Spring is here! Nice to hear the frogs again in the wet areas of the woods. No wildflowers appearing just yet, but Charlie and I are keeping our eyes peeled on our walks.

I like the woods in early Spring. Warm enough to not need a coat, no bugs yet, and you can see a long distance since the leaves haven’t come in yet.

We started seeds, both indoor and outdoor this week.

Indoor: Magic Bullet tomatoes, tomatillos, jalapenos, red lipstick peppers, and rosemary. The tomatillos have already sprouted!

Outdoor: French Breakfast radishes, lacinato kale, spinach, cilantro, and Sugar Magnolia snap peas.

I have another type of tomato seeds coming this week, Firminio’s Plum Tomato.

Charlie is in a bird phase. He loves seeing birds outside. Whenever he does, he excitedly points to them and shouts, even if they are far off. He does the same thing with airplanes – “air pane!”

Since he has taken an interest, we made a birdhouse together out of a gourd and also hung a small birdfeeder on a window so he can see the birds.

Strep update: I went back to work on Tuesday and my throat finally stopped being sore on Friday. This is the first time in many years that I’ve taken antibiotics and they’ve messed up my stomach and made my urine smell funny. Not cool, but better than having strep.

Unfortunately Amanda picked it up a second time over the weekend, so we are still kind of in survival/recovery mode.

Sometimes you need to know when to say, “no blog post tonight, maybe tomorrow.”

Projects corner:

My weather blocks are now mobile friendly. Check them out at https://cagrimmett.com/weather

I figured out how many boards I need for the rock wall project: 8 of the 5/4 x 6in x 8ft pressure treated boards. I measured the side, divided it in half to make a right triangle, then dusted off my trigonometry to figure out the top angle and then made a Sheets formula for figuring out the length each of the boards will be.

=SQRT((A2/SIN(1.01913))^2-(A2^2))

Other projects:

• I need to measure the second level shutters, which seem like they might be a bit shorter than the ones on the first level.
• Looking for some patio furniture at a good price and a large corner swing arm umbrella.

Amanda and I both got strep throat this week, Amanda early in the week and me at the end of the week. I’m writing this Sunday night in bed with a fever. I was supposed to be on jury duty tomorrow, but I’ll have to call and ask for a deferral tomorrow.

The nor’easter that came through on Tuesday dumped plenty of snow, but did not give very interesting weather station readings.

The snow melted off completely by Thursday, when it got up to 60F. Charlie and I went on a nice walk in the woods, then swung in the backyard for a bit. we noticed that daffodils are blooming!

Charlie remembers so much. We seems to know most of the common fruit and vegetables now. We were quizzing him and he was able to point them out correctly multiple times from a grid of photos. We also got out some from the fridge and he got them right, too. He can’t quite say the words yet, but he is working on it.

Lately Charlie has been picking things out when we go to the grocery store. The look of pure joy on his face when we say okay and help him get whatever he picked is worth it. Thankfully it has been normal stuff like cheese and muffins.

I did most of our taxes this week (just need to double check and submit) and we planned a family trip to California for a wedding. It will be Charlie’s first plane ride! ✈️ To quote him, “Wwoooooowww!”

I added spark lines to my weather station blocks. Check them out at https://cagrimmett.com/weather. Next up: Mobile styling.

That’s all. I’m going to get some sleep and hope these antibiotics work quickly. Here’s hoping for a week or two without anyone in the house being sick 🤞

This week was kind of a blur. I had to go back through photos and text messages to piece it together.

• Charlie was home sick from daycare on Monday, which made us feel behind at work all week.
• Tuesday-Thursday had more urgent issues at work than usual. Days that involve regex and database rollbacks are not fun.
• Amanda was sick Wednesday night and Thursday
• Charlie has had some tough nights sleeping Wednesday and Thursday.
• Charlie threw up more than normal this week. We think that he might be overeating, which is new. Hard to tell because only he knows when he is full.
• Saturday brought some fun playtime with Charlie and a long nap where I got to hold him. I know those days will end soon, so soaking it up while I can.
• Sunday we went on a nice walk in the woods and then had brunch at a friend’s house for his birthday. I made butternut squash latkes because he has Crohn’s disease and can’t eat regular latkes. Charlie had a great time being the center of attention. In the afternoon we cleaned the house.
• Charlie is learning lots of new words and made a two-word request this week!

This week I also spent quite a bit of time planning out some house projects. We want to renovate the attic and turn it into a third floor living space, so I was on the hunt for an architect who could guide us through the local regulations and help figure out key components like where to put the stairs.

I’m kind of interested in getting solar panels, so I’m getting some estimates this week for that. Also pricing out shutter replacements and buying materials to build a climbing wall on Charlie’s swingset.

