We went to a cookout at our friends’ place on Friday and figured that Charlie would get sleepy around 8pm and we would head home then. 8pm came and went, and Charlie was still the life of the party, playing with three dogs and crawling around to everyone there, so we decided to see how long it would last. To our surprise he lasted until we left and 10pm, but was asleep in his carseat before we even backed out of their driveway.

Charlie seems to be adjusting well to daycare, and we are finally getting in a morning routine. We’ve had time a couple mornings this week to go for a walk by the waterfront before daycare, which has been really nice.

Instagram turned into QVC 2.0. I’ve complained about it here on the blog before. I’ve been trying to think about what I can do to minimize my usage of Instagram.

What I’d miss about it:

• We live far away from family, so a lot of keeping up with extended family is done on Instagram.
• We also live far away from lots of our friends. As people have kids, texts, emails, and calls become less and less frequent, but at least we have Instagram to keep in touch.

I don’t really want to lose those two things, so realistically I’m probably going to stay on Instagram. That said, I think there are some ways I can nudge people toward better communication mediums:

• Encourage more friends to blog and help them set up a blog
• Emails newsgroups with friends
• Letter writing
• Book groups, preferably with a group blog where everyone can share their thoughts. Wouldn’t that be a cool use of P2?

We planted six grow bags (7gal size) of potatoes this year, three bags of a white variety and three bags of a red variety (Adirondack red). The red variety was ready to harvest, so we dug through them this morning. Charlie grabbed one and started chomping on it 🙂

We cooked some of these tonight. Parboiled, finished on the grill, then tossed with butter, parsley, salt, and pepper. Probably going to use some in brown butter potato salad with dill next.

We also picked some of our first snow peas and added them to our salads tonight.

I baked Alison Roman’s Blueberry Cornmeal Tart for the aforementioned friends’ cookout. It turned out great! We’ve been getting 2 quarts of blueberries a week for the past four weeks from the fruit share we are a part of. Charlie eats about as many as Amanda and me put together, so we’ve been going through them. But we’ve frozen enough to make a couple more of these tarts this winter.

A Trader Joe’s opened close to us this week! Very exciting to be able to shop there whenever instead of needing to plan for a 40 minute drive each way. A lot of their stuff is “convenience food” and more expensive than making everything yourself, but at this stage of life with a 1 year old and both parents working full time, we are willing to spend a bit more for the time savings. We tend to get things like their tamales, the marinated meats like chicken shawarma and carne asada, dips, and some pantry items like rice pilaf mixes, pasta, couscous, and sauces. We rarely get fruits and vegetables there (we get most from local farms during the summer and fall), but if we do it is usually a convenience item like shredded cabbage for a quick coleslaw or base for a bowl.

I can manage my heartburn/reflux by watching what I eat and not eating anything after 6 or 7pm. At least once a month I think it will be fine to eat pizza and have a beer at 10pm and it never is.

Red wine, amaro, and liquors without mixers are my best bet for avoiding heartburn if I want a drink. Beer just doesn’t sit well with me anymore. Neither do cocktails with lots of citrus. Dry ciders are mostly okay.

I picked up some kefir today and am interested in making a glass of it a day part of my regular diet. I’d like to start making it again, but probably not in the cards right now.

Speaking of fermented foods: We found a great babysitter a couple months ago whose parents are Haitian immigrants. We often chat about Haitian food. Today she brought us some pikliz (spicy pickled vegetable slaw that slowly ferments). I’ve been having a bit with dinner the last couple nights. Really good stuff! I think I might make some of my own. This version is cabbage, carrots, habanero peppers, white vinegar, and lime juice. Some recipes online have onions or shallots, some don’t. I’m in favor of leaving onions out, because they tend to get pretty pungent and funky after a week or so.

When I’m feeling unmotivated, down, or generally off, it is so important to either accomplish something right away (even something mundane like emptying the dishwasher) or get outside and go for a walk. I usually need to drink water, too. I rarely drink enough water.

An important question I’ve been asking myself recently: What are some things taking place during this season (of life, of work, meteorological) that I can embrace instead of focusing on the things that aren’t?

Reading

Currently reading:

• Sand, Wind, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig
  • Second book in the Montana series. I already had book one and read it a couple weeks ago (English Creek), and I was able to find nice hardcover versions with good dust jackets this week at the local used bookstore, Bruised Apple.

Books I learned about this week and added to the ever-growing “want to read” list:

• The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson
• Candy House by Jennifer Egan
• Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
• Wild Problems by Russ Roberts
• The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd
• This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Around the internet

• Two recent discussions on blogging (a perennial interest of mine) on Hacker News.
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32137336
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32191140
• Cory Doctorow on blogging, curation, and social networks.
• The Wandering Inn, seven books and counting published chapter by chapter on a blog as it is being written. Pretty cool. h/t Manton Reece
• A foldable treadmill for under your desk. Ever since I read the essay in Neal Stephenson’s Some Remarks on using a treadmill desk, I’ve wanted one. I’m probably going to get one of these. The ability to fold it and slide it under my desk sold it for me. (And not needing to buy one of those giant clunky treadmills and mod it.)

Until next week—keep blogging 👋

Charlie has been very active this week, crawling and exploring as much as he can. He is fast! So curious, too. One of our goals is to keep fostering that natural curiosity as much as we can.

I brush his hair every morning before daycare and he started grabbing the brush and trying to brush his hair himself. So cute.

Charlie helped spin the salad spinner tonight and he loved it. I can’t wait to find little things that he can do to help out and feel a sense of accomplishment.

We still haven’t gotten in a good groove with breakfast, getting ready, and taking Charlie to daycare in the morning. We are getting closer, though. I made a frittata on Sunday night so we have an easy, healthy breakfast for the first half of the week, which should help. The main disruptor is still how often Charlie gets up during the night. On nights that he wakes up less, things are smooth the next morning. If he gets up a lot, we are all tired, groggy, and tend to fall behind. We’ll get there.

We usually listen to classical or jazz with Charlie, though occasionally we throw on stuff like the Beastie Boys or Chali 2na and get him dancing. While we were out for dinner this week, Rancid’s …And Out Come the Wolves album came on (one of my favorites) and he seemed to enjoy it and bopped along with it. So now we listen to some of the cleaner Rancid songs sometimes on the way to daycare. It is good to be musically well-rounded.

Friday night we went to the Italian festival in Verplanck, celebrating its 100th year. The thing to go for there is the sausage & peppers booth. We went for the first time last year while Amanda was still pregnant, two weeks before Charlie arrived. I’m excited to start yearly traditions like now that with Charlie.

Saturday afternoon we made calzones on the deck and ate them on a picnic blanket in the yard. Charlie got his own with sausage, mozzarella, and sauce.

Saturday night I found myself sitting on the porch after Charlie goes to bed, reading on a lounge chair that I built, reading a book and sipping a Belgian golden ale while the setting sun paints the sky above the trees gradients of purple, pink, orange, and grey.

Sunday night I find myself writing this post.

Lots of tomatoes and tomatillos, but none ready to pick yet. Two of the roma tomato plants are showing some bloom end rot, so even though I solved the watering issue, I must not have fertilized enough. The okra and pepper plants are finally looking good, and we have snow peas to pick this week. This coming Monday will have the first rain we’ve seen in a couple weeks.

The hummingbirds seem to love the nasturtium and borage!

Lots of data munging at work this week, so lots of time working in spreadsheets writing formulas. I stuck some of them in P2 so I can find them again later, but this is a good reminder to stick them in my digital garden, too.

I think there are two prevailing mental models for spreadsheets:

1. Tables that can live anywhere in the sheet(s)
2. As a lightweight relational database that is primarily row and column driven

I’m strongly in the lightweight relational camp and find it difficult to efficiently work with spreadsheets from folks in the table camp.

The Query Loop block in WordPress needs the ability to exclude certain parameters, too. For example, it would be nice to exclude posts in certain categories or tags. This is of course possible in WP_Query, so I expect it to get added to the block eventually.

iOS now has the App Library feature, which means that apps do not need to live on one of your screens or deep in some folder. It also has useful widgets. So for the first time in years I’ve rethought my homepage with a single page of the apps I use most often and a second screen with two useful widgets. I’m liking the change so far.

Reading

I finished reading Ivan Doig’s English Creek and started reading Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand, and Stars. I’m also still listening to Neal Stephenson’s Odalisque.

I’m keeping my eyes peeled for more Ivan Doig books at used bookstores.

I’ve decreased the amount of time I’ve spent on social media again this week. It has been nice. I’ll try to keep it going.

A week of trying to get back to normal after Charlie and I were sick last week. Lots of playing catch up, but I’m glad to report that Charlie went back to daycare and Amanda and I got back on normal work schedules.

A couple things I’ve been trying to get back to doing each day:

1. Listing three things I’m thankful for. Good to keep gratitude in focus.
2. Going for a walk, preferably with Charlie and Amanda. Spending a bit of time outside when it is cool in the morning or evening is restorative and grounding.

The wineberry patch I like to pick looks like it should be ready by Wednesday or Thursday this week. Not sure what I plan to do with them yet, but I’m sure I’ll decide in the next couple of days. Most likely another flaugnarde.

The Swiss Giant Snow Peas I planted are finally blooming and producing pods. Looking forward to munching them in salads and stir fries!

Made some progress on my current batch of orange bitters I started back in April. They should be ready to bottle later this week. Let me know if you’d like a bottle!

One of the best parts about doing a veggie share is being challenged to think creatively about how to use the veggies you get each week and eating something not in your regular rotation. We’ve been having lots of salads, sheet pan dinners, and grilled meals full of vegetables. Also lots of sautéed greens (turnip, chard, kale, beet, etc) with garlic scapes as a quick side dish.

Charlie LOVES blueberries, which are in season around here right now 🫐

Farmers markets local vs food terminals

I love going to farmers markets on Saturday mornings. There are two really good ones that all of the best vendors go to about 20 minutes away each (Cold Spring and Tarrytown), but the local one here in Peekskill is gaining some steam. We usually go to the one in Peekskill, but occasionally make the drive to Tarrytown or Cold Spring if we have the time.

