Back to work. It was a jarring rentry. The very first thing I saw when getting online Monday morning was a ping about an issue that had major customer impact. Talk about getting the adrenaline pumping.

It turns out GitHub and Cloudflare both had even bigger issues this week, too. And the time change didn’t even happened yet!

Not the smoothest week in the tech world.

Trick or treat was fun this year. We went to a friend’s house in Lake Peekskill and trick or treated as a group. Charlie really got into it and was pretty conscientious–he generally only took 1 piece of candy per bowl, and understood that it was communal, so he didn’t get upset when there were other people getting candy before and after him.

He dressed up as a cow (Amanda made his costume!) and Amanda and I dressed up as farmers.

We are really thankful for the friend group we have here. Really thankful.

Unfortunately, it looks like Charlie picked up RSV at daycare, so the end of the week and weekend has been tough. Tired, sick toddler with tired, stressed out parents.

I made this easy chicken noodle soup on Friday and I think it will be a new go-to when someone is sick. It is delicious and takes only 30 minutes to make. The secret is using ground chicken to speed up the process and retain flavor.

Easiest Chicken Noodle Soup Recipe – NYT Cooking

The majority of shortcut chicken soup recipes use rotisserie chicken It’s a convenient hack, but cooked chicken doesn’t absorb flavors very well On the other hand, sautéing ground chicken in olive oil with garlic, coriander and celery seeds (or fennel seeds and rosemary, or herbes de Provence) creates a deeply complex base

cooking.nytimes.com

I made some quick sheet pan meals this week, too. We have lots of sweet potatoes from the CSA right now, and those are quick to roast (peeled and 1in dice, 425F for 30 minutes) and tasty with paprika, garlic, and salt. Would probably be good with eggs for breakfast, too. Maybe I’ll do a breakfast sheet pan with sweet potatoes and bacon this week.

One of my favorite new follows on Twitter is Nico Chuan, who posts great in-progress photos of his carving process. I’ve learned some things about the process just from his photos that I hadn’t quite figured out in my head.

New favorite follow on Instagram: Ethan Neiderer, who makes skin-on-frame St. Lawrence River Skiffs. I thought they were ADK guideboats at first because they are so similar. The differences: No bottom board, all ribs are bent instead of laminated, and slightly different style of stem and deck. I’m comparing notes with Ethan soon and thinking of designing a hybrid style that combines the benefits of both the ADK guideboat and the St. Lawrence River Skiff. Not having to laminate all those ribs would save a tremendous amount of time and effort.

Starting the winterization process. I pulled the last of the ACs out of the windows today, swapped the screen door for the glass one, and picked up some weather strip, weather seal, and foam kerf for the windows and a few doors. I plan to put that on tomorrow.

I feel horribly behind on my reading and writing. I know that is all self-imposed, but I feel behind none-the-less.

While hunched over in my IKEA Poäng chair looking at my laptop, I thought, “I wish there were a desk for this chair.” So I fired up my web browser and typed in the magic incantation, and Bateman Labs makes one!

I bought it, Charlie helped me put it together, and I love it. It has improved my posture and it makes a nice alternative to my standing desk.

Using FeedLand I created a News Product for Peekskill with all of the local and city news feeds I could find. Check it out at https://peekskill.news/

Future updates to make:

• Split the feeds into tabs: All, City, Local news, Area news (like River Journal North, etc).
• Figure out how to pull in Twitter and Instagram feeds. This probably requires me setting up a service to make feeds on one of my servers.

Gabriel Sim-Laramee remixed one of my Sol LeWitt wall drawings that I did in javascript. Pretty cool!

I spent a week in Málaga, Spain, for work. We had a Division Meetup (here is last year’s in Denver) with ~250 of our coworkers. It was a great time!

• I gave a workshop on using Grafana and Logstash for tracking down problems.
• I gave a flashtalk on FeedLand, a project we’re working with Dave Winer on.
• I got to meet and chat with a bunch of cool people I haven’t met in person before, including Alex Kirk, proprietor of Friends, and Matrix guru.
• I attended a lot good sessions and workshops, and collaborated across different divisions of the company. This is always pretty valuable for us.
• A group of us walked down to the Mediterranean sea one night and jumped in. The water was a brisk 65F.
• We got some free time to visit the Picasso Museum and walk around the city center, where I picked up some torrons from Vicens. I also got a smashed 5c piece to add to my smashed penny collection.
• I ate my weight in jamon.
• The way there and back was mostly uneventful, though I traveled about 20 hours each way. I do not love that. I read part of a book on the history of Spain of the way there, then watched a full season of Yellowstone on the way back.
• We had so many people flying in that I saw my coworkers at multiple connecting airports: NYC (JFK), Amsterdam, and Paris.
• I played beach volleyball!

While I was gone, Amanda did a trunk or treat at Charlie’s daycare. Charlie wanted to be a cow, so Amanda went with a farm theme.

When I got back, I spent the next morning with Charlie at the playground, and there was conveniently a construction site close by for us to watch. They are redoing an old football field and putting in pickleball courts and a new track. Charlie knows all of the construction vehicles!

I then went down to Manhattan that night for a surprise birthday for Chris Johnson at Caledonia.

Sunday Amanda and I met Meg, Jeremy, and Miles at an indoor halloween event in Elmsford. The boys had Jedi costumes. Last year that they dressed up as Mario & Luigi.

Charlie had Monday off from daycare for the holiday, but Amanda and I had to work, so we switched off every couple hours. Charlie and I started off the morning by going to the coffee shop, picking up some cheese at the grocery store, and watching trains at the train station. We also played in the yard for a while before naptime. Charlie and Amanda decorated small pumpkins.

That evening some friends had us over to carve pumpkins and have a bonfire.

Monday was a great day for Charlie.

The Whole Earth Catalog is now available online. Incredible resource to have archived. Here is how the online archive came to be.

I’m fascinated by the image prompt injection people are doing with GPT-4V. Much more interesting than text prompt injection, IMO. Simon Willison has a good post up about itArchived Link.

Neighbor spent all day lowering his car (a Subaru WRX, I think). Now he can’t get it in or out of the driveway without it bottoming out. So far he hasn’t lifted it back up, he just lets it scrape.

Reminder to change the cabin air filter in your car occasionally. You can usually buy them on Amazon and replace them yourself pretty easily.

This Wednesday was the last Wood Fired Wednesday at Pizzeria Baci. Of course we had to go. The pizza was excellent as always, and this week Charlie decided that he likes pepperoni, which is new. He didn’t like it two weeks ago, but now he loves it. My man. He is the latest in the long line of Grimmett men who love pepperoni pizza.

It helps that saying “pep per O knee” is kind of fun!

Charlie’s daycare had their annual Fall Fest on Thursday. We had fun hanging out with some of the other parents and watching the kids be in their element. There were hayrides, animals to pet, hotdogs, and an ice cream truck.

Here is last year’s fall fest.

Charlie has been working really hard at figuring out the stairs without holding on to the rail. He is getting pretty good at it.

Charlie takes recycling very seriously.

Another Saturday, another walk in the rain. Seems like it has rained every Saturday recently. Charlie doesn’t mind. As long as we have our raincoat and boots, we are good.

This is Charlie’s walking stick.

Charlie has shown even more interest in music this week:

• Jamming daily with a little keyboard
• Watching videos of different kinds of instruments with Amanda. It keeps his attention longer than most videos!
• Playing with a ukulele at a birthday party.

