chat with someone who also does remote work a lot like my own and has a child around the same age. We go through so many similar things! Jeremy is also a WordPresser, IndieWebber, and blogger. It is a shame we live on opposite sides of the country.

Friday evening Amanda and Charlie hung out with some friends of ours while I opted to stay home for some quiet time. I ended up cleaning the dining room and kitchen, tidying living room, writing my weekly veggie share post, and reading a little bit.

Saturday we met one of Charlie’s daycare friends and her parents at Barnes & Noble’s Saturday Storytime, where they read a children’s book, do live music, and some coloring. Everyone was having a good time, so we went out to lunch afterward. We love seeing Charlie and other kids play so well together. The original plan was to go to Muscoot Farm, but it was raining all morning.

During naptime I worked on an iOS Shortcut for posting to this blog, Twitter, Bluesky, and Mastodon all at the same time.

• You can download a stripped-down version here. It relies on the native Twitter app (which annoyingly prompts you to confirm posting), Ivory for Mastodon (you can swap out with your Shortcuts-friendly Mastodon app of choice), and two Get Contents of URL actions for Bluesky. You’ll need to swap in your Bluesky identifier and app password in the cURL sections. h/t to Eric Davis for sending me the Bluesky API calls.
• Here is my shortcut for posting to a WordPress blog via Micropub.

Later after naptime we went grocery shopping and made taco salads for dinner.

Sunday I mowed and then replaced the shutters on our downstairs windows while Amanda and Charlie played in the sprinkler. I need a taller ladder to do the upstairs windows, so those will have to wait a few weeks.

The humidity the last couple days has been rough. If this keeps up, I’m seriously considering putting the window air conditioners in. We’ve held off so far this summer because the evenings have been cool and it is nice to have the breeze.

I remarked to Amanda that though Wednesday was the solstice, it still doesn’t feel like summer to me. Probably because we haven’t done the activities I typically associate with summer (swimming, rowing, kayaking, hiking, fishing.) We need to change that.

Happy Father’s Day! I’m feeling extra thankful for our little family today. It has been a tough week with Charlie being home from daycare most of the week while we both had to work (all three of us were frustrated and no one had a good time or got enough work/play in), but it has been a nice weekend and I’m looking forward to the family outing we have planned this afternoon.

Three times this week when Charlie is flopping around and having trouble getting comfortable at bedtime, he has crawled into my arms and fallen asleep. It melts my heart every time.

Charlie has started to sing to himself recently, and gets excited when we recognize the song and join in. The past couple days it has been Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Also on the music front, he has been playing music with Amanda on a small music set he has. He stays in beat on the drum while Amanda plays Wheels on the Bus on the xylophone! Thank goodness he got her musical abilities instead of mine. I can’t even keep a beat.

Charlie has also started to address us directly by saying “Momma” or “Dada” or “Mommy” or “Daddy” and then what he wanted to say. That is new in the last week or so.

He’s requested going on a walk every day (sometimes multiple), which we are more than happy to oblige. We follow his lead, which usually means going to the end of the street and into the woods, where he likes to pick up and throw rocks. We saw a rabbit on Tuesday and he has stopped every day since at the same spot to look for it again. He brought his first rock home on Saturday. That has to be a little boy milestone, right? I know I had a rock collection. Still do.

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The garden is looking good! Potatoes on the left and tomatoes/tomatillos on the right. No photos of the other garden bed this week, but plenty of peas and kale to pick.

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I went to an art show here in Peekskill on Saturday at the new Center for Machine Arts, started by Bre Pettis. The focus is creating art with machines, and the majority used pen plotters, though one artist used a metal CNC.

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I was most interested in the generative landscapes that Leo McElroy made (I made some generative art last year as well, so I enjoyed chatting with him about his process) and some studies of natural leaf patterns by Jenn Karson, who I think did a great job showing her process and some of her experiments along the way. She also showed some of the same pieces in different mediums, and sometimes inverted (milling the lines vs empty space on aluminum).

I chatted with Jenn about what it might take to do some of the same work on wood from the same tree species as the leaves, and if done on greenwood what kind of interesting elements the natural drying process would add to the piece.

Check out Jenn Karson’s Damaged Leaf Dataset, it is pretty cool.

There is another show on July 22 with a slightly different cohort.

