I’m into a habit of writing these every Saturday when my wife leaves to go to work building bikes. It’s just me and my kids here at home, and they spend the 30 minutes or so I’m upstairs yelling at me that I’m taking too long. I’m OK with it. One day I’ll miss them screaming their frustrations and disappointments at me from the bottom of the stairs.

I’ve started spending a lot of time this week stretching to help my lower back. It’s been hurting a lot lately. If you’re like me and sit at a computer a lot of the day, it’s worth finding a way to counteract the sitting and keep your hips and back stretched out. The pain sneaks up on you. Before you know it you’ve thrown out your back reaching for a t-shirt in the drawer.

Notes

  • I stepped on a Lego so hard this week that it bruised the bottom of my foot. Those little pieces are unforgiving. Their pointy corners are engineered for maximum pain.
  • Counting this post, I’ve written 18 posts about a month ago. It’s been a lot of fun, and I feel writing leads to more writing. I haven’t shared many of the posts anywhere. And I think that’s helped me write without worrying what others think. No offense if you’re reading this.
  • Also, I’m finding that writing a lot makes you into a better observer. You start to watch the world to find ways to turn what you see into a story, even if you never write it down or share it. You try to mix what you’re learning with the ideas you’ve collected. That’s how creativity happens, and writing seems to be a way to boost that creativity.
  • This article about joining CSV and JSON data together was interesting.
  • I wrote about a rabbit hole of handmade sites that I went down. There’s a lot of fun sites to explore if you’re looking for something to do.
  • I started reading Artemis by Andy Weir, who’s the author of The Martian. It’s OK. I’m not into it like I was when I read The Martian.
  • I visited my parent’s house last weekend and had the chance to fly my brother’s drone. There must have been something off with one of the propellors, because as it lifted off the ground, it took off in one direction on its own, flew around the house out of sight, and slammed into something—a tree or the roof. It survived and caused no damage, but it could have been a lot worse! My brother got it fixed back up, and I flew it around for a while. It was awesome.
  • Here’s a video of Olympic Gold Medalist Katie Ledecky swimming with a glass of chocolate milk balanced on her head. It made me wonder, do Olympic athletes drink a half gallon of chocolate milk when they workout?
  • I went golfing on Friday and had a five-putt hole. If you’re not familiar, this means that once I got to the green, it took me five putts to get the ball into the hole. It should normally take one or two. A bad hole might take three. A rare bad hole might take four. But five? I’ve never putted that poorly. It’s an accomplishment to try your best and putt that many times.

I like my rake deploy script that I’ve made for writing here. When I finish typing this last paragraph, I’m going to run it and it will publish this weeknote. It was a nice improvement to working with Hugo.