Small seasons update: The beginnings of crocuses started popping up in the front flowerbeds, trees are starting to bud out, and taps are in the sugar maple trees.

Thanks to a reminder on Instagram from my friend Erin Carlson, I sowed poppy seeds during nap time this week. Hungarian Blue Breadseed and Icelandic Grey poppies. I’m hoping to get enough seeds from the Hungarian Blue to bake with this year.

Variable late winter/early spring weather this week. 60F one day, then snow and ice the next. We didn’t get as much snow as predicted, but we did get ice, so I went out and filled up the bird feeders. As I learned from Richard Prum this week, even though birds do fine even in negative temperatures if they have enough food, they can die in a single night without access to food (like after an ice storm).

I had my first couple day stretch as a solo dad while Amanda traveled for work this week. It was tiring but Charlie and I did alright. There was nothing that I haven’t done dozens of times solo over the past six months—the only difference is that there were no breaks for a couple days. I’m learning to rest in the in-between moments and blog during naps. 90% of these posts are written during naps, the other 10% after bedtime.

I went out for a 15 minute errand and popped a tire on a pothole this week. What a pain. I didn’t bring milk for Charlie because I thought we’d only be gone 15 minutes. He cried the whole time. Thankfully it was a sunny day, I had a tarp and furniture blanket in the car to kneel on, and the tire change only took me 30 mins, and I already had an appointment at the dealership the same day for an inspection, so I had a new tire put on, too. I’ll never leave the house again without a bottle, not even for “quick errands.”

Never despair; Nothing without labour

https://blog.lostartpress.com/2018/12/01/dont-despair-nothing-without-labour/

I’ve added more content to my digital garden. Next I need to figure out how to use pages as the source for the RSS feed and create some meta blocks for published date and last updated date.

I’ve been following along over at IndieWeb with the personal libraries project. Links:

• https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/02/indieweb-peronal-libraries-popup-session/
• https://events.indieweb.org/2022/02/personal-libraries-pop-up-session-Wax8N17zQuY0
• https://indieweb.org/personal_library
• https://www.manton.org/2022/02/20/personal-libraries-next.html
• https://maggieappleton.com/interoperable-libraries

That gives me three ideas for my own Reading page:

1. Revive the RSS and JSON feeds
2. Connect the post type to the Open Library API to pull in info and link out
3. Add a “to read” list to get my wishlist out of Amazon and reduce my Amazon purchasing

I started brining corned beef for St. Patrick’s Day. I have two briskets in the soup and one will get turned into pastrami. I’m not Irish and not really into St. Patrick’s Day, but I will take any excuse to eat corned beef.

My heart goes out to Ukrainians. I can’t imagine my life getting completely disrupted by war. The NICU babies getting moved to a bomb shelter really got me. When Charlie was in the NICU things were already scary and difficult enough. I’m very thankful (and often take for granted) that we live in a place with political stability and my family is safe. I’m holding Charlie a bit closer this week. Putin must be dethroned and defenestrated.

I found this 360° view of how we got to the current war in Ukraine from Grid to be very informative. I’m appreciating context a lot more these days. Nothing is as straightforward as it seems and context matters for getting a better understanding. Beyond the obvious attacks and aggression, two things worry me about this war: The rampant online misinformation and the cyber attacks that preceded the invasion, both of which seems to be Russia-sponsored.

Speaking of context, one thing to keep in mind before demonizing Russian soldiers en masse is that Russia has mandatory conscription, punishable by jail time for non-compliance. There is a high likelihood that the young Russian men on the ground in Ukraine didn’t enlist voluntarily and don’t want to be there. They have mothers, partners, and children weeping for them, just like the defenders of Ukraine have. War is such a tragedy.

It is difficult to get a sense of how popular the war is in Russia without a free press there (no one doing that unbiased reporting and data collection, and misinformation being spread there by official sources to garner support.)

I am very glad that Trump isn’t the one making decisions in the White House about what to do right now. I’m not a huge Biden fan, but he is more stable and clear-headed than Trump, who I regard as a loose cannon. Plus, Trump’s ties to and support of Putin are worrying to say the least.

The Russian cyberattacks bring up something that has been on my mind recently: How does one personally prepare for a massive internet outage? Cyberattacks could bring outages, as could coronal mass ejections. I’m not a “prepper”, but I do think it is worth trying to mitigate the downsides of the three biggest ways the Internet affects my day-to-day life:

1. My income (I build websites!)
   1. I can do physical jobs for a bit, I’m pretty handy
2. Access to money (Can’t swipe a credit card if the pipes are down)
   1. Mitigate by storing some physical money somewhere
3. Access to information
   1. Mitigate by investing in more offline reference resources, mostly books. I’ve already made a start here, but there is more I can do.