I know that if I don’t take action on these things right away, months will go by without them happening.

We decided to up our seed starting game this year with grow lights, so I got some set up. Ready to start some in a couple weeks! In the meantime, this week we plan to direct sow some radishes, spinach, and peas.

In what little spare time I have, I’m trying to make some styling updates to my Wunderground PWS blocks plugin. Here is what I have so far:

Next: Adding some sparkline trends, trying to figure out whether the pressure is high or low for our area and adding an indicator, and dialing in the color palette a little more (colors change based on the data).

What a crazy end to the week with Silicon Valley Bank being taken over by the FDIC. This doesn’t affect us or the companies we work for directly, but it does impact some projects we work on with third parties. I expect this will loom large in the tech consciousness for quite some time.

Unfortunately there are so many bad takes about what happened. When Lehman Bros went bankrupt in 2008 and kicked off the financial crisis, I spent a lot of my free time the next 4 years reading about money and banking and then much of my work time from 2012-2014 focused on it, too. I’m no longer very interested in that space, so I’ll spare you my take. I’m very curious what the FDIC/Fed/Treasury will announce on Monday morning. Do they have a buyout lined up? Are they setting a crazy precedent and making depositors whole without a buyout? Leaving depositors hanging and causing more runs? I guess we’ll see.

As is common during periods of financial turmoil, it is amusing to watch Nassim Taleb calling people with bad takes imbeciles and ignoramuses on Twitter. Never change, NNT.

Monday was my birthday!

We celebrated the day before with a day trip to Kingston and Woodstock, where we visited a bunch of indie bookstores and two restaurants I’ve wanted to try. It was a really nice day!

The find of the day was the full Sandman series, each book signed by Gaiman, at regular retail price. I’ve only ever checked these out of the library, so I’m stoked to have the full set on my shelf now.

Day-of I had to work, but I made a nice dinner for the three of us at home and Amanda and Charlie got me an ice cream cake.

Check out my birthday post:

We had some snow on Tuesday! It was the first major snow of the year. We took Charlie out for a sled ride in the woods.

Charlie has some new words this week: Open and Taco. He’s been asking us to open various things all week and it is pretty cute. He’s also been pointing out words he already knows wherever he sees (the object) or hears them, and his recognition/noticing is getting pretty good.

Wheels on the Bus is still his favorite song, but Row, Row, Row Your Boat is closing the gap.

He and I were on our own for a couple days this week while Amanda travelled for work, which meant some early morning breakfast outings. This little NY toddler loves Bacon, Egg, and Cheese breakfast sandwiches.

I created a plugin to pull down data from my home weather station and display it in a custom block. The data updates every 10 minutes. I’m also gathering daily summaries behind the scenes for future blocks to come.

Here is the block in action. It is currently “no frills” and needs some styling and a round of code clean up, but I’m happy with the first working version.

58°FHeat Index

58°FActual Temp

58°FWind Chill

91%Humidity

0UV Index

Low risk, no protection needed.

0 in/hrPrecip Rate

0 inTotal Precip

56 °FDew Point

29.99 inHgPressure

Holding steady ↔️

0 mphWind Speed

EDirection

0 mphWind Gust

This block will live permanently at https://cagrimmett.com/weather/

You can find the plugin code on GitHub: https://github.com/cagrimmett/wunderground-pws-wp-blocks

Some things I have in mind for future updates:

• Highs, lows, and averages for the past 7 days, past 30 days, and months, quarters, and years.
• Maybe some historical charts.
• Styling for better representation of the data.

I’m also open to ideas for more blocks using this data. Would would be cool to see? The current block is dynamic, but I’m open to some static blocks, too.

The Carthusian monks, who have been producing Chartreuse since 1605, will be limiting production and allocating their bottles in an effort to devote more time to monastic life. “We look to do less but better and for longer,” reads the memo, which also considers the costly environmental impacts of production and distribution of the beloved herbal liqueur.

We were pretty well stocked on the yellow Chartreuse, but picked up another large bottle of the green this weekend before the prices sky rocket even more than they already have. Get some while you can!

I expect to see some more alternatives/knock-offs coming to market over the next year. Lots of boutique bitters and amaro producers are well positioned to do it.

Heck, I might try making some. The process isn’t that different from making the ginger liqueur, falernum, and pimento dram I’ve made in the last year. Plus it will give me an excuse to go to Kalustyan’s again.

We got out and did a little bit of yard work this weekend, mostly trimming trees and bushes, and clearing out dead plants to make way for the new shoots. I noticed peonies, lilies, and rhubarb emerging out of the ground this week!