I love buying from local growers, bakers, and makers, which is what keeps me going back. I do get really frustrated by a certain type of vendor commonly found at the smaller second-tier farmers markets: The truck with “[Generic name] Farms” painted on it that clearly buys produce from the food terminals, puts it in baskets, and tries to pass it off as their own. Things like sweet corn and plums in late June that clearly aren’t in season locally yet. Stickers painstakingly peeled off before the cucumbers get put out, the broken down waxed Andy Boy boxes stuffed out of sight behind the tables. Stuff that is no different than what is being put out at the grocery stores. There is probably money in it, but I refuse to buy stuff from those booths. They go against the ethos of the small local farmers markets. One thing that makes the Tarrytown and Cold Spring markets really good is that they keep these kinds of vendors out and give the actual farmers and producers a chance to shine.

Saturday was a day to fix things around the house:

• Reversed the gate on the back porch so it only opens in to prevent Charlie from falling down the stairs
• Fixed the pin going into the ground on the secondary fence gate. It isn’t normally used, but I had to move some big stuff into the yard last month and needed to pull the pin so I could open the second gate and make the opening large enough for a wide landscaping dolly to move through. When I tried to open it, I discovered that whoever put it in before we bought the house put it in wrong, so it was impossible to get the pin out. They must have put the pin in and then screwed the brackets on without trying it. I took the brackets off last month and tossed them aside, so I finally took a few minutes to put them back correctly so the door could be opened.
• Screwed a few loose deck slats back down.
• Screwed a shelf back in place in a bookshelf.
• Put wall anchors on all of our bookshelves now that Charlie is mobile.

I got two of these umbrella clamps to put the umbrellas up on the deck railing instead of needing to be in a table. They free up a lot of space and give Charlie more room to play on the deck without being in direct sun. They were one of those “I wonder if this exists…” purchases and I’m delighted they do.

Logging out of Twitter in my browsers and deleting the app off my phone was a good idea. Having instant access to the news around the world (negativity gets pageviews!) and everyone’s hot takes about it is not healthy. I’m not ready to say goodbye to Twitter forever, but I am glad to have less time on it.

I’m currently reading:

1. Odalisque, book three of volume one of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Currently listening to it on audiobook while I run errands and do dishes.
   1. I’d love to have a Stephenson book entirely about Enoch Root, who appears in the Baroque Cycle, Cryptonomicon, and Fall.
2. English Creek by Ivan Doig.
   1. I love reading books in the same season they are set. Part II of English Creek takes place over the July 4 holiday, when I started reading the book.
   2. I’ll probably finish it in my next reading session.
   3. I’ll definitely pick up the other two books in Doig’s Montana Trilogy, and probably some of his non-fiction, too. I’m hooked.
   4. Some characters play the card game pitch, which I hadn’t heard of. Time to get out my 1970s “Hoyle Up-To-Date” book and learn how to play.

I learned this week that you can install a non-current version of a plugin pretty easily via wp-cli.

--skip-plugins --skip-themes plugin install SLUG --version=VERSION --force

This is pretty helpful when an update breaks something. Make sure to turn off autoupdates for that particular plugin, though.

Toronto’s major internet and cell service outage this past week reminded me that I still need to get a store of cash to keep at home in case of just such an outage. Credit cards are so convenient, especially when you pay them off in full each month. But cash is king.

Virtually any business or service that relies on Rogers for internet or mobile connection is warning customers that debit machines, ATMs or phone lines are not working.

Music I encountered this week for the first time that I’m digging:

Charlie’s illness ended up getting worse early this week, despite looking like it was clearing up over last weekend, so it was another week of keeping a sick baby home from daycare while we tried to work. The doctor said that the poor guy had a double ear infection.

Then I caught whatever caused his illness, which knocked me out for a couple days, too. I assumed it was Covid, but everyone’s tests came back negative. Some other upper respiratory virus, then.

Thankfully the antibiotics seem to be working and Charlie is doing a lot better now. I’m still recovering, but also doing better.

I think the only thing of note to report this week is Charlie’s mobility. He graduated from army crawling to regular crawling! His holding on to the furniture and walls while cruising has greatly improved, too. He can make it around corners, transfer between objects with gaps as wide as his arms are long, and climb over obstacles in his path. He is on the move now.

I finished listening to King of the Vagabonds while rocking a sleeping Charlie this week.

I’m thankful for the break this holiday weekend provides. I’m going to spend as much of it as I can offline because I spent entirely too much time on Twitter while I was sick, which isn’t good for one’s mental state.

Looking forward to splashing with Charlie in his little turtle pool, taking some walks, having a small cookout with friends, watering the garden, getting ice cream, and reading Ivan Doig’s English Creek.

See you next week 👋

Two anniversaries this week: Amanda and I have been married for 9 years and this blog is 14 years old. Both anniversaries are actually on the same day! I’m incredibly thankful to have Amanda as my partner in life, though all of its ups and downs. I’m also

Charlie started daycare this week and made it a whole three days before coming down with his first stomach virus, complete with fever, vomiting, and cartoonish green boogers. Poor little guy.

I spent the week with a bucket of conflicting emotions: Relieved that daycare afforded focus time at work, intensely missing Charlie while he was at daycare, feeling so sorry for Charlie that he was sick, glad we could snuggle and comfort him, and stressed about the focus shattered by his fussiness and juggling taking care of him while needing to work, thankful for the flexibility of working from home, and grateful to have such a sweet little boy who smiles at us even if he doesn’t feel good.

I often want to start this post with something like “it has been a tough week.” But I can’t start every week’s post like that. Our life isn’t hard. We have it relatively good. What, then, is making me think each week has been difficult? Perhaps I need to update my baseline expectations. Our lives are much more complex than ten years ago, so I shouldn’t expect things to be as simple and spontaneous as ten years ago, either. It is probably mostly the lack of sleep affecting how I feel about things.

Besides for changing my expectations, I can probably also do more on the weekends to make the week go more smoothly: Doing more meal planning and prep to make getting lunch and dinner ready faster.

Like I posted last week, I need to remind myself to take a wider view.

The tomatoes, tomatillos, and okra love this heat. The nasturtium and Bachelor’s Buttons do, too. Dill, peas, and kale are coming along nicely. The pepper plants aren’t doing as well as I’d hoped, but maybe we’ll get some peppers off of them in late summer.

I had a dream last night that deer got in the fence and ate every last one of our tomato plants. Thankfully it was just a dream.

We had kolokithokeftedes (Greek zucchini fritters) for the first time this week and they were delicious. From what I could tell these had zucchini, onion, feta, and dill in them. Since zucchini season is fast approaching, I think we’ll start making these at home.

Fellow Automattician Artur Piszek wrote about how he and his wife do long-term RV travel with a dog and a 1 year old while working. The part about learning to manage vs things getting easier spoke to me. I think I need to stop hoping that things will get easier and double down on figuring out how to manage. (See above!)

Kevin Kelly thinks that in 200 years very few people will use their assigned names. I think he is probably correct—betting that things will trend toward more individual choice and personal expression is likely a good bet.

Currently reading:

• King of the Vagabonds (book 2 of Quicksilver, volume 1 in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle series)
• Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte
• Working by Studs Terkel
  • This is something I occasionally pull off the shelf to read a couple sections rather than trying to read it all at once. I like the short vignettes into how people view their jobs and work.
  • I want to find a copy of Terkel’s “Hard Times” too. I prefer purchasing old books like this at used bookstores rather than reprints from Amazon.

I switched from Alfred to Raycast this week. I spent a couple hours Tuesday night rebuilding my workflows, snippets, hotkeys, etc, so that I could make a clean transition. It is faster than Alfred and I love all of the available extensions, which have a huge amount of overlap with other tools I use. In fact, I replaced Alfred, TextExpander, and Paste (clipboard app) with Raycast.

If you use Raycast and have built any cool workflows with it, I’d love to hear from you.

I wanted to write a bit about the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade, but I honestly don’t know what to write, partially because I’m still forming it. If you want to talk about it in good faith and we are friends, feel free to give me a call. All sides of the discourse on seem to be lacking in empathy and nuance. Spending more characters and pixels on it here will be futile.

Focus how you can help friends and family in your community who are struggling, in pain, grieving, stressed, and sad. Miscarriages are hard, failed pregnancies are hard, trying to get pregnant is hard, getting pregnant when you didn’t want to is hard, raising a child is hard, making the decision to terminate a pregnancy is hard, birth is hard, struggling to find formula to feed a baby is hard, sleep deprivation is hard, adoption is hard, struggling with shame and fear is hard, and grappling with religious beliefs is hard. Do yourself and everyone in your orbit a favor in the coming months and work on your capacity for empathy. And maybe think thrice before hitting send on that hot take.

It was a long, tiring week. Despite that, I’m feeling really thankful and lucky this week.

• Both Amanda and I have good jobs.
• We have a sweet, curious little boy.
  • It is my first Father’s Day as a father. Spending the day going for a long family walk, holding Charlie while he naps, and hanging out on the deck making pizza.
• We closed on our house at a great time pre-covid and don’t have to worry about the constantly rising rental market prices.
• We live in a place where we used to drive > 45 mins to get to on the weekends to escape our apartment. We also traveled here by train when we didn’t have a car.
• We can look up and clearly see the stars at night, something that from 2012-2019 was only really possible on vacation for us.
• We have a garden where we can grow things. Planting seeds and watching them grow seems like a miracle.

It is so easy to get caught up in the current short-term difficulties. I do all the time. (Teething babies with separation anxiety are no joke!) It is important to remind yourself what you are thankful for to take a longer view.

The most useful thing I learned from studying economics is methodological individualism. Only individuals, specifically individuals with subjective motivations and values, act. Groups don’t act; individuals within that group act. Companies don’t act; employees and owners within companies act. Political parties don’t act; individual voters and politicians act. Keeping this in mind when evaluating situations brings a lot of clarity.

