We are pretty much recovered from COVID, though we still fatigue faster than normal and food still isn’t tasting quite right.
This week was a long and tiring one. Amanda had to work in Houston, TX, from Monday to Thursday, so between the COVID fatigue and Charlie’s momma separation anxiety, it was a struggle. Even so, Charlie and I got a lot of bonding time, and he seemed happy to get back to his regular daycare routine.
After daycare, we usually had dinner right away, went out for a walk if the weather was nice, and then watched a couple episodes of Trash Truck before getting ready for bed.
We tried out a new burger place that opened this week in Peekskill. It was pretty good! It is right across from the train station, which is one of Charlie’s favorite spots to hang out (where else can you see trains, busses, tow trucks, and boats from one location?).
Some work news: Our team saved the Blogs.Harvard network from being shut down back in July and now host an archived version of it on Automattic’s infrastructure. We see it as a major win to keep this important piece of internet history available, and keep links from 2003 still working.
We upgraded the network from WordPress 4.8.1 and PHP 5.5.9 to WordPress 6.3.1 and PHP 8.2. No small feat with ~1500 blogs with tons of themes and plugins.
We had another crazy rainstorm on Friday that flooded the region for something like the 3rd time this year. There was too much water in our basement this time to only use the shopvac, so I bought a non-submersible transfer pump and ran it every 20 mins or so for about 4 hours until water stopped seeping up through the floor.
I don’t think this weather pattern is going to get any better, so the first call I’m making on Monday morning is to a sump pump guy and get that on the calendar.
Amanda’s college sorority little, Kat, visited us this weekend, in from London for a wedding in upstate NY this week. We hung around this general area, made dinner, drank wine, visited Muscoot Farm, walked along the riverfront with Charlie, and caught up after 4 years like no time has passed. Kat give us a couple of book recommendations:
At the farm I liked the pitch forks made from single branches. I’d like to try to make one. Charlie liked the tractor and the mud puddles the best.
We have a lot of apples right now, so apple desserts are the thing right now. Apple galletes and apple sauce are always good, and I made this apple crisp, which employs pecans for the topping. Better than oats, IMO. 🍎
I changed my mind on something this week: We decided to hire cleaners once a month to help us clean the house. Until now I’ve been against it, probably because of my midwestern work ethic and Appalachian self sufficiency (family roots run deep!), thinking that we should save the money and take care of it ourselves. After all, we had the time and I thought it was lazy to not do it ourselves.
What changed my mind was struggling to do the base-level things like mopping, dusting, kitchen grime, etc, after we had Charlie. Not only do we have less time now, but he also creates more messes than Amanda and I combined. When he was 3 months old we had someone come babysit him while we cleaned all day, but that has our priorities backwards. Why not pay someone to clean so we can spend that time with Charlie instead?
Needing to get the house ready for a guest while Amanda was traveling and I had a busy week at work pushed me over edge. It was more affordable than I expected and they did a great job in a couple hours while I was working. We’ll probably have them come once a month.
I redid my Likes page to be closer to a linkblog.
I’m thinking about changing my permalink structure to no longer include the category slug. We’ll see. I just need to make sure my redirects will work as expected.
I fixed a spacing issue around images and galleries with adjacent text that has been bothering me for a while on this site. The answer was sibling selectors.
p ~ figure, p ~ div.wp-block-jetpack-tiled-gallery {
margin-top: 1rem;
}
figure ~ p, div.wp-block-jetpack-tiled-gallery ~ p {
margin-top: 1rem;
}
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