Weeknotes, 2025-09-07

It’s not great that only the second one of these I’m trying to do weekly is half a week late. But better done than not, I suppose. It was a mixed bag of a week. Lots of good, one kinda bigish bad, which at least somewhat contributes to the lateness.

Home and Family

A friend with similar-aged kids volunteered to take 6yo to OMSI on her own on Monday while they all had the day of school. They all had a great time, and my partner and I were able to finish¹ our garage cleanout project. Win/win! Now on to the basement…

(¹: Hahahahaha… it’ll never be “finished”, but it’s done enough that it’s a functional space, we can see everything, and I’ve gone through every one of the boxes I’d been accumulating for decades. Good enough!)

One of my partner’s oldest friends came to town. The two of them spent most of the day together, but I did join them for meals at two of my favorite places to eat in Portland: Ben & Esther’s, an amazing vegan Jewish deli, and Los Gorditos, a Mexican place with wonderful vegetarian and vegan options. And it’s always nice to see this friend when she’s in town, food or no.

It’s probably good for me that Ben & Esther’s is on the other side of town. I’d likely eat there daily if I could swing it.

Then my five-year-old turned into a six-year-old! This kid remains absolutely amazing and makes me feel most days that I might actually be the luckiest guy in the world. The three of us spent a lot of time being all goopy over pictures from the day she was born; it was lovely.

Her birthday was on a school day, and a good friend had already scheduled for the upcoming weekend (which was also a fun party), so we’re pushing her party out a bit, which I think she’s excited about since it means she gets two days.

Bodies are weird

A few weeks ago, due to a combination of bad timing, recent maintenance, and stupidity, I took a spill on my bike, going clear over my handlebars and landing on my palms. Which is not a good idea, in case it comes up. They hurt right away, but I figured it was all moderate soft tissue damage that’d heal up fine. Towards the beginning of this week I started to get worried that the healing seemed to have slowed down or maybe stopped, and on Friday I went to see a doc about it.

It’s rarely good when doctors consider you interesting. Both the doc I was seeing and the first radiologist who read the x-rays said “ooo, I’ve never seen that before”. 🤦🏻 I’m seeing ortho next week, but in the meantime I’ve got braces on both arms, which make doing everything take longer. And things still kinda hurt, but, um, only when I try to do anything with my hands? But also it looks like I forgot to finish changing out of my superhero outfit! Don’t give away my secret identity.

Tech things

The balance wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for, but was much better. I did a lot of more intentional research and planning for a project that’s been percolating for three years or so (or… lord. I just looked at a mailing list archive and I think the first tiny seed of this got planted in… 2008?!?👴🏼). The wrist injury makes everything go slower, but this is the first week that I have felt like there’s been progress; certainly the first week there’s been actual code (even if it’s just sending static test data for now).

The unexpected bonus was that I got to go to a neat workshop on LoRa, put on by CETI. LoRa’s also been on my “to investigate” list for a couple years now (I bought a radio hat for a Raspberry Pi at one point but haven’t put the time in). The workshop was great and we got to assemble a little kit and take it home. I’ve now got a working Meshtastic radio sitting in my window.

(I’m not sold on Meshtastic as the “right” answer here (most especially because flood-fill routing has pretty serious upper bounds on network size), but it’s certainly the easiest to get started with, and also what they were doing at the workshop, so I’m going to try it out for a while.)

I also hadn’t known about CETI before someone in #pdxtech on IRC told me about this workshop. It’s a neat space and org, and the people seem great; I’m hoping to spend some more time with them.

Media

6yo (hah! back when she was 5yo) spent the first half of the week on a sea shanties kick, which was fun. That was apparently brought on by remembering that they sang some at one of her summer programs, even though she didn’t mention that at the time. She’s also entirely forgotten that her and her cousin had a similar kick about two years ago.

Fora while now, bedtime reading with 6yo had been dominated by the graphic novel Hooky, which we’re both really enjoying. We’re into Volume 3 and will probably finish it next week, and I’m sad it’ll end.

I’m sure I read or listened to something that wasn’t for my kid, but I’ve lost whatever it was. Oh, well.