This week in cooking:

• Lots of big lunch salads. The vegetable shares started up last week, so we have plenty of salad greens coming in right now.
• Stir fry bowls. Usually some kind of meat + vegetable + sauce + rice. This week it was pork + bok choy and chicken + asparagus + broccoli.
• Grilled meat + vegetables. Chicken, bratwurst, corn, asparagus.
• Strawberry cobbler. We got a fruit share along with the vegetable share from local farms this year, and right now is fresh strawberry season. Since the rest of last week’s batch was starting to turn, I made a quick cobbler with almond flour on Thursday morning.
• Buttermilk biscuits
• Sausage, kale, cheddar, and onion quiche. I used puff pastry for the crust since we had some in the freezer. It worked pretty well!
• Tiki Friday: Missionary’s Downfall with fresh mint and borage flowers from our garden.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to protect my family against the effects of natural disasters, prolonged recessions, cyber attacks, new pandemics, power grid outages, food shortages, and supply chain issues.

I’m thinking about this in a “prepper” way but in a risk-weighted way. I’m not spending my days convinced something awful is happening and digging a bunker. I mostly want to protect against the major downside risks for my family while going about our daily lives.

It is important to keep in mind that whatever we are currently going through is likely not a temporary outlier. (h/t @aspiringpeasant)

I feel pretty good on the food and fuel/energy generation front. I don’t feel great about our water storage, though. Turning my attention to that next.

Currently reading:

• King of the Vagabonds by Neal Stephenson
• Best of Edward Abbey
  • Edited by Edward Abbey himself. Using it as a way to figure out which of his full books I want to read.
• 12 ways to be better to work with by Jaimee Finney
  • The book is full of great reminders for both coworker and client interactions: assuming positive intent, being proactive and following up, tips for diffusing rather than inflaming situations, making situations impersonal and solutions-oriented, and making small changes to critical words to underscore our intentions.
• Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte

We got a cast aluminum chiminea for the porch. I’ve wanted one since we moved in. Used it twice this week. Part of the ongoing effort to spend more time outside and away from screens, especially before bed.

Time to press publish and go outside 👋

As I write this on Sunday morning, Charlie is napping on me. I’m sitting in that one Ikea chair everyone seems to have, Charlie’s head is on my shoulder, he is wrapped up in a blanket, and my laptop is perched on a pillow on my lap.

Some sweet Charlie vignettes from this week:

• Having dinner as a picnic on a blanket in the backyard, Charlie enjoying every bit of it and feeding himself from his own bowl of chicken, rice, and cauliflower.
• Charlie taking turns feeding Amanda and me.
• Charlie saying “Dada” while I was looking the other direction so that I’d turn around and play peek-a-boo with him. First time saying my name to get my attention so that I’d do something!
• Taking Charlie swimming and him having a thrill each time I disappear under the water across the pool and pop up next to him and his Mom.
• Charlie learning how to stick his tongue out in the mirror, then sticking it out at us when we stick our tongues out at him.
• Charlie is strongly in favor of self feeding, so we’ve been having a lot of fun putting together little plates and bowls of whatever we are having for him to self feed. This week it was ham, eggs, cheese, toast, and hashbrowns for breakfast, deconstructed taco salad, deconstructed cheeseburger, chicken, rice, and cauliflower bowls, and sushi (avocado roll) for lunch/dinner.

The potatoes, tomatillos, tomatoes, lavender, and borage are blooming! Growth has been a bit slow this year. After a few scorchers in May, it has been fairly cool. Looks like it is heating up next week, so we’ll probably see some nice growth this week.

Jon and I got his pergola all framed in! The 6×6 beams were freshly milled and very heavy. He had two dry ones laying around from a project last year, and they were half the weight of the wet ones.

The main skill in woodworking is not executing plans, but figuring out how to adjust when those plans don’t go as expected. For example, we spent a decent amount of time today figuring out how to adjust for a half inch gap between two 12ft beams that were supposed to be abutted. Ended up taking 1/4in off one end of the brace and 1/4in out of the brace’s opposite end housing on the post. Worked!

Also, one of the beams was actually 5.5×5.5″ instead of 6×6 like all the others, but didn’t catch it until it was already up, braced, and pegged, wondering why the two abutting beams didn’t match. We adjusted by cutting the shoulders a bit deeper on the one we hadn’t pegged yet.

We got smart toward the end of the framing and made templates to make cutting the mortises go faster, and used a router to clean out mortises and cut shoulders and brace housings.

We decided to get an Ooni Koda 16″ pizza oven. We tested it out on Saturday evening. I burned my calzone and charred one margherita pretty good, but the two other pizzas came out pretty good. Looking forward to improving my dough shaping technique and dialing in the temperature. Porch pizza summer.

Our tiki journey continues, too. I made my own pimento/allspice dram and honey syrup this week. The pimento dram: Toasted, crushed allspice berries soaked in rum for two weeks, mixed with equal parts brown sugar, vanilla, cinnamon syrup. Honey syrup: Equal parts honey and hot water.

I’m looking forward to incorporating more fresh fruit into the tiki drinks as it comes in season.

The tiki and pizza projects are great examples of how approaching something as an ongoing, long-term endeavor changes how you do it.

When you only make pizza once every couple months, you tend to try to make one of each of your favorite kinds, which becomes stressful with all the varied prep and execution. When you make it once every week or two, you can focus on 1-2 kinds each week, which takes the pressure off, makes prep easier, and allows you to dial it in.

Same with tiki. You can make 1 syrup/add-in each week, which allows you to explore that flavor in a couple drinks. Then after two months you have a wide variety of flavors to choose from and a better understanding of what you like.

I wrote a couple big bash scripts this week. One for work to pull data from a CRM and transform it into a sqlite database to hook up to Metabase for visualization, and one personal script to automate archiving website backups monthly (pulling the latest backups from my webhost’s API.) I used curl, jq, and tr pretty heavily. I posted some learnings in my digital garden.

Less reading this week than I’d prefer. Finished Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson and started King of the Vagabonds, the next book in the series. Also made some progress on Neuromancer by William Gibson , which I hadn’t picked up for a few weeks.

Transitions are hard.

I went back to work this week after four months of parental leave. The hardest parts were Charlie crying when I had to hand him over to the nanny and go to work and watching him play through my office door but needing to work instead of hanging out with him. I think he felt it too because he was cranky and clingy. He is also struggling with some sleep regression. Poor guy.

Also, inconsistent/unreliable child care is zero fun. Pretty stressful. Looking forward to when he starts at a really nice day care later this month.

Our backyard looked nice this week. The mock orange is blooming.

Related: Thermacell mosquito repellers actually work!

A few of the WordPress Block Art pieces I made a couple months ago got picked up by the Museum of Block Art this week:

Space Fog – MOBA

Made by Chuck Grimmett using the following materials: Columns block, Group block, Spacer block.

block-museum.com

Circular rainbow – MOBA

Made by Chuck Grimmett using the following materials: Group block.

block-museum.com

Rectangular Spiral – MOBA

Made by Chuck Grimmett using the following materials: Cover block, Group block, Spacer block.

block-museum.com

I didn’t do much book reading this week, but I did listen to an audio book while I did dishes and was in the car. Quicksilver (book 1 of the Baroque Cycle) by Neal Stephenson.

I did do a lot of reading on P2 at work, but almost all of that is private.

I’m enjoying Jeremy Felt’s new Book notes posts. I usually incorporate mine into my weekly posts, though it may be worth breaking them out at some point if I stop doing weekly posts.

More timber framing work with my friend Jon on Saturday. It turns out that a laser level is a lot more accurate than a string with a line level on it. Easier to use, too.

I got our window unit ACs in this week because it got up into the 90s (Fahrenheit) again.

Amanda and I got to go on date this weekend while some good friends watched Charlie. We opted to pack a picnic lunch and go out rowing in the Peekskill Bay. Amanda hadn’t been in the Adirondack Guideboat yet because I finished it last summer when she was very pregnant. It was great to take her out in it today.

The coming US economic downturn/possible recession has been on my mind a lot this week.

• How can I minimize the downsides for my family?
  • The biggest downside risk is one or both of us getting laid off.
    • In this situation, cash is king. The longer we can pay our fixed costs (mortgage and car payments), the less stressful it is to find new jobs. We refinanced during COVID and got a great rate, which helped lower our mortgage payments. So what remains is making sure some assets are accessible and liquid-ish.
  • Another risk is worsening supply chain issues.
    • In that case, having a well-stocked pantry that you can rotate through and access to/relationships with local farms for food is very helpful.
• What purchases are best in recessions?
  • Valuable assets what have a reduced price due to the recession.
  • Tools for DIY and/or that can be used in contract/freelance work.
  • DIY home improvements if the cost of materials decreases AND it makes sense (decreasing energy usage, improving resale value).
• What kinds of activities are best in recessions?
  • Gardening. Growing some of your own food + keeping busy at home so you spend less elsewhere.
  • Outdoor activities. Hiking, rowing (if you already have access to a human powered boat), etc. Low cost + good exercise.
  • Cooking. Decreasing eating out expenditures.

How are you thinking about minimizing the biggest risks for your family during the coming recession?

This was my last full week on paternity leave. I return to work next week. I snuggled Charlie as much as I could, including holding him for more naps instead of putting him in his crib like usual.

It was a bit of a stressful week for all of us in the Grimmett house, and we are all more tired than usual. But we got through it, got childcare lined up for when I go back to work, and we were able to take it easy on Saturday while it rained.

Charlie and I have our own “thing” now: Multiple times a day when he sees me he scrunches up his face and breathes heavily and loudly through his nose, then I do it back. It never fails to bring smiles ad giggles to both of our faces.

