Nice spring weather this week. We enjoyed it by taking walks in the woods.
I was mostly recovered from strep by Wednesday, which was good because Amanda was in Austin for work from Wednesday morning to Friday night.
Charlie and I spent Wednesday and Thursday evenings at playgrounds, then on Friday we went to Home Depot and got some soil and planted potatoes.
Charlie has been refusing all medication, even if he feels super sick and really needs it. We have to dupe him by mixing liquid medications into either yogurt or gatorade. Thankfully he hasn’t caught on yet. I hope by the time he does he can be reasoned with a bit more.
Which books still pop into your head at least once a month, even if you read them years ago?
For me:
- Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
- Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
- Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin
- Daemon by Daniel Suarez
- The Founding Fish by John McPhee
These might not be my all-time top picks, but I can’t get them out of my head.
We went to dinner on Friday with one of our high school teachers, Chas Deremer, and his family. It was nice to catch up, and now that we are adults with a child of our own, we have much more in common with him and his wife than high school Chuck and Amanda could have realized.
We spent most of Saturday and Sunday building some stuff for Charlie in the backyard: A mud kitchen and a sandbox. Not ready to share photos yet, but everything is coming along nicely. We’ll finish the sandbox on Monday or Tuesday and put the finishing touches on the mud kitchen next weekend.
I made a circle cutting jig for the bandsaw to cut nice circles. Burners for the mud kitchen stove.
Charlie is showing some interest in baseball, so I decided to turn a small bat for him. Started tball bats are roughly 24″ long, 13-16oz, and 1.9″ in diameter. I turned down a piece of 4×4 pine to roughly 2″, which I need to finish shaping one night this week. I know bats are usually made from ash, but I don’t think I’d get down to 13oz with a hardwood, and he’ll start using softer baseballs anyway. I’ll make a bigger one out of ash in a few years.
More on the carbonation front: I carbonated a 1944 recipe mai tai. Very good, though didn’t hold the carbonation when I added ice. Some ways to try and remedy that:
- Triple carbonation over the course of 2-3 hours.
- Get the drink as cold as possible before each carbonation. Aim for 20F.
- Clarifying the drink? Not really worth the hassle, IMO.
Grilling more again is nice! I got my first sunburn of the year today.
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