Who else is thinking about this? 🤔

I’m reading and appreciating Matt Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan a lot more than I used to. I don’t always agree with them, but I find them to be clear thinkers who are willing to take intellectual risks and update their priors based on new evidence.

What I’m listening to this week:

• Sylvan Esso’s What Now
• Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American
• Mutemath’s Armistice
• Andrés Segovia

Last week I posted about writing descriptions of the small seasons in the lower Hudson Valley. I now have a page going for that with two entries. You can find that over at https://notes.cagrimmett.com/outdoors/small-seasons-of-the-lower-hudson-valley/

Ice melts, daffodils start to pop out of the ground. Stink bugs wake up.

Small Seasons of the Lower Hudson Valley

Speaking of: After kicking the idea around in my head for over a year, I planted a digital garden. You can check it out at https://notes.cagrimmett.com. It is very much in its early stages and I have a lot to add, both in terms of functionality and content.

The coffee cherries on my coffee plant are starting to ripen! This is the first time in the 10 years that I’ve had this plant that it has produced cherries. I’m very excited!

The local bakery, Signal Fire Bread, has baguettes each week now, so I picked some up this week and made jambon buerre sandwiches for lunch (ham, butter, and homemade pickles, though I also added cheese and mustard because I’m an American, after all.) I think this might turn into a regular Friday occurrence.

I’m starting to sway back and forth to the rhythms of paternity leave. I’m getting more used to working around naps and Charlie started rolling back to front consistently this week, slept completely through the night once, and developed a new habit of blowing raspberries. He is eating more real foods now, including yogurt, banana, sweet potato, carrot, and apple sauce.

My 41 day Wordle streak ended with Wordle 244, then it took me 6 tries with #245, the first time it has taken me 6. I’m going downhill.

Twitter recently added a feature that prompts you to read an article before sharing. Good on Twitter for adding it.

I got it when I was about to share a comment about the Neuralink animal testing article and not wanting to give a computer access to my brain. But when I read the article I realized that I hadn’t considered the possibilities it opens up for people with disabilities. Animal trials still suck, but I’m not as anti-computer/brain interfaces as I was before reading the article.

I posted a guide to understanding my favorite podcast, Conversations with Tyler.

The WordPress.org photo directory I posted about last week is now a proper Make team! I joined a call with some of the folks on Friday to discuss the path forward with the photo directory and am excited about being a part of it. It is also cool to see first-hand how the governance and decision-making process works.

I enjoy sketching patterns with p5.js. I saw this one on a door in The Witcher and had to sketch it.

What I’m Reading

• Two posts on creating watercolor-esque graphics with code
  • Tyler Hobbs’s How to Hack a Painting
  • Gorilla Sun’s Making of Vestige
• Chris Hardie’s Unlocking email content into RSS feeds redux with WordPress and Postie
  • Last week I posted about using Feedbin’s email address for newsletters. Chris Hardie’s approach here is convenient for things that should have a public feed but do not, and I’ll keep this in my back pocket for future projects. Chris also had the great idea of using an email address at a domain he controls and aliasing it to the address for a service like Feedly or Feedbin. I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of that, but I’m now switching my newsletter subscriptions over to an address I control and aliasing it to Feedbin.
• Kevin Kelley’s list of Contemporary Heresies. Lots here that would be on my list, too. I should jot down my own soon.
• I really like the Big Here quiz Kevin Kelly posted about, too. I don’t know all of the answers for where I live in Peekskill, but I intend to find out and publish the answers in my digital garden.

It is warm enough again to take Charlie on daily walks in the woods, which I’m excited about. I’m glad to be able to introduce him to nature early. We saw a couple of robins this week. Apparently not all robins migrate, but I haven’t seen others this winter, so I’m taking this sighting as a good sign. We also saw the first skunk cabbages popping up in the low wet areas of the woods. The eagles are out around here too, which typically happens late winter. These are all good signs of spring.

This reminds me of the Small Seasons guide, which I admire and have been brainstorming ways to visualize. I think I’m going to write my own descriptions for these seasons in the lower Hudson Valley and lay them out on a page with illustrative photographs. Maybe it morphs into a small print version, too.