I also ordered some seeds this weekend. I plan to get seeds started in the next couple weeks. New for us this year: Cherry tomatoes are replacing the heirloom slicing tomatoes that always seem to split and the animals get to before we do, a new variety of pea (sugar magnolia snap peas), and spinach for some additional early season harvesting. Also bought some foxglove seeds to add another perennial to the flower beds.

I’m looking forward to getting back out in the garden!

Time for bed. See you next week 👋

Busy week!

My parents were in town last weekend, so I published my weekly post early and was offline for most of the weekend.

They helped us put in new bookshelves in my office and moved the chalk board. I love it! This opens up the space and gives it more of a study feel instead of a classroom feel.

Having a background of books for calls is better than having a chalkboard + pull down map, in my opinion (though I don’t have any screenshots of me on the previous background handy, perhaps some coworkers do):

They also helped us hang a weather station they gifted me for my birthday and a birdhouse with a camera in it that I got from my aunt and uncle for Christmas.

I’ll write a full post on the weather station soon, but for now you can see the weather data on:

• WundergroundArchived Link
• Windy
• PWS Weather
• WindGuru

…and any app that pulls in one of those sources! I’m currently pulling in the data to CARROT Weather. It has been super cool to watch the rain and wind more closely and know the data is coming from my weather station.

For fun, here are some weather charts from my station’s observations this week:

February 20, 2023 – February 26, 2023

My next step is to figure out how to get the weather to CWOP, too. APRS isn’t exactly a REST API that you can post JSON to. In the meantime I plan to work on a custom block to pull in the current Wunderground observations and display them on a page on this site.

The birdhouse needs electricity, so we set it up on the side of the shed/workshop. No one has taken up residence yet.

Charlie had a great weekend with his grandparents. It is wonderful watching them love him and seeing how much he loves them, too.

The aforementioned sleep training improved dramatically last weekend. Since last Friday he has slept through the night until ~5:30-6:30am, at which point he comes to snuggle in our bed for a little while to wake up. This is the first time he has consistently slept through the night (we had some short stretches before, but never like this), so we are all sleeping better.

The pre-bedtime routine is now more important than ever, and Charlie expects to read at least four books and sing a round of Wheels on the Bus, his current favorite song. He knows all the hand motions.

He is also taking naps in his bed most of the time now, which means less naps snuggling on us, but more time for us to do the dishes, cook, do laundry, and clean up. Tradeoffs.

We put up a tent in Charlie’s room this week, which he loves:

We got snow on Feb 25! I thought for sure we were going to go the rest of the season without snow. Looks like more is coming on the 27th and 28th. Looks like I need to move some stuff so we can get our vehicle in the garage 😬 ❄️

Unexpectedly had to replace our tires this week. Wheels were out of alignment, so the tire wires were showing on the inside edges and the vehicle wouldn’t pass inspection. I asked the mechanic to see, and they weren’t bullshitting me. Fun.

It is a year to the week since I popped a tire and had to get a new one. At least I got to keep the new one I bought then as a backup.

Work this week was lots of racing against the clock to figure out Stripe fraud rules (RadarArchived Link) and evaluating a surfeit of individual transactions. Then planning out a migration away from AWS, also against the clock.

I finally got to try out my homemade falernum this week. I made a Chartreuse Swizzle. I’m pleased!

The Tavern included some of my art in a recent post:

That’s all for now 👋

Sleep training toddlers is not for the faint of heart. Unfortunately, while sleep training a toddler this week, I learned that I am faint of heart.

It did get easier by the fifth night.

I don’t have a lot to say this week. Work was pretty stressful, which coupled with the lack of sleep was tough. Charlie has been teething all week, too. Despite all that, he has been a lot of fun. He is picking up new things quickly!

I am concerned about how unseasonably warm it has been, but I have been enjoying it. Nice to take Charlie on walks and use the swingset again. I hope it doesn’t freeze and destroy all the flowers popping up.

I’ve been using my Micropub Shortcuts a lot this week. They’ve been very handy. One improvement I want to make: Pass highlighted text from a webpage into the action so it can be added to the content body as a quote. I also want to try adding a note with a like.

I’m publishing this early because I’m going to be mostly offline this weekend. My parents are visiting and we’ll be working on some projects, cooking, and hanging out with Charlie. See you next week 👋

My weekly roundup

I realized last week that I could use the Query Loop (I prefer the one from Generate Blocks because you can restrict the query with before and after dates, just like wp_query) to include the Microblog posts and Likes I’ve posted in the last week as a roundup in these weekly posts.