I had to go buy some tomato plants at a local greenhouse because the ones I started from seed just didn’t take off. The tomatillos and peppers did, but tomatoes did not 🤷‍♂️

So I got the tomatoes in the ground this week and set up the new watering system I wanted to try: Wick irrigation. 1/2 inch nylon braid wraps around the root balls and wicks water from a bucket. I’m still trying to decide whether I want to cover and bury the buckets or not. We’ll see how this coming week goes (a couple of 90F+ days).

The peonies bloomed this week, so we cut a few and brought them inside. So nice to have flowers from our own garden on the mantle.

Amaranth, nasturtium, borage, calendula, both red and white potatoes, and dill are all doing great with all this rain and warm weather. I had to replant the peas because the original ones never came up. I went with the Swiss Giant Snow Pea variety.

Currently reading:

• Quicksilver (book 1 of the Baroque Cycle) by Neal Stephenson – Audio
• The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard – Hardcover
• A couple of Tiki cocktail books as I figure out what I want to make next and as I brainstorm my own custom recipes.
  • Easy Tiki
  • Smuggler’s Cove
  • I’m waiting on the Minimalist Tiki book to come in

I’ve been on a mission to eat more beans recently, so I’ve been trying out new recipes. This week I made Enfrijoladas with some delicious Rancho Gordo Rio Zape beans. The recipe only uses 1/2 pound, so we are definitely making this again. It was delicious!

I changed the SIM cards on our phones this week. Believe it or not, this is the first time I’ve ever changed a SIM in the 16 years of having a cell phone.

Every week I think I did nothing, then surprise myself with how much I did once I finish this post.

Spent lots of time outside this week. It seems like we had about a week of Spring, then jumped directly to Summer. It was in the mid 90s (Fahrenheit) all weekend, which is just too dang hot for May. I didn’t put any air conditioners in the windows because it will be back in the 70s next week and we prefer the fresh air whenever we can get it. Getting a baby to sleep when it is 80+ degrees in the house is tough.

Charlie and I went out searching for morels three days, but I think they are finished for the season. Too warm now. We did see a garter and a black rat snake, a pileated woodpecker, two kinds of millipedes, toads, frogs, wildflowers, and an owl pellet.

I also met up with guide Lex TaylorArchived Link to search one of his favorite spots with lots of dead elms, but we came back empty-handed. He taught me how to identify dead elms, which I’m grateful for.

I covered up the potato plants with dirt twice this week and they need covered up again! They are growing like crazy in this heat.

I mowed in spurts during Charlie’s nap times this week. It was too hot and I was too tired to have him in the carrier while I mowed. Charlie is teething again and getting up very early (5-6am most days), so we are all pretty tired.

We’ve instituted Tiki Fridays for the summer. Tiki is notorious for having tedious prep, so I’m treating it like a long-term project and making a new syrup/mix or two each week. Soon we’ll have a wide variety of ingredients on-hand. I was surprised at how easy most tiki ingredients are to make at home once I started looking into it. Separate blog post coming soon.

I helped my friend Jon do some timber framing this week. He is building a pergola over one of his patios. We help each other with projects.

We road tripped up to Williamstown, MA, on Sunday to see the Strict Beauty Sol LeWitt prints exhibition at Williams College. It was worth the drive. I hadn’t seen many LeWitt prints, mostly just wall drawings. It was cool to learn that many of the prints with lots of editions were made from a small number of plates that were rotated and prepared with different colors.

On the way back we stopped at the West Taghkanic Diner, which lives up to the hype. The food was excellent. Amanda had the veggie burger (created to be a good veggie patty, not to mimic meat), I had the smoked chicken, and we both had a vanilla cardamom milkshake. We’ll definitely go back.

Currently reading:

• The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard – Hardcover
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler – Audio
• American Buffalo by Steven Rinella – Audio
• A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage – Audio
  • Lots of fun anecdotes, but the narrative is a bit of a stretch.
• Neuromancer by William GibsonArchived Link – Hardcover

“Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illumines the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.”

Jules Michelet

This is my last full week on paternity leave. I’m snuggling Charlie extra.

Charlie is learning how to walk by slowly holding on to and pushing a small stool and stepping along with it. He is making great progress! He’s been trying so hard and we are very proud of him.

Charlie seems to like chicken shawarma and pickled turnips. That’s my boy.

The thing that has the biggest influence on my day is the length and quality of sleep the night before. Two things seem to affect that the most: What I eat (heartburn/reflux) and when I go to bed.

I found another nice morel in our yard! There was a third that I didn’t catch in time and it shriveled up. Still haven’t found any in the woods yet.

What I thought were black eyed susans coming up along the fence turned out to be mugwort. Whoops.

We have another small garter snake in our yard this year. This one likes to hang out in the front flower beds. It is a bit smaller than the one that hung around last year. I haven’t seen any black rat snakes in the yard yet this year.

I’ve noticed a lot more cardinals in our neighborhood this year. And this seems to be a banner year for maple seedlings. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many come up.

We are trying nasturtium in pots on the porch this year so they can cascade over the railing instead of just laying on the ground. They’ve sprouted in the pots, so we are hopeful!

Mowing season is here. Thankfully our electric mower is quiet enough that I can mow with Charlie in the carrier without either of us needing ear protection.

More sawing and moving wood from the trunk of my neighbor’s downed tree this weekend.

I participated in a cool project this week. Kristin Henry is collecting data on mail delivery timed. Kristin sends some stuff to you and you let her know when it arrives, then you send something back. If you are interested in participating, fill out this form.

Currently reading:

• The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
• American Buffalo by Steven Rinella

Cool things I found online this week:

Slim Gaillard, who Charlie and I’ve been listening to while we eat, made up a lot of slang for his songs and wrote a dictionary for them:

On soil and regenerative farming:

Almost single-handedly, through trial and error, Tolly has developed a new and revolutionary model of horticulture. At first it looks like magic. In reality, it’s the result of many years of meticulous experiments.

Two of his innovations appear to be crucial. The first, as he puts it, is to “make the system watertight”: preventing rain from washing through the soil, taking the nutrients with it. What this means is ensuring the land is almost never left bare. Beneath his vegetables grows an understorey of “green manure”, plants that cover the soil. Under the leaves of his pumpkins, I could see thousands of tiny seedlings: the “weeds” he had deliberately sown. When the crops are harvested, the green manure fills the gap and soon becomes a thicket of colour: blue chicory flowers, crimson clover, yellow melilot and trefoil, mauve Phacelia, pink sainfoin.

Soil is fractally scaled, which means its structure is consistent, regardless of magnification. Bacteria, fungi, plants and soil animals, working unconsciously together, build an immeasurably intricate, endlessly ramifying architecture that, like Dust in a Philip Pullman novel, organises itself spontaneously into coherent worlds. This biological structure helps to explain soil’s resistance to droughts and floods: if it were just a heap of matter, it would be swept away.

It also reveals why soil can break down so quickly when it’s farmed. Under certain conditions, when farmers apply nitrogen fertiliser, the microbes respond by burning through the carbon: in other words, the cement that holds their catacombs together. The pores cave in. The passages collapse. The soil becomes sodden, airless and compacted.

This week went by quickly. Lots of rain and time indoors. I didn’t do much during the week except take care of Charlie, cook, do dishes, and read. I did make up for that a bit this weekend by mowing, weedeating, and sawing and splitting some wood with my friend Jon that my neighbor let me have from a tree she took down. I’m planning on turning and carving some bowls out of the wood, and perhaps make a couple stools.

Charlie absolutely loved swim class this week. He started smiling and splashing as soon as we got him in the water. The next day we took him to the park and put him in the baby swing, which he also loved. Such a happy little boy 😊

Speaking of Charlie, he expanded his repertoire of foods a bit this week: Naan (which he dipped in tikka masala sauce), hummus, grilled chicken, pizza, and French toast (no syrup). Old classics like cucumbers, pears, and broccolini are still a hit. He strongly prefers to self-feed, so we are just cutting things into strips or putting it in a bowl and sticking it in front of him to see if he eats it.

We’ve been listening to classical and jazz music with Charlie while we eat breakfast each morning. Favorites include Peter and the Wolf, Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra narrated by David Bowie, Ella Fitzgerald’s renditions of nursery rhymes, and Slim Gaillard’s Serenade to a Poodle and Potato Chips. We started collecting it in a playlist on Spotify:

I found my first morel this week! After two years of searching the woods near our house and coming out empty handed, I found this one in our own backyard of all places.

Some tasty things I cooked this week:

1. Chicken tikka masala and naan
2. Chicken thighs, radishes, and broccolini on a sheet pan with everyday spice
3. Chicken burritos with rice, pico de gallo, pinto beans, and cheese. Griddled to crisp the outside.
4. Breakfast burritos
5. Chicken shawarma bowls with roasted cabbage, hummus, tomatoes, and cucumbers.

In retrospect, that is a lot of chicken.

Silicone ice cube trays are always so smelly, no matter how much you wash them. I stumbled upon a solution this week from Cooks Illustrated: Bake them!

My friend Chris Johnson came up from NYC for a visit on one of the two non-rainy days we had this week. Chris has a nice personal knowledgebase site (similar to my digital garden, but built on GitBook.) Chris shared this really cool post about how mechanical watches work with nifty animations.

Currently reading:

• Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
• The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi
• An Amish Paradox by Charles Hurst

Currently watching:

• Amanda and I recently finished watching Russian Doll season 2.
• We are enjoying Ted Lasso. This post is late this week because we decided to snuggle and watch Ted Lasso after Charlie’s bedtime this past weekend instead of blog.

New newsletter subscription: Drinking and Knowing Things, a weekly newsletter to help you learn about wine. I might get the book, too.

Jason Kottke is taking a break. Good on him for taking the time he needs to recharge, reset, and reconnect.

Looks like my digital garden has some problems: List items style inexplicably changed and the links in the page list block are no longer clickable. Neither reason is readily apparent. I’ll investigate more this week.

My reflection on blogging has been getting linked to from other folks and shared on quite a bit this week! Trackbacks and pingbacks warm the heart.

