posted tagged with #Week-Notes

• listen to my story (week notes 024)

  I’ve missed a few weeks, so consider this my catch up post before starting my week notes up again…

  Doing

  I’m working on migrating off big tech companies — I’ve deleted all my twitter accounts and am in the process of migrating from Google Photos to a self-hosted immich service. Joe and I are also working on wiring up some of our house with ethernet: we’ve run cable the living room and plan to do the office next. I’ve also upgraded my server rack with a patch panel and managed switch (Aruba S2500). That will maybe become a big project post once we’re done.

  23 Feb 2025
• dancing around the subject 'til my legs hurt (week notes 23)

  Doing

  We had an unexpected snow day on Tuesday and then Wednesday off for Lunar New Year, which was a welcomed opportunity to relax at home. I played a lot of Fields of Mistria and did some upgrades to the computers in my house — all three (my PC, Joe’s, and one hooked up to our TV) are AM4 builds, so I’m able to upgrade my PC and put the old parts into the others. We’re also planning and ordering equipment for our next big home project: wiring the living room and office with Cat6 ethernet and running down to a managed switch on the network rack. We made all of the purchases this week and plan to do the work over our February break.

  2 Feb 2025
• I need love, can you get to me now? (week notes 022)

  Doing

  I bought a space heater — primarily for my office, which is uninsulated — and it’s a revelation. I took a fat nap in front of it on Friday night. I can’t believe it took me this long to get one (I thought the were way more expensive than they actually are and that Joe was morally opposed to them for some reason).

  26 Jan 2025
• she knows I love my cereal (week notes 21)

  Doing

  I recently discovered some weirdness with my hard drives in my PC. It’s a long story that isn’t worth telling, but the end of it is that I bought an NVMe drive and am starting fresh with a clean install of Windows. It’s fairly painless now that I have a drive that’s just my files with a separate OS drive. I do have to reinstall and set up some apps again, but it has been a good opportunity to reassess the cruft I’ve let build up on there over the years.

  19 Jan 2025
• hold on tight to this time, this place (week notes 020)

  I had a friend over one evening for pizza and card games — mostly Fan Tan and Blackjack, which are almost the only card games I like. My volleyball rec league started up again this week; I haven’t made time for physical exercise lately, and volleyball is a good commitment. I’d like to start running again soon too, but I’m nursing a minor foot injury that I’d like to see cleared up before I put too much stress on it. Thursday was the school spelling bee, which is both fun and heart-wrenching to watch.

  11 Jan 2025
• stop thinking a phone call or text is too complicated (week notes 019)

  I’m still reading Pride & Prejudice, but with the hubbub of the holidays, I haven’t made much progress. I’m excited about the next books in my pile, though, so I am determined to finish soon.

  4 Jan 2025
• using purell 'til my hands bleed and swell (week notes 18)

  Doing

  Unfortunately I haven’t been able to exercise much; partly, this is because I haven’t been making the time for it, but I also tweaked my right shoulder somehow and it’s been quite painful to use in every day tasks. Ring Fit is therefore off the table. The trouble is that I genuinely don’t know what I did to it! This week is my last before our holiday break, and I’m hoping to get back on the horse over the course of my 16 (!!) days off.

  22 Dec 2024
• sleepyhead 'cause all the fucking foxes kept me awake last night (week notes 017)

  Doing

  I bought a new domain name — I’m not going to post it just yet — but I’m considering switching this site over to it. I love esotericbullshit, but I’m not sure it’s the energy I want to put out there. It makes the URL a little hard to share. But it also feels remarkably stupid when I just moved this over from another domain (which is incidentally quite similar to the new one…).¹

  15 Dec 2024
• to find part of you still works is like a tiny victory (week notes 016)

  Doing

  • I went for a run with a good friend at an indoor track near me. The track itself is quite short, so the run is a little awkward, but it’s a super soft flooring which made the run easy on my joints. It’s nice to have a new run buddy, too!
  • Saturday I felt angry and sick and exhausted all day; I’d intended to go out and do holiday shopping but instead just rotted at home. I know I needed the rest, but seemingly everything put me in a bad mood. It’s maybe just PMS — I haven’t been good about tracking my cycle lately, though — or just the seasonal depression. It’s shit no matter what it is.

  Reading

  • Hometown Visit. I love reading folks who blog about their loves. It’s probably voyeuristic — I don’t know that it reflects well on me — but it makes me wish I had the courage to do the same.
  • Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek. I’m waiting for Villette to come in, so I wanted something that would be easy to jump in and out of. This fits the bill; I love Mango Street dearly and this simply feels like more of it (albeit not following one character, but then, Cisneros’s stories all seem to co-exist).
  • 25 Wirecutter Journalists Can’t Be Wrong: How Owala Became an Official Water Bottle Pick. What a ridiculously self-important, self-absorbed article. I generally like and use Wirecutter; some of their recommendations are ridiculously decadent and detached from reality, but they are one of the few reliable online sources for product reviews and recommendations. I am all for an ode to something you love and that makes your life better, but this read not as “we tested and compared a lot of products” but more “we all have good taste and have this water bottle so it must be good, right?”

