Week In Review 2026-05-23
This weekly update covers Monday 05-18-26 through Friday 05-22-26 (an icon Glossary, if needed).
LIFE
- 🈁 Readjusting to a “normal” life after a vacation is never easy. All the familiar things I used to do feel alien to me now. Getting back to a routine has been a struggle.
- 📕 I owe folks a quick recap about the vacation, which was quite enjoyable up until a normal flight back home became abnormal, causing the vacation to be extended by nearly 24 hours.
- 📜 Work has been quite challenging for both myself and L., particularly as neither of us had a full recovery day before Monday 05-18. The upcoming 3-day weekend will be sorely needed for recuperation.
- ❤️🩹 Teeth are clean, my referral to vascular specialist was rejected due to insurance coverage, and I have to make time for a blood draw next week.
EXPLORE
- 🎨 I made two lens-related purchases this week: one was for a Pentax K-mount to Micro 4/3 adapter to repurpose my old Pentax 50mm f/1.7 lens for Caira; the other was a Siuri Aurora 85mm f/1.4 for my Sony, so I finally have a fast autofocus lens for this camera.
- 🔬 No real testing to speak of this week, minus a few test shots with the new 85mm lens.
- 🪟 Kept my outside excursions low this week as time and energy weren't forthcoming. I hope this holiday weekend will have more outside time allocated.
MEDIA
- 📰 The Union Forever — How Thornbridge Saved a Vital Piece of Brewing History, Pellicle Magazine (The Burton Union system is an older style of beer fermentation, using wooden barrels for storage and aging. It's labor-intensive, and incapable of scaling too high, but it is easier to control fermentation. Newer styles of fermentation have made Burton Union largely obsolete, but Thornbridge Brewing in the UK has saved an older Burton Union system for their own use. For the record, the XXX or XXXX on some older beer labels comes from the metal axles holding up the wooden barrels.);
- 📰 How To Be Inspired Without Copying, Westenberg. (Joan Westenberg flips the old "good artists copy, great artists steal" aphorism into a paean for learning technique by mimicry. Copying how an artist produced output may sometimes provide the same results, but the goal is to learn how this work came to be, rather that duplicating it. Only by understanding the process can an artist come up with their own work. For me, it feels like another idiom that is often said about photography: “You have to learn the rules before you break them.”);
- 📰 The Uncanny Allure of Japanese Jazz (J-Jazz), Jazz & Coffee (Related to Joan's article is this brief, yet wordy, encapsulation of the history of Japanese jazz, which did start out as a direct copy of whatever was going on in the US, but quickly evolved into its own distinct sound.)
- 🎬 Optic Echo Presents 5/19/26, Optic Echo Presents (A return of one of my favorite ongoing series of ambient music.)
- 🎬 Episode 641 – Tennesseein’ is Tennedrinkin’, ABV Chicago Craft Beer Podcast (Ryan and Craig review a smattering of beers that Craig picked up when he and his wife vacationed in eastern Tennessee, featuring not just discussions of beer, but of glass blowing, Dollywood, the Simpsons references to the Sunsphere in Knoxville, and plenty of information about chestnut trees.)
- 🎬 Batch 314: Keeping Together Battles The Barrel-Aged Robots, Malt Couture (Appropriately enough, the most recent Malt Couture episode features Keeping Together, a brewery I visited twice in Santa Fe during my New Mexico trip. I've got a lot more to say about this wonderful brewery and its tasting room in my upcoming vacation recap.)
WORK
- 🏥 When I left for vacation, our team’s ticket queue was over 200. When I returned, it was around 165, and it’s now in the low 150’s. Sisyphus, move over, here comes something
meatiermore never-ending!
OTHER
- 🗣️ Here’s my mental note to myself to work on that Pitchfork article I’ve been meaning to write.
NEXT
- 🔮 A three-day weekend over Memorial Day will finally give L. & I a chance to fully recover from our trip’s unplanned bonus day. I owe a vacation recap, so I hope to get one published around Memorial Day.
PICTURE
- 📸 A test photo with the Siuri 85mm lens, wide open at f/1.4. I think I’m going to enjoy using this lens.
