Charlie has been completely attached to stuffed animals this week. He carries one with him at all times, including when we are at the grocery store and when he is sleeping. He refused to let an Elmo from daycare go on Friday, so Elmo is hanging out at our house this weekend.

We went and cut a Christmas tree today. Compare this photo of Amanda & Charlie picking out a Christmas tree today to Amanda & Charlie last year. He is getting so big! 😍

ChatGPT was the big thing in the tech world this week. I got access to the beta and have been using it as a learning tool. Pairing that with GitHub Copilot has sped up my programming and quickly resolving errors that would have otherwise taken me a while to figure out, such as “Serialization of ‘Closure’ is not allowed.” ChatGPT told me exactly where the error was and how to fix it! Amazing. It also coached me on how to break large requests down into smaller chunks to avoid timeouts.

Unfortunately it is still in early stages and sometimes makes up complete falsehoods. For example, I asked it to recommend a mystery book, which it did, but then it said the book won a prestigious award that I can’t find any evidence of it having won. Or suggesting API endpoints on public APIs that don’t exist. Or confusing WordPress.org with WordPress.com, which is a common mistake.

I used the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday emails as a chance to clean out my subscriptions with Leave Me Alone. Their $7 7-day pass is gold. They are an indie company, and unlike Unroll they don’t sell your email data.

I fixed a couple of bugs on my site that have been bothering me for a while. Feels good. I also made a ton of progress on making Jetpack Likes for posts into Webmention likes. I have a few things to tweak and test, but I expect to run it on my own site this week and then blog about it and share my script.

Amanda and I both noticed that we had some free time in our work schedules one day this week, so we decided to go out and have a lunch date at the spur of the moment and spend some child-free time together. That was really nice. More things like that in 2023, please.

Currently watching:

• The new season of The Crown on Netflix.
• The new Star Wars Andor series on Disney Plus.

Currently Reading:

• Neal Stephenson’s The Juncto, the fifth book in the Baroque Cycle series.
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

I added my Blogroll to the site this week after seeing great resources like blogroll.org and ooh.directory. Blogrolls are now more important than ever in our age of online social diaspora.

I also blogged about holiday cocktail ingredients and batch cocktails over at CookLikeChuck:

Homemade cocktail ingredients and batched holiday drinks that make great gifts – Cook Like Chuck

Have a cocktail lover in your life and want to make them something unique? Or want a host gift for a holiday party that will stand out against the bottles of wine everyone else is bringing? Here are some cocktail ingredients you can make at home and some batched holiday drinks you can make. Homemade…

cooklikechuck.com

I’ve been on a holiday cocktail quest lately, tracking down recipes from the Sippin’ Santa tiki popup, making syrups and liqueurs (cranberry syrup, cinnamon syrup, nutmeg syrup, ginger liqueur), infusing pineapple rum, and mixing up batches of Black Christmas and tequila and sherry eggnog. Some for personal consumption, some for gifts.

We are making good progress through our holiday card list, aided by the drinks above.

My Spotify Wrapped for 2022. Again I’m in the top 1/2% of Tycho listeners. I think they must be excluding certain artists, because we listened to A LOT of Caspar Babypants.

I’m off to do some Christmas decorating, cookie baking, and card writing! 🎄👋

Charlie has been showing more interest in stuffed animals recently and has been very affectionate toward them, giving them hugs and snuggling them. This week he started carrying around a stuffed sloth almost as large as he is. Some times when he gets home from daycare, Sloth is the first thing he picks up.

Charlie also has a new thing where he takes his sippy cup and hits it against your cup and says “Cheers!” He’ll also do it with whatever food he and you have in your hands at any given time.

I was a solo dad for a few days this week while Amanda was on a work trip. Totally doable, but it tends to crowd out the possibility of doing anything other than the baseline during that time. Each time I solo parent for a few days, I have a new appreciation for single parents.

I had to work on Saturday for a quick turnaround project. Thankfully that only happens once a year.

After I published last week’s post, I spent some time outside sowing some flower seeds that need cold stratification. Then I came in and made dinner. Sitter was sick and we couldn’t find anyone else, so we canceled our dinner reservations for Amanda’s birthday and instead did “NY Steakhouse Night” at home. A 2.5in NY strip cooked in the sous vide and seared in butter, creamed spinach, hash browns, and a bottle of French wine. It was great!

First big freeze of the season froze all of my jalapeños before most of them turned red, so I had to pick them all and throw them in the smoker to make chipotles, even though they were still green. They seemed to turn out pretty well after 6.5 hours in the smoker, though I haven’t eaten any yet. The plan is to pack most of them in adobo sauce.

IndieWeb stuff:

• I’m @cagrimmett on Mastodon.
• I installed ActivityPub on this site so you can follow my blog posts at @cagrimmett wherever federated posts are fetched.
• I joined the IndieWeb WebringArchived Link and set up my representative h-card on my homepage.
• https://indiewebify.me/ is a helpful tool!
• https://github.com/Ryuno-Ki/webmention-tools allows you to send webmentions from the command line.
  • You can also send them with curl!
• More to come.

Two project ideas:

1. I like the idea of BookWyrm, but I like keeping my books all on my own site. Perhaps I write a dedicated ActivityPub feed for my books page? Something like @books@cagrimmett.com. What If I make this into a WordPress plugin so others can use it, too? Make book lists and notes available via RSS and ActivityPub. Maybe it extends the existing ActivityPub plugin. We can call it the IndieWeb Book Club.
2. A good project for learning how to make WordPress blocks: An easy block to allow WordPress site owners to add a representative hCard to their site. It should optionally support all hcard properties.
   • Relevant links:
   • about representative hcards: http://microformats.org/wiki/representative-h-card
   • hcard properties: http://microformats.org/wiki/h-card

A couple thoughts on the Twitter debacle:

• If Musk were quietly, diligently making changes internally for the first month and announcing occasional improvements after they were shipped and stable, we’d all have a different outlook and maybe give him the benefit of the doubt. Instead, he chose mass firings and daily public spectacles. Makes me think the real reason that Tesla and SpaceX are so loved is because of incredible PR and comms teams keeping his nonsense reigned in. People he doesn’t have at Twitter.
• How can the remaining staff at Twitter get anything done amidst such radical uncertainty?
• Chris Aldrich on your Twitter Go-Bag.
• Scrape useful metadata about your Twitter archive.

This week I learned there are tools run by OpenDNS, Google DNS, and Cloudflare DNS where you can request that they update their DNS cache for a particular domain and record type.

• Google’s for 8.8.8.8: https://dns.google/cache
• Cloudflare’s for 1.1.1.1: https://cloudflare-dns.com/purge-cache/
• OpenDNS’s: https://cachecheck.opendns.com/

Two cocktails we’ve been enjoying this week:

1. Scotch hot toddy
   • 2oz Scotch
   • 1 tsp honey
   • 1 star anise
   • 3 cloves
   • 1 lemon slice, juice squeezed into the cup
   • Top with boiling water
2. As an alternative to the scotch toddy, I subbed in an amaro for the scotch, which was pretty good!
3. Bobby Burns
   • 1oz Scotch
   • 1oz Sweet vermouth
   • 1/2oz Benedictine
   • Stir in a mixing glass with ice, strain into a coupe.

Charlie is getting better at making some animal sounds like “ruff ruff” and “moo.” It is adorable.

We went to a friend’s house last weekend and Charlie discovered the magnets on their fridge and loved playing with them. We have some art magnets, but they are difficult for his little fingers to pull off the fridge, so we ordered some fun magnets that he can play with. Now every morning while we are making coffee he has fun putting magnets on the fridge, pulling them off, transferring them to the dishwasher, etc. There are some on the garage door in my office, too. Great purchase.

This is the first Daylight Savings change that affected Charlie. On Monday he got up at 5am and we ran out of things to do, so I took him grocery shopping at 7am. He loves the grocery store.

So, what do you do with an energetic toddler at 6:30am? I still don’t know, but today we made some cinnamon bread together. I went into it knowing there would be a mess, and there was, but he enjoyed it.

It was Amanda’s birthday this week! I decorated the dining room, got a cake and her favorite ice cream, and threw a little get-together for her. Also planning on making her a nice dinner tonight (our sitter plans fell through so we canceled the restaurant plans) and soon going to Regarding Oysters to celebrate.

It feels like so much of what we considered our normal lives was put on hold during the pandemic and is now pretty different with a child, so we have to be flexible and celebrate whenever and however we can.

This Elon Musk Twitter takeover has been such a mess. Early on I thought it would go pretty well (cutting costs, shipping features faster), but in reality it is a lot worse than I thought.

The $8 verification has turned into a fiasco, with accounts impersonating huge companies:

• Lockheed Martin
• Coca Cola
• Tesla
• SpaceX
• Nestle
• Eli Lilly
• Every major politician you can think of

It has honestly been funny to watch, but I expect lawsuits to start popping up.