This week’s Likes

This week’s microblog posts

Charlie has been engaging this week. It is fun watching him make the leaps where he wakes up one day and has new skills. He seems to understand more of our language and is trying to string it together himself, doing some solo imaginative play, and noticing even the smallest things. He is saying Momma a lot more, which Amanda appreciates.

We think moving up to the older toddler room at daycare is rubbing off on him.

On Saturday we put together a toddler bed for him (one of the low to the ground style that he can get in and out of by himself), involved him in the setup process, and made a big deal about it. Afterward he took a nap in it (after spending some time getting used to it… new things are exciting!).

That night it was a little rockier. We got him to bed, but he got up five times throughout the night. That said, we were able to soothe him back to sleep in his bed instead of caving and letting him cosleep in our bed, so that is a win. Hopefully it gets easier.

Amanda reminded me of what some friends said: When they got serious about drawing bedtime boundaries, they decided to only have Dad go in when the kids cry. When Mom isn’t an option, they tend to figure it out quicker. My new term for the regular nighttime cries is Mommafishing.

Walks with Charlie have been sweet. He reaches up on his own to hold our hand. Playground time, too. He is getting faster and more independent by the day!

Here is what walks in the woods with Charlie last year looked like vs this year:

I created some Micropub Shortcuts for iOS and have been using them a lot. Next step is setting up autosyndication for these Micropub posts.

I’ve also used my Upload Photos to WordPress Shortcut a lot this week and I refactored it to work with the Share Sheet.

I put in a PR to update the Authentication section of the WordPress.org REST API docs that was approved and merged: https://github.com/WP-API/docs/pull/149 – Here is a link to the new section: https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/using-the-rest-api/authentication/#basic-authentication-with-application-passwords

I upgraded my work computer to the new MacBook Pro with M2 Pro chip this week and I’ve been blown away at how fast it is. UI changes are instant. The battery lasts a long time. The fan doesn’t run like my i7 Intel version. Great update. I do miss the touchbar, though.

Some new-to-me songs I’ve enjoyed recently:

Reading

I recently finished Recursion by Blake Crouch and Daemon by Daniel Suarez. I’m now working on Freedom by Daniel Suarez (second book in the Daemon series) and listening to Solomon’s Gold by Neal Stephenson, another book in the Baroque Cycle.

My Weekly roundup

I realized tonight that I could use the Query Loop (I prefer the one from Generate Blocks because you can restrict the query with before and after dates, just like wp_query) to include the Microblog posts and Likes I’ve posted in the last week as a roundup in these weekly posts.

This week’s Likes

This week’s microblog posts

After I posted last week’s update, we went to Beacon, NY, and had a nice family day exploring parts of Main St that we haven’t gone to yet. Charlie walked almost a mile on his own and overall we had a really good time. We had burgers and fries at Meyer’s Olde Dutch, which we recommend.

Charlie had a big week! He moved up to a new room at daycare and he got his first haircut. No photos yet because he is teething and kind of grumpy today, so we’ll catch him at a happier time later.

We got him a learning tower and he has enjoyed helping is make breakfast and dinner all week. Also helping Momma make banana bread!

Two ways he showed some new skills this week:

1. We came across one of those “find this object” puzzles in a Highlights magazine (thanks, Grandma and Grandpa!). He was able to quickly find the objects!
2. While helping me make coffee in his learning tower (he likes to dump the beans into the grinder and help me crank the grinder handle), he pointed to the coffee filters on the wall, which is the correct next step, and put it into the Chemex when I handed it to him. Before we know it he’ll be making coffee on his own.

Forget improv classes. Drive a car with a grumpy toddler in the back seat. You’ll figure out how to riff off of whatever you see pretty quickly since the stakes are higher.

I’m still not feeling good consistently, which is very frustrating. Last week I wrote about my eyes and persistent cough. Thankfully my eyes are better, but my cough is still. I also had body aches twice this week (Wednesday and Saturday) and a fever once (Saturday). Today I have a sore throat. Charlie’s cough hasn’t gone away yet either. We are all very ready to be rid of this.

Amanda and I were able to go have a lunch date this week, which was really nice. We both agreed that we need to prioritize that more.

The “spy balloon” was such an absurd situation this week. I like Arnaud Bertrand’s take.

Charging for the Twitter API and the very poor sudden communication without a concrete plan (one week notice, no details), may be Musk’s biggest misstep at Twitter yet other than buying Twitter in the first place.

Christina Warren said it best: $100/month is not something someone will pay for a small hobbyist project (which is one of the core things that makes Twitter great!), but it is something that scammers with stolen credit card numbers will pay, just like they did with Twitter Blue, another Musk Misstep™️.

Then the next day, shutting off API access for certain apps without notice? Very nice move.