Going to the show made me start thinking about how I can create art again. One idea I had is to make an ongoing series of bookmarks for places I visit. I love picking up bookmarks from local bookstores, so why not make some of my own? I’ll need to cut some cardstock and leave it in my backpack with some pens.

Also, perhaps I can start by making some for Peekskill. Perhaps an outline of this section of the Hudson River (I bet I can turn the GIS data from naturalearthdata.com into an SVG that is plottable or cuttable), or maybe a sketch of the view from the waterfront.

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WordCamp Europe happened last weekend and I got a bunch of photos from friends who attended, letting me know that one of my pieces from the Museum of Block Art was included as a postcard for the attendees. Each person got a pack of all of the same kind and was encouraged to trade with others to get a full set. I love that.

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Two meals that turned out better than expected this week:

1. Whole grilled chicken. I spatchcocked it, then grilled it over direct heat on each side for a little bit, moved it to indirect heat, and finished over direct heat again. We ate it with sauteed chard with garlic and lemon, and orzo rice. Again, I’m pleased with the grill we got last month. The spatchcocked chickens I tried on the old one got burnt to a char from all the flareups and it was too small to set up two zones (direct and indirect heat).
2. Rigatoni with sausage and kale. The tomato paste/wine/onion/garlic/fennel seed/cream sauce was quick and easy to make. We all loved it. One to remember.

It is strawberry season. We’ve been getting fruit every week from local farms (as well as our regular veggie CSA), so we’ve been eating a lot of strawberries the last two weeks. some made it into this quick cobbler.

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Off to try pizza at Hudson & Packard and walk across the Hudson with Amanda and Charlie 👋

The weather this week was weird. We had a hail storm on Tuesday, then smokey, hazy orange skies on Wednesday and Thursday as smoke from the Canadian wildfires moved in. I didn’t take photos of the smoke, but you probably saw them on the news.

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Thursday night Charlie refused to go to bed without Bunny, who we had not seen for a week. So we turned the house and car upside down looking for Bunny, who I eventually found between the covers at the foot of the bed, where we tuck the covers under the mattress. Bunny had made a little warren down there.

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Saturday morning we had over some parents with kids around Charlie’s age to play and have breakfast in the backyard. We made pancakes out there on the Blackstone and generally had a good time.

Though after two out of the three families left, Charlie finally opened up. He seems to do better with small groups, so going forward we’ll probably prioritize playdates with just one family at a time.

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It is interesting seeing kids a couple months older than Charlie. It is amazing how much language use and independent mobility (like stairs!) spikes around the 2 year mark. A couple months ago we thought that stuff was still far off for Charlie, but we notice weekly improvements in both areas now. It is so cool watching him grow.

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I spent some time Sunday morning doing yard work (mowing, mending a hole in the mower’s grass collecting bag, watering and fertilizing the plants, pulling out some poison ivy that popped up), and moving some things out of the basement and garage to post on the local Buy Nothing group, and cleaning up two used window air conditioners a friend gave us. Amanda and Charlie played with the hose and washed some stuff outside. Charlie absolutely LOVES playing with the hose.

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Scenes from the garden. Charlie loves helping water the plants. Purple peas are starting to come in.

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Sometimes Charlie likes wearing his cowboy hat around 🤠

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I finished Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez yesterday and started Golden Son by Pierce Brown.

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I started my weekly veggie CSA ideas posts again over at cooklikechuck.com. Here is the first one:

Roxbury Farm 2023 CSA, Week 1

I prioritized spending time with family and friends last weekend, so I am doing a combined post this week.

My parents came to visit over Memorial Day weekend, and it was great to spend time with them. The weather was beautiful and we spent a lot of time outside. We got the tomatoes and tomatillos planted in the garden, added more dirt to the potatoes (which are doing great!), washed and folded up a tarp that I’ve been neglecting, and changed the spigot on our bathtub. We didn’t work the whole time… a decent amount of time was spent on the deck, which we just got some new furniture for: A cantilever umbrella, a couch, and some chairs. (We got a rug this week, but no photos of that yet.) We made some pizza and tiki drinks one night, and another they watched Charlie while Amanda and I went out on a date.