Advertisers pulling out, entire teams (including the communications team and accessibility team) fired, and reversal of their work at home policy. Like I said, a mess.

Meanwhile, the team over at Tumblr is having fun trolling Twitter with their Important Blue Internet Checkmark.

Combine that with the FTX.com bankruptcy and someone running off with the FTX.us assets, it is been a wild week on the internet.

Honestly, Mastodon is not the answer. It is a crappier Twitter and I don’t expect it to get better. Instead, I think I should spend my time reading more indie blogs and liking/responding via webmentions. I know this isn’t a great setup for everyone, but I feel it is right for me.

There are a number of new tools this week to find people who have Mastodon handles in their profile, but I’d like a tool that looks for blogs with RSS feeds. There has to be one out there. If not, modifying one of the Mastodon tools could do the trick.

Hoping to carve out some time this coming week to work on it.

Another related tool: shawnhooper / twitter-archive-to-wp – import your Twitter archive to a custom post type using wp-cli.

GitHub Blocks looks pretty cool! Kind of like the next iteration of bl.ocks.org or a GitHub-centric lightweight Observable.

If you update to macOS Ventura and have trouble with your SSH connections, you’ll probably need to add PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes +ssh-rsa to your ~/.ssh/config file.

macOS 13 (Ventura) ships with a version of OpenSSH that “disables RSA signatures using the SHA-1 hash algorithm by default.”

Still reading Hernan Diaz’s Trust. I’m very close to the end. Maybe picking up Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Unraveling or Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star next.

I’ve been more frustrated, irritated, impatient, and less empathetic than normal this week by small-ish things that don’t usually get under my skin. I’m not sure why, but I do know it isn’t other people, it is definitely me. I probably need to get outside, maybe start meditating again, and get back to my practice of writing down three things I’m grateful for each day.

I have a couple ideas for new posts on my neglected cooking blog. I need some time to put them together, but hoping I can make it happen!

The rosemary has been blooming like crazy. Almost time to bring it back inside since we are expecting some freezes this week.

I spent Sunday through Friday in Denver at an Automattic meetup. This was the first large meetup held since I joined the company in early 2020. ~200 people across three of the companies divisions attended. It was wonderful to meet so many of my coworkers and make new connections. The days were packed and I think I made the most of my time there by:

• Working on some projects in-person
• Sitting with different groups of people at meals
• Giving a flash talk
• Taking walks with people and chatting
• Asking a question during the group AMA with Matt
• Volunteering to help coordinate some of the programming
• Connecting with other teams like some of the Jetpack product teams, Pressable, Day One, Sensei, etc.
• Participating in the coffee exchange (swapping coffee from local roasters around the world)
• Going out for social time at the end of each day (board games, karaoke, bars)

I met a lot of cool people I want to keep in touch with and am looking forward to the next one.

One thing I did is taking some time before dinner each day to write some notes on the conversations I had, which will be very helpful in following up on some project ideas once we are back at our desks next week.

Bob Ralian, head of advertising at Automattic, told me something very insightful (and maybe even inciteful!) during dinner one night:

Don’t assume good ideas are being worked on.

Bob Ralian

This week I learned about the The HTTP Archive, an open source project that tracks how the web is built, including historical data. It is queryable by BigQuery, so I plan to check that out this coming week.

Before I left for the work trip, I did some grocery shopping and meal planning for Amanda and Charlie. The goal was to minimize stress where I could even though I was away. I’m going to continue doing that when I travel in the future because Amanda found that helpful. Wrangling a toddler solo is no joke!

Some of our planning to make more local friends, especially other parents of toddlers, is finally starting to come to fruition. We went to a morning play date on Saturday where everyone seemed to have a good time, and then made some concrete plans again before leaving. Looks like a rotating “Saturday morning donuts” playdate is going to be a monthly occurrence.

We also had some new neighbors over for dinner, which was really nice. They are the closest in age to us on our street and we have some interests in common, so it was nice to connect.

When Amanda and Charlie picked me up from the train station when I came home on Friday, I picked Charlie up and he immediately buried his head in my shoulder, clutched me, and refused to let go for ~5 mins. That really got my heart. I missed him so much last week!

Charlie’s vocabulary is continuing to expand, as is his understanding of what we are saying and what is going on in pictures and illustrated books. You know that part of Llama Llama Red Pajama where baby llama is weeping wailing for his mama? When we get to that page, even if we don’t say anything, Charlie throws his head back, raises his arms, and yells. It is very funny.

We’ve been listening to a lot of Caspar Babypants with Charlie, so I started to listen to Presidents of the United States of America again, which is Chris Ballew’s other band. It is funny how similar the lyrical style is. Peaches could easily be a Caspar Babypants song.

Looking for an alternative to Twitter? Give Tumblr another try. (Yeah, that-thing-you-used-10-years-ago.tumblr.com). Great community, good people behind it, good vibes.

I read a lot of Hernan Diaz’s Trust during my flights and am really enjoying it. After I finish it I might pick up his In the Distance.

Charlie is waking up from his nap, so it is time to wrap this up, make some lunch, and spend the rest of this unseasonably warm day outside with Amanda and Charlie 👋

Charlie sounded out some new words this week:

• Pouch (like applesauce pouches)
• Arthur (his friend who came to visit)

Amanda put a stool by the front window so Charlie could climb up on it and look out. It has been a huge hit and he stands on it multiple times a day.

We had one of Charlie’s daycare friends and his parents over on Saturday and are really glad we invited them. It was nice to connect with other parents of young kids and chat while they ran around. I made some pizzas in the Ooni, we had some wine and snacks, and generally just chilled.

There is something comforting about all being in the same boat and being both unapologetic and understanding when one of the toddlers does a toddler thing and having to deal with that. It is harder to relax when people without kids come to visit and your kid does something weird.

This visit was one of the first times another walking, interactive toddler like Charlie who doesn’t yet understand how to interact well with other kids came to our house, and Charlie had some bouts of jealousy and frustration when things didn’t go as he expected. There were some tears. I can understand that it is tough to see someone playing with your toys, standing on your stool, and being held by your parents. He hasn’t had to share before. It is better for him to learn now than a couple years from now. Still, it is tough to see him frustrated like that, and we snuggled him extra that night.

Charlie and his friend Miles dressed up as Mario and Luigi for Halloween. So cute.

The saffron crocuses are blooming! I’m harvesting the saffron to make rice, soups, and paellas.

This week was peak fall color in Peekskill. The weather was also nice. It ended up being one of the more beautiful autumns we’ve had here.

Currently reading:

• Trust by Hernan Diaz
• Woodswoman by Anne LaBastille
• The Confusion by Neal Stephenson (part of the Baroque cycle)

I had a conversation with a friend about working with neurodivergent people. I currently work with some neurodivergent folks and have worked with others in the past. Some helpful things I like to keep in mind:

• When working with neurodivergent people, it is best to assume you aren’t working from a shared understanding of any given situation until you make your understanding explicit and have a conversation about it. This eliminates frustration on both sides.
• Assume positive intent. If they miss a call/meeting/ping, don’t assume it is intended. For some, they can get zero’d in on something to the exclusion of other things.
• Try to understand their strengths and weaknesses and try to structure their work to maximize use of their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.
• Make as much explicit as you can. Give clear expectations, clear instructions, and clear feedback. Minimize nuance. If you ask them for a call, give a clear list of what you’d like to discuss and why.
  • On the flip side, don’t assume. Ask!

https://tenpages.github.io/us-level/us.html

There are only 8 US states I haven’t been to!

We spent the past week in the Lake Placid/High Peaks region of the Adirondacks. Unfortunately Charlie was sick most of the time which put a damper on things, but we made the best of what little time (and sleep) we had. Lots of reading and snuggling Charlie (I read a bunch of essays from The Adirondack Reader (archive.org version), a walk at High Falls Gorge, scenic drives, and time in the hot tub at the hotel.

The main takeaway for me is that I definitely want to go back and hike, fly fish, cross country ski, and row my guideboat.

As always, I’m glad we went during the off season. No crowds or traffic, and even though lots of places are closed, it is a tradeoff worth making.

I was quite taken with the birch bark.

Charlie attempted lot of new words this week. He is trying his best to make the sounds for “tree”, “truck”, “dog”, and “duck”. He also pairs these words with the word “hi”, so we’ve been saying hi and waving to lots of trees, dogs, and trucks this week. He also started coming over and hugging us on his own, which is just the sweetest thing.

Charlie’s illness made its way to Amanda and now to me. We haven’t been hit as hard has he was, but we are still taking it easy this weekend.

Back at home, it has been a season of soups.