Tough week. All three of us had colds the beginning half of the week (the first for Amanda and me since before COVID), then Charlie started teething again the latter half of the week. Seasonal allergies hit me this week, too.

Nevertheless, some highlights:

• Caught up with Jeremy Felt, which is always nice.
  • I now have his Shortnotes plugin up and running under a different namespace/slug (micro), so I’ll be using it soon!
• Cooked/baked some English muffins this week. I always forget how easy they are to make at home, and how much tastier they are than Thomas’. I use the Baking Steel recipe, but I prefer to fry them in a cast iron skillet, which is easier to clean up than the baking steel.
• Made lentil vegetable soup.
• Published a meditation on the importance of blogging.
• Made some Japanese curry and katsu.
• Bought and set up a grow lightArchived Link for our seedlings. I bought a bulb and put it in the swing arm light I already had attached to my desk so it is easy to position.
• Swim class on Saturday with Charlie was fun. He is really getting the hang of kicking, and he started splashing a lot on his own this time, which is a good step to being comfortable in the water.
• I sowed some flower seeds on Sunday. Some of the neighbor’s black eyed susans self-seeded along a section of our fence, so we decided to turn over the ground along the rest of it and seed it with echinacea, African blue daisies, amaranth, cosmos, and showy orange milkweed.
• It is ice cream season again! We’ve wanted to get an ice cream maker for a while, but continue to hold off because going out to a local ice cream shop is always a good diversion for all of us. Our current go-to is The Blue Pig in Croton.

Cool site I stumbled upon this week: http://www.insearchofsimplicity.net/ – A site dedicated to Bill Coperthwaite. I found it while looking for some of Bill’s democratic woodworking designs. I really like that someone digitized and linked to his library.

Currently reading:

Flowers along the fence

Currently reading:

• Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
  • I love Methuselian characters in stories: Daniel Defoe in Mr. Eternity, Enoch Root in Neal Stephenson’s books, and Gaspery-Jacques Roberts in this book.
  • Some characters from Emily’s other books show up in this book, which is fun.
• The Amish: A Concise Introduction by Steve Nolt

I just pre-ordered The Woks of Life cookbook. I’ve cooked a lot of things off of their site and have subscribed to it in my RSS reader for years, so this was an instant pre-order for me.

New sprouts in the garden: Radishes, borage, calendula, bee balm, and more poppies. In the yard, wild violets are popping up and the forsythia and rhododendron look great. Black-eyed Susan volunteers came up all along the fence, self-seeded from the neighbor’s flowerbed on the other side. I’m going to leave them and weed around them.

I followed through on succession planting the French breakfast radishes and direct sowed kale, oregano, and seed potatoes. Also transplanted some fern roots by the shed.

I had to restart rosemary, lemongrass, tomatillos, Vietnamese peppers, Italian basil, Thai basil, and celeriac. The neighbor’s dog ate those seedlings while we were gone (neighbor was watching and watering the seedlings for us.) Now that those are a month behind, I’m going to buy a grow light to help them along.

I’m not mowing for a couple more weeks even though the grass is getting long because I want to save the violets and dandelions for the bees. 🐝

Neighbors on both sides of us are cutting (or have cut) down large trees, just on their side of the lot lines this month. I know they are their trees, but I can’t help but feel frustrated that 50% of the trees providing shade to our yard are going to be gone this summer. I have a good relationship with the neighbors, but we might need to feud. See: The Lorax.

Looks like I’ll be putting in some new trees this year.

We spent Easter and the following week in Ohio with our family. It was great to see them and even better to see Charlie with them.

I spent a day in Holmes County, Ohio, with my parents and saw something new: Amish (or Mennonites, difficult for me to tell the difference from dress alone) riding ebikes. Men, women, and children, typically solo (not riding in groups). This seems to be a recent adoption; three years ago I saw zero Amish on ebikes, but today I saw more ebikes there in rural Ohio than I have in NYC or SF in a single day.

Holmes County, the second largest Amish settlement in the US (Lancaster is the first) is quite hilly, so I can see the big benefit of ebikes there. At first I was surprised to see so many of them because ebikes are relatively expensive, but when compared to the cost of a horse and buggy and how easily they can be charged via diesel generator or solar, they seem like a great investment for getting to and from work. 

Next time I’m down there I intend to hunt down a bike shop and see which kinds are most popular and what kind of adaptations are sold with them.

A couple articles on Amish and ebikes:

• https://amishamerica.com/amish-e-bikes/
• https://thisebikelife.com/e-bikes-overtake-buggies-for-some-amis/Archived Link

I realized I don’t know as much as I’d like to know about the Amish. My family gets most of their firewood from an Amish mill that sells offcuts, and we also have some great Amish-made furniture, but those interactions have been very business-focused. So I put together a reading list to learn more:

• Amish: A Concise Introduction
• The Amish in Their Own Words
  • From the Amish magazine Family LifeArchived Link
• An Amish Paradox: Diversity and Change in the World’s Largest Amish Community
  • All about the Holmes County settlement

You’ve probably seen Jarlsberg cheese at the grocery store. I knew it was from Norway and assumed it was only made there, but I didn’t know that it is also made in Holmes County, Ohio! We drove past the facility during our Amish country excursion.

My parents and I made char siu. We ate the first batch with rice and braised bok choy, then we used the leftovers in fried rice. Always nice to get the wok out. It was pretty good, though I think if it is going to be used in fried rice it needs to have more spice to stand out amongst the other ingredients. But eaten on its own it had plenty of flavor. We grilled it instead of roasting it due to time constraints, but I’ll roast it when I make it next time. Or smoke it with a bit of cherry wood.

Charlie is big enough to sit in the seat on shopping carts! He loves it.

I learned this week that cold weather affects baseball games. The density of the baseball changes, which affects how it interacts with the bat, and it travels differently through cold air, too.

Currently reading

Just finished Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb. Recommended. You know that viral video about wolves changing the Yellowstone landscape? They are only half of the story. Beavers are the other half.

Currently listening to A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage. The greeks cut their wine with water. Should we be doing that? 🤔

Around the web

AI

How DALL-E 2 Actually Works

How does OpenAI’s groundbreaking DALL-E 2 model actually work? Check out this detailed guide to learn everything you need to know about DALL-E 2.

www.assemblyai.com

A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says? – The New York Times

OpenAI’s GPT-3 and other neural nets can now write original prose with mind-boggling fluency — a development that could have profound implications for the future.

www.nytimes.com

Blogging

I like this idea of a public river of RSS content. Here’s my own personal river. This is the flow of content from the 280 feeds I follow: /feeds.

My personal feed is generated using a Google Docs script because it’s a technology I know how to code. It’s creaking at this point and I need something more robust – you know using a technology more advanced than a hyperlinked spreadsheet.

Turns out Dave Winer has the technology. River5 is his tech stack using NodeJS t

I like the idea of curated sets of feeds and I can subscribe to and changes to the source propagate down to me. I regularly publish an XML file of the feeds I subscribe to so others can check them out.

Publish Something Online

How to make things that live on the internet.

publishsomethingonline.com

Nice layout for a curated list of resources.

Our radishes sprouted!

We discovered that Charlie really likes oranges. He also discovered how to pull himself up to standing this week!

I started a new batch of orange bitters, trying to improve upon the first batch I made a few years ago:

• Doubled the amount of orange peel
• Added more bitter botanicals (wild cherry bark, cassia, quassia)
• Removed the husk from cardamom pods and only added the seeds (which is what Gaz Regan did)
• I’m also planning on replacing the water with fresh orange juice

I posted the recipe and my notes in my digital garden.

Also sprouting in the digital garden: Gathering notes on making amaro.

I made some traditional Easter Cheese with Grandma.

I tried to convince Grandma to cook the eggs very slowly to achieve more of a custardy consistency, but she wouldn’t have it. I think I may riff on this next year and make an Easter custard, and add some cinnamon and nutmeg, as some recipes call for.

I ate it on rye bread with ham and kielbasa. It was pretty good!

Reading:

Termination Shock (2021 edition) | Open Library

Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson, unknown edition,

openlibrary.org

Eager (Mar 08, 2019 edition) | Open Library

Eager by Ben Goldfarb, unknown edition,

openlibrary.org

Ben Goldfarb is pretty funny in Eager. If you are into wildlife conservation, it is recommended.

Our indoor seedlings are doing great and Charlie and I got out in the garden on Friday to direct sow some seeds: French breakfast radishes, peas, slo-bolt cilantro, borage, calendula, black eyed susans, hibiscus, moon flowers, and a pollinator wildflower mix. This year I’m planning on succession planting things like radishes, cilantro, and basil so we have a regular supply of them. Since I never actually followed through with it in previous years because I forgot, I added reminders to my calendar this year.

Speaking of gardening, I came across this great idea for keeping tomato plant roots consistently moist:

Charlie is doing swimming lessons now! 🏊‍♂️

One of our friends let us know that the town we live in has swimming lessons for babies 6mo+ for a very reasonable fee at the local middle school once a week. The first week it was all new and Charlie was very unsure. The second week he warmed up to it and had more fun. The third week he took right to it and started kicking in the water, splashing, holding onto the wall when he was supposed to, and was comfortable with the floating exercises.

I took Charlie to his first art museum this week, Dia:Beacon.

We also explored some indie bookstores we haven’t been to before. Someone put together a site and bookmark with the indie bookstores in the Hudson ValleyArchived Link. We’ve been to half of the list just by taking day trips to the various towns and stumbling upon them. The one we are missing are primarily the northern ones, since those are a few hours away.

Three great used bookstore finds from Montgomery Book Exchange:

1. A hardcover collection of Aldous Huxley’s essays for $1
2. First edition hardcover of James Michener’s Hawaii with the dust jacket in great condition
3. Books 1-10 of the Wheel of Time series as a $10 “get it out of here” grab bag.

I always enjoy visits to Dia:Beacon, but the standout from this week’s visit was seeing Marian Zazeela’s drawings. I’m sorry to say that I hadn’t encountered her work before now!

