Months of October and November 2025

With my shifted work schedule (now 7am-3pm), Charlie getting home earlier, increased work stress, and needing weekends to put our lives back together and get ready for the following week, the last couple months have felt pretty busy and my weekly blogging hasn’t made the cut. My regular time for writing this weekly post has been Sunday nights, but now I’m going to bed earlier than I used to and need to find a new patch of quiet time to write it. Perhaps I actually get up when my body wakes me up at 5am and write this with some coffee while the sun comes up? We’ll see.

Here’s a brief recap of the last two months:

We’ve been spending as much time outside as we can after school while it is still light…

…and even sometimes after dark.

As the days grow shorter and colder it is challenging to keep a 4yo entertained indoors while keeping the house from becoming a chaotic mess. We might switch to Monday swim class instead of Saturday, which will help one night a week. Other nights we sometimes go to the library, sometimes go grocery shopping, sometimes do art projects, sometimes bake. Lots of reading. Accepting any and all ideas!

Swim class has been going well. Charlie is more independent and confident than the spring session!

Charlie is going through a lot of growth right now. Physically, emotionally, intellectually. It is really great to witness and help foster that growth. We have such a wonderful kid and we feel so grateful to be his parents.

Our new schedules and the longer school commute is finally starting to feel like normal after three months.

For Halloween this year, Charlie wanted to be a Spider Plant. Amanda loves making costumes and does a great job at it, so she made houseplant costumes for all of us. She was a String of Pearls and I was a Ponytail Palm.

One fun thing we’ve been doing more recently is doing “family movie night” together in the basement with a projector on the weekends. Charlie’s attention span is now long enough for a full movie, and he loves the ritual of making a snack tray, popcorn, and snuggling up together. We love it, too. Some of his favorites: Toy Story, Cars 1 and 2 (but not 3), Despicable Me 1, 2, 3, and 4, Arthur and the Haunted Tree House, Curious George: Cape Ahoy, and WALL-E.

Charlie had a canon childhood event last week: Cutting his own hair with scissors. We were able to cut it a bit shorter so it isn’t too noticeable. Thankfully picture day was the week before.

One thing of note at work is that we soft-launched a project I’ve been working on: the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer plugin. The plugin automatically fixes broken links by replacing them with archived versions from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer

It got mentioned on stage at the Internet Archive’s gala.

I’m pretty excited about its potential! We still have a lot of work to do to improve it and promote it, but it is off to a good start. Over 100 active installs and growing with very little promotion so far.

I’ve had beta versions running on this site for months. It does what it says on the can!

At home I’ve done very little woodworking and no fishing, but a little bit of fly tying and lots of reading. I also did the fly swap and wrote the recap post, which will be published soon over at Tenkara Angler.

We didn’t have plans today and wanted to get out of the house and have some quality family time, so we hopped on the train and went down to the Intrepid Museum. Charlie was jazzed about going on a big ship, getting to see a real space shuttle, and getting to see some planes. We all had a good day. Now he is old enough that spontaneous half-day outings like that (lots of walking, multiple forms of transit, two meals out) are totally doable and fun.

Looking forward:

We are hosting some friends for Thanksgiving again this year. I’m hoping to have enough free time over the long holiday weekend to make this year’s batch of hot sauce from my habaneros and to get out in the workshop and try to turn something.

Speaking of turning something, I’ve learned that Shopsmith is shutting down. I’ve been waiting on new quill since May and now it looks like I’ll probably not get it. Their customer service phone number and email are no longer working. Wondering how long until I should file a chargeback?