Last weekend we made this Pho Ga:

30-Minute Pressure Cooker Pho Ga (Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Soup) Recipe

Make a superb bowl of Vietnamese pho ga (chicken noodle soup) with rich, aromatic broth and fall-off-the-bone tender chicken in 30 minutes using a pressure cooker.

www.seriouseats.com

Yesterday I made this chicken and wild rice soup:

Best Instant Pot Creamy Chicken and Wild Rice Soup Recipe – How to Make Instant Pot Soup

Chicken and wild rice soup can now be made in the Instant Pot! Keep reading for this easy, weeknight recipe that’s perfect for chilly fall days.

www.thepioneerwoman.com

Today I’m making some kind of minestrone with orzo, recipe TBD.

Some links worth sharing from this week:

• Wooden Canoe Museum – an online museum of wooden canoes and builders
• 5 Pieces of advice for my 37th birthday from Art Piszek, which also includes some of the best pieces of advice from other lists he’s found
• Brian Coords remade the WordPress Quick Draft widget using the javascript API. Fun small project to understand how it works.
• Ryan Welcher made VSCode snippets for Gutenberg development
• Dark Sky (archive.org version) is shutting down soon. I’ve already moved to Carrot Weather on iOS, but have been looking for alternatives on the web. These two look nice (h/t Courtney Robertson)
  • https://www.windy.com/
  • https://www.foreca.com/
• The US State Department now allows online passport renewal.
• As of v1.5.0, p5.js has a native saveGif(filename, duration, delay) function. Previously this was a pain that needed external libraries and lots of know-how to get them to work.

Hudson shipwrecks and 3000 year old submerged walls!

What appears to be a largely intact 19th-century sailing sloop — something that historians and sailors have hungered after for years and never found — has been located in Haverstraw Bay, about 35 miles north of Manhattan, for instance, and the suspected remains of a half-dozen Revolutionary War vessels scuttled in 1777 have been tentatively identified farther north.

The surveys have also turned up more mysterious structures, including a series of submerged walls more than 900 feet long that scientists say are clearly of human construction. They say the walls are probably 3,000 years old because that was the last time the river’s water levels were low enough to have allowed construction on dry land.

Prehistoric rock hunting structures under the great lakes!

Archaeologists Have Found Prehistoric Rock Structures Under the Great Lakes. Here’s What the Stones Can Tell Us | Discover Magazine

A Doggerland of the Great Lakes? Underwater rock formations on the lakebed of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron may have been created by hunters thousands of years ago.

www.discovermagazine.com

A nice visual representation of different ways to distribute points randomly in a circle:

This coming week we hope to have some new friends over as long as everyone is illness-free. Some parents of kids from Charlie’s daycare and some new neighbors. I’ll report back next week 👋

Charlie

Charlie is getting really close to one nap territory now. When he has two naps it is very difficult to get him down at night, but he falls asleep pretty quickly at night when he only has one nap. I guess the trick is to get the timing of that one nap right so that he doesn’t crash too soon before his bedtime.

He has been very into Wheels on the Bus and Itsy Bitsy Spider this week, hand motions included.

Mimicking things we do is a new pastime. It is so cute!

Charlie likes kefir.

He is getting so confident and fast with walking, which is really fun to see. His climbing is improving a lot, too. That one is more fun for him and less fun for us. I love that he is adventurous, but he doesn’t quite understand what he can and can’t climb on and what will hurt him, so we need to pay pretty close attention to him.

WordPress

I’m trying out Jan Boddez’s new Indieblocks plugin. It has some of the same functionality as the old IndieWeb plugins, but made for the block editor. After resolving a conflict with another plugin and flushing my permalinks, things started working as expected. I sent out a few likes to some friends and it looks like they went through!

Next steps:

• Make a better looking archive page for Likes and Notes.
• Figure out a workflow for sending likes and creating bookmarks that is faster than doing it through wp-admin.
• Auto post short notes to Twitter or micro.blog?
• I might rewrite the slug from notes to “micro” or “short” in order to not get confused with my digital garden, notes.cagrimmett.com.

WordPress 6.1 is shaping up to be a pretty cool release.

Tl;dr:

• Performance improvements and more query caching
• Accessibility additions
• Extending the query loop block
• Locking blocks
• Much more!

I’d like to do more core testing, providing feedback, docs improvement, and maybe even some development work. Maybe I should set aside a couple hours a week at work to do that?

I noticed that some updates to the Gutenberg plugin and TwentyTwentyTwo are making my site look wonky. I know I need to update it, but I probably won’t get to it for another week or two. The cobbler’s kids have the worst shoes.

Everything Else

I went down a rabbit hole of figuring out Winter/Christmas/Holiday tiki.

started with a question: What does Winter Tiki look like? Lots of overlap between island spices and winter spices (cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, anise). How do you make a tiki drink that feels seasonally appropriate in a cold climate?

I asked this question to some friends and I emailed some well-known tiki bartenders. I heard a lot of “tiki is a mindset” and “tiki is a year-round thing for me.” There didn’t seem to be a repository for holiday tiki drinks, so I decided to put one together from what I found. It is a work in progress, but off to a great start. You can find that here:

I want to make more generative art. I need to make some time for it. Here’s how I’m thinking about that:

How can I set the stage so that when I have ~30 minutes I can sit down and explore right away, rather than spending those 30 minutes getting things set up? What templates can I leverage? What ideas can I sketch out on paper beforehand?

Sheet pans and bowls were the dinners of choice this week. Roasting chicken and vegetables, and grilled meats with rice and sautéed green. All done in quantity so there were abundant leftovers.

Doing some pho ga in the instant pot for dinner tonight.

I wrote a blog post about using curl to determine if a site uses Cloudflare cache:

My uncle mentioned to me this week that he stopped getting emails for new blog posts, which seemed to be running through the old Feedburner I set up in college. I investigated, and it looks like Feedburner got some updates:

• The styled feed page is gone. Now it returns a standard XML feed.
• The account editing screen for existing accounts has some UI updates.
• Emails look like they are turned off, but there was a way to export email addresses of subscribers, so I migrated those emails to Jetpack Subscriptions.

The end of an era. Feedburner was once ubiquitous.

The Obsidian 1.0 update that dropped this week is great. I’ve been using Obsidian daily for the past year and the update makes it even better.

Obsidian 1.0 – Obsidian

Obsidian: A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files.

obsidian.md

Mostly Twitter is to be avoided, but there have been two high points for me recently:

1. Connecting more with the greater WordPress community
2. Martin Doudoroff (the guy who makes the good cocktail apps) sharing things from the Cocktail Kingdom library.
3. Threads like this one on Afghan fall recipes.

This is my lemongrass harvest for the year. A bit underwhelming (I expected it to grow larger), but this will work for ~4 meals. Planning on using it this sweet potato curry and this tom kha gai soup.

Tough week. Charlie got a stomach bug on Tuesday and was up all night vomiting, so we kept him home Wednesday and Amanda missed a work trip. By Thursday morning Charlie was fine, but Amanda and I came down with what we assume is the same bug and were vomiting all afternoon and early evening. Taking care of an energetic toddler while sick is zero fun. Thankfully it passed by mid Friday.

Charlie is transitioning to one nap a day, which comes with some sleep regression at night and trouble getting him down for his naps during the day. Accordingly, he was fussy this week, seems to be having some separation anxiety, and some big toddler emotions in reaction to small inconveniences.

So, tough week.

Despite that, there were some high points:

Charlie’s daycare had a fun Fall Festival for families. I volunteered to take photos.

Charlie helped us clean out the tomato and tomatillo bed. He is excellent at putting green tomatoes in a brown paper bag to ripen.

We went on a nice fall walk.

I started a new book while holding Charlie for his morning naps: Woodswoman: Living Alone in the Adirondack Wilderness by Anne LaBastille.

I made Smitten Kitchen’s Apple Pancakes for breakfast on Sunday, and made a breakfast skillet with sausage, potatoes, and onions on Monday. Breakfast has felt pretty rushed around here recently, so taking the time to make a couple full breakfasts was nice.

This is a heck of a thing to think about. The single issue that shaped American politics for the last 21 years (the amount of time people in my generation have been politically aware/active) amounted to much less than everyone expected.

With the benefit of hindsight, everything about 9/11 and the War On Terror was a random blip in history with no broader implications. There was not a rising Islamofascism, there was not a clash of civilizations. There were a few guys in some caves doing terrorism, they got lucky once, the US got angry and invaded a few countries, and then everything continued as before. If people were ranking threats to the world order now, Islam and terrorism wouldn’t make the top twenty.

I do take a few issues with this quote, but it gets the big picture right, which is that the threat is much smaller than we imagined.

• I think there should be an asterisk stating that the US invasion of the middle east turned out to be disastrous for the middle east and set the whole region back 50 years.
• The rise of support for the Islamic State and the related bombings/attacks in Europe might still be an issue there.