Saturday afternoon was Miles’s birthday party. Little guy turned two. We ran into Miles’s parents at the coffee shop when Amanda was ~30 weeks pregnant and Meg was ~22 weeks. Amanda used to work with Miles’s dad Jeremy and we didn’t know they moved up here to the Peekskill area. We’ve been hanging out ever since. When Charlie and Miles came along, they joined the hangouts. It is fun watching them grow up together.

I put in some water sensors so we get a bit of warning if our basement gets water. One in each low spot where water seeps in first and one under the sink in the kitchen. (I’m still wary of my plumbing work on the glass rinser.)

Decided to go with YoLink. I like that they use LoRA to connect to a hub that then connects to the internet instead of adding a bunch of new devices to my wifi network. There’s enough on there already.

Amanda takes horse riding lessons. This week Charlie went and got to ride a pony, which he loved. Maybe he will take lessons in a couple years, too!

Poor thing has its mane and tail dyed so he can dress up like a unicorn for parties. His name is Henry.

I’m maintaining a couple news products on FeedLand that pull in posts form a bunch of sources:

1. https://peekskill.news – Local Peekskill news
2. https://wordpressne.ws – WordPress Project Updates

If you want to make one for your local area or for your niche interest, let me know!

I revamped my notetaking. (Yes, longtime reader, again.)

This time I’m using Tiago Forte’s PARA method in Obsidian. Both seem to work better with my brain than previous approaches. I’m due to write a blog post about my Obsidian setup and which plugins and external capture tools I use.

I’ve been staying up very late every day this week. Haven’t gone to bed before 1am. Lots of irons in the fire and it feels good. It has taken two years, but Amanda and I are starting to feel like ourselves again, with the added bonus of having a sweet kid in our lives. (Contrast that with mostly feeling like caregivers the last two years.) Our energy and sleep are improved, which helps give space for our interests, projects, and new ideas.

When telling a friend that we wish our house had more space, they helpfully pointed out that the nice thing about small houses is that families spend more time together rather than each person going to a separate space most of the time. That is a good way to think about it. Yes, alone time is important, but so is spending time together as a family, and the constraint of limited space is a benefit in that respect.

Charlie is getting more adventurous, independent, and capable of advocating for himself. He expresses his wishes and needs more, tries new things, ventures further and further from us when out on walks, and spends longer periods of time in solo imaginative play.

This week a kid ran into him at the playground and Charlie turned around and loudly said, “Scuu Me!”

This phase does come with some challenges, especially when his wants conflict with what is possible, safe, reasonable, etc. Such is life.

One morning the trash truck came a little early and we slept in a little later than usual. Charlie heard it, got up, and shouted, “Momma! Trash truck! Wake UP!”

Trash trucks are serious business in this house.

Our new thing at the grocery store is having Charlie scan our groceries at the self checkout. He loves it.

It is interesting how our checkout habits have changed in the past two years. We went from only self-checkout pre-Charlie, to cashier checkout while Charlie was younger, and now back to self-checkout with Charlie scanning.

Some random play moments: Making a vacuum truck out of blocks, learning how to replace batteries with a screw driver, and vacuuming together.

I made some roasted red jalapeno pepper sauce this week with our garden jalapenos. It smells like roasted red peppers, but has a kick.

I made some Chile Verde Pork on Friday, and to my surprise Charlie seemed to like it. It is quick and easy to make, especially if we have salsa verde on-hand from our garden tomatillos. We like to serve it over rice with some sour cream and avocado.

We finally went to the Tuscana pasta factory in Peekskill and got some fresh ravioli, pasta, and sauce. We are very pleased. Why didn’t we go here sooner?! It is 5 minutes from our house.

We wanted to do some fall farm activities this weekend, and even though it rained we decided to make the best of it. We’re glad we did because we all had fun.

We had fun in the woods throwing leaves in the creek, exploring the textures of different kinds of bark, finding hickory nuts and acorns, and picking up sticks. 🍂

More fall stuff.

Reminder to myself to take the air conditioners out of the windows this week. Even though we had 85F weather this week, it now sufficiently cools down at night so we don’t need them.

We are pretty much recovered from COVID, though we still fatigue faster than normal and food still isn’t tasting quite right.

This week was a long and tiring one. Amanda had to work in Houston, TX, from Monday to Thursday, so between the COVID fatigue and Charlie’s momma separation anxiety, it was a struggle. Even so, Charlie and I got a lot of bonding time, and he seemed happy to get back to his regular daycare routine.

After daycare, we usually had dinner right away, went out for a walk if the weather was nice, and then watched a couple episodes of Trash Truck before getting ready for bed.

We tried out a new burger place that opened this week in Peekskill. It was pretty good! It is right across from the train station, which is one of Charlie’s favorite spots to hang out (where else can you see trains, busses, tow trucks, and boats from one location?).

Some work news: Our team saved the Blogs.Harvard network from being shut down back in July and now host an archived version of it on Automattic’s infrastructure. We see it as a major win to keep this important piece of internet history available, and keep links from 2003 still working.

We upgraded the network from WordPress 4.8.1 and PHP 5.5.9 to WordPress 6.3.1 and PHP 8.2. No small feat with ~1500 blogs with tons of themes and plugins.

We had another crazy rainstorm on Friday that flooded the region for something like the 3rd time this year. There was too much water in our basement this time to only use the shopvac, so I bought a non-submersible transfer pump and ran it every 20 mins or so for about 4 hours until water stopped seeping up through the floor.

I don’t think this weather pattern is going to get any better, so the first call I’m making on Monday morning is to a sump pump guy and get that on the calendar.

Amanda’s college sorority little, Kat, visited us this weekend, in from London for a wedding in upstate NY this week. We hung around this general area, made dinner, drank wine, visited Muscoot Farm, walked along the riverfront with Charlie, and caught up after 4 years like no time has passed. Kat give us a couple of book recommendations:

• Balkan Ghosts
• Africa is not a Country
• Pachinko
• How Women Rise

At the farm I liked the pitch forks made from single branches. I’d like to try to make one. Charlie liked the tractor and the mud puddles the best.

We have a lot of apples right now, so apple desserts are the thing right now. Apple galletes and apple sauce are always good, and I made this apple crisp, which employs pecans for the topping. Better than oats, IMO. 🍎

I changed my mind on something this week: We decided to hire cleaners once a month to help us clean the house. Until now I’ve been against it, probably because of my midwestern work ethic and Appalachian self sufficiency (family roots run deep!), thinking that we should save the money and take care of it ourselves. After all, we had the time and I thought it was lazy to not do it ourselves.

What changed my mind was struggling to do the base-level things like mopping, dusting, kitchen grime, etc, after we had Charlie. Not only do we have less time now, but he also creates more messes than Amanda and I combined. When he was 3 months old we had someone come babysit him while we cleaned all day, but that has our priorities backwards. Why not pay someone to clean so we can spend that time with Charlie instead?

Needing to get the house ready for a guest while Amanda was traveling and I had a busy week at work pushed me over edge. It was more affordable than I expected and they did a great job in a couple hours while I was working. We’ll probably have them come once a month.

I redid my Likes page to be closer to a linkblog.

I’m thinking about changing my permalink structure to no longer include the category slug. We’ll see. I just need to make sure my redirects will work as expected.

I fixed a spacing issue around images and galleries with adjacent text that has been bothering me for a while on this site. The answer was sibling selectors.

p ~ figure, p ~ div.wp-block-jetpack-tiled-gallery {
	margin-top: 1rem;
}

figure ~ p, div.wp-block-jetpack-tiled-gallery ~ p {
	margin-top: 1rem;
}

This was not our week.