Prior to the Gregorian calendar, farmers in China and Japan broke each year down into 24 sekki or “small seasons.” These seasons didn’t use dates to mark seasons, but instead, they divided up the year by natural phenomena.

https://smallseasons.guide/

Paternity leave is teaching me to slow down, discard schedules, and take things as they come. I usually have multiple irons in the fire and make lots of plans, so this is a big shift. It is going well so far, though. I’m loving all the time with Charlie and having the time to cook more. He loves being involved, so I put him in the carrier facing out and talk to him while we cook, do dishes, laundry, etc.

We are working on sleep training this week, which seems to be going well so far. It was difficult the first couple nights, but as we shift more of his calories to the daytime Charlie is sleeping longer at night.

My canelé baking plans got put on the backburner this week, but I did bake a big loaf of banana bread today with the overripe bananas that Charlie didn’t eat. I used this recipe from Serious Eats as a base, but used turbinado sugar and added nutmeg and clove to deepen the flavor.

Apparently moving the blog back to a dedicated page instead of the homepage made Feedburner start picking up my posts again. My WordPress install used to be in a subfolder (/blog), but is now in the root folder. I just happened to make /blog my posts page, as one does. So people who subscribed in college are getting my posts again after not getting them for many years. Hi, old friends! 👋

I’ve been submitting photos to the new CC0-licensed WordPress Photo Directory. I’ve had 40 accepted so far, many that I haven’t put online before. Related: I’ve long been wanting to contribute more to the WordPress community, so I joined the moderation team for the photo directory. I spend about 30-60 minutes a day moderating new submissions.

I can’t imagine that Spotify’s podcast acquisitions will go well after this Joe Rogan debacle. What shows worth acquiring (read: bringing in audience + revenue) would be willing to give up their independence to Spotify now? Gentle reminder that walled gardens are rarely the answer. Regardless of what you think about Rogan’s show, podcasting as a whole thrives when podcasts are independently hosted and have open RSS feeds.

In 2011 I took two photos of some friends smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Threw them up on Flickr with an open license. They now get used in news articles about marijuana legalization at least once a month. I was big into exploring off-camera lighting a la Strobist at the time. The latest instance: https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/nationworld/report/020422_marijauna_banking_bill/us-house-advances-marijuana-banking-bill-though-final-passage-uncertain/

New indie games I played this week:

• Globle. Guess a country, then each incorrect guess will appear on the globe with a color indicating how close it is to the Mystery Country.
• Nerdle. Guessing math equations.

Keep them coming. Let a thousand ____le games bloom!

I recently ran out of my favorite dot grid A5 notebook from Muji. I haven’t been able to find them for over a year now (they’ve been discontinued, but I had a stack) and have been looking for worthy replacements. Mark Frauenfelder over at Cool Tools apparently used similar ones (though A6 and with a clear cover instead of cardboard) and recommended ones from Yansanido as a replacement. I’m liking them so far!

Speaking of notebooks, Amanda got me a recipe journal from Moleskine many years ago and I seldom wrote in it, but now I know what I want to do with it: 1) Write down the recipes that I always have to look up and 2) Write down our favorites that have evolved over time and I make from memory. Examples: Pancake mix, cast iron waffles, red curry chicken soup, sweet potato curry, Japanese curry, meatballs, our template for bowls (grain + protein + veggies + sauce).

I fixed my reading page. I wrote a custom template in my previous theme to lay it out grouped by year and I couldn’t replicate it with the query loop block, so I added the PHP template to the twentytwentytwo theme. It took me a little while to figure out why nothing else in the template was loading, and it turned out that do_blocks was the answer. h/t to Carolina Nymark for writing a helpful post about using PHP templates in block themes.

I also took the time to add the publication year to each of the books on my reading page. One of my goals this year and going forward is to read more old books (I tend to read a lot of contemporary books), so having the publication year will help me keep track of my progress on that front. I plan to add an average publication year for the whole page and each year, which I hope will trend down over time.

Currently Reading

• The Valley of Horses by Jean M. Auel
• Precious Little Sleep by Alexis Dubief
• The Control of Nature by John McPhee
• Baby Sign Language Made Easy by Lane Rebelo
• Artcode issue #1, a new magazine exploring generative art, itself minted on the blockchain.
• David Wondrich’s new article on ratios in dry martinis 🍸

I subscribed to a couple more paid newsletters this week: Al’s Cocktail Club (actually a renewal of a gift) and A Piece of Cake by Bill Clark. Al’s Cocktail Club also provides access to the online archive and a members area, which is cool. A Piece of Cake is a Substack that I’ve been following for a while, and I’ve made a bunch of his free recipes, and I decided to subscribe because there are more of his recipes I want to make behind the paywall. I like supporting indie content creators.

