Highlight of the week: Got happy hour sushi and took a walk at the waterfront on a gorgeous sunny weekend afternoon
Looking forward to: Finally got around to ordering a new Discover Pass so I’d like to get out to a State Park soon (I need to plan some more stuff to look forward to!)
Stuff I did:
- 13.5 hours consulting — I’m shockingly only like an hour over my estimate for the current phase! Just another hour or two more to turn in the deliverable, so this’ll be much closer than the first phase 👍 (It’s a fixed fee project so I just get a slightly lower effective hourly rate than my target when I underestimate. Not ideal, but estimation is ever a learning process.)
- Figured out (and paid) my estimated taxes
- Listened to an author talk about going wide
- DH got his braces off!
- Set up a bike stand for my husband’s bike and reorganized the living room
- Met a friend for a quick walk — but oh nooo my allergies! Got a headache afterwards and had to send husband for acetaminophen
- Took the cat back to the vet for a followup booster shot 😿 They gave us medicine (gabapentin) to help him panic less about riding in the car — maybe it helped a little?
- One online appointment
Dinners:
Didn’t cook much, I must’ve been tired 🤷♀️
- Shake Shack veggie burger
- ???
- White bean and mushroom stew + toast
- Thai takeout — eggplant and tofu + rice + veggie spring rolls
- Peanut butter toast + milk
- Fancy frozen pizza + bagged caesar salad
- Taco Time frozen crisp bean tacos + sour cream + guac + pico
Reading:
- Read:
- Novellas: The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo and The Factory Witches of Lowell by C.S. Malerich
- Comics: The Hard Switch by Owen Pomery and Dumb: Living Without a Voice by Georgia Webber
- Art books: Susan Point: Works on Paper by Dale Croes and Mexican: A Journey Through Design by Newell Turner
- Continued reading Come Together by Emily Nagoski
- DNF’d Last Ship Off Polaris-G by Carol Van Natta, The Dragon of Ynys by Minerva Cerridwen, Goblin Girl by Moa Romanova, and Burning Roses by S.L. Huang
- Bought ebook All That They Desire by Zoe York, ordered Design is a Job zine by Mike Monteiro, and backed The City We Chose by TO Comix Press
Words I looked up / concepts I learned:
- Ligne claire — looked up for the art style of The Hard Switch
- Sturgeon’s Law — I have a hard time keeping track of all these things named after people, but this concept would have been handy when I was writing about critique recently
Pretty stuff I saw:
- the paperback cover of Hummingbird Salamander
- Kevin Gleason – Full Moonrise–Evolution Valley
- Liron Gertsman – The Frigatebird and the Diamond Ring (story behind the photo)
- Ravi Zupa – Fun Tonight
- love the color combo on this turquoise and coral tumbler
New music I listened to:
- Ben Howard – Couldn’t Make It Up
Website changes:
- Updated my blogroll (last updated in November) — I’ve been on a spree following other bloggers over the past several months and had 30+ new folks to add, that was exhausting 😅 I think I’m only gonna do it twice a year… unless I figure out some easy way to do it as I go 🤷♀️
- Updated my robots.txt with a bunch more AI user agents… I know this is a losing battle but this is the one protest move I can take so I’m doing it while it’s still marginally viable.
- Updated my theme, which requires making some manual updates to the theme files because it doesn’t honor child theme edits for a few microformats updates I needed for IndieWeb friendliness.
- Followed these instructions to replace youtube.com embeds with youtube-nocookies.com embeds — the inline iFrames method worked for me once I fixed the URL typos in lines 5 and 6.
Nature notes:
- Camas in the raised bed is blooming! Not the camas in the ground yet though, but close.
- The espalier apples are starting to flower so I’m waiting for the deer to show up and chomp down like usual… I never noticed before but the leaves are budding out from the bottom tier up, so the top tier barely has any leaves but the bottom is already flowering 🤷♀️
Random thing I learned:
- Cookbook authors pay for their own photography 😳