We ended a long, challenging weekend of potty training on a high note and felt pretty confident about Charlie telling us when he needed to go to the bathroom and holding it until we got there. Then we hit a wall because Charlie refused to use the potty at daycare. They only have regular sized toilets there with inserts, and we trained him on a tiny toddler-sized toilet. He was so thrown off by having to use a big toilet that we are back to square one, using diapers and regrouping until we can get another three-day weekend to try again.

Then the next day we got hit by COVID after successfully avoiding it for three years. It was surreal seeing a positive test after having seen so many negative ones.

Charlie and Amanda got pretty mild cases and mine was the worst of the house. I had fevers, vomiting, chills, sweating, and intense headaches for three days. That finally stopped by the middle of the third day, but the sore throat, cough, and fatigue are still here. Amanda’s developed into a chest cough. I break out in a sweat whenever I try to do anything physical.

Taking care of a toddler who is at full energy while you have Covid is quite challenging.

Hopefully next week is better 👋

Wildlife relocation count: Three groundhogs, two skunks. One groundhog eludes us.

We had a nice Friday night. We went to the local used book store and Charlie showed some real interest in browsing for books there. Then we ate outside at the new Gaucho’s Steakhouse, which was pretty good. N. Division St gets closed off Thursday-Saturday nights and all the restaurants on the street put out tables and hire local musicians. Charlie loved the live music.

I don’t think we’ll be going out to eat much this winter. Charlie is in a stage where he does not like to sit in one place in a restaurant, and if he can’t get down and move he starts to get loud. That is more acceptable outdoors at picnic tables than indoors, and since it is starting to cool down, it might be takeout only for us for a while.

Christie WrightArchived Link convinced me to carry a tourniquet in the car. She recommends this Bleeding Control Kit from SAM. I ordered one for the car and one for my workshop, the two places I’m most likely to be around an accident that causes severe blood loss.

This was part of a conversation about what we travel with that is non-standard. Blog post about that coming soon.

Our tomatoes are almost done for the season. I picked the second to last batch of Firmino plum tomatoes on Saturday and made a small batch of pizza sauce that I really liked, based on this Detroit-style sauce recipe. Now that I know we like it, I’m going to make a bigger batch to freeze in 4-pizza quantities (roughly 3 cups each).

The tomatillos are still trucking along! They tend to keep growing until the first frost.

Looks like it is time to switch these garden beds to ground-level raised beds. The posts rotted out. I knew it would happen eventually, but I thought I had another year or two. I thought the plywood would go first. Oh well. Ground-level will mean easier access for Charlie, too, and he loves helping with the garden. I’ll have to make the fencing easily removable. I’ll probably do that this fall after the first frost, and make sure I have enough time to get some garlic planted.

We decided to start potty training Charlie this weekend. As I write this we are halfway through day two. We are making progress and cleaning up fewer messes on day two, but holding in our poop. All three of us are pretty tired, but staying calm and sticking with it. We are hopeful that by Tuesday he’ll have the hang of it.

New app I’m enjoying: Texts.com, an inbox for all of your messaging apps. Been using it all week and am not looking back.

This week I kicked some home projects I’ve been neglecting into high gear.

• Scheduled a quote for spray foam insulation in our two attic spaces
• Had someone come out and get rid of our groundhogs
• Scheduled someone to come out and do some maintenance on our boiler
• Had our pile of tree limbs removed
• Picked up what I need to fix the tile in our bathroom
• Picked up what I need to replace the broken piece of flooring in the basement

Next up on the agenda:

• Get a quote on installing a sump pump + radon mitigation system
• Buying water sensors for the basement and under the sink. Probably going with YoLink once they have another sale.
• Decide whether we want to replace the fence now or in the spring. Leaning toward the spring.

Charlie updates:

• He is singing a lot more and making specific song requests for us to listen to in the car. They sometimes come out of left field and it is fun.
• He is recognizing more letters and numbers by sight and saying what they are.
• He is getting potty curious, so we think it is time to start potty training in the next couple weeks before this window closes.
• He is doing a lot more imaginative play, such as pretending he is a bus driver or a chicken, or making some Duplo figures act out something, and building his Duplos a lot more in general.
• Puzzles that were tough for him 6 months ago are a breeze now.
• He got invited to a birthday party on Friday and it was fun to see him play with other kids. His friend Lorenzo ran up, grabbed Charlie’s hand, and they ran off to play.
• He is more independent on the playground now and doesn’t feel the need to stick close to us.

I didn’t take many photos this week. I was busy at work getting caught up from being out for a week, and it was very hot here all week (weather station reported a high of 101.2F/38.44C), but I did take a couple. Here they are:

Most of our plans for the weekend fell through because of the rain. Bummer.

If your name is Dave Wasmer and you are still reading this, here is your reminder to start your weekly post 😄

Here is how I generally do mine:

1. Take notes throughout the week in my favorite notetaking app. Just a couple bullet points as I think of them.
2. Look through the photos I took that week and new bookmarks I made that week for inspiration.
3. Don’t proofread or stress about it. Just press post once I’m done.
4. I write them while Charlie is sleeping, either naptime or after bedtime.

In fact, I hear Charlie waking up from his nap, so it is time to press Publish on this and close my laptop 👋

As mentioned at the end of the last post, we spent the week in Cape Cod for an end-of-summer getaway. We had a great time.

The summer season was winding down, so the Cape wasn’t very busy, but almost everything was still open. We went once a couple years ago in late autumn and found summer to be a completely different vibe.

We stayed on West Yarmouth in an Airbnb next to a so-called cranberry bog (I went hiking in there and didn’t see a single cranberry bush) with lots of rabbits and turkeys as neighbors.

Some things we enjoyed:

Whale Watching! We went with https://whales.net (what a great domain!) and saw a bunch of humpback and minke whales. We even saw a breach!

Beaches

• Mayflower – Bay side. Restrooms, lots of parking, big beach to explore.
• Skaket – Bay side. Incredible tide pools and grassy mud flats with razor clams.
• Chatham Lighthouse Beach – Nice beach to walk, lots of sand dunes, Atlantic side, but protected by some small outer islands.
• Coast Guard – Atlantic side. Lots of surf, seals, and sand dunes. Very limited parking.
• Race Point – Atlantic side. Lots of sea birds, seals, and sand dunes.

Restaurants

• Sesuit Harbor Cafe – I really liked the stuffed quahog, Amanda liked the shrimp.
• Captain Frosty’s – According to my friend (and former chef) Eric, this has the best fried food around.
• Mac’s in WellfleetArchived Link. We tried to get into the main restaurant, but the wait was an hour long and we had a cranky toddler, so we went down the road to the place on the pier. Amanda and I shared a dozen Wellfleet oysters, then Amanda had a lobster and I had a pulled pork sandwich.
• Cape Cod Creamery
• The Knack – Great burgers, onion rings, and lobster rolls.
• Old King’s Coffeehouse – Pretty good breakfast sandwiches.
• Three Fins Coffee – Really solid coffee roaster
• Chequessett Chocolate – Good chocolate bars and truffles in Truro. Cute shop.
• Cape and Island Distillers – Amanda liked their canned Sippewissett Gin & Tonic and I liked their canned Shark Bite Rum Punch. When you don’t have time or space for mixers and a shaker, canned cocktails are convenient.
• Double Dragon Inn – This looks like a regular Chinese restaurant on the outside, but they have an old-school tiki bar inside serving up things like Zombies, Scorpion Bowls, Fog Cutters, and Navy Grogs. We had to go. We shared a Scorpion Bowl, the service was great, and the food was pretty standard Americanized Chinese food.