Zazeela plays with themes of abstract letters, words, and calligraphy, borders, symmetry, patterns, and repeating (and non-repeating) forms.

Here are some pieces I felt drawn to:

The gift shop had a book of Zazeela’s collected drawings from 1962-1991, which I immediately bought. There are a lot more great pieces in there.

Though Zazeela did her work by hand, a lot of her work is a precursor to some of the ideas being explored in the generative art space today with asemic writing and poetry, autoglyphs, and flow fields.

The generative art community tends to focus on early digital art pioneers like Michael Noll and Vera Molnar, but there were also similar themes being explored by artists like Marian Zazeela in physical mediums during the same timeframe.

I recently learned that Zazeela and her husband, composer La Monte Young, perform in their NYC loft, La Monte performing the music and Zazeela doing a light show that she pioneered. I want to go see it!

Another thing I discovered at Dia:Beacon this week: Behind each of the Sol LeWitt Isometric figure wall drawings (411 B, D, and E), there is a barely noticeable grid in a faint pencil line to help the drafters line the piece up.

I’d seen these particular drawings at Dia:Beacon before, but I hadn’t noticed that. It gives us insight into the process of drawing the piece: Lay the grid, subdivide it, subdivide it again, decide on grouping and colors, then fill it in.

This procedural approach is what makes LeWitt’s wall drawings so fun to recreate digitally (and generatively!)

Another observation from spending the day looking at art at Dia:Beacon: Look at the dates. Pieces with similar themes sometimes have years, even decades, separating them. Are you stuck on your current art project? Shelve it for a while and come back later with a fresh perspective.

I’ve been searching for one of these posters since I first saw it at a library two years ago. I finally jumped through a phone tree for the NY Bridge Authority and found the person who sells them. This week Charlie and I drove to their HQ in Highland (next to the Mid Hudson Bridge) and got one!

In the shop this week: Prototyping wooden toys for Charlie and trying to figure out how to speed up the production process.

🌱 Recently sprouted in the digital garden:

• Friends often ask me for NYC recommendations, so I’ve taken the various tourist recs I’ve given and put them all in one place.
  • While putting together this list, I learned that CW Pencil Enterprise closed, which makes me sad. I loved that little store. It was so unique! Thankfully they are keeping their blog up at https://www.cwpencils.com/ – Go check out the TED video from CW about the history of the pencil.
• Some food ideas I needed to get out of my head
• Research for homemade Pimm’s

I stumbled across Jim Nielson’s fantastic Readlists reboot, h/t Ton Zijlstra. I love this. I used the original Readlists a lot and am happy to have a similar tool back.

I made two readlists so far: John McPhee‘s Tabula Rasa series and a sampling of 30 Kevin Kelly articles I want to read. I’m collecting the ongoing readlists I make in my digital garden and you can download the epub or mobi to read or json to remix there: https://notes.cagrimmett.com/readlists/

Books Read By

Discover what the world’s most interesting people are reading. Books Read By is where ambitious readers can find their next read.

www.booksread.by

Cool site with collections of what people are reading or recommend. Reminds me a lot of https://usesthis.com, but for books instead of tools.

I finished the Stewart Brand bio by John Markoff this week. Recommended. I’d love to see a collection of Brand’s essays from his long career, preferably edited by Brand himself. And it definitely needs to be titled “Floating Upstream” or “Brand On Brand.”

Amanda and I are enjoying The Gilded Age on HBO. Agnes van Rhijn and Bannister the butler are our favorite characters.

I’ve been on a mission to use Amazon less, so I successfully got all of the books I had on my wishlist out into a spreadsheet. There were over 500 (I’ve been a Prime member since 2010.) The process was: Open the print view of the wishlist, which displays as an HTML table. You can copy and paste that into a spreadsheet, then use the text -> columns functionality to split columns by “by” and “(” to get the titles and authors into separate columns.

Next step is to get this wishlist and my own reading list into Open Library. I’ve been using my own custom post type here on my site, but I want something a little easier to use that pulls in more info about the book, and Open Library by the Internet Archive is a great alternative to Goodreads (owned by Amazon, no API.) Open Library has an API, so I just need to figure out the right sequence of calls to the search and bookshelf endpoints to put the various books where I want them. Then I’ll be able to query they API and display the books on my own site.

Since I’m doing so much work in my Digital Garden these days, I need to set up a script to pull one backup each week and store it locally. Pressable does a great job with the backups, but I’d like to keep one offline. Looks like this is possible with the Pressable API GET /sites/{site_id}/backups/{backup_id}, so I just need to set up a cron job to manage it.

So, it is Saturday morning and I haven’t written a thing for this week’s update. I usually collect notes in a draft throughout the week, but not this week. Thankfully Charlie’s naps have been longer and I should have time to knock something out.

Fingers crossed that this past week was the last 20F cold snap of the season. This week I did maintenance on the elevated beds—leveled them, added brackets to support the bottom, loosened the soil, and added compost, soil, and fertilizer. I think I’m going to sow radishes, dill, and peas this week.

Forsythias are starting to bloom! I’d love to take the guideboat out on the Hudson and try to catch some striped bass (they start to run when the forsythias bloom), but I don’t think that is going to happen this year. Maybe next year.

After a 5 year hiatus, I’m getting back into curing meat. I cured and smoked some pastrami and tasso ham this week. Both turned out pretty good! Next I’m planning on getting a pork belly and curing pancetta. I’m using the Ruhlman/Polcyn Charcuterie book for the base techniques, but usually modifying the spices.

Cooked some latkes this week with butternut squash instead of potatoes because a friend with Crohn’s disease came over for dinner. I used almond flour and egg as the binder, and shredded the butternut squash and the onion with the shedder attachment in the food processor. Instead of frying them on the stove, I baked them on sheet pans in the oven. They turned out better than expected!

We made more food for Charlie this week: Mango and strawberry puree to mix with his morning yogurt (the little guy almost refuses to drink milk in the mornings now, preferring yogurt for breakfast), and pear/spinach for lunch/dinner.

We’ve also been feeding him what we eat for dinner: Some chunky tomato sauce when we had spaghetti and meatballs, mashed up beans and polenta, and butternut squash latkes. We’ve also been taking some of the veggies we cook with and steaming them for him (asparagus, carrots, yellow squash.)

I heard about a new Sol LeWitt exhibition at Williams College in MA. It shows ~200 of his prints, which I’ve not seen many of. Most exhibitions focus on his sculptures or wall drawings. We are going to take a drive up there in a couple weeks!

Strict Beauty: Sol LeWitt Prints – Williams College Museum of Art

WCMA sparks new ways of thinking about art and the visual world through its innovative exhibitions, programs, publications and projects.

artmuseum.williams.edu

I’m currently reading Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock and listening to both The Valley of Horses by Jean M. Auel and Whole Earth, The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff.

From around the web

An area of personal interest: How do we get more people blogging? Tom Critchlow offers some ideas:

The idea is to make a blogging accelerator. Only you don’t call it anything to do with blogging. Instead you just make it an interesting project that people engage in, with a by-product being writing up the project online.

The thesis is this: don’t tell people they should be blogging or explain to them why to blog but instead trick them into writing online and show them how the magic works. Get them to feel it for themselves.

What are your learning questions?

Similarly, a Learning Question is designed to encourage a full and meaningful enquiry. It’s more about provoking a process of learning than about finding an answer, but if you do seek an answer it must be one that incorporates your growing knowledge and personal perspective.

Rich Tabor published his Gutenberg blocks on GitHub. I’ve found them helpful as a learning tool, especially since he made a block that does the same thing that I made a block for: Modified dates on posts. Except that his works in FSE and mine does not. I’m rewriting mine soon using his approach to making the block dynamic as inspiration.

I’ve been impressed with Marcus Burnette‘s ability to spin up useful Chrome extensions for various online tasks. We are both moderators for the WordPress Photo directory, for which he’s already made a couple extensions to add some extra functionality and add favorites.

Speaking of Chrome extensions, I’ve been using Quotebacks to save and embed quotes from articles I read. Check them out above!

What can I build into a Chrome extension to make my life better?

Update on the seeds I posted about planting last week: Kale, Black Vernissage tomatoes, Cherokee Purple tomatoes, Ten Fingers of Naples tomatoes, Milkweed, and Hollyhock have already sprouted.

We have another cold snap coming early next week that will probably include frost, so I’ve held off on direct sowing radishes, peas, and dill. I’ll probably do that late next week after doing a bit of maintenance on the garden beds and adding some soil, compost, and fertilizer to them.

🐸 Frog fact of the week 🐸: Did you know there is a different word for hibernation in cold-blooded creatures? It is called brumation. Hibernation refers to periods of dormancy in warm-blooded creatures (endotherms).

I used the Merlin Bird ID app this week to identify a bird that I couldn’t see by its song. I’m terrible at identifying birdsongs, and I want to get better. This app is really good.

Merlin Bird ID – Free, instant bird identification help and guide for thousands of birds – Identify the birds you see

merlin.allaboutbirds.org

Charlie has been sleeping longer during the night this week, which has been pretty nice. He got to try a swing this week, he ate some new foods (fresh mango, polenta, tomatoes with cranberry beans), and he worked with me outside.

I made and minted some pixel art on 8bidou late one night this week. Not usually my style, but it was fun!

I also turned a dry vase on the lathe.

I haven’t done a lot of sewing other than sewing the ballistic nylon together for the kayaks and guideboat, but my favorite pair of jeans got a huge split in the crotch and needed to be fixed, so I watched a few YouTube videos about mending splits and I mended them. It isn’t the neatest sewing job, but it is pretty sturdy, and I feel confident in fixing other splits in the future.

I cooked a pretty good, quick one-pot meal this week that I think I’ll make again: Orzo with spinach, peas, mushrooms, shallots, and pancetta.

