Week Notes, 2025-06-29

29 Jun, 2025

Weekly Features from June 23rd - June 29th:

🆒 The heat wave finally ended on Friday. I’ve been indoors too much this week, so I look forward to seasonal weather for the July 4th weekend as I can spend more time outdoors. While I'm glad I didn't overheat, being indoors for such an extended period made me feel isolated and brain-dead. It's clear that I need to spend more time out and about.

🔧 Most of this week's indoor activities involved online maintenance and lots of reading. I'm not sure if I need to revisit my Declutter project from earlier in the year, but there's a small voice in my head suggesting that I pick it up again. Maybe this decluttering should be viewed as a rolling task and not a discrete project?

🍱 I am also on the hunt for an effective digital asset management tool for organizing my photos. Except for my iPhone¹, I have them grouped by Camera > Year > Month > Subject. Years ago, back when I had a Windows PC, I used Lightroom to rate the photos inside the Subject folder, then post-process the ones which ranked at 4/5 or 5/5. Today, as much as there are parts of Lightroom I miss using, I don't wish to be locked into the Adobe ecosystem (though Adobe Bridge may be an exception to this wish). Some results of this hunt are in the Testing section below.

🩺 The results from a liver ultrasound came in on Monday 06-23, and the fatty liver deposits are no more! Back in late 2023, I was diagnosed with what used to be called Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease, so my prior doctor started me on Lipitor, followed by GLP-1 injections. The goal was to lose weight and to rewire my diet, and after nearly 18 months, I can say the goal has been reached. It's likely I will still have to take both medications going forward, but I'd rather do that than the alternative.

🧽 Both L. and I are feeling sluggish, like a wet sponge today. I hope next week's update will have more to say.

Other Things to Note from The Week That Was:

📺 Watching:

• This NORTHERN GANNET Colony is HUGE!, YouTube, Bob Duchesne
• America's Forgotten Natural Wonder: The Great Raft, YouTube, Miniminuteman;
• LPC LoonCam 2 ~ A Mink Tries To Climb On Loon Nest 😲 And A Beaver Eats The Lily Pad Flower 💮 6.26.25, YouTube, Lady Hawk
• “The Well,” Doctor Who²

🎧 Listening:

• Episode 748: June 15, 2025, Brainwashed Radio
• isolatedmix 132 - Matt Xavier: Psilocybin Therapy Protocol v1.22a, A Strangely Isolated Place
• This Site Unmasks Cops With Facial Recognition, 404 Media Podcast
• Don’t Let Them Take Our Western Public Lands, Desert Oracle Radio

📖 Reading:

• The women saving Japan's vanishing cuisine, BBC News
• The New Vera C. Rubin Observatory Is a Firehose of Astronomical Imagery & Data; kottke.org
• This Queer Online Zine Can Only Be Read Via an Ancient Internet Protocol, 404 Media³
• Substack Did Not See That Coming, AMC All The Time
• The more library books per capita, the fewer residents require nursing care: Japan study, The Mainichi
• ABC of AFX, 032c Magazine
• Every Bottle in the Four Roses Single Barrel Collection, Explained, VinePair
• Chloe Dzubilo And The Perilous Path Forward For Trans Life, Defector
• Surveillance is inequality's stabilizer (26 Jun 2025), Pluralistic: Daily Links from Cory Doctorow
• Sacramento State is dead set on joining the big time. But what will it take?, The Athletic
• The Film Photography Handbook (3rd Edition), Chris Marquardt & Monika Andrae, 2023, Rocky Nook

💫 Creating:

• The roll of Adox HR-50 b/w film finally arrived on Thursday 06-26. The packaging both without and within really got beat up in the shipping process, so I hope it will be OK to use.
• I somehow created two similar but different timelines for my second blog project, so I started to merge them together on one ever-growing spreadsheet. Don't know why I didn't do this long ago.

🗄Organizing:

• I tweaked the upvote icons on blog posts to have 🆙 icon for upvoting, and 🍶 icon for posts where you already voted.
• A bunch of domain names are up for renewal, so Namecheap has been sending me 30-day notices. Quite a few of them will fall by the wayside.
• Lots of laundry this week, including four new-to-me shorts from a thrift store. Last year's haul of shorts were in a size that's too large for me now, so they'll go back to the thrift store. The circle of (clothing) life continues.

🌾 Socializing:

• Visited Kaldi's twice this week (one in Ladue, the other in Kirkwood), and Rosemary Coffee once.
• Visited Schiller's on Monday 06-23 to pick up my b/w pictures, and a roll of Kodak Gold 200 film.
• Visited Side Project Cellar on Thursday 06-26.

🧪 Testing:

• Deleted digiKam from my Mac, as macOS does not play well with this particular open-source software.
• Downloaded and installed Eagle as a potential digital asset management program.
• Reading up on Adobe Bridge as another potential asset manager app. It's free, but it looks like I will need an Adobe account.

🗃️ Work:

• A couple days of tweaking Outlook filters appears to have been successful. The additional groups I was added to last week now have emails going into separate folders, which I can ignore except when I'm on-call.
• Lots of Haiku setup tickets.

🏥 Health:

• Results from the liver ultrasound, as mentioned earlier.
• Went swimming with L. on Sunday 06-22 and Tuesday 06-24, with Tuesday's swim taking place in water warmer than a bathtub.
• Had a short walk with L. on Thursday 06-26 in our apartment complex, then a longer walk on our usual route on Friday 06-27.
• Started up a solo workout on Friday 06-27. I want to get back into doing these at least 2 times a week.
• Air quality and excessive heat were no joke this week, but it feels like relief is now on hand.

#DoctorWho #Documentation #Life #WeeklyNotes