Do you know about johnbillion/wp_mail? This document lists all the situations where WordPress core sends an email, how and when they happen, and how to filter or disable each one. Most of the time you don’t need it, but when you do it is invaluable. Sharing for those who don’t know about it.

I spent much of my week auditing permissions, access, and security-related processes at work this week. More ahead this week, then hopefully I can set that aside for a while. It takes a particular kind of focus that I find taxing.

I don’t think you should spend much mental energy on the possibility of nuclear war. Now is a good time to review your home emergency preparedness (food, water supply, heat, energy, emergency medicine) in case there is an emergency, otherwise ignore it as much as possible and go about your life.

Things I’m looking forward to this week:

• Picking the jalapenos from the garden and smoking them to make chipotles (and maybe fermenting some for jalapeno hot sauce).
• Charlie got invited to two birthday parties next weekend. Maybe we’ll make some more parent friends?
• Carving out a little bit of time to read.
• More backyard time and walks with Amanda and Charlie

It is chilly outside, Charlie is showing more of his own personality and interests every day, and lots happening in my corner of the WordPress world this week.

Table of contents:

Charlie

• Charlie’s favorite song right now is Wheels on the Bus. He loves doing the hand motions.
• Charlie’s favorite author is Sandra Boynton.
  • Listening to Barnyard Dance being called like a square dance is fun!
• He is getting faster at climbing the stairs every day. This weekend he figured out how to take a sippy cup up with him by putting it two steps above him, climbing up to it, then repeating.
• He is learning how to do a high five. Next time you see him, ask him for a high five.

Home & Garden

Tomatillos were doing well at the beginning of the week, but the cold weather pretty much killed the plants, so this is the last of the tomatillos for the season.

Currently waiting for my jalapeños to turn red so I can turn them into chipotles.

With the arrival of chilly weather, I pulled the ACs out of the windows. It seems like we went from 80/90s (F) to 40/50s (F) with only a week of 70F in-between.

We had a couple of fires in the chiminea on the porch this week. I’m really glad we got that.

Good things from around the web

WordPress

• Ton Zijlstra on WordPress+IndieWeb as the OS of the Open Social Web, a topic near and dear to my heart.
• Cloudflare’s new origin rules open up more possibilities for serving different services on the same domain. Yoast uses it to serve static pages for docs on Cloudflare Pages and their WordPress blog at /blog on their own infrastructure.
• The ability to set block patterns changes as content-only will land in WordPress 6.1. This gets rid of the need for one of the more common ACF use-cases I’ve seen. I’m excited for this to land.
• Dan Knauss mentioned my WordPress Core Contributor Stats post on Post Status this week.
  • I’d been toying with the idea of joining the Post Status Slack for a while and this pushed me over the edge. I’m glad I did, because after chatting with Dan there, we decided to work together on compiling historical and ongoing contributor stats. More soon.
• My contributor stats post also got shared on WP Owls, WPNews.ioArchived Link, and PainelWP.

Other things

• One of my creative commons smoking photos from 2011 is still getting used every couple months. Here is the latest: https://www.kake.com/story/47274271/smoking-weed-is-now-more-popular-than-smoking-tobacco
• Fig.io adds some cool capabilities to your command line. I’m liking it so far.
• GorillaSun continues to put out excellent P5.js tutorials for making generative art. This one is on an algorithm for polygon intersections.

A new bar called Mothership opened in San Diego. We live on the other side of the country, but I want to go. Check out their gorgeous menu:

Other things I’m thinking about

• What does Winter Tiki look like? Lots of overlap between island spices and winter spices (cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, anise). How do you make a tiki drink that feels seasonally appropriate in a cold climate?
  • If you have any winter tiki favorites, let me know!
• Christmas cards. We found a local artist who does house portraits and had her do one for our Christmas cards. We love it. Now we need to get the cards printed.
• I’ve learned more about SSH in the past three weeks than I ever thought I’d know for a project at work. Updated my digital garden entry accordingly.

I finally figured out how to stop Spotify from launching on startup. There is an option buried in the Spotify app settings:

My thirty-third weekly post! A good week at work, some autumnal fare, a sick baby, planning ahead,and some WordPress data exploration.

Charlie

Charlie surprised us this week! We played a children’s song playlist on Spotify and he started doing hand motions to some of the songs. We had no idea they were doing that at daycare and it was really fun to see that. Over the weekend he started sounding out a songg by himself without music playing and making hand motions.

Daycare had picture day and Charlie’s photos were adorable. He knows how to ham it up for the camera.

Amanda realized that after a day of playing with other kids, Charlie needs some quiet snuggle time when he gets home, so one of us holds him on the couch or on the porch while he has a snack and the other parent gets dinner going. Such a sweet time with our little boy.

Charlie graduated to taking a bath in the regular tub instead of the baby bath that sets in the tub. He loves playing with floating tug boats and the faucet.

Poor little guy got sick at the end of the week and is having a tough weekend. He was supposed to go to the first day of fall swim lessons on Saturday, but unfortunately he couldn’t. He is snoozing on me while I type this.

When Charlie wakes up from a nap on either Amanda or me and looks up and smiles because he realizes he is snuggling with one of us, it melts our hearts.

Projects & work

My Jekyll Tools repo reached 100 stars and 30 forks this week!

I don’t use Jekyll anymore, so I haven’t updated this in a couple years. Cool to see it continue being used. I’d be happy to take PRs and add other contributors.

I published a post exploring WordPress core contributor stats:

I learned how to use pup (a command line tool for processing HTML) and Datasette (a tool for exploring data) while compiling this.

The post generated some community discussion on Twitter, and I learned:

• Jean-Baptiste Audras has done some similar work:
  • https://jeanbaptisteaudras.com/en/2022/05/wp-6-0-arturo-contribution-stats/
  • https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/12/29/a-year-in-core-2021/
• WordPress’s props system is fractured and does not encompass some of the larger community-focused work. Weeks spent on writing Learn docs garner the same amount of props as fixing a typo in the codebase. There are some efforts underway to make it more encompassing: https://github.com/WordPress/five-for-the-future/issues

I helped Charlie’s previous nanny (who we hired for a couple months when I had to go back to work but nighttime wake ups and feedings were still tough and Amanda needed to get some sleep) set up a website for her business this week. It is nice to walk people through using WordPress for the first time and take them from not having a domain to launching a landing page in under an hour.

I had a really good week at work. I can’t talk about most of it, but I’ll just say that I got a lot of work done, got some good feedback, helped out coworkers, and moved some important projects forward.

Food & Drink

A few things of note this week (I won’t bore you with the ham sandwiches or grilled chicken):

Amanda made bacon cheddar chive scones with our garden chives.

I made the first lentil sausage soup of the season. It was chilly in the second half of the week!

Lentil, Sausage, Potato, and Greens Soup – Cook Like Chuck

This is one of my favorite soups. As soon as the cold weather sets in, I make this at least twice a month.

cooklikechuck.com

I made one of my favorite quick meals again this week: Turmeric black pepper chicken and vegetables. Takes less than 30 minutes and is delicious. Charlie eats it, too. Asparagus, green beans, broccoli, and snow peas all work well.

Turmeric-Black Pepper Chicken With Asparagus Recipe – NYT Cooking

In this sweet and spicy stir-fry, black pepper, honey and rice vinegar help accentuate turmeric’s delightfully earthy qualities Thinly sliced asparagus doesn’t need much time to cook, but feel free to swap with any other vegetables that cook in just a few minutes, like thinly sliced green beans, frozen peas or baby spinach Serve this with rice or rice vermicelli noodles, or tuck it into a lettuce cup or pita with yogurt and fresh herbs

cooking.nytimes.com

I finally bottled the orange bitters I started in April.

• It turned out good! Closest to Regan’s, but has a bit more spice. Nice in Manhattans and Boulevardiers.
• I used 6 oranges last time and 12 oranges this time. Next time it needs to be 18 or 24 to get the intense orange flavor I’m looking for.
  • I don’t know how some of the brands of orange bitters out there get the flavor and color. I think they use orange extract and caramel coloring.

The recipe for this batch is up in my digital garden.

I have a bunch of 1oz eye droppers of the stuff. If you want a bottle, let me know!

Planning

• Cold weather is coming. Time to start thinking about getting garlic and flowers that need a cold period (black-eyed susans, milkweed, echinacea, poppies)
• We’ve been toying with the idea of expanding our deck and maybe putting an outdoor screened in porch on part of it.
  • Do we need permits?
  • Can we do this work ourselves?
  • How big is too big?
• We planned a trip to Lake Placid.
  • What are the must-dos/sees?
  • What is good to eat around there?
  • What are some good books set in the area to read while we are there or listen to on the drive up?
• I’m looking for some good autumn reads. I’m starting with Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. What else should I read?
  

