Week Notes, 2025-05-04
Weekly Features from April 28th - May 4th:
🤶🏻 Next weekend will be May 11th, or Mother's Day in the United States. It will be my first Mother's Day after my mother passed away last October. Right now, I feel sad about being sad, which is more about anticipating the day instead of being honest about my feelings. My emotions will undoubtedly fluctuate from now until next Sunday. Part of me wants to write about these feelings, while another part of me dreads rehashing those memories and stories all over again. I may poke around in a rough draft, then determine later on if it should be binned or cleaned up.
📋 The wet weather has kept me and L. homebound for most of the past week. On the other hand, we've had a fair amount of cleaning projects to tackle, and had we been distracted by nicer weather, we wouldn't have been able to accomplish them. In light of the above entry, you could say that the projects are a way to keep my mind from dwelling too much on the upcoming Mother's Day. Yes, you would be partially correct, but these projects needed to happen regardless of my emotional state.
📷 The last film camera I owned and used, prior to the Kodak Brownie experiment this year, was a Canon SureShot Z115 I won in a work contest around 1994-96. The camera worked hard and held up well until suffering a mortal wound on a 2001 family trip to Ireland. It managed to limp along the rest of the trip, giving its life to document adventures in the westernmost part of Europe. Sometime in May, I'll return to the world of 35mm film, as I have a brief list of potential candidate cameras to buy. In order, I'm looking at a Canon Canonet QL17 GIII, a Minolta Hi-Matic 7sII, or a Konica Auto S3. If you ask me right now, my thoughts are between the Canon and Minolta, as the Canon would effectively be a full-circle return to the Z115 era, while the Minolta would be the ancestor of my "big-boy" Sony a7II. The Konica is an intriguing dark horse, though.
🖼️ Related somewhat to the above post, I have started looking through my photo collection and realized, hey, sometimes I knew what I was doing! There are a bunch of photos I never shared on Flickr or anywhere else that actually look great, and since I have committed to using Glass, I will post them there. My first Series, Nikon D50, 2008-09, has 11 photos so far, with more to come.
🪛 My Doctor Who backlog is currently up to four episodes. Argh!
Other Things to Note from The Week That Was:
📺 Watching:
- WORKPEDIA JAPAN!: Uplifting Fitness in Fukuoka - Where We Call Home, YouTube, NHK World-Japan
- Bird-Safe Glass Testing Tunnel Process, YouTube, Cornell Lab of Ornithology
- live from the Acela - nyc show tonight, YouTube, We’ll There’s Your Problem Podcast
- Japan’s Most Beautiful Village: A Hidden Gem Travel to Shinjō, Okayama, YouTube, Maibaru Travel
🎧 Listening:
- With Scentfluencer Alice du Parcq, Making Scents Make Sense
- Meta’s AI Chat Bots Are a Disaster, 404 Media
- Episode 275 (Guest mix by Elori Saxi), Flow State
- A Very Special Live Episode of Waste or Taste!, Waste Or Taste
📖 Reading:
- A Canadian Elections Crash Course: election process, security, conspiracies, & more, Patreon, Jodi Ettenberg
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail turns 50, Ars Technica
- The Endgame of Edgelord Eschatology, Truthdig
- I’m an Apple fan in 2025. What does that even mean?, Macworld
- RIP Joshua Clover, Music Press Pantheon (Note: you must read the epic Twitter thread copied into this post. Trust me on this one.)
- Lots of Mastodon posts and linked articles relating to the ongoing Fosstodon shitshow.
💫 Creating:
- Another recycled post, this one in draft form from 2014: From the Unarchive: "...like a slow divorce" (aka The Demise of the CBC Radio 3 R3-30 Podcast)
- Added more to the second blog lore.
- Created a few placeholder outlines for future blog post topics.
🗄Organizing:
- I made a big payment of my credit card bills, which was an actual joy to accomplish.
- I sorted through some shorts and slacks that don't fit anymore due to weight loss, and ordered replacements that fit better. It's a bit boring to stick with one brand (in this case, LL Bean), but on the other hand, I know what I'm getting into size-wise.
- My Anybox bookmarks were out of control, as often happens when I save without a real plan. I've culled a few of them and determined better tags and folders for grouping.
- Interested in buying a couple cheap-ish watches? I finally posted the Timex Hodinkee and the AVI-8 Spitfire on eBay. I don't feel the need right now to replace either of them, as I'll just stick with the three-watch collection of a Seiko, a Vostok Amphibia, and a Swatch automatic.
🌾 Socializing:
- Thursday 05-01 bottle share at Side Project Cellar.
The usual round of church services, Ethiopian coffee, and grocery shopping at Aldi on Sunday 05-04.Nope, I slept in. I was really tired, and ended up rising around 9:45 AM.- Calling my father on Sunday 05-04 to wish him a happy birthday, as he's now full of the "Spirit of 76!"
- Preparing for an evening shopping run at Costco on Monday 05-05. More on that next week.
🧪 Testing:
- Musebox, a macOS photo library app, has entered the testing phase, and it's already helping me with sorting through my photo collection for Glass.
🗃️ Work:
- Lots of chatting and emails about solving problems without actually being able to solve them, due to issues outside of my control. It's frustrating!
🏥 Health:
- Three afternoon walks with L. this week.
- The aforementioned sleeping-in on Sunday 05-04, which was really necessary.
- Shoulder rehab on Wednesday 04-30, where progress has been made over last week's range of motion and reduction of pain.
- I got two different bills for a dental cleaning in late April. I figured I’d give the insurance a few days to process their statement before I made a decision...next week.