One thing we learned on this trip: For the next couple years, eating outdoors at picnic tables is much more our speed with a toddler.

It seems like the dockside places are all BYOB, which I wish we had figured out sooner. Everyone seemed to carry in a cooler and pull out their own drinks. Now we know.

Lighthouses

• Chatham Light
• Highland Light
• Nauset Light
• Sandy Neck Light

Signs

I love informational signs. There were some good ones in Cape Cod.

On the way back home on Friday we stopped for lunch in Providence, RI, to visit one of my teammates, Nate Allen. We also stopped in Danbury to eat at Frank Pepe’s (IYKYK) and shop at Stew Leonard’s (again, IYKYK).

Labor Day Weekend

Amanda and I both had things we wanted to do with friends on Saturday, so she hung out with Charlie in the morning while I went kayaking with my friend Jeremy Wall (we saw an eagle on Iona Island!), and I hung out with Charlie in the afternoon while she went to see the Barbie movie with Kristin Richer. Charlie and I cut the grass, rode bikes, fixed the screen door and Amanda’s bike handlebars, picked tomatoes, played on the swingset, and ate leftover pizza. You know, cool dude stuff.

Sunday we went grocery shopping, Amanda went horseback riding, then went to a friends’ house for an end of summer party. We all had a pretty good time.

Monday we hung around the house. I cleaned out the fridge and did laundry, we all picked up the house, and then I made some ribs on the grill for dinner. I used this quick method from Meathead, which I think turned out great. They had a bit of bite left in them, which I like, but Amanda prefers them a little more fall-off-the-bone, so I might cook them longer next time, or finish hers in the oven.

I also decided to replace the built-in soap dispenser with a glass rinser hooked up to the hot water line. It is awesome. $25 on Amazon.

Unfortunately I made a stupid mistake while replacing it and got sprayed with 5 gallons of hot water while frantically running around to find a towel and trying to turn the hot water shut-off completely off. What a mess. I thought I had checked it, but in retrospect I must have only checked the cold water on the single-handle faucet. That is a mistake I won’t make again.

This week it is back to work. The weather looks like a scorcher all week, so I made cold brew and have some easy dinner plans like taco salads and grilled chicken.

One cool thing that happened this week is one of my photos was selected to be in a special gallery at WordCamp US! I didn’t go this year, but some friends sent me photos. My photo is the one of the sheep, which I took in 2018. It was used in as a sign for a conference room, too.

Not much I can talk about from work this week other than I have a much better understanding of WordPress Multisite and I’ve been thinking a lot about link checkers. Hopefully I can point to some public announcements soon.

On Tuesday Charlie and I met our friend Dave and his daughter Lianella (one of Charlie’s friends from daycare) for dinner and some playtime down by the waterfront. To everyone’s relief, both kids were happily playing together and seemed to enjoy the outing. They shared well together, giggled a lot, and even carried on their own little conversation. Cool to see. It was nice to hang out with another Dad and let the kids play. We’ll definitely do it again soon.

Charlie helped pick a lot of tomatoes this week, then helped us wash and freeze them. I have plans to make sauce once it cools down. He bit into them with gusto again this year. He has grown so much since this time last year!

While peeling the Firmino tomatoes after Charlie went to bed, I discovered the joys of the Sherry Cobbler. It is delicious, low abv, easy to make, and adaptable to whatever fruit is in season.

Charlie also helped Amanda make a galette. Galettes have become a go-to for us because they are faster and easier to make than pies and taste just as good. This one was blackberry peach.

Though I haven’t carved much recently, I reconnected with two carving friends, Julia and Fahd, who came to pick up some of the cherry wood from my fallen limb. Also, I got Emmet van Driesche‘s new book in the mail, Greenwood Spoon Carving.

We saw two frogs this week, both of which I think are gray treefrogs. In our four years of living here, I had only seen one other, but this week spoiled me. Charlie was pretty excited about seeing them, too.

On Saturday we left for Cape Cod. We are staying in this cute little cottage next to a cranberry bog and spending as much time as we can at the beach this coming week 🏖️

We took Charlie out in the guideboat on Lake Sebago in Harriman State Park for the first time on Saturday and he had a blast. We did, too. Charlie loved rowing, did pretty well in the boat, was excited about his lifejacket, and was excited to catch a fish. I think we’ll be spending a lot of summers there.

We are members of the American Canoe Association, and they have a camp on Lake Sebago for members. It is secluded, rarely busy, and inexpensive to use. It it one of the best kept secrets around here.

My cartop carrying methods for the guideboat continue to evolve. I cut a 2×4 and wrapped the ends with the drawer liner we had laying around and I now rest the boat on that before strapping it down. It is a more stable base for the wide boat than the factory crossbars.

Next I need to figure out a way to secure the oars inside the boat before putting it on top so that I don’t have to set them in the car. They go all the way up to the dashboard.

Tomatoes are coming in hot! Picking a quart every other day. These are the Magic Bullet variety.

I traded our neighbor a quart today for an eggplant. We gave another quart to the neighbors across the street on Friday, who asked us to borrow our ladder to clean a clogged gutter. It is nice to have friendly neighbors.

Our hydrangeas are looking lovely this year and the bees love them. I think this variety is Limelight Panicle Hydrangea based on their hardiness, shape, and color (the flowers are green, then turn white.)

I finally got around to cutting and cleaning up the branches in our backyard from the fallen cherry limb. Charlie was a big help dragging the branches to the front yard so we can have them chipped up.

I’m glad our little guy likes helping!

My coworker Kyle Runner suggested that Charlie needs a bell at the top of the climbing wall, so I got one and put it up. Charlie promptly climbed to the top and rang it.

We took lots of walks and bike rides this week after dinner.

For dinner tonight we went to the Jet Set Tiki Bar and Restaurant in Newburgh, NY. It is set on the river walk in Newburgh and has a nice outdoor seating area. We’ll be back! Midnight Ferry, an ice cream place a block down, was pretty good too.

I used ChatGPT heavily this week at work. I had a ton of data to transform and work with and it excels at creating utility scripts. Some examples:

• Taking an export of a full year’s worth of content in a Slack channel and extracting the links, deduplicating them, separating out the host and path from the links, detecting the RSS feed for each domain, and then turning that into an OPML file to import into feed readers.
• Cleaning up the output from a broken link checker. Reduced the number of reported broken links from 75K to 13K on an old-school blog.
  • Filtering out all known social share links from sharing buttons.
  • Removing all Twitter links (Twitter blocks robots, so a lot of false positives)
  • Request each URL via cURL with a 5 second timeout and record the HTTP status code for each link in a spreadsheet.
    • This helped me weed out redirects vs 404s vs 500s vs timeouts (most like not on the internet anymore)
• Filtering and converting a very large and needlessly normalized JSON export out of Contentful to a CSV
• Taking the HTML of a large webpage and pulling out links with certain attributes and putting them in a structured JSON file

Hi there! 👋

I took a bit of a summer break from blogging this past month. Here are some of the highlights:

