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), 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:
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Yesterday I made this chicken and wild rice soup:
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 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)
- 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!
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 👋