• Crisp up the diced pancetta.
• Add the shallots and mushrooms and let them soften for a few minutes.
• Add 1lb of orzo with 4 cups of chicken broth.
• Add 1/4 cup cream and 1/4 cup grated parmesan with the peas and spinach.
• Let everything simmer on low, stirring regularly, until the broth is absorbed by the orzo.

I listened to this album for the first time this week and I’m really digging it.

I used to think words needed to have unchanging definitions. Now I don’t think it matters as long as the meaning is understood by both parties communicating. Words are a means to an end: Communication.

My friend Mitchell Earl shared this quote with me that gets at the heart of it:

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

I’m decreasing my usage of Amazon and supporting local indie stores instead. Just canceled all of my Amazon book pre-orders and emailed a local indie bookstore to reserve copies. Three reasons:

1. I’ve been a huge advocate of the indie web, but realized I don’t always carry that independent spirit to where I shop.
2. I want to support what I want to see more of in the world.
3. I like building relationships with local businesses by being a regular.

This is a good article in The Atlantic about MBS, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Long, but good. MBS is likely to become king in the next five years, which is terrifying. On one hand he is opening up the country and modernizing it on multiple fronts (more freedom for women, limiting the power of the clerics), but on the other hand he is quickly slipping into the territory of a brutal dictator (jailing and dismembering dissidents).

Inside the Palace With Mohammed bin Salman – The Atlantic

Asked about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Mohammed bin Salman said, “If that’s the way we did things, Khashoggi would not even be among the top 1,000 people on the list.”

www.theatlantic.com

Two things I highlighted:

“You Americans think there is something strange about a ruler who sends his unqualified son-in-law to conduct international relations,” one Saudi analyst told me. “For us this is completely normal.”

A crown prince with a subtler mind and a gentler soul might have implemented MBS’s reforms without resorting to his brutal methods. But it is pointless to consider policy in a state of childlike fantasy, as if it were possible to conjure some new Saudi monarch by closing your eyes and wishing him into existence. Open your eyes, and MBS will still be there. If he is not, then the man ruling in his place will not be an Arab Dalai Lama. He will be, at best, a member of the unsustainable Saudi old guard, and at worst one of the big beards of jihadism, now richer than Croesus and ready to fight. As MBS told me, to justify the Ritz operation, “It’s sometimes a decision between bad and worse.”

I’ve been reading and enjoying artist interviews. Here are some quotes I saved this week.

The interconnectivity between the natural and the digital is an important part of our lives, and will become even more important as we shift further into digital spaces. We find connection in the calmness and beauty of the natural world, and we must maintain that connection even while living more of our life in the digital realm. 

This project is the result of an exploration that did not succeed. I was initially studying the possibility of creating a fur or hair coat effect. This exploration gave birth to a ball of fur with eyes. I didn’t really like the direction taken by the project. I explored the possibilities offered by the existing code, turned the hair into grass and tried to simulate some perspective effect. The result was not yet worthy. Adding a circle to test the interaction of the grass with objects was the trigger. The contrast between the circle (simple shape with a smooth and soft aspect) and the grass (repetitive and pointed shape) appealed to me right away. This was the starting point to create a surreal world around these 2 elements.

Nothing is ever finished, everything is always a work in progress. Finished to me is where I’m happy to let it go and let others interact with the token. It’s finished where it reaches the state where it’s mature enough to make small mistakes to be interesting enough but is consistent enough to tie together into a single concept and visual output.

I suggest to students that they pick three artworks or artists and then try to smash those styles together, which serves a couple of purposes. If you choose just one artist and then someone goes, “You just copied so-and-so”, that’s a feel-bad moment, especially if you attempted to pretend it wasn’t true! But if you mash together three different styles, you can happily say, “I was influenced by these three artists”, which is an excellent way of doing art. You’re most likely pushing one of the styles forwards in a new direction, even if just by a little bit, which is how traditional art works, and you’re acknowledging your inspiration. And in the process, you’ll probably move away from those sources anyway as you explore your own take on the whole thing.

I don’t think I ever mention on the blog that I started an artist interview site over at Behind the Art.

Behind the Art – Interviews with NFT artists

behindtheart.xyz

I’ve only done five interviews so far but I plan to do more in the future. If you are interested in interviewing digital artists and want to publish them on the site, send me an email.

Every week I’m concerned that I’ll have nothing to write about, and every week I produce at least 1000 words for these updates.

Big week for Charlie. His first tooth is coming in and he started saying “Da da” in relation to me. He still doesn’t ever want to be put down, but he is interacting with us so much more than he did a few months ago. It is so fun watching him learn and grow.

I made some food for Charlie over the weekend and he seems to be enjoying it. Strawberry/mango purée, spinach/apple purée, and kale/pear purée. I chopped it up and cooked it down on the stove a bit, then puréed it with the stick blender, leaving a little bit of texture for him. I put a splash of lemon juice in each one to help with preservation. We mix the strawberry/mango with yogurt for breakfast and leave the stuff with greens for lunch and dinner. Charlie seems to like the kale/pear more than the apple/spinach. I tasted both and I think I need to add a higher fruit to greens ratio next time.

Charlie also seems to enjoy cooked carrot sticks and little cherrio-shaped puffs made from sweet potato and carrot. Small things that he can feed himself help with this dexterity.

Amanda and I have talked in the abstract in the past about maybe homeschooling our kids and that she thinks I’d make a good teacher. Now that we have Charlie, that possibility is a lot more tangible than it was before, and it is starting to seem like a good idea. What if I were to start a school for Charlie and his friends? Can we make it work financially? I’d have to quit my job. Could I turn the curriculum I develop into a product? Would anyone else want me to teach their kids? I’m starting to collect books on early childhood education and learning. Send me your non-obvious recommendations.

Mint, peonies, poppies, hostas, tiger lillies, blueberries, and forsythias are all showing signs of life. We started some seeds this week (check out what we started on the physical garden page of my digital garden) and pruned some trees and bushes around the yard. It is nice to be able to work outside again, and it is great having a little buddy tagging along.

Great week for book purchases, some used and some new:

• Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, a great old Modern Library copy with a nice dust jacket
• Escher on Escher, Exploring the Infinite, a collection of some of Escher’s lectures, articles, and letters about his work
• The Best of Edward Abbey, a collection of what Abbey considered his best work.
• River of Mountains by Peter Laurie, a book about the author’s canoe journey down the Hudson River, a journey I’d also like to make with my son when he is older.
• Can’t and Won’t, a collection of very short stories by Lydia Davis
• Conscious by Annaka Harris, a primer on the mind
• Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, on how to think about the time we each have on this earth
• The World-ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry – I haven’t ready much Berry, and someone on Twitter told me this is the place to start with his non-fiction. I found a good hardcover copy on eBay.

It dawned on me tonight why I read so much fiction these days. I have to be very analytical at work and rarely get to engage my imagination. Fiction engages my imagination. In high school and college, I read almost exclusively non-fiction. There was plenty else going on to engage my imagination. Once I started working full time, I started reading more fiction, and the ratio has shifted more toward fiction each year since. I’m not into gaming, and while I’ll watch movies or shows, they don’t really engross me like reading does. So reading stories is my imaginative outlet. But since I’m on paternity leave right now and doing less analytical stuff, I’m feeling the pull to read more non-fiction again. Not sure what I’m going to pick up first. Maybe Julia Galef’s Scout Mindset, Annaka Harris’s Conscious, or Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks.

I finished another Wodehouse book (The Inimitable Jeeves) and am now reading Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, published in 1919. The book is a series of vignettes of small town Ohio live and the people who live it. This single paragraph paints such a picture of the character, place, and time.

The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it. The hands alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away and looked with amazement at the quiet inexpressive hands of other men who worked beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy teams on country roads.

Winesburg, Ohio, page 9 – Sherwood Anderson

Mitchell Earl told me that he stopped tracking the books he finishes, instead only tracking the books he starts. It is useful to reflect on a personal progression of ideas and learning while remaining flexible enough to put books down when they no longer serve you. I like this. I start many more books than I finish, but I haven’t catalogued them. It would be useful to, though! I think I’ll start.

Jackson Bierfeldt is posting weekly updates!Archived Link 👏

Are you posting regular updates? Link your blog below in the comments. Bonus points if you have an RSS feed I can subscribe to. If you’ve been wanting to start a blog, now is a great time. Email me and I’ll help you get started.

I’m getting an unreasonable amount of ads on Instagram for various hair loss reversal products. I have no intention of ever purchasing them. Hair loss and hair color change are a normal part of aging, and I think it is important to age gracefully and accept it. Trying to artificially cover it up is an uphill battle. I’m still working on the acceptance part personally–it isn’t easy to find new hairstyles that work with your head and face, and it is disconcerting to have ads and people in real life regularly point out that your hair is rapidly thinning, as if I don’t already know. But such is life, and one must accept it.

fxhash is doing their public launch on April 1, and part of that launch includes a contract update that will make all beta projects no longer mintable, essentially burning all unminted tokens. Since my two generative art projects on fxhash weren’t minted out yet, I decided to make them free and see if people would mint more of them. They did! Both projects minted out. Here are the final mints for each:

A couple things I learned from these projects and some self-criticism: I don’t think I added enough variation and I weighted some of the variations I did add way too low. This made the average output less exciting than it should have been. Each piece should have been interesting and collectable on its own, not just some of the outputs. I think I was excited to mint a token and rushed these. I should have spent a couple weeks iterating them. I’ll take this into account with my next project!

I created two pieces just for the collectors of those two projects and gifted them each an edition:

I went with orange because Pattern plus plus had a rare orange variation that didn’t show up in any of the mints, but I think it would be fun to make orange a reserved color in my future art and make all “thank you” or special pieces orange.

I made some WordPress Block Art, inspired by the Museum of Block Art! You can see the live rendering on my Block Art page, but here are some screenshots:

More signs of spring: Crocuses are blooming, early signs are showing of the very beginnings of peonies, and when it was 60F one night I could hear the frogs in the woods at dusk.