• I went to San Juan, PR, for work.
  • One of the cool things about working at Automattic is that meetups are a crucial part of our remote culture. We meet up twice a year to work together on a project in-person for 5 days and hang out. This time a couple teams decided to meet up together, so 12 of us were at the meetup.
  • We stayed in the Condado neighborhood at Stay at Mare and did most of our work there, with the exception of a few stints at a coworking space when our internet cut out.
  • We successfully shipped an MVP of an internal project and had plenty of time to hang out by the pool, have a picnic at the beach, and do a walking tour of Old San Juan.
• When I got back, we had a week to prepare for Charlie’s birthday party, which we hosted in the backyard.
  • We trimmed the hedges, weeded, mowed and trimmed, etc. I also disassembled and fixed a problem with the feed on the weedeater.
• Charlie turned two! We had a party with lots of his friends from daycare and some family friends. My parents came in from Ohio, too.
  • The theme was Wheels on the Bus and Amanda made all the decorations.
  • We served pizza from Pizzeria Baci, which was a hit.
  • Dan the Music Man provided the entertainment. He is great with kids. They loved the parachute.
  • After a scorchingly hot day, there was a torrential downpour just as the party was wrapping up. Thankfully we had tents, so we didn’t get too wet.
• Charlie started learning how to ride a 2-wheeled balance bike.
• I put in a big exhaust fan that mounts to the window frame on our second floor.
  • It is the best purchase we’ve made all year. I wish I had put it in 3 years ago. It pulls air in through the open windows downstairs and pushes it out upstairs, cooling the whole house down. It is essential at night when the outside temp drops to the mid 60s.
• I finally bought a 24ft extension ladder. Another homeowner must-have.
• Lots of time outside in the garden, mowing, eating ice cream, taking out recycling, catching lightning bugs, early mornings playing with .
  • On the recycling: Charlie has his own bag of bottles, cans, etc, that he carries out to the road and puts in the bin every Thursday.

A mishmash gallery from the last month:

2 years is a magical age. Their language skills and communication ability increases exponentially around 2 and it is so fun to watch. Charlie has been counting to 10, doing the ABCs, pointing to things and naming their colors (and names if he knows them!) and singing lots of songs.

His physical abilities are ramping up, too. He is making progress on climbing the stairs without holding on to the railing (not quite there, but on his way) and he figured out how to climb both up and down his climbing wall completely solo.

I worked from Automattic’s NYC offices this week for the first time in about a year. I had the privilege of working with Dave Winer, creator of RSS and podcasting, and early blogging pioneer. More to come on that soon. He even gave me a demo of his outliner, Drummer.

It was nice to work in the office for a couple days, but I’m glad that we are remote-first and I don’t have to do that commute every day.

Our cherry tree split in a storm on Tuesday and a huge limb dropped on our fence and garden. Thank goodness for chainsaws, rope, hand saws, and axes. It might finally be time to get that fence replaced.

Despite the tree limb falling on the tomato and tomatillo bed, we are still getting plenty of tomatoes and tomatillos.

We got a mediocre potato harvest this year. A groundhog ate all the leaves off the plant in early July, so the potatoes stopped growing and stayed small.

We have black swallowtail caterpillars on our parsley. We go out every day with Charlie to look at them.

I tried a new orgeat recipe this week. It makes a decent Mai Tai. I was able to stop at Astor Wines & Liquors while I was in Manhattan this week (just a couple blocks from the office!), so I picked up an aged agricole rum (Rhum J.M Gold), a Black Jamaican rum (Hamilton), and the Clement Creole Shrubb, all of which where soon put to use in said Mai Tai.

I’m loving these Campfire Rudbeckia in our front yard.

We went to Sloop Brewing in East Fishkill on Friday night. They have a nice restaurant space adjacent to their brewery. We already knew we like their beer, but their food is also good. We’ll go back for sure!

Their website runs on WordPress and WooCommerce, which I love.

Amanda’s brother, Ben, visited this weekend. We spent Saturday exploring Beacon and Cold Spring, then made dinner, a blueberry pie, and played with Charlie at our house. Charlie made friends with the cat at Split Rock Books. Sunday we went to the Bronx Zoo and then had pizza on our porch for dinner.

Tip: Arthur Avenue, the Little Italy of the Bronx, is very close to the Bronx Zoo. You can get incredible sandwiches and stick them in a cooler for lunch instead of the overpriced and terrible concession food.

It has been a very damp week here. It rained 6 out of 7 days this past week.

We are glad we came back on Saturday, because there is a big chance the route we took would have been washed out around the time we would have encountered it on Sunday due to the storms. We got ~6in of rain on Sunday night/Monday morning and our basement flooded, along with everyone else in the neighborhood. We removed 80 gallons of water, which is less than most of our neighbors got. It was seeping up through the floor because the ground was so saturated. We were spared compared to Highland Falls and West Point, though.

It has been such a rainy and humid month that we haven’t sat out on the back porch for three weeks.

On one calm evening, I took Charlie out to ride his bike by the river again. He was so conscientious and stopped and moved to the side when groups were walking by. He also thanked me for pushing him up hill.

More water in the basement on Sunday the 16th. Much less than Monday, but still more than we’ve gotten at any other time living here. The last time we got close to this much was during Hurricane Ida in 2021. Probably time to put in a sump pump and re-seal the basement floor.

We also lost power for much of Thursday evening and early night, unrelated to weather. We came home from picking up Charlie to find the power out, so we decided to go to The Feast of Mt. Carmel in Verplanck to get sausage & peppers for dinner. It has become one of those yearly traditions for us. We went for the first time two weeks before Charlie arrived, then two weeks shy of his first birthday, and now two weeks shy of his second birthday.

I got a new bike with a seat for Charlie. Looking forward to family bike rides! Charlie loves his “bike hat.”

Charlie is in a new “What’s this?” phase, except he is actually asking “What’s this?” instead of “Dat?” and when we tell him the word for the thing he is pointing to, he attempts the word, no matter how hard.

He is also getting consistent with some colors. He seems to have Blue, Orange, and Pink down, and a solid start on Yellow and Purple. Green and Red still seem a bit tough.

Big enough to push a child cart at Trader Joe’s, but not big enough to not run into people or displays.

Rough time at work this week. I found a UI bug in phpmyadmin the hard way 😣 I’m not ready to post about it yet, but will once we track it down and propose a fix.

We are entering my least favorite part of the year: The hot, humid season. I can deal with dry heat, but the 85+ % humidity we’ve been having just zaps my energy. The plants love it, though. Unfortunately so do the bugs.

We finally had to put the air conditioners in when more smoke rolled in from the Canadian wildfires and stuck around, which limited the only source of relief we had: Fresh air from open windows. In years past we’ve put them in around our anniversary, so this isn’t too far out of the norm.

This is our fourth year in Peekskill and the 10th year in the Hudson Valley. We’ve had more thunderstorms this summer than any other year we’ve been here. I hope smoke + heat + frequent storms isn’t the new normal, but I’m concerned that it will be.

Perhaps I should revisit my disaster prep plan again (which I blogged about last year). I think the focus will be on getting us through a week or two without power, at which point we’d probably pack up and go stay somewhere else until power comes back on. That primarily means propane for cooking + powering the generator for a few hours at a time to keep the freezer cold. If I wait until the power is out to get propane, I probably won’t be able to get it, so I should get a couple more tanks of propane and stick them in a dry place.

I also need to keep my garage clean so I can keep my car in there so it doesn’t get destroyed in a hail storm. We’ve had more of those here this year than all other years combined.

