This week had two big conclusions: I finished at my work client, and I did the Toronto half-marathon. The half went well, although I wasn’t in my best form for it. I will post a write up later.

I’m happy about work wrapping up, it was one of my hardest clients, with a tight deadline, and a lot of work flying through the air trying to land. I was impressed with the client team for managing it so well, although I am glad for some time to rest.

This week a friend sent a beautiful hand-made bench in the mail, as a gift to our baby. I can hardly believe it—it’s gorgeous.

Of making things, I’m finding I’m struggling hard to dig up what I wish to do with my limited free-time. This has been an on-and-off challenge for me, but I hope the month ends with my feeling a bit more clear-headed about it.

Another week flew by. Looking back at it, it has already disappeared into the wind. What happened?

I spent more time configuring my home server. My Beelink computer arrived and it was a lot of fun to set up. The studio is a mess of cables, small hard drives, and computers lying around. I was able to migrate everything off the Raspberry Pi with no trouble. Now I’m running the following tools, from home:

• Actual - Budgeting software
• Bookstack - personal wiki
• Immich - photo hosting
• Paperless NGX - physical paper archiver
• Forgeo - Git server
• Ghost - CMS
• Syncthing - File syncing server

Right now, I’m only really using Actual and Immich frequently, but I’m excited to start up a "house wiki" as well as move my personal site over to Ghost.

I’ve been slowly moving my site back over to Ghost. I want to try it out again for a few reasons. The latest release (6.x) allows connecting to the Fediverse, better analytics, and their suite of existing features (e-mail newletters, built-in patreon-esque support etc.)

As I promised to myself last week, I made it to the gym every workday morning, rowed for about 10 minutes, and then went home. It wasn’t much, but it feels like I’m taking charge of my life and fitness again.

This weekend I got out running in some nature and it made a world of difference. I ended my run by jumping into Lake Huron and it felt shockingly good.

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I started reading The Count of Monte Cristo, after seeing a co-worker’s rave reviews. I had tried picking up the unabridged version a year ago and didn’t make it far. I’d read the abridged version once upon a time when I first travelled alone in Europe, and I remember it being very compelling.

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I had some nice folks reach out through this blog, which is encouraging. Thanks, nice folks.

I found myself with a cough and a congestion this week. It was only three weeks ago that I was sick. Now I'm sick again. I've drank nearly a bottle of Nyquil in a month and had some pretty weird dreams (and awful nightmares) for it. Thankfully, I've gotten over most of it and this time around it was a much briefer stay.

I dove into doing some more self-hosting on my Raspberry Pi before going all in on a bigger, more powerful server. I set up Actual Budget, Paperless NGX, Forgejo and Ghost. Self-hosting has long been pretty intimidating, but now that I've just tried again and again with a few different services, it's become a lot more approachable, and I'm satisfied with that. It’s been fun.

This week, I’m determined to be a bit more rigorous with my life. I tried the rowing machine at the gym and want to try to do that, even if just for 10 minutes, to get some exercise in. Losing my exercise time (whether due to being sick, or childcare) has caused my mood to plummet the past month. So, I’m determined that this week, I will get up early, get to the gym when it opens, row for 10 minutes and then go home. It’s the habit I want, not the hard workout.

I did get a bike ride in with a friend on Saturday night. We made it down to the lake under a nearly full moon. We sat on a bench and watched it rise, watched a party boat, lit up with strings of yellow lights, drift silently across the lake.

This week I read Men I Trust, a beautiful comic (painted, too!). It was excellent.

On to another week.

This week was split between voraciously reading about self-hosting, hosting some family, and a host of house cleaning.

I've been searching up and reading through all kinds of threads on reddit about self-hosting open source software, and I'm finding myself quite excited to try some of these programs. Here's a catalogue of things I plan on setting up.