An aside on Substack: I don’t prefer it, but I understand why it is so popular. It is fairly easy to use on both the content creator and the subscriber front. It allows writers to make money, which I’m all for. I’m noticing that they are finally allowing writers to export their posts and subscribers, allowing custom domains, and RSS feeds for public posts. This is a big improvement over when they first launched.

I’d love to have a private feed URL for my Substack subscriptions, but I have a workaround. I pipe my newsletter subscriptions to Feedbin via their email address functionality and read them via RSS. NetNewsWire is my reader of choice.

Cool Tools posted about the Weird Old Book Finder, a tool that searches Google Books and returns one random result for your query. Pretty cool! If found an old price list of Stanley tools from 1892 with excellent illustrations and a book on woodworking for “teachers of woodwork” that starts with a general bibliography, which I think is an excellent practice that all books should include.

All for now! See you again next week.

p.s. Do you write weekly updates? Send me a link, either in the comments, as a webmention, or via email. I’d love to read them!

Thoughts

Charlie turned six months this week! He is growing so quickly and gaining a lot of core strength and coordination. I bet he’ll be crawling in the next month.

Public education suffers from many things, chief amongst them is the complete lack of autonomy most students face for the majority of their childhood. The effects can be devastating and have long-term consequences. (Inspired by this Twitter thread.) More student autonomy is desperately needed. We each want to feel like we have more say over the directions of our lives.

We renewed our vegetable CSA (community supported agriculture) share for our 9th year. We are going with Roxbury Farm this year, similar to the last two years. The vegetables and variety are great, the pickup location is convenient, and they send out an informative newsletter that we enjoy each week. I love the challenge each week of making meals with the local seasonal assortment of vegetables we receive.

I went to a funeral this week for the first time in six years. A close friend’s father passed away unexpectedly. It was the first Jewish funeral I’ve attended. I found the Hebrew chants quite beautiful (though I didn’t understand the words). I was also moved by how the filling in of the grave is a physical communal act that brings a sense of finality to the ceremony. One isn’t just watching someone get buried, but actually doing the burying. I participated, then after the other attendees finished their shovelfuls, I helped my friend and a couple others finish filling in the rest of the grave. It was an honor to be handed a shovel and asked to help. The experience was on my mind all week and it will stick with me for a long time.

I’ve been making a lot of website updates. I switched to twentytwentytwo and went all-in on FSE. I’m slowly updating templates and template parts and dialing in mobile. Also taking the opportunity to add more pages to the site about various projects I’m working on. I’m making these updates primarily when Charlie sleeps, so changes will be gradual.

I got a Work Sharp Mk.2 and it beats every other knife sharpener I’ve used in terms of speed and the level of sharpness you can get in such a short period of time. My kitchen knives are razor sharp after just 4-5 mins per knife. I first heard about it on Cool Tools.

I got my smoker out for the first time in a year and a half. (Has it really been that long? Pandemic time is mind-bending.) I smoked some pork for tacos arabes. I decided to leave the smoker out so that it lowers the barrier to using it. High on the “in the next month or two” list: Pastrami (which I’ll make when I cure corned beef for St. Patrick’s Day), beef for birria tacos, Canadian bacon (needs to be cured beforehand).

Everyone is thinking about Wordle’s acquisition and indie games. I have an idea for a number game that I’d like to hack on soon: Pick a random two-digit number and figure out how to combine 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 with any operators (+, -, /, *, sqrt(), ^n ) to create the number. Share your time and whether or not you used all 5 numbers to create it.

I found my canelé molds in the basement this week. I want to experiment with making small batches of canelés and dial them in. They are my favorite coffee break snack.

It is almost time to start seeds again! The leeks didn’t work well last year, so those are out. I want to grow some jalapeños this year (which I haven’t in a couple years) so that I can make some fermented hot sauce and smoke some to make my own chipotles.

Reading

I’ve been reading so much recent stuff that I forgot how great Project Gutenberg is for old books. I just downloaded a bunch of Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers to my Kindle.

