Week In Review 2026-04-25

27 Apr, 2026

This weekly update covers Sunday 04-19-26 through Saturday 04-25-26¹.

LIFE

• 🈁: Work and home life are starting to decouple. I feel like I am coming out of a fog, not due to illness but because of how overwhelmed I was with the Beaker project, but now it feels like the yoke is being lifted from my shoulders.
• 📕: Beaker has decreased its stranglehold on my work life, as I have the time to answer non-Beaker questions and follow up with my other tasks at work. It's somewhat like the relief one gets when taking medicine to reduce sinus inflammation: the pain is still there, but noticeably lessened. There were over 3000 tickets filed since Go-Live on Saturday 04-11, which is an immense number that itself will require longer and deeper investigations by multiple departments. But that's a story for another day.
• 📜: With a pending vacation, I would have preferred not to spend over $1100 on car repairs on Thursday 04-23, but all four brake rotors and pads needed to be replaced, and stopping a car like Fred Flinstone is not a viable option. My car is fully in its era where repairs are expensive, but still cheaper than buying something new (especially when the average price of a new vehicle in 2026 is just under $50K).
• ❤️‍🩹: EAP will resume on Tuesday 04-28. I will be adjusting my 7-minute workouts for the following week so that I can have more variety with the exercises. Neighborhood walks with L. are still in effect, though we are both suffering from the excessive pine tree pollen.

EXPLORE

• 🎨: Caira is scheduled to arrive on Monday 04-27. Beyond that, I had little to no time for creative ventures this week.
• 🔬: Updated to Developer Beta 3 of the iOS/macOS Tahoe 26.5 cycle. Deleted Astropad Workbench and Pellica from iOS. Installed the Caira iOS app in preparation for the camera's arrival, and also ordered a Micro Four Thirds-to-Sony E-Mount adapter to test out the usefulness of the MFT lens on my Sony a7ii.
• 🪟: Worked lunch at Living Room Coffee on Tuesday 04-21 and Comet Coffee on Wednesday 04-22. Attended Zwanze Day 2026 festivities at Side Project Cellar on Saturday 04-25. Spent Sunday 04-26 with the usual routine of church, coffee, and groceries, with a longer stay at the coffeeshop to talk with three of the younger parishioners who seem to think L. & I are okay for older folks.

MEDIA

• 📰: LandLines. #90s Tik Tok. Medievalcore. Strategists are proclaiming that 2026 is the year of nostalgia., Design Observer (Ugh, reviving the 90s and the hipster era, together? It sounds awful at first, but it's really part of a much needed "post-digital" movement that I support.). Recalibrating my reading for thinking, Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden (Similar to Tracy, I am sick of reading about AI, or thoughts about AI, or reactions about AI. Maybe I should take inspiration from her and recalibrate my own readings.).
• 🎬: Overnight at Japan's Loneliest Village that Locals Warned Me About at Mt. Fuji, travelgeek (A ryokan in the Japanese "suicide forest" that also was near the headquarters of Aum Shinrikyo? And going on a night walk through said forest? Yeah, I have some concerns.). Ep. 323: Greyfade Label Edit, Flow State (The label doesn't necessarily showcase "creepy" music, but the selection of ambient, experimental, and contemporary classical pieces would have accompanied the travelgeek video really well.). 1997 Ford Ka: Regular Car Reviews, RCR (I still wish this car would have been sold in the US; I would have been in a line to buy it back then.)

WORK

• 🏥: Besides Beaker, I was able to set up changes for the Epic mobile apps rollout at the next feature release in August; I'm happy with this compromise to notify Rover users to update but not force an update upon them.

NEXT UP

• 🔮: L. & I really have to jump on top of our New Mexico trip planning--it's only two weeks away! I still have an itinerary from the abandoned November 2025 New Mexico trip, so I'll throw this into the mix to help us schedule.

PICTURE

• 📸: It’s late January 2005. L. & I were past our second year as a dating couple. She had recently moved to St. Louis for a job that hired her as soon as she had finished grad school. I was living by myself in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago, enjoying the sights and sounds of the city, but L.’s absence soon meant I would have to make some serious decisions about the future. None of those thoughts were in my mind at the time of this photo, which was taken as a massive snowstorm was blanketing the city. My camera was the first “real” digital camera I owned, a Canon PowerShot A85 that punched well above its weight and size. Allegedly, it’s not great form to use your on-camera flash at night, but I really like the effects of the light reflecting off of the falling snow. The location here is Giddings Plaza, formerly where Giddings Street intersected Lincoln Avenue.

  

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