Apps I already use

• Immich: an excellent photo hosting application.
• Actual: budgeting software, similar to YNAB
• Syncthing: I haven't used this for a few years, but I look forward to setting it up again.
• Ghost: Blogging software

Things I'm excited to try

• BookStack - Wiki software
• Jellyfin - Media server / player
• Forgejo - Git forge
• Paperless NGX - physical paper manager
• Kavita - comic library software
• Audiobookshelf - audio book player
• Restic - for doing backups

There's no shortage of applications to try. It should be fun. I'd also like to learn more about Ansible, or other similar tools for standing up servers and their programs. I still have yet to buy my server itself—I'm planning on getting a Beelink mini-pc, but the specs / model I'm still working out.

I also did some plant-repacking. Specifically, I propagated a pothos for the first time. I don't know if it will stick, but they sure look happy and pretty on the shelf.

Speaking of green things, I got a new ink called "Tramol Kiwi" - It's a beautiful green that shades and is pigmented, meaning it'll be ideal with watercolours going over it, and your general-no-smudgedness for this lefty.

I got back on the road running in a big way. I did my first half marathon around town in a long while. I got up around six and ran from 630 till 9 . It took me two hours and 10 minutes. I celebrated with the two breakfast sandwiches and a bottle of Gatorade as well as a very large blister on my right foot. It’s good to know that I can do it again although I feel like a bucket of tar right now..

While on my run, I saw a cyclist making themselves a coffee with a jet boil in front of Lake Ontario and as I ran by, I said “hey, you’re doing it right!” They laughed and wished me a good day. I think this week I might try to attempt the same thing while we have this great weather.

This week I experienced my first 4 day-work week. I’ve been sub-contracted through another company to work at a client, and the sub-contracting company happens to do 4-day work weeks. As you might expect, it makes a huge quality-of-life difference. I was able to get chores done, spend time with my family, and have time for video games with a friend, who coincidentally, had been put through the ringer at his job and been given the day off, too.

This won’t be my normal, as the client will wrap up in October, but just having the insight into the different having Friday off has gotten me thinking.

Beyond that, the week was packed to the walls. We enjoyed a 7km walk around Toronto, enjoying the lake for the first time this summer. It was lovely to sit and watch the rowers go back and forth and enjoy the breeze coming off the water.

I started doing some creative writing in the last few minutes of the day, but by then my battery is so drained I can hardly get out more than a few sentences.

I got really interested in miniPC’s this week and am looking at getting a Beelink SER8. Originally, I had been setting aside some money for a mac-mini to work as a home-server for family photos and other self-hosting. But now, I’m thinking I will try something different, and dig into using Linux. Since this is a home server after all, being able to upgrade the space (not to mention the machine comes with 1TB of data, compared to the Mac-mini’s puny 256gb) is valuable.

I spent this week getting sick and recovering surprisingly rapidly. I got back to good enough health to attend the wedding of a dear friend. There was much dancing and singing—including a family band. Watching this friend’s family playing music made me yearn for something I don’t know how to describe, other than to say, what if after having dinner with friends, someone got out a guitar and you all just sang songs together? What if you all just knew the songs, no one cared about how good of a singer you were, and you just sang?

While sick I read Ayako by Osamu Tezuka. It’s a pretty brutal tragedy which paints a picture of post WWII Japan and the changes that came to farmers and one particularly odious, fucked up family.

I got my Jamis restored this past week; I can’t believe how good it feels to ride a standard sized bike that doesn’t carry cargo. It goes at least 5km/h faster.

The leaves are changing in a tree by our park. My favourite season is arriving.

Autumn always seems to arrive and depart quickly. It’s officially still summer, but kids are back to school, and it is much cooler.

This week I began my tidying spree, following the Marie Kondo method, which I learned more about from a book I found in little free library. My relationship with clothing is strange; maybe I’ll write about that later. For now, suffice to say, the way I decide if I really love something, is if I’ve ever asking myself _where is my ___ when it’s gone missing under a pile of other clothes, or is in the dirty laundry. I don’t have many clothes like that. I pretty much cycle the same few things that I absolutely love.