It has been an exciting couple of weeks at work. I shouldn’t say much other than I’ve been working with some OGs of the blogging world, which has been pretty cool.

I’m getting burned out on social media again. For how smooth the onboarding was, the content on Thread is completely terrible. Twitter is continuing to go downhill. Bluesky’s content is pretty good, but it isn’t yet a vibrant community (if you want an invite, hit me up). I’m enjoying the content on my Mastodon instance the most these days. There is a non-zero chance of my retreating to my feedreader again for a while.

I saw someone on Mastodon post that they heard someone call mindlessly scrolling “rubbing the glass.” Everyone I’ve mentioned that to has recoiled, but that phrase is so good.

Charlie decided two weeks ago that he really likes riding his bike. It is now one of his favorite activities. Cruising downhill on his bike fills his face with a smile and the air with giggles.

This has been a big week for Charlie’s language skills.

• He is singing songs on his own more. Wheels on the Bus and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
• He counted to 10 on his own on Saturday! I’m not quite sure he grasps the concept of numbers all that well yet, but he is getting the sequence down.
• His vocabulary is growing rapidly. He remembers words for more and more things.
• Even more Thank Yous than before.
• He is communicating more of his wants and needs rather than just being upset. He still has a ways to go, of course, but the increase has been helpful. The flip side is that he is saying “No!” a lot more, but that is part of communication too.

Charlie is also getting more adventurous and capable every day. It seems like the 2 year mark is a time of incredible growth.

I learned how to recharge the AC in my car with refrigerant. It was a lot easier than I expected. My Dad says that it tends to go out over the winter when the system is not in use, so it might be good to turn on the car AC once a month in the winter.

We went to Ohio for the week of July 4 and had a great time. We spent time in the pool, Charlie had a lot of grandparent time, and we got to relax a little bit. It was nice to see Charlie open up around the rest of the family the way he does at home with just us.

As you can see, Charlie realllllly liked playing on and driving lawnmowers. He also learned how fun it is to run around in the rain and stomp puddles, which he did again on Sunday after we got home.

My favorite pizza place in Ohio, Yala’s Pizza, is now Fran’s Pizza. Apparently the name change is primarily to honor longtime owner Francesca DeSantis. No recipe change. Here is an article about it in the local Chronicle Telegram.

Ohio and New York are both in the Eastern timezone, but on opposite sides. Sunrise and sunset in New York are so much earlier than in Ohio that they almost need to be in separate timezones.

Charlie did great on the road trip. He is able to entertain himself more with imaginative play, he took a long nap, and we made a couple rest area stops to “run our sillies out.” The last hour and a half of the 8 hour journey is always the toughest, but Mamma sang lots of songs with Charlie and saved the day.

Here is Charlie’s Car Jams playlist:

It is amazing how having a 4-day weekend reinvigorates me a little bit. Ideas started flowing again for the first time in a while.

Reading: I finished Golden Son by Pierce Brown and listened to American Terroir by Rowan Jacobsen and Cod by Mark Kurlansky on the road trip.

From American Terroir:

“The Yupik have a word, slungak, that translates as ‘coming to.’ It describes when awareness first blossoms in a child, when the child stops living purely in the moment and becomes conscious of time and place and self and starts to lay down memories. For many Yupik, slungak kicks in when the kings run.”

Now I’m reading The House on the Lagoon by Rosario Ferré.

New additions to the to-read list:

• My Confession by Samuel Chamberlain, inspiration for McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
• Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man by Mark Kurlansky
• American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard

This week flew by.

Last Sunday after my weekly post, getting pizza at Hudson & Packard didn’t happen. After an hour drive with a toddler who didn’t want to be in his carseat, they were sold out. We’ll try again in the future. We did have dinner somewhere else in Poughkeepsie, then got ice cream in Wappingers Falls, where Charlie had a lot of fun riding his bike around the parking lot (it basically lives in the car these days.)

Amanda was off of work on Monday. I had to work, so we still sent Charlie to daycare and she was able to do some projects with the Cricut machine she just got. Tuesday, and Wednesday were pretty work-heavy for both of us, so I don’t have much of note to report. We opted for easy dinners and after dinner walks with Charlie.

Getting Charlie to bed seemed more difficult than usual this week. Not sure what is going on there.

Thursday was our 10th anniversary! We celebrated by making a nice dinner at home together (double cut ribeye, sauteed greens, side salad), then having a fire in the chiminea on the deck after we got Charlie to bed, sharing a bottle of wine, making s’mores, and writing down some of the big things from our first ten years of marriage. We’ve shared and grown a lot together.

Yeah, I overfilled the chiminea. It did burn down pretty quickly and was soon at a more reasonable level.

As I like to jokingly remind Amanda, our wedding anniversary and the day I started this blog are both on June 22. I’ve been blogging here for 15 years! On June 22, 2008, I was holed up in a hotel room in Tarrytown, NY, (not far from where we live now!), eating pizza, and learning how to install WordPress on my cheap shared hosting, writing my first post, and figuring out how to customize my theme. The rest is available via RSS.

I caught up with Jeremy Felt on Friday afternoon, which was nice. I’ve been enjoying our catch up calls once every couple months. It is nice to chat with someone who also does remote work a lot like my own and has a child around the same age. We go through so many similar things! Jeremy is also a WordPresser, IndieWebber, and blogger. It is a shame we live on opposite sides of the country.

Friday evening Amanda and Charlie hung out with some friends of ours while I opted to stay home for some quiet time. I ended up cleaning the dining room and kitchen, tidying living room, writing my weekly veggie share post, and reading a little bit.

Saturday we met one of Charlie’s daycare friends and her parents at Barnes & Noble’s Saturday Storytime, where they read a children’s book, do live music, and some coloring. Everyone was having a good time, so we went out to lunch afterward. We love seeing Charlie and other kids play so well together. The original plan was to go to Muscoot Farm, but it was raining all morning.

During naptime I worked on an iOS Shortcut for posting to this blog, Twitter, Bluesky, and Mastodon all at the same time.

• You can download a stripped-down version here. It relies on the native Twitter app (which annoyingly prompts you to confirm posting), Ivory for Mastodon (you can swap out with your Shortcuts-friendly Mastodon app of choice), and two Get Contents of URL actions for Bluesky. You’ll need to swap in your Bluesky identifier and app password in the cURL sections. h/t to Eric Davis for sending me the Bluesky API calls.
• Here is my shortcut for posting to a WordPress blog via Micropub.

Later after naptime we went grocery shopping and made taco salads for dinner.

Sunday I mowed and then replaced the shutters on our downstairs windows while Amanda and Charlie played in the sprinkler. I need a taller ladder to do the upstairs windows, so those will have to wait a few weeks.

The humidity the last couple days has been rough. If this keeps up, I’m seriously considering putting the window air conditioners in. We’ve held off so far this summer because the evenings have been cool and it is nice to have the breeze.

I remarked to Amanda that though Wednesday was the solstice, it still doesn’t feel like summer to me. Probably because we haven’t done the activities I typically associate with summer (swimming, rowing, kayaking, hiking, fishing.) We need to change that.

Happy Father’s Day! I’m feeling extra thankful for our little family today. It has been a tough week with Charlie being home from daycare most of the week while we both had to work (all three of us were frustrated and no one had a good time or got enough work/play in), but it has been a nice weekend and I’m looking forward to the family outing we have planned this afternoon.

Three times this week when Charlie is flopping around and having trouble getting comfortable at bedtime, he has crawled into my arms and fallen asleep. It melts my heart every time.