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One thing I forgot in the last post: Charlie recapped his day during bedtime. Amanda heard him saying the words he knows for things he did that day, like he was recapping the day’s events. Pizza, Carly, Cupcake, Lella, Drive. We went to a birthday party for Carly, had pizza, ate a cupcake, played with Lianella, and pretended to drive on an arcade game. He amazes us every day.

Today’s amazement: He started washing one of his bathtoys (a seal), just like I was washing him. Then when it was time to get out of the tub he started handing me his toys so I could put them away, which he hasn’t done before (nor have we asked him to.)

This week Charlie has been saying Thank You (without being asked!) to people when they help him with things. It is very sweet. It gets our hearts every time.

Charlie has been a little more independent on the climbing wall lately. He doesn’t want help placing his feet.

Sometimes you feel more like a parent (taking care of the kid, making sure they are fed and safe, dealing with their tantrums) and other times you feel more like a Dad (the two of you having fun together, they are being very lovey and sweet, and things are just generally going better). This week I felt more like a Dad. Lots of walks, giggles, sweet snuggly reading time, fun dinners out while Mom traveled for work. Charlie jamming to music while eating pizza at Baci’s Woodfired Wednesday, the pure joy on his face when having ice cream at the Blue Pig, sitting on the front porch and giggling together. What a wonderful feeling! ♥️

We had one of Charlie’s classmates and her parents over for a play date and dinner on Saturday. They played well together, shared better than we expected, had conversations together that the grown-ups didn’t understand, and both mentioned each other’s names the next day. The cardboard house made out of the huge box the patio furniture came in and the big yoga ball were the two hits of the day. It was great to see Charlie playing with a friend. We are actively making plans to hang out again.

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I’ve been listening to The Hold Steady a lot lately. Looks like they are having a cool festival celebrating 20 years of being a band up at Arrowood Farms, a place we really like. I’m not going, but I expect it to be a great time for those who do.

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Our method for getting marginally more vegetables into our diet: Every salad has lots of broccoli slaw mix added, which in addition to nutrition gives it a nice crunch component. And our self-imposed rule is that we have to finish our salad before getting seconds on the main dish. (That rule doesn’t apply to Charlie… it is challenging enough to get him to eat as it is.)

The veggie shares start this coming week, which we are very much looking forward to!

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Charlie loves playing with the hose.

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I’m pleased with the garden and yard plants in general this year. The peas are blooming right now, the potatoes are growing quickly, and the spinach and kale are putting out lots of leaves. After two years of trying to get some perennials to grow on the side of our house from seed, we finally have some Rudbeckias that are taking off. Looking forward to the blooms brightening up that side of the house.

An update to the wick irrigation for the tomatoes this year: I buried the buckets and make them stick out of the dirt only an inch or so to minimize the length of rope that is out of the water or dirt so it has less of an opportunity to dry out. So far so good with the couple of 90+F days we’ve had.

Not all worked out, though. The basil, rosemary, and peppers I planted either didn’t come up or died. Most of the cilantro and spinach I planted didn’t come up either–only a few plants sprouted. So we went to the local greenhouse today and bought some basil, rosemary, jalapenos, and parsley to plant.

The Mock Orange is blooming right now, and so are the Rose campion.

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My weather station showed a high of 104F on Friday. I am certain this was inaccurate, because I was outside at the time and I think it was a lot closer to 92-94F. The sun has been very intense though, so maybe the whole unit got overheated. 🤷‍♂️

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I’ve been pretty much off of social media for the past month and a half, and that has felt pretty good. I did log on to Instagram today to post a story of Charlie and the hose, but I’ll probably delete the app off of my phone again soon. Even new things like getting an invite to Bluesky haven’t been able to pull me back into social media. I’ve also been neglecting the internet in general. My unread feeds backlog is so long that I might have to declare bankruptcy.

Is it the time of year? Is it wanting to spend as much time as I can with Charlie? Disillusionment? Probably all of the above.

When I am on my phone, I’ve been reading books in the Kindle app, which is something I never thought I’d do. Nothing beats the convenience of always having your phone on you, though.

I’m currently reading Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez, book two of the Delta-v series.

I think I want to start Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series next. She has a fantastic blog, by the way.

This time last year I had just started the Baroque Cycle series. Right now I’m on book 7 of 8. Still listening while I mow the lawn or do the dishes.