Work was intense this week, as expected. It was my first week of really experiencing what being a parent + working feels like. So, that was humbling.

In the 1001 albums project, I was exposed to The Doors and The Stooges, as well as a favourite I already had: Lost in the Dream by The War on Drugs.

This week I read a book called I who have never known men. It seems to be making waves among people in my circles, right now. It was a haunting, reflective book, and it was excellent.

Also, I found a new fount this week that I really like. I'm using it to write right now, zoomed in and taking up a large portion of my screen. Averia Serif Libre.

Work picked up for me at the end of this week, and it’ll be even hairier next week. I’ll be jumping into a high velocity Node.js backend yellow-field application. Hopefully it will go ok.

To be honest, there isn’t much time between work, eating food, child care, and trying to keep our home from looking like it was tipped up-side down. I have found the time to write a few blog posts, which I’ll publish at some point. For now, it just feels good to write.

I finally finished my cargo bike video, and posted it online. This will be my last YouTube video for a little while, I think. I’m not entirely convinced making videos is something I want to keep doing. But we’ll see, the spirit might capture me in a few months when I have a more normal schedule.

For now, I plan on chipping away at all the projects I’ve started. No starting new ones. All ideas will go into the "Project Ideas" list, from which I will someday pick something; it’s my hope that the good ideas will stand out from the riff-raff after some time has passed.

This week was my first week back at work. It was good to see coworkers again and get back into this way of things. In my downtime I made progress on my painting which I documented last week. I added quite a bit of green in the bottom left corner and for a moment considered that I didn't actually know which was the bottom left corner and tried looking at the painting from a few different sides. I still like it the way it's been going and I don't plan on changing that.

I also did some more research on traditional american style tattoos, and tried a few more designs with acrylic ink. I learned about spit-shading. Not sure how I feel about it. Seems toxic.

We threw a shindig for my partner’s birthday, which went almost entirely according to plan, minus a swarm of bees that enjoyed the food alongside us.

I also made it to a significant wedding for a beloved, old friend of mine. Words fail me to describe how special it was.

I started considering moving my site to Ghost (again), now that Ghost 6 was released. It has it’s own fediverse features in it now. By migrating, I could host my own blog and fediverse solution. I really liked Ghost, too, although there are trade-offs for both it vs a standard SSG. Either way, I’ll be doing some more writing soon.

I’m returning to work tomorrow; this is my last week of parental leave. I’m feeling very grateful to have gotten 8 weeks off. I think the transition will be challenging for us, but we will adapt.

This week I got out for an evening ride / errand-hang. I picked up a Wald 157 basket off marketplace to attach to my Clydesdale fork. It’s a massive basket. The seller cited that it was too big for their wife whom they had bought it for. I got it for $60, regularly $120 + taxes new, so I was pretty stoked about that. Since getting the clydesdale, I’ve been rocking a standard milk crate on the front fork, but this basket is wider and longer. I biked to the east end with my friend Chad, bought the bakset, zip-tied the thing to my crate, and then went to check out the new Portlands park in the east-end of Toronto and get some ice cream. It was nice to have an evening out riding my bike after weeks of staying in parenting. The new Portlands park is gorgeous, too.

Yesterday, I put the basket to the test and loaded it up with 3 12-packs of sparkling water and some groceries. It was slow handling but it worked really well. I’m seeing that cycletrucks/short-johns definitely have place in my bike shed — they fill the gap of being both a commuter and hauling medium-sized cargo when getting out a full-sized cargo bike is not necessary.

I’ve been trying my hand at drawing traditional tattoo flash. I watched a few videos to understand how artists approach doing fades, linework, and what materials they use. Other than maybe acquiring a speedball b-5 nib, I’ve got pretty much everything I need: abundant watercolours, acrylic ink, india ink, and lots of paper. Most of my sketchbooks go neglected right now; I only have time to draw one thing a day, and that goes directly into the hobonichi journal where I also write up the day.