Reading

Currently reading:

• The Adirondack Reader by various authors
• Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig, second in the Montana trilogy
• The Juncto by Neal Stephenson, fifth in the Baroque Cycle series

Around the web

Cool things I read or dug into for the first time this week.

• pup is a command line tool for processing HTML. Uses the same kind of selectors you’d use in CSS, for example.
• Datasette is a tool for quick data exploration.
• Speaking of data exploration, here is a Twitter thread on how people process data
• Whisper is an open source tool that uses a neural net for speech to text. Would be cool to run all of your home videos through it on your local machine to make searchable transcriptions.
• Gitleaks is a tool to scan your repos for accidentally committed secrets.
• p5.grain is a p5.js addon for conveniently adding grain and texture overlays to artworks. Here is a good post about using grain in generative art from Gorilla Sun and meezwhite.

Robin Rendle’s notes on taking care of your blog:

Blog your heart! Blog about something you’ve learned, blog about something you’re interested in. Blog about cameras or HTML or that one browser bug you’ve noticed this morning or blog about the sky above you right this very second. How many clouds are up there? Blog about your annoying kids and your fucked up relationship and blog about that terrifying time when you went to the beach with some people you weren’t really friends with and you got drunk and then it got real dark and you didn’t have a tent so you slept on a sand dune all night long.

I say again to ye: just blog!

There are no rules to blogging except this one: always self-host your website because your URL, your own private domain, is the most valuable thing you can own. Your career will thank you for it later and no-one can take it away. But don’t wait up for success to come, it’s going to be a slog—there will be years before you see any benefit. But slowly, with enough momentum behind it, your blog will show you the world: there will be distant new friends, new enemies, whole continents might open up and welcome themselves to you.

The revitalization of NY’s waters:

Nine humpback whales recently surfaced there together, spouting and breeching against the city skyline as though vying for the most dramatic selfie. Fin whales and right whales are also appearing in startling numbers—along with bottlenose dolphins, spinner and hammerhead sharks, seals, blue crabs and seahorses. Oysters, which all but vanished decades ago, are clamping themselves to bulkheads from Brooklyn’s Coney Island Creek to the Mario Cuomo Bridge, almost 20 miles up the Hudson from the city.

Off to hold a sick baby and maybe make applesauce from the two bushels of apples on our table 👋🍎

When we pick him up from daycare, Charlie has been signaling to be picked up, then he hugs us and gives us a kiss on the cheek. It is so sweet 🥰

Charlie is Mr. Independent right now. Except when he crawls or walks underneath something and gets stuck, then he appreciates Mom and Dad coming to help.

A pretty rainy week after a long dry spell. We definitely needed it.

Finally got around to updating my Reading page to add what I’ve read the last couple months.

Though, inspired by Mitchell Earl, I really ought to add the books I started but didn’t finish, too. There would be at least 10 more from the past two months across multiple genres. Currently the page only shows the ones I finished, which have been all fiction recently.

Unfinished from the last couple months (but still in the pile to finish): William Gibson, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Saint-Exupery, Ivan Doig, Jane McGonigal, John McPhee, Zena Hitz, Allan Ginsberg, Ruth Reichl, Zadie Smith, Edward Abbey, and Sherwood Anderson. I jump around a bit.

I’d love to say that I’m going to take autumn to finish these books, but I’ll honestly probably buy 12 more, finish 5 of those, and only finish 2-3 of these 🤷‍♂️

Cooking of note this week:

• Thai-style ground pork with green beans, garlic, thai basil, and tomatoes (the last two are from our garden, and making this is one of the reasons I grew Thai basil this year)
• Blackberry apple tart
• Lost Voyage tiki cocktail
• Salsa de chile morita
• Eggplant Sabich bowls
• Chicken fajitas

I find the new Instagram update that autoplays sounds on ads and video stories hostile and unusable. It breaks the traditional pattern of honoring the users’ silent setting and makes it impossible to stop the sound unless you turn your volume completely to zero.

I wrote a traditional blog post this week:

Our team at work played a remote team social game that was more fun than expected: Everyone takes a photo of their desk and everyone tries to figure out which desk belongs to which team member. We had a blast!

Here is a photo of my desk:

I helped my friend Jeremy build a swing set for his son Miles (Charlie’s friend!) on Saturday. The boys enjoyed it!

Amanda and I are watching Billions and House of the Dragon right now after Charlie goes to bed and we finish cleaning up from dinner.

I’m off to make some pizza sauce and clean the kitchen. I can’t use the pizza oven tonight because it is raining, but hopefully I can use it tomorrow. 👋

Charlie is officially a toddler now. He took his first unassisted steps Sunday, August 28, and by Thursday he was wandering all around the house on his own. It is so fun to see how proud he is when he figures out a new skill.

He also has crawling up the stairs and climbing furniture down pat. Along with that comes pushing boundaries to learn where the lines are, which is trying for sleep-deprived parents. We are doing our best to take deep breaths, stay calm, and be patient.

We froze 9 bags of tomatoes (about a pound and a half each) this week. That makes 17 bags total so far, on top of what we’ve eaten. The plants keep going! We planted 8 tomato plants this year: 6 Romas, 1 Cherokee Purple, and 1 Giant Belgium.

We might be finally though the intense summer heat here. I’m going to leave the window units in a bit longer just incase, but we are loving having the windows open and not being drenched in sweat.

I mowed the lawn for the first time in a month. I’ve only had to mow once a month this summer because of how dry it has been. Most of the grass is brown and I’m only mowing to knock down the weeds that seem to thrive in the dry heat.

I’ve been a bit under the weather this week. I picked up a cold from Charlie, who picked it up from daycare. The goldenrod is in full bloom right now, too, kicking my seasonal allergies into high gear. I’m on the tail end of the cold, so next week should be easier. I’m thankful for this long holiday weekend.

Some work-related news: I’m switching teams (though staying within the same division/group) and becoming a team lead again, this time of one of our engineering teams. I wrapped up and handed off my projects last week and am starting the new position on Tuesday. I’m excited about the new role!

I’m getting sick of social media again. This happens once every few months. I might be scarce there for a bit and blog here more.

Amanda and I have been enjoying House of the Dragon on HBO and The Sandman on Netflix. The latter makes me want to revisit the comics again.

What Labor Day Weekend looked like for us:

• Lots of playing outside with Charlie
• Tiki drinks (Missionary’s Downfall and Jungle Bird)
• Ice cream
• A wedding reception for dear friends
• Bookstores
• Brunch in Cold Spring at Hudson Hil’s
• Grilling chicken for fajitas while Charlie swings
• Cast iron waffles at home
• Cleaning the house
• Laundry
• Burgers and beer at Long LotArchived Link

Going to post this and sign off now and make the best of the rest of the day today. Maybe making pizzas on the deck? Another tiki drink? Long walk by the river? We’ll see what the day has in store.

I skipped a week because I was traveling for work. I was in San Francisco for a team meetup. We spent some time working at Automattic’s SF office, explored the city, ate some great food, visited bookstores, and hit a few tiki bars. Some highlights:

• Catching up with old friends in Walnut Creek
• Tea leaf salad at Burma Superstar
• Chicken kelaguen at Prubechu
  • Currently looking for recipes to make this at home
• Peking duck pockets and the eggplant at China LiveArchived Link
• Expert book recommendations at Borderlands
• Great tacos from Taqueria Cancun
• Bahn Mi from Vietnamese grocery stores and lotto outposts
• Paninis at Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store Cafe
• Walking through Golden Gate Park
• Beat poetry at City Lights
• Views from Alcatraz. The prison itself isn’t much more interesting than Eastern State in Philadelphia and the flies are a scourge, but the views of the bay and city are great.
• Coastal Redwoods at Muir Woods
• Tiki bars
  • Smuggler’s Cove – Best drinks and bartenders. Cool ambiance, but could use a good deep cleaning.
  • Tonga Room – Very cool ambiance and vibe, but the menu is stuck in the late 70s. The band plays in a boat in the pool/lagoon. Occasional indoor thunderstorms. Service is on par with other old institutions. I suppose classics are so for a reason.
  • Pagan Idol – Would be a great tiki bar in most other cities, but the drinks are overshadowed by other tiki bars here in SF. Tonga Room does the classics better and Smuggler’s Cove has more inventive new drinks. Well run and clean, but has a finance bro vibe.

Views from the Automattic office in the Mission:

There are some lowlights, too. The poverty and homelessness in SF is everywhere and it is heartbreaking. I saw people with monkeypox, terrible drug addictions, and mental health struggles, all in the course of a pretty normal walk from the office to the hotel. It made me even more thankful for our homes, jobs, family, and friends.

I love seeing a landscape below when flying that I recognize. I’m a definite window person. This trip I saw the Bear Mountain Bridge and Peekskill Bay, the Lorain lighthouse, and the islands in Lake Erie.