My microblog posts may stop autoposting to Twitter, I’m not sure 🤷‍♂️

I also noticed last week that Twitter removed the card preview from the validator tool. That is annoying because half of the reason to use the validator is that it fetched fresh content from the site, which was a way to force updates on preview cards. I suspect that the preview in Tweet Composer is working off of cached data and there is now no way to force an update. The announcement.

The person who runs the Year Progress bot also said it pretty well: “Twitter management can eat shit.”

I already posted about this on my microblog, but since these weekly posts and the shorter ones have different audiences, I thought I’d post it here too:

The Museu de Matemàtiques de Catalunya (www.mmaca.cat) in Barcelona, Spain, added a photo I took of a cycloid to their interactive cycloid exhibit room!

I blogged about taking this photo in 2008. I won a physics photo contest with it! My parents helped me take the photo and that is their old Suburban in it. Since then it has also been published in a magazine in Japan. One key reason, in my opinion, is that I put my photos out under a Creative Commons license.

I’ve been at this consistently for a year now!

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 cook—he 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 😬

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 🤷‍♂️

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. 👋

Remember how last week we thought Charlie had RSV? It turns out we were wrong and he had the flu. I know because I got it on Sunday and had to see a doctor on Thursday due to dehydration. It hit me like a truck on Sunday and I spent 90% of my time Sun-Thurs in bed. I vomited from Mon-Weds and kept barely anything down. Stabbing headaches the entire time.

I had to call in a friend to watch Charlie Tuesday night and ask Amanda to come home from a work trip early because just getting him dressed and taking him to daycare took all the energy I had. It took a lot to make those asks and disrupt their plans. This was a rough week.

As of Saturday morning I’m slowly getting back on my feet and contributing around the house again. Made breakfast, started cleaning the upstairs, stripped the beds.

We were planning on getting flu shots this year, but never rescheduled when we canceled because Charlie was sick. That is a mistake we won’t make next year.

I did nothing besides lay in bed for the first three days, and I only started watching Netflix and listening to audiobooks on the fourth and fifth days.

I finished season 4 of Ozark (the final season, so I finished the series) and I finished the last couple episodes I had left of Andor. Ozark was dark, gritty, and terrific. Not something you want to watch while in a sensitive state of mind. While Jason Bateman, Laura Linney, and Julia Garner have been in lots of other stuff, I think they’ll be permanently tied to their Ozark roles in my head. The final episode wrapped things up in ways I didn’t expect.

Andor was okay. I don’t think I really get the twist at the end of the last episode. I’m getting tired of all the Star Wars spin offs and have a hard time keeping them in chronological order in my head relative to the original trilogy.

On Friday I picked up Blake Crouch’s Recursion again and finished Part I. Really good so far.

It is such a shame that Tweetbot and Twitterific lost API access to Twitter and that Twitter is being silent about it. What bullshit. That open access to build upon is one of the things that helped make Twitter great.

Tweetbot was my third party Twitter app of choice, so I’m glad to see them working on a Mastodon client.

The WordPress Org’s marketing team shared some of my photos this week:

Dolphins in the Bronx River again! Starlight Park is a good ways from the mouth of the river, almost to the Bronx Zoo.

I posted meal plans for the last two weeks that have been completely tossed aside, so I’ll go back and revisit those this week. I also have to do the same with my work plans and personal plans for our family and for this website.

That’s all I’ve got. Here’s hoping for a normal, sickness-free week at the Grimmett house this coming week.

New year! 2023! The prime factors of 2023 are 7 and 17.

Charlie walking more has opened up additional entertainment possibilities. One of my favorite activities is walking by the Peekskill waterfront, and now he enjoys it, too! We walked a lot before he could walk, too, but carrying him the whole way got tiring and he didn’t love being in the stroller for long periods. Now he can run around on the playground for a bit and walk a good distance before he needs picked up.

I’ve been reflecting a lot on the last year and it is incredible to me the amount of growth that happens for a baby between 6 months and 18 months. This time last year he couldn’t crawl. Now he is running, climbing stairs, communicating, and very curious about the world. Amazing.

We had breakfast with some friends and their family this morning, which was really nice. It is fun seeing non-family love and interact with Charlie, too. It is also nice to see Charlie with older kids and learn how caring and gentle the older kids can be, even if they themselves don’t have younger siblings.

Some house projects I want to do this year:

• Replace the shutters
• Replace the fence
• Paint the shed and add gutters
• Enlarge the back porch (May not happen this year, but I’d like to at least have a plan to move forward on)

I subscribed to some popular advice/tips newsletters for a while, then I followed some of the authors on Twitter and realized that they are not people I want to take advice from, so I promptly unsubscribed.