Recently finished: Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

Continuing: The Inimitable Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse and The Control of Nature by John McPhee

Articles I’ve enjoyed this week:

• My friend Jackson Bierfeldt is doing a retreat to build a new game, Subject Predicate. I’ve enjoyed his weekly updatesArchived Link.
• Jeremy Felt’s note about Elinor Ostrom, commons, and WordPress. Particularly of interest to me with my background in econ. I’d love to see more studies on open source communities. Which reminds me that Working in PublicArchived Link is still on my to-read list.
• Everything in the new Right Click Save publication. Good commentary about the NFT space from Artnome and his team.
• On the generative art front, something I’ve been exploring a lot of recently
  • Ben Kovach’s What Makes Generative Art Hard?
  • Gorilla Sun’s post laying out an algorithm for polygons with rounded corners in p5.js
  • Nadieh Bremer’s write up about her recent release, Anhedra.

I’ve been reading Jeremy Felt’s weekly posts for the past year and decided to write my own.

Thoughts

• Dinners go better when I plan them out a day in advance. Gone are the days when I don’t give dinner a thought until it is time to cook.
• Speaking of “gone are the days”, I now need to write my to-do list for the next day at the end of each day, otherwise things get dropped. This is a best practice and I sometimes did it, but now it is a necessity. Sleep deprivation is a heck of a drug.
• Speaking of sleeping, there is a baby taking a nap on me as I write this. What an incredible feeling!
• I’m taking the second half of my paternity leave starting next week and will be the primary caretaker for Charlie during the day. We timed our parental leaves so that mine picks back up as Amanda goes back to work. I’m very much looking forward to spending the days with Charlie!
• Life was pretty busy for most of January (travel, Amanda going back to work, me finishing up projects before I go on leave), I so I only did a third of the Genuary prompts. I doubt I’ll go back and finish the prompts later, as I have other generative projects I want to work on. I learned some new techniques in the third I did complete, though! Blog post forthcoming.
  • Those other generative projects I want to work on: Finishing the generative cocktails project I started and exploring asemic writing.

What I’m reading

• The Inimitable Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
• Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

Speaking of reading, my friend (and purveyor of fine RSS feeds) Eric Davis found BookFeed.io, a neat little tool that creates an RSS feed to follow new releases from your favorite authors. Liked and subscribed.

Ideas

• Notion to WXR conversion (tweet)
  • Notion is cool, but it is pricy and a walled garden. Now that Notion finally has an API that returns nice JSON, I think that it might be time to make a tool that converts Notion blocks to WordPress Gutenberg blocks, which have parity with Notion’s standard blocks (not sure how to handle Notion’s database blocks yet)
  • Thinking WXR file rather than a wp-cli command, which makes it more accessible to WP site owners. Not everyone has access to wp-cli, but everyone has access to the native importer. And the native importer is a lot easier to use than wp-cli for non-developers.
  • The /search endpoint will be useful for getting a list of pages https://developers.notion.com/reference/post-search
  • The /get-block-children will be useful for getting the top-level blocks for each page. https://developers.notion.com/reference/get-block-children
  • This project looks like a good starting point for the Gutenberg markup conversion, though I’d need to add things like Tweets, Maps, etc. https://github.com/bmorrisondev/notion-to-html/blob/master/main.js
  • Cover images -> Featured images
• Accessibility tool: Color contrast checker with suggestions
  • Tyler Hobbs’s discussion of RGB vs HSB color spaces in Working with Color in Generative Art gave me an idea: Since you can easily increment either the hue, saturation, or brightness in HSB, contrast checkers can give suggestions of how much one would need to change a color in order to have higher contrast.
  • Since most colors on the web are written in hex format, first I’d need to convert into HSB, run a test to see if the brightness needs to be increased or decreased, then increase or decrease it in a while loop until the contrast ratio meets accessibility standards and convert that resulting color back to hex and display it for the user. No reason that incrementing approach couldn’t work with suggesting font weight increases, too.
• Website updates
  • I’m getting that old itch to update my theme again. I’ve had a sidebar nav for a while, but I’d like to expand my post width to show art and write more tutorials, so I think I’ll put the nav back up at the top. I might swap out my homepage for a landing page and move the blog to its own page again, too. Likely going to use the Blockbase themeArchived Link + FSE, which I just had a great experience using at work.

I’ve been enjoying Wordle. Here are my stats. I didn’t get it the first day I played because I didn’t understand the rules and tried to play with the letters in the example 🤦‍♂️

That is it for this week, and Charlie is waking up from his nap! 👋