A weekly note

…tomato, watermelon, oatmeal, mandarin oranges, toast, corn on the cob, sweet potato, and ground beef.

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I meant to write this earlier in the day, but I’ve gone deep on rewriting the theme to this site this weekend. It’s close to ready, and I’ll probably swap it out in the next week or two.

Rather than go full site editing, I’ve gone opposite and embraced WordPress’s PHP roots. It’s felt good to strip out class names and elements and get the HTML to a very bare-bones state. I’m doing my best at building in full microformats support so that I can really start to use parts of the site like I want for posts, notes, likes, and more.

Once it’s all settled, I may try to refactor it for the full site editor, but I may also just stay old school so that I can hack easier in my spare time.

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Sometime around 2.5 years old…

Mom: “Let’s pick up the house”
Me: runs over to corner of room and starts lifting and grunting.
Mom: “What are you doing?”
Me: “I’m trying to pick up the house, but it’s too heavy!”

Some small sense of pedanticism has been with me for over 40 years.

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We believe a hawk family has made their nest in the white fir out front.

Every year several hawks circle the neighborhood. We’ll hear the screeches between parent and young coming from neighboring trees, but we’ve never been blessed with a family in ours. This year, those screeches are coming from straight above.

It will be a noisy next few months, but it’s pretty exciting to know we’ll get to watch at least some of their progress from a little closer.

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I wrote this in August 2021, but it got lost in a draft note that I never published and now I get to delete that draft.

It’s been so long since my last note that Pig, the movie mentioned in that note, has been released and made available to rent. We watched it last weekend and it was fantastic.

Nicolas Cage has been a frequent topic here, mostly because I’ve given him a lot of grief. I’m firmly in the fan club now.

In this movie, I realized I was aware I was watching Nicolas Cage the entire time. Nothing about his playing of the role made the actor disappear and become the character. But I loved it anyway.

It’s fun to compare that experience with someone like a Daniel Day-Lewis or Tilda Swinton who makes me forget the actor and is enjoyable in a completely different way.

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We’ve had our vacuum for almost 14 years. It’s one of those things that seemed a little crazy at the time because who spends $500 on a vacuum? But it’s been a good lesson that well built products are probably cheaper over time. Dyson even has a handful of replacement parts still available.

Does Techcrunch still review vacuums?

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All of which is to say we’re starting to think about getting a new vacuum one of these years.

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We closed on our house on Friday. 🥃

Bonus: it’s the house we already live in, so we don’t have to move.

Other bonuses: no realtor fees, no bidding wars, no paying 1000% above market sight-unseen with no time for a home inspection. Etcetera, etcetera.

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We immediately started ripping down some of the wallpaper and I immediately removed 250 feet of coax cable running to two Dish satellites that haven’t been used in at least 10 years.

Does anyone need 250 feet of coax cable?

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I learned this week that Ogden Nash wrote children’s poems as well. Michelle grabbed a copy of Custard the Dragon from the little lending library across the street.

My grandfather was a big Ogden Nash fan and this was a very fun treat.

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Have you ever seen a potato explode in the microwave?

We cook them all the time in the microwave and never poke holes and none has exploded yet.

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Of course now…

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I have to keep a log of these somewhere that I can adjust as I learn more, but some of our trees as I currently know them:

• White fir
• Western red cedar
• Black walnut
• Maple
• Plum

There are some others and I’d like to get more specific on the above over time. It’s fun to geek out on trees.

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Time to watch a little Ozarks. Enjoy the week!