We watched Glass Onion on Friday night. It was enjoyable, but I liked the first Knives Out more. We also finished season 5 of Billions this week, and I think they did Wendy Rhodes wrong at the end of the season by writing her as powerless and subservient, which is completely out of character for her.

I’m trying to sort out my POSSE stack for this site, but don’t quite have it figured out yet. Mastodon works well, but the Twitter connection via Bridgy publishing is unreliable, so I need to find something new there.

I’d love to learn about other people’s setups!

Also, I’m getting itchy to do a redesign… I suspect that I’ll make some progress in the next couple weeks.

I wonder how I could insert archive.org links after external links in old posts in an automated way? 🤔

I’m enjoying the @smllwrlds tiny sci-fi illustrations project. Some are dark, but still cool.

One of the many things that have changed since having Charlie is that we now need to meal plan more in order to speed up the dinner-making process at the end of the day. Here is this week’s plan:

• Monday: Gyudon with cauliflower rice + stir fried veggies
• Tuesday: Chicken noodle soup
• Wednesday: Pork tenderloin with broccolini and roasted potatoes
• Thursday: Gnocci + sauce + arugula side salad with vinaigrette
• Friday: Dinner with friends, menu TBD
• Saturday: White bean soup with coconut milk?
• Sunday: Sheet pan dinner of some kind. Probably chicken thighs + some kind of vegetable. Side of cous cous?

Now that my team has grown at work from ~10 to ~40, it is time for me to rethink how I handle Slack channels, P2s, notifications, emails, task lists, check-in reminders, etc. I implemented about half my ideas last week and hope to implement the other half this week. Then I’ll see how they work for a few weeks.

Update on clarifying used cooking oil fuel ideas from last week’s post: I talked to someone who used to work in a restaurant and they had a filter powder they’d pour into the oil before filtering that would clump the fatty acids and other solubles together so that they’d get caught by a filter. This kind of stuff.

I upgraded my iPhone X to a 14 Pro. The battery life is much better, the on/off button is in a better location, and the new widget areas are nice (I have a shortcut to set an alarm from my lock screen now). The main thing I miss from the iPhone X, besides it being slightly smaller than the 14 Pro, is the 3D touch, especially from the keyboard to move the cursor. My friend Sean mentioned that you can long tap on the space bar to move the cursor, but I miss the haptic feedback and the convenience of having the entire keyboard has a trackpad.

See ya next week! 👋

We spent Christmas in Ohio. We left a day early to avoid the major snowstorm and single digit temps, but the weather during the drive was still pretty rough. It snowed for the first four hours, then rained for the second four hours. With very little traction, we narrowly avoided hitting a car that had spun out on the ice and the police car that was trying to stop and help it. There was no snow on the way back, but there was rain and thick fog for the final two hours after dark, which made visibility very low. What crazy weather… 1F for a couple days, then 60F a couple days later. My sinuses were going crazy.

Charlie is a completely different baby from this time last year. He is running around, learning to say words, understands a lot more, and is a lot of fun. It was great to see him interact with more people, including some of his young cousins.

One big thing this week is that Charlie is learning to walk down stairs while holding someone’s hand. He is trying so hard and making a lot of progress. A big step for him!

Charlie played in the snow for the first time!

This year’s Christmas ornament. (My Dad has been making them since 2006.) This year he did something new and laser etched a sign similar to the one we saw in Lake Placid earlier this year, onto real birch bark!

We started what might become a new tradition: Learning a new card game the week after Christmas. We chose Pitch. Blog post coming soon.

We made red beans a rice with domingo rojo beans (Rancho Gordo), andouille, and some of my tasso ham. It was easier to make than gumbo, so I think I’ll make it for Mardi Gras this year instead of gumbo.

On the way back to NY, we stopped overnight with some friends in Pittsburgh who had a baby this year. It was great to connect with them on a different level now that we are all parents. Charlie had a great time meeting their cats, trying to pet their dog, feeding and chasing their chickens, and playing at the playground.

This trip’s audiobooks were both by Mark Kurlansky: Salt and The Big Oyster.

My Dad is interested in making biodiesel from used vegetable oil to heat his barn with. So we went down the rabbit hole tonight of trying to figure out which combo of alcohol and catalyst is the cheapest and highest yield. Options are methanol, ethanol, or isopropyl for alcohol, sodium hydroxide (lye) or potassium hydroxide for the catalyst. Looks like he’ll need to set up some small-scale (quart-sized) tests of each combo in various proportions once the weather warms up.

A friend mentioned that biodiesel might be overkill for heating, and that if the goal is to clean up the the used veg oil to make it burn better, treating it with bentonite clay might work.