This was my first trip away from Charlie and that was much harder than I thought it would be. I missed that little boy so much and spent the entire weekend with him when I got home. Swinging, lots of playing outside, snuggle naps, and backyard picnics. Salve for the soul.

We tried to video chat early in the trip, but he got upset, which made me feel terrible. Later in the trip he was saying “Dada” a lot, so we tried to video chat again and he smiled when he saw me.

He is currently snoozing on me while I type this.

His balance is getting great. I bet he will walk in the next couple weeks.

Rob Felty, a fellow A12 (that is short for Automattician, someone who works at Automattic) writes and posts annual reports each year. I like that idea and may give it a try.

It is that time of year where every empty storefront seems to transform into a Spirit Halloween store. The Spirit operations team must be incredible. Securing short-term leases, setting up full stores with all that entails, interviewing, hiring, and training local staff to run these stores, getting merch to these locations by September, then shutting down after October. Year after year, with enough margins to stay profitable. If any Harvard Business students are looking for a master’s thesis topic, here it is.

We froze 8lbs of tomatoes so far and have probably 8lbs more to freeze or make sauce with. I’m going to freeze the okra for gumbo. Tomatillos are getting turned into salsa verde.

Jalapeños are taking off after struggling most of the season. I plan to let them turn red on the plant and then smoke and dry them to make chipotles, which I’ll preserve in adobo sauce.

I harvested the white potatoes from the grow bags on Saturday. Some big ones, but not as much by volume as the red potatoes we harvested last month. Still better than I expected. I think I’ll try some bigger grow bags next year.

Reading

I read This is How You Lose the Time War on the plane ride and listened to more of The Confusion. I visited two excellent bookstores in SF and brought home more books to add to my to-read list:

• Borderlands
  • The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem
  • The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
• City Lights
  • The Mighty Golden Gate (board book for Charlie)
  • Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992 by Allen Ginsberg
  • Big Sur by Jack Kerouac

Family

Charlie has been amazing us this week. He started standing up on his own from sitting without holding on to anything for 5-10 seconds at a time. When he does, he shouts, “Up up!” He figured out how to use a fork. He also learned a new gesture (shaking his head no in reply to certain things), and he seems to have a bit more of a personality than he did last week. Children are amazing.

We had a great weekend playing and gardening in the yard, as well as meeting up with some new friends for a low stress play date at a playground. You have to be super intentional and proactive to forge new friendships in adulthood. Shared interests and/or shared circumstances aren’t enough like they were in high school and college. One nice way to make it easy for someone to say yes to hanging out is suggesting a place like a park so neither party has to host (which requires a lot of clean up and prep that is difficult with an infant or toddler).

Dad hack: move the grill over by the swing set so you can push your child on the swing and make dinner at the same time.

Aging kindly

Recently I’ve been inundated with ads about hair loss products, weight loss products, exercise products, and health supplements. It is crazy! No wonder people are feeling less content with their physical appearance.

I know it is generally worse for women than men, too.

We’ve learned to pretend to celebrate older women, but we haven’t learned to accept what happens naturally to their skin. We celebrate older women but not the un-intervened-upon face. This fuels a multibillion-dollar cosmetic and skin care industry dedicated to helping people — mainly women — stay young, or rather, try to look like it.

I’d like to tell the people in my life these things:

• It is okay if your hair isn’t the same color or as thick as it used to be.
• It is okay if your skin has more wrinkles, stretch marks, or scars than it used to.
• It is okay if you are heavier than you’d like to be.
• What matters most is how kind you are, how much love you show those around you, how much you help others, and what you create.
• In short, your actions matter more than your appearance. It is okay to be kind to yourself.

Related: My current favorite Instagram scam is Colon Broom, which is being marketed as a trendy new weight loss product. It is just psyllium husk, which your grandfather would recognize as Metamucil.

Gardening and cooking

The heat wave finally broke in the middle of this week, so we’ve been spending a lot of time outside: Many meals and playtimes on the porch, swinging time before and after daycare, a fire in the chiminea, gardening, and washing the car for the first time in over a year.

Tomatoes and tomatillos are coming in steadily. We get baskets like this every couple days. Lots of kale to harvest and freeze for winter and dill to dry, too.

Whenever we pick tomatoes, Charlie always grabs one directly out of the basket and digs in.

We cleaned the dried up pea vines out of the garden and planted another batch for a fall harvest. We also planted some daikon radishes and more cilantro.

I made some tomatillo salsa with the first batch of tomatillos. More of that to come as the tomatillos continue to drop. Probably albondigas, too.

I tried two new culinary tricks this week: Making egg bites in the Instant Pot and cooking a sheet pan meal outside in the Ooni pizza oven. The egg bites turned out great and we are making more for the week ahead. The sheet pan meal was tasty, but it cooked faster than I expected even at the lowest temperature, so I scorched some of the vegetables. I also used up some old pizza dough by making a focaccia-ish bread.

Digital Garden

I tended to my digital garden a lot as well this week.

• Added trackback/pingback support for pages to support cross/backlinking.
  • Since I’m already 80 pages in but only just now enabled pings, I’m probably going to have to run a wp-cli script on the site to generate them for existing pages.
• Added a page to display content by last modified date (and added a column sorted by last modified date on the homepage)
  • The goal here is to surface old content that was recently updated alongside the brand new stuff.
• Added new content to 15 existing pages.
• Created 8 new pages
  • WooCommerce Cheatsheet
  • Egg Bites
  • American Sign Language
  • Salsa Verde
  • Things to do with kids in the Hudson Valley
  • Google Sheets Cheatsheet
  • Pizza making notes
  • Seasonal fruit desserts

Things to read on the internet

Tove Jansson’s summer days – by Mason Currey

“Tooti and I wake up early, always simultaneously though we sleep in separate beds.”

masoncurrey.substack.com

Tradition and the Individual Talent by T. S. Eliot | Poetry Foundation

In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to…

www.poetryfoundation.org

The Secret Life of Leftovers — The New Atlantis

www.thenewatlantis.com

Peekskill, N.Y.: An ‘Artist’s Paradise’ on the Hudson River – The New York Times

Newcomers praise this diverse Westchester city for its galleries, art studios and welcoming vibe: ‘It’s easy to be part of the community.’

www.nytimes.com

^^ A piece the NYTimes did about the town we live in.

Kevin Kelley’s website got a refresh recently! Check it out. I’m a huge fan of Kevin’s various projects.

Books

• Finished Odalisque by Neal Stephenson and started The Confusion by same.
• Continued reading Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig

After Salman Rushdie’s stabbing in Chautauqua, I realized I haven’t read any of his books yet, so I’ll be on the lookout for them at used book stores. I’ve spent time in Chautauqua, which is typically a quiet, peaceful place. What a shame for a fanatic to irrevocably alter that.

Ideas

Photos.app -> WordPress media library

I’d love to make (or download if it already exists!) an extension for Photos dot app on macOS to select some photos and have them automatically uploaded to the media library on one of my WordPress sites. Would save me time multiple days a week.

I think this could be accomplished with Automator or Shortcuts. Something like selecting the photos, clicking a share action to kick off the Automation Action or Shortcut, which then exports the photos and runs a bash script that makes a POST to the /wp/v2/media endpoint.

Revisions block

I want to make (or download/install) a custom block that shows a list of revisions for the current post on the front end. Bonus points if it can be a linkable version. Looks like this might help.

I didn’t write a post last week, so I’m doing a double post this week. I had a 26 week streak, but I knew I’d miss one eventually.

Trying out the newish Table of Contents block in this post!

Charlie

Charlie turned one this past week. It is incredible to think about how much he has grown and learned in just one year. He is so sweet, curious, brave, fierce, playful, independent, and snuggly. We are so thankful he is here.

This year Amanda and I were the most tired we’ve ever been, but also so deeply rewarded. We’ve been reflecting a lot on the past year this week. We’ve head to learn and grow a lot this year, too.

Some recent skills Charlie has learned:

• How to crawl up the stairs
• How to flush the toilet
  • It is a race… will you finish before he flushes?!
• Signing
  • He knows the signs for milk, water, more, and eat.
  • We are using Baby Sign Language Made Easy
• Expressiveness and talkativeness in general
• Opening and closing every reachable door in the house, and routinely emptying the cabinets
• Twisting lids/caps on bottles and the applesauce pouches he likes
• Really getting the hang of flipping pages in books on his own and while we read to him
• Independent play
  • His stretches of independent play are getting longer and longer. Recently he has enjoyed finding cups or bowls and then finding things to put in them, shake around, and dump back out again.

We had a small birthday party in our backyard on Friday, took it easy on Saturday, then put together a swing set on Sunday, then we got ice cream at Weir’s and went to the top of Bear Mountain. It was the first time in a couple years that I’ve seen Perkins Memorial Tower open!