I started up an abstract painting at the beginning of the week. With painting, I usually have a mental block in preparing materials and your palette that can be a bit hard to get over—it really doesn’t take long, but I find it hard to get over that. Once I do, however, it’s bliss.I’m not sure what it’ll be, but I’m enjoying just playing with colour and brush strokes.

It seems the only markers of time passing right now are my nails growing and my repeating todo tasks telling me that another week has passed. Didn’t I just clip my nails? Didn’t I just balance my budget? The heatwave has returned and so it feels like we are in a cycle.

My latest fascination in stationary are isograph pens and glass dip pens. I’m wanting to start mixing my own inks using acrylic ink and need to find an appropriate non-fountain pen means for dispatching ink that also won’t get clogged up.

It was a week of good records in 1001 albums land. I’ve recently really enjoyed To Pimp a Butterfly (never listened to it before!), Red Headed Stranger, You want it Darker AND The last broadcast. Outside of the daily albums, I’ve been enjoying the latest release by Wayfarer.

Other notes:

• Went on our first family road trip
• I continue to wake up in the middle of the night delirious, semi-freaking out about where my child is
• Still running, but less frequently due to the heat.

The heatwave finally broke and things have cooled off here. Running has gotten much more pleasant, and I’ve been able to get out on the pavement and get more runs in.

I finished reading Akira—I’ve gone through all six volumes in the last 3 weeks. I still can’t get over the incredible detail in the background design, especially the panels with drawings of buildings.

Lately, I'm thinking about time management and prioritizing things. I was thinking a lot about this before we had a kid too. For the month of August, I'm trying something new: I pick one main project and one secondary project to advance for the month (and I'll try not to start new things or get distracted from these two.

I've been playing around with using Bear as my notes app instead of Obsidian, despite it's subscription fee (I'm happy to pay a small fee monthly for good software, right now). I like having an iOS/mac native app with out of the box syncing, widgets, and a simple, effective UI/UX. I think I'll give it another month or two trial. Having my notes in two separate places isn't the plan; I'm more using Bear for things like blog posts and project notes, whereas Obsidian is more of a comprehensive personal wiki + day-log.

Other notes:

• Sleep deprivation is the new norm
• I got a lesson in sharpening knives from my pal Frank
• Squirrels have chewed through our ceiling; they haunt me at night.

Another week of finding our footing as new parents. A few friends have asked what that’s like, but I can’t really describe it. There is a lot to do, and that is good in itself, as I don’t think my mind could process this big of a change if I had idle hands. Does that make sense? I slept three hours last night. There is love, joy, challenges, and sleep deprivation.

We did something called a Meal Train so that our friends and family could support us. So many people signed up to bring us meals. It really made us feel loved and supported.

With my limited time, I’ve taken refuge in paper journalling. At the end of the day, I write up what happened and try to squeeze in a drawing. Lately I’ve been drawn to traditional american style tattoo flash and have been practicing drawing them.

Projects

• Slowly chipping away at a video for my bike youtube channel.
• I bought Affinity’s universal licence and have been playing with doing some book design. It’s very satisfying. I’ll make a photo book for a recent trip to Ireland and have started working on one for our baby’s first year.

Media

• I joined a listening group for "1001 albums you have to hear before you die". Lots of fun, and having something I can consume in a controlled / intentful way during newborn days is nice. It pushes you to listen to an album a day.
• Been listening to non-fiction podcasts and audiobooks about space.
• I finally watched "The Rehearsal" with my partner and it’s great.
• I’m re-reading all of Akira, and am about half way done it. I’m constantly in awe of the attention to detail, pacing, and the story as a whole.
• Been playing a new game called "Peak" with a friend, which is a good low-stakes game you can chat and catch up over.