Week Notes, 2025-04-13

14 Apr, 2025

Weekly Features from April 7th - April 13th:

🌽🦎 The big highlight of the prior week was my trip to Iowa. I attended the actual 50th anniversary of my college fraternity, and had a great time meeting new people both young and old, and catching up with alumni from my time in school. Some discussions with current students and alums happened to converge, in spite of them never interacting except with me, and the subject of these discussions will become a post at a later time. The weather was typical early April for Iowa, meaning that it couldn't make up its mind, so I wasn't as waylaid by allergies as I had anticipated. Instead, my schedule and poor sleeping at the hotel have contributed to me feeling a bit ill now. In spite of feeling a little bit off now, the trip was well worth it.

🏎️ An unexpected highlight of the trip was my choice of rental cars. My current car is a 2015 Kia Forte with over 120,000 miles on it. Last October, I was involved in a hit-and-run that I feared would total the car, but as luck would have it, the car suffered zero mechanical damage. The repairs don't give anything away about the accident, but I'm not pressing my luck by taking it on fun roadtrips anymore. It's worth the expense to rent a car, and for this trip, I thought about renting a small SUV through Enterprise. When I went to pick up the rental, I was presented with the option to rent a Jeep Wrangler, a Toyota Corolla, or...an Alfa Romeo Guilia. Che fortuna!

I won't lie, I thoroughly enjoyed having this car as a rental. I also won't lie about how stable and comfortable the ride was at 90 MPH, and how if I were to own this car, I wouldn't actually have it due to impoundment and me serving jail time for reckless driving.

🗺️ On my way to Iowa, I drove up along the Mississippi River on Missouri Route 79 between the St. Charles County suburbs and Hannibal. There were plenty of opportunities on this road to exercise the rental, which were accompanied by visual exercises of rolling green farm fields partially covered by pretty purple flowers (that are actually obnoxious weeds). I also pulled off an odd day trip from Cedar Rapids to Des Moines and Grinnell, where I confirmed that L.'s notorious living quarters during her last two years of college had not actually been torn down, as predicted. My return trip began at an octagonal farm near West Branch, where I headed east towards US 61 near Muscatine. I stuck to US 61 for the entire journey back to St. Louis. Traffic and a visible police presence made sure I was a well-behaved driver on the way home.

☑️ The road trip and late arrival on Sunday is why the weeknotes post is a day later than usual.

Other Things to Note from The Week That Was:

📺 Watching:

• I took the week off from watching my usual YouTube channels.

🎧 Listening:

• Spring Forward With the Desert Birds, Desert Oracle Radio
• Episode 104: Something a little different, Ambient Atomic Orbitals
• RA 984: DJ Travella, Resident Advisor¹
• Disparagement Clause ft. Jason Koebler, Trashfuture Bonus Content Feed (Extremely Good)

📖 Reading:

• This Week (and Previous Weeks) - The One With The Hand Injury, Daryl Sun’s Journal
• Trump’s “Liberation Day” and the Ongoing Stock Market Crash: The Key Lessons to Take into the Second Week of the Market Bloodbath, Notes On The Crises
• Simulacra for Bootlickers, McMansion Hell
• Hundreds of backlogged RSS feeds due to the vacation.
• Tens of personal and work emails backlogged due to the vacation.

💫 Creating:

• I took some notes for a potential Apple post.
• I also created a PLACEHOLDER page for situations like this one, where a post is "owed" but the deadline for it has passed. If you see the PLACEHOLDER page, you will know I am either falling behind schedule or writing the post.

🗄Organizing:

• I was proud of my packing efforts during this vacation, as I finally figured out ways to maximize space in my Patagonia travel bag. Packing cubes are your friend for both clean and dirty clothes!
• OTOH, I am not proud of wasting an hour last Monday trying to change a band on a watch, only to find that the band's eyelet holes were designed for a person with Hulk-sized wrists. It was my first and last attempt at wearing that watch band, and I'd like to get that hour back somehow.
• One advantage of the Alfa's rear-wheel drive is the return of the transmission hump, as there are now specific dimensions for the rear seat footwells. Since I wasn't bringing any rear passengers with me, I used the footwells to prop up the wine bottles I bought, as they would have been strewn around the trunk otherwise.

🌾 Socializing:

• The entire weekend was about socializing! Lots of good conversations with current students, all of whom were born after 9-11-2001 (which was just a couple days before I turned 30). 👴🏻
• There were also great conversations with three alumns from my college era, one of whom moved her own road trip up a day so she could meet us in Mount Vernon on Saturday 04-12.

🧪 Testing:

• Except for "testing" out the Alfa's performance, the only major testing ended last week when I gave up on the Orion browser for the Mac. A recent update horked its integration with the Bitwarden extensions, causing them to perform worse with each use. Integration is fine on the iPhone, so Orion is still in use there.

🗃️ Work:

• I started my first-every 70/20/10 plan last week. My goal will be to submit it by the end of this week. None of my other jobs had used this kind of plan, so it's new to me. So far, it's not too complicated, but it will require some thinking time to complete.

🏥 Health:

• Allergy and oversocializing caught up with me today. I'll be taking it easy until at least Thursday 04-17.
• My initial doctor visit on Wed 04-09 went by really well. I think this doctor is a keeper.

#Documentation #WeeklyNotes