  Watching

  • Evermore: The Theme Park That Wasn’t - YouTube by Jenny Nicholson. I love Jenny’s videos but hadn’t watched this one yet; I dozed through portions but enjoyed it all the same.

  Playing

  • Pride & Prejudice The Board Game. My brother gifted this to me years ago and I’ve never found an opportunity to play it. A student of mine is listening to the audiobook of P&P on my recommendation and I told her about the board game; I thought I should play it first myself, so I convinced Joe to play with me.
  • Fabledom. This has been in my Steam wishlist for ages, and I wanted a cozy game to try to quell my Saturday mood. It’s OK. I enjoyed the time I put into it, but I don’t think I will go back to it. City builders tend to entertain me for a few hours, but then I reach the later points of the game (or it becomes a chore to manage everything) and get bored.

  Listening

  I’ve had three songs in rotation this week: “Clown Blood/Orpheus’ Bobbing Head” by Los Campesinos!, “up” by Pigthe, and “You Good? (In Medias Res)” by Proper.

  8 Dec 2024
• my voice moved hades so he extinguished the fire (week notes 015)

  Doing

  • Joe and I ran a Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving morning. My time was not good (40:38), but there was wet, heavy snow coming down, so I was mostly focused on not eating shit. I think mid-November might be my 5K cutoff. We otherwise stayed home for the holiday and spent some much needed time relaxing together.
  • With the holiday season upon us, this is usually around the time that I take a big trip out to a nearby mall to get gifts for everyone. I want to commit this year to shopping mostly (entirely?) from local small businesses or buying handmade and secondhand goods. I’m happy to live in a town with a great Main Street, and I want to stop dumping my money into corporations.
    • I did order a bunch of rechargeable batteries from Amazon for Black Friday, but that was the extent of my shopping.
  • I miss podcasting again. I’ve run a few podcasts over the years, which all petered out for various reasons, but I’m feeling the itch again. I don’t know what I’d podcast about, though, which runs contrary to popular logic: you should have something to say, not just the desire to say things. I love audio production and the sound of my own voice, though.
    • Maybe I record audio versions of my blog posts and turn that into a podcast? I want to write more, after all. I don’t think my week notes would be conducive to an audio format, but maybe my longer form writing (what little of it exists).
  • I bought a camera (Panasonic Lumix G7) on a bit of a whim. I film a lot of videos for my school, so I guess there’s professional utility in using something other than my phone, but I also want to get better about taking pictures to preserve memories.

  Watching

  • On Saturday, I felt sick and rotted on the couch and watched YouTube junkfood: mostly outsidexbox’s seven things videos and Macho Nacho console mod videos.
    • I don’t mod consoles. I like to tinker with electronics, but I’ve never soldered anything. Somehow, however, I find myself watching a lot of these sorts of videos. I think I admire the production value and Tito’s calm, measured approach.
  • I’m about done with Daria, but I haven’t watched the movies yet.

  Reading

  • Into the Wild by John Krakauer. As a kid, the film adaptation was on frequent rotation in my house; my mom often fixated on one movie and watched it over and over, and she was a big fan of the soundtrack as well. I’ve always wanted to read the book since, and I’m trying again to commit to reading more now that the start of school year frenzy has died down for me. I’m enjoying following McCandless’s story and don’t think Krakauer too effusive (though his biases are clear), but some of the tangents feel extraneous.
    • Finished on November 28. A humanizing and sympathetic account of a controversial figure. A few meandering chapters, but there are — in McCandless’s case especially — wrong turns taken in pursuit of truth, meaning, and beauty.
  • I’ve ordered Charlotte Brontë’s Villette through my local bookstore as an upcoming read on the recommendation of a student’s parent. I’m also interested in getting my hands on The Dead Father by David Barthelme after reading an excerpt in Into the Wild.

  Playing

  • Satisfactory. Just a few months before the pandemic, while I was in grad school, I fell deeply in love with Satisfactory and attempted in vain to explain to my literary and well-rounded colleagues that I was spending my free time balancing my iron production pipelines and converting from biomass energy to coal. I dipped my toe in a few more times after my mania but resolved to wait until 1.0 as many of my production lines would need to be seriously re-tooled. Joe suggested we start a co-op save this week and I am back and thriving.
    • We did get into a brief, heated conflict over manifold (my preference) versus balanced production, an argument all couples experience at some point in their relationship, I’m sure.
  • I played a little but more of Pokémon Crystal, but I’m at a point where I have to grind out levels to take on the next gym, which I’m supremely uninterested in doing. Maybe I’ll just hack my save.

  Listening

  • I downloaded the Satisfactory soundtrack and have had that on in the background — it’s very good. Otherwise, I’m mostly still listening to Rainbow Kitten Surprise.
  1 Dec 2024