Charlie’s second year got off to a tough start. One of his little friends who came to his birthday party gave him Hand, Foot, and Mouth. The poor guy started showing symptoms late on Monday and then had to stay home from daycare all week. Thankfully it was a mild case. A lot of my week looked like this (holding a sick, sleeping baby while working):

Garden

We had our first BLTs with our garden tomatoes on Friday!

The Romas are going to start coming in steadily this week, so I anticipate a lot of skinning, freezing, and sauce making next weekend.

Tomatillos are starting to drop, too. I’d like to make some tomatillo salsa this week if I have time.

We finally have some jalapeños and Black HungarianArchived Link peppers growing on our plants. All of my neighbors said that it is a bad year for peppers for them, too.

The okra is loving this hot weather! It probably won’t be ready to pick for another week or two.

Ideas

1. It seems like it was a lot hotter this summer than the last couple that we’ve been in Peekskill. I’ve been doing a lot of sifting through data at work, so why not pull temperature data for this area from the NOAA and see how many days each year are above 90F compared to this year so far?
   1. I’ll probably download a CSV then stuff the CSV contents into sqlite with sqlite-utils then connect the sqlite db to Metabase, which is what I’ve been using at work recently.
   2. Or I might try out Datasette or DataStation.
2. It is so hot that I don’t want to use the oven and heat up the house. Can I make a peach & blackberry galette or tart in the Ooni pizza oven instead? How about a frittata? I think so, as long as I am mindful of the temperature.
3. Is there a block in FSE for Pingbacks and Trackbacks? I’d like to show them in specific places in my Digital Garden. I need to look into this.

Work

I went to a meetup with part of my team at work on Monday. It was the first time I’d seen all but one of them in person in the two and a half years of working at Automattic, and I really enjoyed hanging out with them. You get a different sense of a person when you hang out with them in person for an afternoon than you do from months of Zoom calls.

We worked, got some pizza, went to MoMA, and then got some Mediterranean food.

Some standouts from MoMA:

• Thomas Bayrle
• Lee Ufan
• Ellsworth Kelly
• Bridget Riley
• Frédéric Bruly Bouabré
• André Derain
• Richard Serra

I also got some ideas for art projects to try with Charlie when he is a bit older. It is fun to explore and emulate some of the classics!

The rest of the week was hectic, as Amanda and I both timeshifted a lot to take care of Charlie. Lots of late nights and early mornings. I did manage to finish what I needed to get done this week on projects.

Food & drink

I made a tex mex menu for Charlie’s party because one of his favorite things to eat are quesadillas. The adults had chicken fajitas and the kids had chicken quesadillas. Salad, chips and salsa, and esquites for sides. A pitcher of margaritas and a pitcher of lemonade for refreshments.

I made the corn, fajitas, and quesadillas on a Blackstone griddle. I love cooking on the griddle, but unless it is for a group of people it is hard to justify the time investment to clean it afterward.

Amanda and I had a date sans-Charlie last weekend at The Bird and Bottle. We enjoyed ourselves and plan to go back and have dinner on the patio again.

I found out that a local farm in Fishkill is now making cider, so I went and sampled some this weekend (and also picked up some fresh peaches!). The dry stuff is really nice, so I got a couple bottles to bring home. They also have a nice outdoor bar and eatery there, so I think we’ll go back again soon.

Big Mouth Coffee in Beacon is experimenting with canning some of their coffee. They work with Snapchill, a company that brews coffee hot, cools it rapidly, and then cans it right away to seal in the flavors. The results are fantastic so far. Some of the best cold black coffee I’ve had.

We tried a new pizza dough recipe last week (the one from Ooni) and liked the results. It is a same-day dough that was easy to work with and shape. I’m cold proofing some right now, so we’ll see how that turns out.

Reading

I only read a little bit the last two weeks: Some of Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig and some of Odalisque by Neal Stephenson.

That’s all for now. Looking forward to a week ahead with no sickness and a regular work schedule. Hopefully reading some more in the evenings, too. And cooler temperatures later in the week!

We went to a cookout at our friends’ place on Friday and figured that Charlie would get sleepy around 8pm and we would head home then. 8pm came and went, and Charlie was still the life of the party, playing with three dogs and crawling around to everyone there, so we decided to see how long it would last. To our surprise he lasted until we left and 10pm, but was asleep in his carseat before we even backed out of their driveway.

Charlie seems to be adjusting well to daycare, and we are finally getting in a morning routine. We’ve had time a couple mornings this week to go for a walk by the waterfront before daycare, which has been really nice.

Instagram turned into QVC 2.0. I’ve complained about it here on the blog before. I’ve been trying to think about what I can do to minimize my usage of Instagram.

What I’d miss about it:

• We live far away from family, so a lot of keeping up with extended family is done on Instagram.
• We also live far away from lots of our friends. As people have kids, texts, emails, and calls become less and less frequent, but at least we have Instagram to keep in touch.

I don’t really want to lose those two things, so realistically I’m probably going to stay on Instagram. That said, I think there are some ways I can nudge people toward better communication mediums:

• Encourage more friends to blog and help them set up a blog
• Emails newsgroups with friends
• Letter writing
• Book groups, preferably with a group blog where everyone can share their thoughts. Wouldn’t that be a cool use of P2?

We planted six grow bags (7gal size) of potatoes this year, three bags of a white variety and three bags of a red variety (Adirondack red). The red variety was ready to harvest, so we dug through them this morning. Charlie grabbed one and started chomping on it 🙂

We cooked some of these tonight. Parboiled, finished on the grill, then tossed with butter, parsley, salt, and pepper. Probably going to use some in brown butter potato salad with dill next.

We also picked some of our first snow peas and added them to our salads tonight.

I baked Alison Roman’s Blueberry Cornmeal Tart for the aforementioned friends’ cookout. It turned out great! We’ve been getting 2 quarts of blueberries a week for the past four weeks from the fruit share we are a part of. Charlie eats about as many as Amanda and me put together, so we’ve been going through them. But we’ve frozen enough to make a couple more of these tarts this winter.

A Trader Joe’s opened close to us this week! Very exciting to be able to shop there whenever instead of needing to plan for a 40 minute drive each way. A lot of their stuff is “convenience food” and more expensive than making everything yourself, but at this stage of life with a 1 year old and both parents working full time, we are willing to spend a bit more for the time savings. We tend to get things like their tamales, the marinated meats like chicken shawarma and carne asada, dips, and some pantry items like rice pilaf mixes, pasta, couscous, and sauces. We rarely get fruits and vegetables there (we get most from local farms during the summer and fall), but if we do it is usually a convenience item like shredded cabbage for a quick coleslaw or base for a bowl.

I can manage my heartburn/reflux by watching what I eat and not eating anything after 6 or 7pm. At least once a month I think it will be fine to eat pizza and have a beer at 10pm and it never is.

Red wine, amaro, and liquors without mixers are my best bet for avoiding heartburn if I want a drink. Beer just doesn’t sit well with me anymore. Neither do cocktails with lots of citrus. Dry ciders are mostly okay.

I picked up some kefir today and am interested in making a glass of it a day part of my regular diet. I’d like to start making it again, but probably not in the cards right now.

Speaking of fermented foods: We found a great babysitter a couple months ago whose parents are Haitian immigrants. We often chat about Haitian food. Today she brought us some pikliz (spicy pickled vegetable slaw that slowly ferments). I’ve been having a bit with dinner the last couple nights. Really good stuff! I think I might make some of my own. This version is cabbage, carrots, habanero peppers, white vinegar, and lime juice. Some recipes online have onions or shallots, some don’t. I’m in favor of leaving onions out, because they tend to get pretty pungent and funky after a week or so.

When I’m feeling unmotivated, down, or generally off, it is so important to either accomplish something right away (even something mundane like emptying the dishwasher) or get outside and go for a walk. I usually need to drink water, too. I rarely drink enough water.

An important question I’ve been asking myself recently: What are some things taking place during this season (of life, of work, meteorological) that I can embrace instead of focusing on the things that aren’t?

Reading

Currently reading:

• Sand, Wind, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig
  • Second book in the Montana series. I already had book one and read it a couple weeks ago (English Creek), and I was able to find nice hardcover versions with good dust jackets this week at the local used bookstore, Bruised Apple.

Books I learned about this week and added to the ever-growing “want to read” list:

• The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson
• Candy House by Jennifer Egan
• Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
• Wild Problems by Russ Roberts
• The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd
• This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Around the internet

• Two recent discussions on blogging (a perennial interest of mine) on Hacker News.
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32137336
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32191140
• Cory Doctorow on blogging, curation, and social networks.
• The Wandering Inn, seven books and counting published chapter by chapter on a blog as it is being written. Pretty cool. h/t Manton Reece
• A foldable treadmill for under your desk. Ever since I read the essay in Neal Stephenson’s Some Remarks on using a treadmill desk, I’ve wanted one. I’m probably going to get one of these. The ability to fold it and slide it under my desk sold it for me. (And not needing to buy one of those giant clunky treadmills and mod it.)