Charlie has started to sing to himself recently, and gets excited when we recognize the song and join in. The past couple days it has been Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Also on the music front, he has been playing music with Amanda on a small music set he has. He stays in beat on the drum while Amanda plays Wheels on the Bus on the xylophone! Thank goodness he got her musical abilities instead of mine. I can’t even keep a beat.

Charlie has also started to address us directly by saying “Momma” or “Dada” or “Mommy” or “Daddy” and then what he wanted to say. That is new in the last week or so.

He’s requested going on a walk every day (sometimes multiple), which we are more than happy to oblige. We follow his lead, which usually means going to the end of the street and into the woods, where he likes to pick up and throw rocks. We saw a rabbit on Tuesday and he has stopped every day since at the same spot to look for it again. He brought his first rock home on Saturday. That has to be a little boy milestone, right? I know I had a rock collection. Still do.

The garden is looking good! Potatoes on the left and tomatoes/tomatillos on the right. No photos of the other garden bed this week, but plenty of peas and kale to pick.

I went to an art show here in Peekskill on Saturday at the new Center for Machine Arts, started by Bre Pettis. The focus is creating art with machines, and the majority used pen plotters, though one artist used a metal CNC.

I was most interested in the generative landscapes that Leo McElroy made (I made some generative art last year as well, so I enjoyed chatting with him about his process) and some studies of natural leaf patterns by Jenn Karson, who I think did a great job showing her process and some of her experiments along the way. She also showed some of the same pieces in different mediums, and sometimes inverted (milling the lines vs empty space on aluminum).

I chatted with Jenn about what it might take to do some of the same work on wood from the same tree species as the leaves, and if done on greenwood what kind of interesting elements the natural drying process would add to the piece.

Check out Jenn Karson’s Damaged Leaf Dataset, it is pretty cool.

There is another show on July 22 with a slightly different cohort.

Going to the show made me start thinking about how I can create art again. One idea I had is to make an ongoing series of bookmarks for places I visit. I love picking up bookmarks from local bookstores, so why not make some of my own? I’ll need to cut some cardstock and leave it in my backpack with some pens.

Also, perhaps I can start by making some for Peekskill. Perhaps an outline of this section of the Hudson River (I bet I can turn the GIS data from naturalearthdata.com into an SVG that is plottable or cuttable), or maybe a sketch of the view from the waterfront.

WordCamp Europe happened last weekend and I got a bunch of photos from friends who attended, letting me know that one of my pieces from the Museum of Block Art was included as a postcard for the attendees. Each person got a pack of all of the same kind and was encouraged to trade with others to get a full set. I love that.

Two meals that turned out better than expected this week:

1. Whole grilled chicken. I spatchcocked it, then grilled it over direct heat on each side for a little bit, moved it to indirect heat, and finished over direct heat again. We ate it with sauteed chard with garlic and lemon, and orzo rice. Again, I’m pleased with the grill we got last month. The spatchcocked chickens I tried on the old one got burnt to a char from all the flareups and it was too small to set up two zones (direct and indirect heat).
2. Rigatoni with sausage and kale. The tomato paste/wine/onion/garlic/fennel seed/cream sauce was quick and easy to make. We all loved it. One to remember.

It is strawberry season. We’ve been getting fruit every week from local farms (as well as our regular veggie CSA), so we’ve been eating a lot of strawberries the last two weeks. some made it into this quick cobbler.

Off to try pizza at Hudson & Packard and walk across the Hudson with Amanda and Charlie 👋

The weather this week was weird. We had a hail storm on Tuesday, then smokey, hazy orange skies on Wednesday and Thursday as smoke from the Canadian wildfires moved in. I didn’t take photos of the smoke, but you probably saw them on the news.

Thursday night Charlie refused to go to bed without Bunny, who we had not seen for a week. So we turned the house and car upside down looking for Bunny, who I eventually found between the covers at the foot of the bed, where we tuck the covers under the mattress. Bunny had made a little warren down there.

Saturday morning we had over some parents with kids around Charlie’s age to play and have breakfast in the backyard. We made pancakes out there on the Blackstone and generally had a good time.

Though after two out of the three families left, Charlie finally opened up. He seems to do better with small groups, so going forward we’ll probably prioritize playdates with just one family at a time.

It is interesting seeing kids a couple months older than Charlie. It is amazing how much language use and independent mobility (like stairs!) spikes around the 2 year mark. A couple months ago we thought that stuff was still far off for Charlie, but we notice weekly improvements in both areas now. It is so cool watching him grow.

I spent some time Sunday morning doing yard work (mowing, mending a hole in the mower’s grass collecting bag, watering and fertilizing the plants, pulling out some poison ivy that popped up), and moving some things out of the basement and garage to post on the local Buy Nothing group, and cleaning up two used window air conditioners a friend gave us. Amanda and Charlie played with the hose and washed some stuff outside. Charlie absolutely LOVES playing with the hose.

Scenes from the garden. Charlie loves helping water the plants. Purple peas are starting to come in.

Sometimes Charlie likes wearing his cowboy hat around 🤠

I finished Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez yesterday and started Golden Son by Pierce Brown.

I started my weekly veggie CSA ideas posts again over at cooklikechuck.com. Here is the first one:

I prioritized spending time with family and friends last weekend, so I am doing a combined post this week.

My parents came to visit over Memorial Day weekend, and it was great to spend time with them. The weather was beautiful and we spent a lot of time outside. We got the tomatoes and tomatillos planted in the garden, added more dirt to the potatoes (which are doing great!), washed and folded up a tarp that I’ve been neglecting, and changed the spigot on our bathtub. We didn’t work the whole time… a decent amount of time was spent on the deck, which we just got some new furniture for: A cantilever umbrella, a couch, and some chairs. (We got a rug this week, but no photos of that yet.) We made some pizza and tiki drinks one night, and another they watched Charlie while Amanda and I went out on a date.

One thing I forgot in the last post: Charlie recapped his day during bedtime. Amanda heard him saying the words he knows for things he did that day, like he was recapping the day’s events. Pizza, Carly, Cupcake, Lella, Drive. We went to a birthday party for Carly, had pizza, ate a cupcake, played with Lianella, and pretended to drive on an arcade game. He amazes us every day.

Today’s amazement: He started washing one of his bathtoys (a seal), just like I was washing him. Then when it was time to get out of the tub he started handing me his toys so I could put them away, which he hasn’t done before (nor have we asked him to.)

This week Charlie has been saying Thank You (without being asked!) to people when they help him with things. It is very sweet. It gets our hearts every time.

Charlie has been a little more independent on the climbing wall lately. He doesn’t want help placing his feet.

Sometimes you feel more like a parent (taking care of the kid, making sure they are fed and safe, dealing with their tantrums) and other times you feel more like a Dad (the two of you having fun together, they are being very lovey and sweet, and things are just generally going better). This week I felt more like a Dad. Lots of walks, giggles, sweet snuggly reading time, fun dinners out while Mom traveled for work. Charlie jamming to music while eating pizza at Baci’s Woodfired Wednesday, the pure joy on his face when having ice cream at the Blue Pig, sitting on the front porch and giggling together. What a wonderful feeling! ♥️

We had one of Charlie’s classmates and her parents over for a play date and dinner on Saturday. They played well together, shared better than we expected, had conversations together that the grown-ups didn’t understand, and both mentioned each other’s names the next day. The cardboard house made out of the huge box the patio furniture came in and the big yoga ball were the two hits of the day. It was great to see Charlie playing with a friend. We are actively making plans to hang out again.

