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:
- Tables that can live anywhere in the sheet(s)
- 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.