Until next week—keep blogging 👋

Charlie has been very active this week, crawling and exploring as much as he can. He is fast! So curious, too. One of our goals is to keep fostering that natural curiosity as much as we can.

I brush his hair every morning before daycare and he started grabbing the brush and trying to brush his hair himself. So cute.

Charlie helped spin the salad spinner tonight and he loved it. I can’t wait to find little things that he can do to help out and feel a sense of accomplishment.

We still haven’t gotten in a good groove with breakfast, getting ready, and taking Charlie to daycare in the morning. We are getting closer, though. I made a frittata on Sunday night so we have an easy, healthy breakfast for the first half of the week, which should help. The main disruptor is still how often Charlie gets up during the night. On nights that he wakes up less, things are smooth the next morning. If he gets up a lot, we are all tired, groggy, and tend to fall behind. We’ll get there.

We usually listen to classical or jazz with Charlie, though occasionally we throw on stuff like the Beastie Boys or Chali 2na and get him dancing. While we were out for dinner this week, Rancid’s …And Out Come the Wolves album came on (one of my favorites) and he seemed to enjoy it and bopped along with it. So now we listen to some of the cleaner Rancid songs sometimes on the way to daycare. It is good to be musically well-rounded.

Friday night we went to the Italian festival in Verplanck, celebrating its 100th year. The thing to go for there is the sausage & peppers booth. We went for the first time last year while Amanda was still pregnant, two weeks before Charlie arrived. I’m excited to start yearly traditions like now that with Charlie.

Saturday afternoon we made calzones on the deck and ate them on a picnic blanket in the yard. Charlie got his own with sausage, mozzarella, and sauce.

Saturday night I found myself sitting on the porch after Charlie goes to bed, reading on a lounge chair that I built, reading a book and sipping a Belgian golden ale while the setting sun paints the sky above the trees gradients of purple, pink, orange, and grey.

Sunday night I find myself writing this post.

Lots of tomatoes and tomatillos, but none ready to pick yet. Two of the roma tomato plants are showing some bloom end rot, so even though I solved the watering issue, I must not have fertilized enough. The okra and pepper plants are finally looking good, and we have snow peas to pick this week. This coming Monday will have the first rain we’ve seen in a couple weeks.

The hummingbirds seem to love the nasturtium and borage!

Lots of data munging at work this week, so lots of time working in spreadsheets writing formulas. I stuck some of them in P2 so I can find them again later, but this is a good reminder to stick them in my digital garden, too.

I think there are two prevailing mental models for spreadsheets:

1. Tables that can live anywhere in the sheet(s)
2. As a lightweight relational database that is primarily row and column driven

I’m strongly in the lightweight relational camp and find it difficult to efficiently work with spreadsheets from folks in the table camp.

The Query Loop block in WordPress needs the ability to exclude certain parameters, too. For example, it would be nice to exclude posts in certain categories or tags. This is of course possible in WP_Query, so I expect it to get added to the block eventually.

iOS now has the App Library feature, which means that apps do not need to live on one of your screens or deep in some folder. It also has useful widgets. So for the first time in years I’ve rethought my homepage with a single page of the apps I use most often and a second screen with two useful widgets. I’m liking the change so far.

Reading

I finished reading Ivan Doig’s English Creek and started reading Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand, and Stars. I’m also still listening to Neal Stephenson’s Odalisque.

I’m keeping my eyes peeled for more Ivan Doig books at used bookstores.

I’ve decreased the amount of time I’ve spent on social media again this week. It has been nice. I’ll try to keep it going.

A week of trying to get back to normal after Charlie and I were sick last week. Lots of playing catch up, but I’m glad to report that Charlie went back to daycare and Amanda and I got back on normal work schedules.

A couple things I’ve been trying to get back to doing each day:

1. Listing three things I’m thankful for. Good to keep gratitude in focus.
2. Going for a walk, preferably with Charlie and Amanda. Spending a bit of time outside when it is cool in the morning or evening is restorative and grounding.

The wineberry patch I like to pick looks like it should be ready by Wednesday or Thursday this week. Not sure what I plan to do with them yet, but I’m sure I’ll decide in the next couple of days. Most likely another flaugnarde.

The Swiss Giant Snow Peas I planted are finally blooming and producing pods. Looking forward to munching them in salads and stir fries!

Made some progress on my current batch of orange bitters I started back in April. They should be ready to bottle later this week. Let me know if you’d like a bottle!

One of the best parts about doing a veggie share is being challenged to think creatively about how to use the veggies you get each week and eating something not in your regular rotation. We’ve been having lots of salads, sheet pan dinners, and grilled meals full of vegetables. Also lots of sautéed greens (turnip, chard, kale, beet, etc) with garlic scapes as a quick side dish.

Charlie LOVES blueberries, which are in season around here right now 🫐

Farmers markets local vs food terminals

I love going to farmers markets on Saturday mornings. There are two really good ones that all of the best vendors go to about 20 minutes away each (Cold Spring and Tarrytown), but the local one here in Peekskill is gaining some steam. We usually go to the one in Peekskill, but occasionally make the drive to Tarrytown or Cold Spring if we have the time.

I love buying from local growers, bakers, and makers, which is what keeps me going back. I do get really frustrated by a certain type of vendor commonly found at the smaller second-tier farmers markets: The truck with “[Generic name] Farms” painted on it that clearly buys produce from the food terminals, puts it in baskets, and tries to pass it off as their own. Things like sweet corn and plums in late June that clearly aren’t in season locally yet. Stickers painstakingly peeled off before the cucumbers get put out, the broken down waxed Andy Boy boxes stuffed out of sight behind the tables. Stuff that is no different than what is being put out at the grocery stores. There is probably money in it, but I refuse to buy stuff from those booths. They go against the ethos of the small local farmers markets. One thing that makes the Tarrytown and Cold Spring markets really good is that they keep these kinds of vendors out and give the actual farmers and producers a chance to shine.

Saturday was a day to fix things around the house:

• Reversed the gate on the back porch so it only opens in to prevent Charlie from falling down the stairs
• Fixed the pin going into the ground on the secondary fence gate. It isn’t normally used, but I had to move some big stuff into the yard last month and needed to pull the pin so I could open the second gate and make the opening large enough for a wide landscaping dolly to move through. When I tried to open it, I discovered that whoever put it in before we bought the house put it in wrong, so it was impossible to get the pin out. They must have put the pin in and then screwed the brackets on without trying it. I took the brackets off last month and tossed them aside, so I finally took a few minutes to put them back correctly so the door could be opened.
• Screwed a few loose deck slats back down.
• Screwed a shelf back in place in a bookshelf.
• Put wall anchors on all of our bookshelves now that Charlie is mobile.

I got two of these umbrella clamps to put the umbrellas up on the deck railing instead of needing to be in a table. They free up a lot of space and give Charlie more room to play on the deck without being in direct sun. They were one of those “I wonder if this exists…” purchases and I’m delighted they do.

Logging out of Twitter in my browsers and deleting the app off my phone was a good idea. Having instant access to the news around the world (negativity gets pageviews!) and everyone’s hot takes about it is not healthy. I’m not ready to say goodbye to Twitter forever, but I am glad to have less time on it.

I’m currently reading:

1. Odalisque, book three of volume one of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Currently listening to it on audiobook while I run errands and do dishes.
   1. I’d love to have a Stephenson book entirely about Enoch Root, who appears in the Baroque Cycle, Cryptonomicon, and Fall.
2. English Creek by Ivan Doig.
   1. I love reading books in the same season they are set. Part II of English Creek takes place over the July 4 holiday, when I started reading the book.
   2. I’ll probably finish it in my next reading session.
   3. I’ll definitely pick up the other two books in Doig’s Montana Trilogy, and probably some of his non-fiction, too. I’m hooked.
   4. Some characters play the card game pitch, which I hadn’t heard of. Time to get out my 1970s “Hoyle Up-To-Date” book and learn how to play.

I learned this week that you can install a non-current version of a plugin pretty easily via wp-cli.

--skip-plugins --skip-themes plugin install SLUG --version=VERSION --force

This is pretty helpful when an update breaks something. Make sure to turn off autoupdates for that particular plugin, though.

Toronto’s major internet and cell service outage this past week reminded me that I still need to get a store of cash to keep at home in case of just such an outage. Credit cards are so convenient, especially when you pay them off in full each month. But cash is king.

Virtually any business or service that relies on Rogers for internet or mobile connection is warning customers that debit machines, ATMs or phone lines are not working.

Music I encountered this week for the first time that I’m digging: