We are on the road to recovery, health-wise. I went back to work this week and when Amanda started showing symptoms on Monday, we immediately got her a telehealth appointment and some Tamiflu, which helped immensely. She avoided the worst of it (still has a sore throat and cough, but no fever or body aches) and was able to work all week.
I have some residual that I’m still recovering from. Still have a regular cough with phlegm. The worst has been my eyes, though. They are still dry and scratchy and very sensitive to light. I’m also having trouble getting them to focus, so everything is just a bit fuzzier than normal, even with my glasses on. It is almost like my prescription changed overnight. I’m going to give it another week before I call the optometrist.
Charlie has been a lot of fun this week. Lots of laughs and giggles and fun play times. Also lots of helping us cookāhe loves putting things from one bowl into another and dumping things you’ve measured into the proper bowl. We ordered a Learning Tower for him which should arrive next week and make cooking together even easier.
Sometimes he does sweet stuff like climb up in his chair with a snack and a book, which melts our hearts.
Lest it sound like things are all fun and sunshine, you should know that between the bouts of fun giggly playtimes, Charlie also has big toddler emotions, melts down, and throws things when he is upset. I know it is developmentally appropriate and he is learning how to process and deal with his emotions, but it is still quite grating. We are mostly choosing to focus on the good times rather than the bad times, but I don’t want to misrepresent. Toddlers are still toddlers.
Saturday was a beautiful 50F degree day (unheard of in January!), so Jon and I decided to go for a row in our guideboats on the Croton River.
We went out at high tide and rowed roughly three miles round trip. The water was quite swift and we had some difficulty navigating a few bends in the river where the current picked up. Nice workout!
Jon got me thinking about better ways of transporting my guideboat. So far I’ve really only been taking it a mile down the road to the Hudson, and I’ve had it rightside up in a cradle on top of my Subaru Forester. Going to Croton is a 15 minute drive down the highway, and I didn’t like how much it moved on the highway, even at a slow 50MPH. It really needs to be upside down for longer distances, but the boat is slightly wider than my roof racks. Getting it on and off of the car upside down is also a bit trickier than sliding it rightside up into the cradle.
We did some brainstorming and found a possible solution: Reese makes a canoe loader that attaches to your car’s trailer hitch. It looks like a T and swivels, so you put one end of your boat on the loader, then pick up the other end and swing it around 180 degrees to put the other end on your car. I think this might solve the problem of the boat being wider than my roof rack because if the boat is sitting partially back off of the vehicle onto the T, the front of the boat should rest on my crossbars and take the weight. I need to go out and measure the boat and my vehicle to make sure, but this looks promising.
A few house-related things I’m excited about:
- I bought some nice wall-mounted bookshelves for my office. Solid oak with adjustable feet. They’ll span the entire wall behind me (if you’ve ever been on a call with me, it is the wall with the chalk board). I’m moving the chalk board to the other wall and moving the shelf that is over there to the basement when the new shelves come in. These shelves will solve some of our current lack of bookshelf space and I think they’ll look really nice on video.
- I wanted to build them myself, but it would take me a couple full weekends to do it and that is time I’d rather spend with Charlie. Once I factored in the cost of wood right now, the hardware, and my time preference of wanting these up now rather than sometime late summer, we thought it best to buy them.
- We contacted an architect to help us figure out how to remodel the attic, where to put the stairs, and generally what is feasible with the space. Feels good to get that process started.
- I hung some windchimes (Corinthian Bells from Wind River) that my parents got us for Christmas. I can hear them from my office, the dining room, and the kitchen. Such a soothing sound.
I got around to making decent archive pages for the Likes and Notes (I changed the slug to microblog) post types and got them in the menu finally. Also made some home page and global nav updates. Feels good.
I fixed a PHP error that I think was preventing webmentions from being sent. So if you got a bunch of webmentions from me last night around 11pm Eastern, I’m sorry.
I’ve also fine-tuned some of the Syndication Links and Share on Mastodon functionality with some of their hooks. Now I need to take those and move them into a mu-plugin instead of keeping them in functions.php – I’d never put things like that in a default theme (I’m using twentytwentytwo) at work, but sometimes the cobbler’s website has the worst metaphorical shoes š¬
One thing that I’m still struggling with is auto syndicating my microblog posts to Twitter. Syndication Links wasn’t working for me for a while (most of the time it wouldn’t share the post, and when it did, it shared the link despite the setting to not share links) until I finally uninstalled it and re-installed it. Now it shares posts to Twitter without links but doesn’t share images š¤·āāļø
So I’m on the hunt for another solution. I know of a solution in the works from a pretty popular plugin that I’d like to try, but it isn’t quite ready yet and I want something now. Since I really like Jan Boddez’s Share on Mastodon, I might try his Share on Twitter, which is no longer being updated, but might work until the other solution I mentioned is ready.
Last week I published a post about my workflow for posting Likes to my website:
There is finally a birria truck in Peekskill! Paradise Taqueria Birrieria, parked on Brown St. Saturdays and Sundays. The standard quesabirria + consume is delicious, as are their salsas. Amanda likes the green salsa and I like the smokey red salsa.
We are off to have a family afternoon in Beacon, NY. We’ll probably get some coffee at Big Mouth, hit up a big playground or walk down at Long Dock Park, and have burgers at Meyer’s Olde Dutch. š
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