I spent some time after Charlie went to bed each night working on a WordPress plugin that fetches posts I’ve starred from my RSS reader and outputs them as Likes on my site. I’ll publish the code later this week.

Since posting Likes is kind of a pain on mobile, I want to do the something similar for posts I’ve come across online outside of my RSS reader and think that I’ll do bookmark app -> cron job -> Like post. Most of that is already written for the other plugin and I just need to adapt the source.

While in Ohio my Twitter feed was completely swamped by sports betting ads, which was sad. Especially so because I have family there with gambling problems. It is also interesting to me that sports betting online is legal in New York, but I don’t recall ever having gotten ads for it on Twitter. Billboards yes, Twitter no. What was so stark in Ohio was the huge number of ads I was bombarded with immediately.

I’ve been enjoying reading everyone’s year-end blog posts and I wrote a couple of them myself. I’m adding a lot to my To Read list from people’s reading roundups.

New Year’s Eve was low-key. We were completely worn out from the car ride (we got home around 7pm), put Charlie to bed, then watched two episodes of The Crown and went to bed around 10:45pm.

Charlie got up at 5pm, so we went grocery shopping around 9am and had a sweet moment by the bagel shop as we shared a breakfast sandwich outside on a bench and he waved at the dogs out for their walks.

Some neat things I came across the past two weeks:

A reminder to back up your cloud content because it could go away at any time.

Also, ditch LastPass if you haven’t already.

• Around Thanksgiving Charlie and I were looking at a picture book with a turkey in it and I made a turkey sound that he found hilarious. Fast forward to this week, Charlie picked up that book and we were flipping through it. When we got to the turkey page, he started making the sound himself, even though he hasn’t heard it in a couple weeks. He remembers more than I thought!
• One of Amanda’s favorite books growing up was Cockatoos by Quentin Blake, and we have a copy that we read with Charlie. I was surprised this week that by the middle of the book where the Cockatoos are hiding, Charlie was able to pick them out on most pages.
• Another instance of Charlie’s image recognition and memory expanding: We occasionally watch shows like Sesame Street and Bluey when one of us doesn’t feel well and we need some snuggly downtime. Occasionally animals pop up one the screen that Charlie recognizes, and when they do, he goes and gets a book and excitedly points them out.
• Charlie started throwing big-feeling toddler fits where he flops down on the floor crying and doesn’t want to be picked up and consoled. He has also been taking longer naps and eating more than usual, so maybe he is going through a growth and/or developmental spurt?

I had my Mastodon username in my Twitter bio before the rule changes went up. I wonder how long it will be before I get suspended? 🤷‍♂️

Edit: The rule change link now goes to a 404. Constant rule changes are a great indication of a healthy platform.

It was very cool to see art I made behind Matt during the 2022 State of the Word:

I did the circular rainbow using only WP core blocks for the Museum of Block Art:

I’m sick, which is a bummer, because this is one weekend where I would have really liked to have been well. I missed a date night with Amanda that we had been planning for a couple months and a concert (Modest Mouse’s Lonesome Crowded West 25th anniversary) with a friend that I was excited about (and I don’t usually want to go to concerts).

My Raycast Wrapped:

I’m thinking about redesigning my site to better incorporate my non-blog content (short posts with text, images, likes, bookmarks). Seems like a good January project instead of doing Genuary again.

Charlie in his “that” phase. He points to things constantly throughout the day asks what they are by saying “that?”. Sometimes it takes a tired daddy a few seconds to remember what a kettle is called first thing in the morning.

We got invited to a play date with some kids who were a year to a couple years older than Charlie, but Charlie held his own and did great with them. More progress on the making parents friends front, too! We find that you’ve gotta be intentional and share your number or ask for theirs, or else it doesn’t happen.

We went to the Bronx Zoo on Saturday. We forgot that lots of warm weather animals are not out when it is cold outside, so there was a lot we couldn’t see, including Charlie’s favorite from his books, the zebras. Next time! He did get to go inside and see some giraffes though, which he enjoyed. He loved the sea lions, too.

We did more Christmas cards this week (Charlie signed some!) and a bit more decorating (drying grapefruit slices, getting the wreath up out front). We treat it as an ongoing holiday process and it is less stressful that way.

Here is the Christmas tree that still needs dried grapefruits hung on it.

We had the first real snow cover last night. We have about an inch and a half covering the ground.

This week I learned about Maid-Rite sandwiches, an Iowa thing. Loose ground beef cooked with onions, on a bun with mustard and pickles. Think of a sloppy joe with no sauce or a chopped cheese without the cheese. Naturally I had to try them, so I made us some for dinner one night. They were pretty good!

