Week of January 20, 2025

We woke up to a total of ~7 inches of snow on Monday and a couple hour school delay, so Charlie and I suited up and went out to shovel, clean off the car, and play.

The past two weeks have been in the teens and single digits (fahrenheit). It finally broke freezing this afternoon. So cold that the snow we got on Monday is still powdery! I’m glad we got a proper freeze for a while.

From a mid-week woods walk:

Whatever seasonal sickness(es?) going around visited our house this week. Charlie was home a couple days, Amanda felt crummy a couple days at the same time as Charlie, then I felt crummy Friday night and Saturday.

Amanda and I switched off working and hanging out with Charlie, so we both had a stressful week trying to meet our deadlines at work. On my team, we also had a lot of time sensitive work come in over the two days where Charlie was back at school, so no reprieve there.

We are all looking forward to a regular week with hopefully no surprises.

Speaking of being at home with a sick kid, Charlie has figured out how to navigate the Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ apps by himself, so we’ve had to start figuring out the parental controls and content blockers. Fairly new development because he never really switched shows or apps by himself before. Fun times.

One tactic that we used this week is setting up movie time in the basement with a projector and the big cushions from our deck furniture. Charlie doesn’t have the attention span for a full movie yet, but we did get a solid hour each time we tried it. I know that tactic will stop working soon, but for now it is still novel.

Lest you think all we do is distract our kid, let me remind you that him being home sick while we have to work is atypical. His pre-K3 is a fun, constructive environment and we have a hard time matching that while we have to work. Weekends while everyone is healthy are a different story.

Charlie has longer and longer stretches of imaginative, constructive solo play now, which is fun to watch. He’s been building lots of things out of blocks by himself this week, and involving his various trucks, excavators, and dump trucks in the process. He engages with his blocks longer than he’ll watch a movie! We love to see it.

One night Charlie wanted more connection, and kept bringing books for us to read to him at the dining room table after dinner. It was lovely.

Pre-Charlie, Amanda and I were never meal planners. We almost always winged it.

Now, we almost always find that if we don’t put in the effort on the weekend for the following week, we end up stressed and eating crap.

So, today Charlie and I went grocery shopping at Stew Leonard’s and I made a plan for the week.

Today: Steak, potatoes, salad (sub mac and cheese for seat 2)

Monday: Chicken and wild rice soup

One of the ways to cut the cooking time in half on this is to use ground chicken

Tuesday: Black pepper turmeric chicken with asparagus

Wednesday: Pork tenderloin with veggie and rice

Thursday: Flank steak fajitas

Friday: Takeout, either pizza or Chipotle

Charlie loves the animatronics at Stew’s:

My friend Jeremy Wall told me last week that he got a band together a couple years ago and recorded some instrumental jazz tracks, put it up on Spotify, but then never really told anyone about it.

It is really good! I’ve been listening to it this past week while I work. Thought I’d share:

I didn’t get out to the workshop at all last week, but hope to this week. I’d like to turn another platter and more bowls. I have the blanks ready to go.

My pheasant tail fly tying project is almost done. I have one pattern left to go, and the blog post 95% written with a space to drop in the last pattern. I’ve learned a lot and tied some nice flies, but now I’m ready to tie something else other than patterns with pheasant tails.

Next up are some more tenkara kebari, probably some Japanese Lanterns, pearl sakasa, peacock futsu, and some little black jun kebari with starling feathers. Then I’d like to try squirrel tail again, and I might do a project with just squirrel tail after I get my box full of kebari that I can use once the weather warms up.

Here is what I tied this week:

Pheasant tail glass bead midges, size 18

Pheasant tail parachutes, size 14

The first batch was frustrating and slow, but the second batch was faster, easier, and turned out better after I switched to finer thread and doubled the amount of para post, based on some helpful tips from folks on Bluesky. Nice community over there.

I wouldn’t characterize myself as a capital P Prepper, but the rising occurrence of severe storms and natural disasters brings our own emergency preparedness to mind. I started thinking about this last year and put together an emergency box, but I asked myself last week where I think we are most vulnerable, and three things came to mind:

Heat

Water

Food

I already had some preparation in these areas, so I doubled down on it this week and am feeling better. I picked up some Sawyer filters for water, more propane for the generator, and extra dry goods. Nothing crazy. We have limited space.

As a side note, what I think differentiates lowercase p preparedness and capital P Preppers is preparing for widescale war/societal breakdown/apocalypse scenarios where you have to be self sufficient long-term and defend yourself. I’m not worried about that. I want to be secure and be able to help out neighbors if we have a natural disaster. We know from our prolonged power outage a couple years ago that northern Westchester is one of the last ConEd customers to get power back because NYC and lower Westchester always get priority.

This kind of prep is an asymmetric calculation for me. It is low cost (besides for the generator, we’ve spent less than $1K on supplies) with a very large upside if we have a disaster.