I’ve been listening to The Hold Steady a lot lately. Looks like they are having a cool festival celebrating 20 years of being a band up at Arrowood Farms, a place we really like. I’m not going, but I expect it to be a great time for those who do.

Our method for getting marginally more vegetables into our diet: Every salad has lots of broccoli slaw mix added, which in addition to nutrition gives it a nice crunch component. And our self-imposed rule is that we have to finish our salad before getting seconds on the main dish. (That rule doesn’t apply to Charlie… it is challenging enough to get him to eat as it is.)

The veggie shares start this coming week, which we are very much looking forward to!

Charlie loves playing with the hose.

I’m pleased with the garden and yard plants in general this year. The peas are blooming right now, the potatoes are growing quickly, and the spinach and kale are putting out lots of leaves. After two years of trying to get some perennials to grow on the side of our house from seed, we finally have some Rudbeckias that are taking off. Looking forward to the blooms brightening up that side of the house.

An update to the wick irrigation for the tomatoes this year: I buried the buckets and make them stick out of the dirt only an inch or so to minimize the length of rope that is out of the water or dirt so it has less of an opportunity to dry out. So far so good with the couple of 90+F days we’ve had.

Not all worked out, though. The basil, rosemary, and peppers I planted either didn’t come up or died. Most of the cilantro and spinach I planted didn’t come up either–only a few plants sprouted. So we went to the local greenhouse today and bought some basil, rosemary, jalapenos, and parsley to plant.

The Mock Orange is blooming right now, and so are the Rose campion.

My weather station showed a high of 104F on Friday. I am certain this was inaccurate, because I was outside at the time and I think it was a lot closer to 92-94F. The sun has been very intense though, so maybe the whole unit got overheated. 🤷‍♂️

I’ve been pretty much off of social media for the past month and a half, and that has felt pretty good. I did log on to Instagram today to post a story of Charlie and the hose, but I’ll probably delete the app off of my phone again soon. Even new things like getting an invite to Bluesky haven’t been able to pull me back into social media. I’ve also been neglecting the internet in general. My unread feeds backlog is so long that I might have to declare bankruptcy.

Is it the time of year? Is it wanting to spend as much time as I can with Charlie? Disillusionment? Probably all of the above.

When I am on my phone, I’ve been reading books in the Kindle app, which is something I never thought I’d do. Nothing beats the convenience of always having your phone on you, though.

I’m currently reading Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez, book two of the Delta-v series.

I think I want to start Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series next. She has a fantastic blog, by the way.

This time last year I had just started the Baroque Cycle series. Right now I’m on book 7 of 8. Still listening while I mow the lawn or do the dishes.

This felt like a pretty long week, though it is the same length as all the others. Amanda was out of town for a few days and Charlie got sick while she was gone, so I needed to take off work a couple days to take him to the doctor and care for him. Poor little guy has some pretty noticeable chest congestion and a bad cough. He needed to be put on antibiotics. To make things worse, it seems like the rest of his remaining teeth are all coming in at once, so his mouth is sore. Both of those things affect his eating and sleeping, so it has been a tough week for Charlie, and a tiring one for his parents. Also, my allergies are at peak intensity right now as tree and grass pollen fill the air.

When he was feeling well, Charlie started playing on his own in the backyard with us up on the deck. A first! It is really cool to watch him do things on his own and explore.

I love when the Black Locust trees are in bloom. So beautiful.

We had some friends, Chris and Meg (the same ones we met in Poughkeepsie last month) come stay with us on Friday night. We made kabobs on the grill, two of our favorite tiki drinks, and hung out for the evening, and made breakfast the next morning. Unfortunately our plans for the next day were sacked due to the rain (it was beautiful all week and the next day, but Saturday was cold and soggy!), so they went home a bit earlier than originally planned. We’ll try again on a day with better weather.

I mentioned last week that we got a new grill (Weber Spirit II E-310). I’m very happy with it! The old one had thin metal grates and was prone to flare-ups, but this one has thick enameled cast iron grates, which hold and radiate the heat for much more even cooking. No flare-ups so far, either!

Amanda and I took Charlie to a birthday party at an indoor kids play area in Danbury, CT, and he had a great time once he opened up and got used to lots of other kids running around. Someone he gets along with very well with at daycare was there, so that helped him adjust. We enjoyed chatting with her parents, so I see some play dates in the future.

Currently reading Delta-v by Daniel Suarez on my Kindle. I’m also listening to the seventh book in the Baroque Cycle series by Neal Stephenson.

As soon as I can get to the bookstore, I’ll probably pick up the next book in the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown. I enjoyed the first one, which I finished last weekend.

I breezed through Dark Matter by Blake Crouch this week, but it was a bit dark for me to read this week. It didn’t help that the main character’s son’s name is Charlie.

Weather highs and lows for the week:

I enjoyed looking back and seeing what we did at this time last year. I was still on paternity leave then and we were trying to get a few things in before I had to go back to work: More woods explorations, West Taghkanic Diner, the Sol LeWitt exhibit at Williams College, helping Jon do some timber framing. It was also the start of our renewed tiki exploration, and I’m happy to report that we are are better versed, have cooler drinkware, and a wide variety of rums on-hand.

I need to get back to my practice of writing down three things I’m thankful for every day. It makes a noticeable difference in my outlook.

I have a ragù slow cooking on the stove for dinner. I rarely have the time to prep something like that and let it simmer all afternoon, so I’m looking forward to it. 👋

Tuesday we were up and out early because Amanda had to go their NYC office, so Charlie and I ate breakfast outside and watched the trains, walked by the waterfront, and played at the playground before daycare. That was nice.

Saturday morning we did the same thing as a family, and that was great too.

We like doing what we call “Charlie walks.” Within reason, he chooses where to go and we follow him. We like seeing him choose and explore. Just because we don’t know the decision-making process doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

Woodfired Wednesdays are back at Pizzeria Baci.

I sharpened my mower blades on Friday. Charlie is fascinated by how things work, so he squatted down right beside me while I was taking the blade off the mower and watched my every move. Reminds me of me watching my Dad work on things.

Charlie and his wheelbarrow.

My friend Bob Ewing mentioned me in an article last week. It has been a while, so I scheduled a call to catch up with him next week.

We are working on re-outfitting our deck. We spend so much time out there in the summer that we want it to be comfortable and nice. Currently searching for a good outdoor rug, an offset tiltable umbrella, and some furniture. We just got a new grill to replace the old small one that the previous owners left here and we’ve been using since. Looking forward to lots of outside time this summer.

When I can get Charlie to bed on time, I love watching the bats flutter around and eat bugs at dusk 🦇

I had an idea this week while making margaritas: The favor profile of falernum would work well with the tequila, lime, and Cointreau. It looks like I’m not the first person to think of that, as there is a recipe for a Californian Margarita that includes falernum. I don’t love that specific recipe, so that is something for me to work on this summer.

Someone I met in California, when learning that I enjoy sci-fi, recommended the Red Rising series to me. I picked up the first one in the bookstore at SFO, which I just finished last night. I liked it and will probably read more of the series soon. I’m not sure I’d give it an open-ended recommendation unless I know you like dystopian space sci-fi.

Busy next two weeks: Charlie and I are on our own for a couple days this week while Amanda travels for work, then we have visitors the next two weekends. 👋