Twitter’s infinite scroll behavior has been pretty broken for me all week. No more than 14 tweets will load in the feed on the web interface. Good impetus to shut the tab and get back to work.

Unfortunately, some of the shitty hot-take viral factory accounts that I thought were mostly sticking to Twitter came through on my Mastodon feed as boosts recently. I unfollowed the person who boosted that nonsense, and it looks like I need to migrate my block list from Twitter.

I’ve been brushing up on my PHP at work, making some CLI commands with the Symfony Console component.

Getting phpcs and phpcbf set up with the WordPress-Extra standards proved to be time consuming. There is a known error with the WordPress Standards and PHP 8. When I switch to the develop branch, I get different errors, and when I switch down to PHP 7.4, my Composer dependencies break for projects. Fun.

It is possible to run the command on the command line using the -d error_reporting="E_ALL&~E_DEPRECATED" flag, but that doesn’t allow VSCode extensions to run phpcs and phpcbf.

So I added this rule to my local version of the WordPress-Extra ruleset, as explained in this comment:

<ini name="error_reporting" value="E_ALL &#38; ~E_DEPRECATED" />

Kind of hacky, but at least phpcs and cbf are working 🤷‍♂️

For fun I generated some of those AI avatars people have been posting about. They are mostly meh for me, but I also didn’t have a ton a great selfies to feed into it. I don’t plan on using these for anything.

Maybe I should buy a rust colored suit? 🤔

A cool set of drawings of real root systems I came across this week:

View the collection here: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13

Charlie has been completely attached to stuffed animals this week. He carries one with him at all times, including when we are at the grocery store and when he is sleeping. He refused to let an Elmo from daycare go on Friday, so Elmo is hanging out at our house this weekend.

We went and cut a Christmas tree today. Compare this photo of Amanda & Charlie picking out a Christmas tree today to Amanda & Charlie last year. He is getting so big! 😍

ChatGPT was the big thing in the tech world this week. I got access to the beta and have been using it as a learning tool. Pairing that with GitHub Copilot has sped up my programming and quickly resolving errors that would have otherwise taken me a while to figure out, such as “Serialization of ‘Closure’ is not allowed.” ChatGPT told me exactly where the error was and how to fix it! Amazing. It also coached me on how to break large requests down into smaller chunks to avoid timeouts.

Unfortunately it is still in early stages and sometimes makes up complete falsehoods. For example, I asked it to recommend a mystery book, which it did, but then it said the book won a prestigious award that I can’t find any evidence of it having won. Or suggesting API endpoints on public APIs that don’t exist. Or confusing WordPress.org with WordPress.com, which is a common mistake.

I used the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday emails as a chance to clean out my subscriptions with Leave Me Alone. Their $7 7-day pass is gold. They are an indie company, and unlike Unroll they don’t sell your email data.

I fixed a couple of bugs on my site that have been bothering me for a while. Feels good. I also made a ton of progress on making Jetpack Likes for posts into Webmention likes. I have a few things to tweak and test, but I expect to run it on my own site this week and then blog about it and share my script.

Amanda and I both noticed that we had some free time in our work schedules one day this week, so we decided to go out and have a lunch date at the spur of the moment and spend some child-free time together. That was really nice. More things like that in 2023, please.

Currently watching:

• The new season of The Crown on Netflix.
• The new Star Wars Andor series on Disney Plus.

Currently Reading:

• Neal Stephenson’s The Juncto, the fifth book in the Baroque Cycle series.
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

I added my Blogroll to the site this week after seeing great resources like blogroll.org and ooh.directory. Blogrolls are now more important than ever in our age of online social diaspora.

I also blogged about holiday cocktail ingredients and batch cocktails over at CookLikeChuck:

Homemade cocktail ingredients and batched holiday drinks that make great gifts – Cook Like Chuck

Have a cocktail lover in your life and want to make them something unique? Or want a host gift for a holiday party that will stand out against the bottles of wine everyone else is bringing? Here are some cocktail ingredients you can make at home and some batched holiday drinks you can make. Homemade…

cooklikechuck.com

I’ve been on a holiday cocktail quest lately, tracking down recipes from the Sippin’ Santa tiki popup, making syrups and liqueurs (cranberry syrup, cinnamon syrup, nutmeg syrup, ginger liqueur), infusing pineapple rum, and mixing up batches of Black Christmas and tequila and sherry eggnog. Some for personal consumption, some for gifts.

We are making good progress through our holiday card list, aided by the drinks above.

My Spotify Wrapped for 2022. Again I’m in the top 1/2% of Tycho listeners. I think they must be excluding certain artists, because we listened to A LOT of Caspar Babypants.

I’m off to do some Christmas decorating, cookie baking, and card writing! 🎄👋