It is time to start seeds for tomatoes, peppers, and tomatillos. We plan to start ours this weekend. Better get out Clyde’s Garden Planner. Speaking of starting seeds, I think I’m going to use the coffee cherries from my coffee plants to start new ones. There aren’t enough to roast, so perhaps I’ll grow some more plants and give them to friends.

I reconnected with some old friends this week. I had three different calls with friends on three different days and came out of each feeling lighter. If anyone else wants to catch up, email me and let’s video chat over lunch!

This has been a tough week for Charlie. According to Wonder Weeks he should be going through a leap where he has a better understanding of relationships and has a lot of separation anxiety when we are not holding him. During particularly tough days, I’m reminding myself of something Amanda said recently: “He can be tiring but we’re all still figuring each other out. What matters is the way he lays his sleepy head on your shoulder or looks up at you with his gummy smile.”

We had some nice walks this week. He is able to sit up on his own in the stroller without the car seat now, so he can face forward and see the world. He loves it.

The Indie Microblogging book is live! I backed the Kickstarter in 2017 and was part of the micro.blog community for a couple years. I stopped posting to my microblog when I consolidated everything under one URL, but now I’m thinking it is time to set one back up. I think I’ll use Jeremy Felt’s Shortnotes plugin to power it. Before I do, I’m going to see if there is a filter to change the name. I already call my digital garden Chuck’s Notes, so I’d want to call this something different.

Speaking of shortform content, Instagram is getting worse and worse. I’m getting tons of ads and sponsored content, and the targeting is completely off for me. I’m getting ads for women’s clothing, sporting goods, meme accounts, and crappy TV shows that I’ll never watch. Twitter was pretty bad until I started using Tweetbot, a third party Twitter app, which allowed me to go back to the chronological timeline without ads or “recommended” content.

And speaking of things getting worse, I’ve been inundated with spam calls for student loan scams lately. I don’t even have student loans! I’m thinking about finding an app to send all numbers not in my contacts to voicemail.

The Seatbelt Rule for Judgement from Danny Guo (h/t the Studio Neat Gazette):

My willingness to judge something should be proportional to how much I know about it.

Danny Guo

John McPhee has published 29 books, regularly writes for the New Yorker, and won a Pulitzer Prize, yet he rarely writes more than 500 words a day. (h/t Cal Newport and Eric Davis)

“People say to me, ‘Oh, you’re so prolific’…God, it doesn’t feel like it—nothing like it.  But, you know, you put an ounce in a bucket each day, you get a quart.”

John McPhee

This Turmeric-Black Pepper Chicken With Asparagus was really tasty and fast to make. We ate it over quinoa with a side salad. We will definitely make it again!

This cinnamon bread recipe is pretty simple to make and is tasty. I’m going to experiment with adding a little sugar to the dough and trying out some different filling variations to dial it in. I didn’t use an egg wash to bind the filling because we had eaten the last of our eggs an hour before for breakfast, but just water worked okay and the loaf didn’t have any gapping problems.

My cousin Matt got me a bottle of Weller Special Reserve for Christmas, which I’m enjoying. Since it is made at the same distillery as Pappy van Winkle, rumor has it that Weller Special Reserve is bottled from the barrels that didn’t quite make the cut for Pappy 12 year, but with a price point $50 lower.

We’ve been drinking Calvados since 2014, when Jeffrey at Rochambeau persuaded me to buy a bottle, but like all types of French alcohol, I’ve been confused by the various AOC classifications for Calvados. Imbibe recently published an explainerArchived Link, and I was pleased to find that we have a bottle of Pays d’Auge in the cabinet.

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Wok book is out! As with all things Kenji, it is highly recommended. I’ve cooked more meals from his recipes than any other author. I’ve already leafed though this book and have half a dozen things I want to try out.

Speaking of J. Kenji, my friend Jon asked me what sodium nitrite does in the corned beef brine, and a Serious Eats article from Kenji answered the question for me:

So how do nitrites work to preserve meat? First off, they are flavorful. They give hams and corned beef their characteristic tang. It also inhibits the growth of the few types of bacteria that are tolerant of salty environments. Finally, it helps preserve color.

We all know that meat turns from red to brown as the main muscle pigment myoglobin oxidizes and turns into metmyoglobin, a reaction catalyzed by free iron atoms in the meat, right? (I mean, who doesn’t?). Well, when nitrites react with meat, they form nitric oxide (that’s nitrogen with but a single oxygen molecule), which in turn bonds with the iron, thus preventing the reaction that transforms myoglobin into metmyoglobin, allowing beef (or ham) to retain its deep pink color, even when fully cooked.

Interestingly enough, this is the exact same reaction that occurs with barbecued meats to form the pink smoke ring around their edges. But that’s neither here nor there.

https://www.seriouseats.com/homemade-corned-beef-brisket-with-potatoes-cabbage-carrots-recipe

The same article also suggests dry curing corned beef instead of brining it. I’m already brining mine, but I might dry cure it next year!

I wrote a master study tutorial for one of Vera Molnar’s works using p5.js this week. I intend to do more of these because it helps me learn p5 and it helps other people who are getting started, too. Other artists I want to explore: Sol LeWitt, Herbert Franke, Frieder Nake, Michael Noll, Georg Nees, Josef Albers, Manfred Mohr.

Minified javascript is a pet peeve of mine. It is kind of like DRM for code: You can get around it, but it is annoying and takes lots of time to reverse the function name assignments. I’ve learned so much from reading other people’s code that I feel like I need to do other people a solid and not minify my own. Whenever you can, ship your unminified code to production. When build tools make that prohibitive, share the unminified version on GitHub.

Speaking of poking around in other people’s code, here is a great explainer on how to use undocumented APIs from Julia Evans.

12ft.io is a great resource for getting around paywalls. It pulls the cached version from Google’s crawlers. Brilliant.

What I’m listening to this week:

I’m beginning my thirty-third year. You can read some reflections on my thirty-second year and the directions I’d like my thirty-third year to take.

Regular reminder for myself: Remember the days when you wished for what you have now. It helps reframe your current feelings and helps you take a longer view.

I met up for coffee this week with an acquaintance I first met 10 years ago when I first moved to New York. I usually ran into him once or twice a year and chatted for a moment, but that was the extent of it. We always knew we had some overlapping interests, but now it seems like our interests are even more similar than we thought. Ten years later a real friendship is forming and we are planning on working on a project together. I’m glad we loosely stayed in touch. There is a time and season for all things.

Whenever I feel myself getting frustrated with my son being cranky, I sit down and read one of his books to him. He loves it and it never fails to soften my hardened heart.

I edited the RSS feed for my digital garden to show pages instead of posts, so you can now subscribe to new content from my digital garden. I also added a JSON feed if you are into that sort of thing.

I made my first Gutenberg blocks this week! I used George Stephanis’s Your First Block gist as a guide instead of some of the more complex starters out there since it is stripped down and helped me get the hang of how it works. The two blocks I made output a post’s published date and last modified date with an optional editable label in the sidebar. I know the Gutenberg plugin already has a Post Date block with more options, but this simple use case was a good way for me to wrap my head around how to create blocks, query the WordPress database using JavaScript rather than PHP, and manipulate/output data with blocks. Hopefully more blocks to come!

GitHub – cagrimmett/meta-dates-blocks: WordPress blocks to output published and last updated dates

WordPress blocks to output published and last updated dates – GitHub – cagrimmett/meta-dates-blocks: WordPress blocks to output published and last updated dates

github.com

Good news: The blocks work in regular pages and posts. Bad news: They don’t work in FSE. They way I’m pulling the date attributes doesn’t seem to work with FSE templates, returning NaN undefined NaN, and I haven’t figured it out yet. As soon as I figure that out, I plan to use these blocks in my digital garden so that it is easy to tell if a particular note is being tended to or not.

I enjoyed this profile of Wendell Berry in the New Yorker, though I’m vexed by the given title. I suppose it is another example of a clickbait headline, as the piece is clearly a profile and not an advice column from Berry.

One idea from the Chuck Klosterman episode of Conversations with Tyler that I’m thinking a lot about this week is now that there is less scarcity in access to music (music is readily available to stream now vs needing to go buy maybe 1-2 cds every two weeks), we build less of an identity around the music we listen to now than we did in the past. If someone can see who we are by glancing at our social feeds, there is less of a need to signal that identity via our music choices, which frees us up to have a wider variety of musical interests on average now.

Wired Magazine had some wise words this week: “politicians aren’t meant to be idolized, even in their finest hours.” It does look like Zelensky is doing a pretty good job in the face of overwhelming adversity, including multiple assassination attempts. I think he even deserves praise for leading his people in this tough time. But he should not be idolized and turned into a meme. Doing so will make it harder to hold him and his government accountable once this war is over. In Zelensky’s own words:

“I do not want my picture in your offices. The president is not an icon, an idol or a portrait. Hang your kids’ photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision.”

Zelensky’s inauguration speech, 2019

I cooked some “outside of our norm” meals this week:

• Fried tostones from green plantains (double fried them – unsmashed first, then smashed), topped with mojo-marinated pulled pork that I cooked in the Instant Pot, avocado, and curtido.
  • I used some of the mojo pork to make Cubano sandwiches later in the week.
• A King Cake and made Cajun Gumbo for Fat Tuesday.
  • The King Cake recipe is suitable for almost any cool-weather holiday dessert if you change the icing and decoration. I may make one for Christmas or Easter!
• Yellow split pea soup, flavored with dill and fennel seeds. I make a lot of lentil soup, but this is the first time I’ve made split pea soup because I had a housemate in college that would simmer split pea soup for three days straight and the smell completely turned me off of the stuff for years.

Speaking of cooking, I have no fewer than four different repositories of saved online recipes that I’d like to make better use of. If it is silo’d in one app (like Paprika) that I might not have on a particular advice, I won’t use it. So I’m thinking through ways to organize this in my digital garden. Ideas welcome (comments, email, etc)!