Week of February 17, 2025

I spent M-F this week in Southport, NC, at a team meetup for work. We stayed in the beautiful Cape Fear House on the Cape Fear River. Unfortunately, it was unseasonably cold and we canceled our planned outing of taking a ferry to explore a local island. We did check out two local museums and squeezed in a visit to the USS North Carolina battleship on the way back to the airport. We mostly hung around the house and worked.

At the USS North Carolina, the analog computers fascinated me. All of those gears doing complex calculations!

This reminds me that I want to read George Dyson’s Analogia, Paul Nahin’s The Logician and the Engineer, G. Pascal Zachary’s Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush’s Pieces of the Action, and Simon Winchester’s Exactly.

I dusted off my Canon 6D, and even though we didn’t get out, I snapped a few shots inside. Here are Mark, Klaus, and Eoin:

It was good to get my SLR back out. I need to do that more.

We ate a lot of good meals, but the best was this plate of grits with red peas, tomatoes, and zucchini from Southern.

I video chatted with Charlie and Amanda while I was gone. My favorite part was Charlie grabbing the phone and saying, “Daddy, come on!” and carrying me around to show me stuff. I got some great screenshots.

Saturday Charlie and I got out of the house for the afternoon and visited Anglers Den to pick up some fly tying materials, then went and checked out the east and west branches of the Croton River.

Later that night I tied some black jun kebari and tried out a few techniques for using oversized soft hackle on smaller hooks.

This morning Charlie helped me make waffles.

Then Charlie and I went grocery shopping and visited a bookstore in Ossining we hadn’t been to before, Hudson Valley Books for Humanity. A lovely store!

I picked up Nineteen Reservoirs by Lucy Sante, about the reservoirs that supply NYC with fresh water. Charlie picked up a 25 piece Hungry Caterpillar puzzle.

That’s all for now. I am going to read a little bit then go to sleep.