Gorgeous day for a smoking session on the Big Green Egg! First smoke at the new house! 🔥
I just preordered Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. I was going to buy it anyway so the additional benefits he added were a bonus! 📚
Took my new Ratio Eight Coffee Maker and Baratza Virtuoso grinder for a first run this morning, paired with Sump Coffee beans. It’s like an automatic Chemex, delicious brew! ☕️ Awesome surprise from my amazing and thoughtful wife. 🥰
I have no idea what I’m doing with this 3D Printer! But it’s still fun!
Today is moving day! 📦🚛🏠🥳
Internet service up and running at the new house! 🥳
Moving Day
Today the movers will be showing up to move all the big things to our new house! It’s been nearly 9 years since we last moved. It is the first time that our kids are part of the moving process, making it a completely new experience for them.
We have really loved this house and the neighborhood. It’s been a great 9 years, without any reservations.
Tammy and I have watched a couple of episodes of Tidying Up on Netflix. Marie Kondo takes a moment in the beginning of each episode to introduce herself to the house. It’s humorous to see the homeowners in each episode react to her meditatively sitting on the floor doing this. It seems both odd and entirely fitting to communicate with the house.
In my own way, I would like to send a message to our home for the last nine years on Morgan Ave. “Thank you. You have been a great place for our family to grow, have fun, and be happy together.”
UGears Locomotive
Over the holidays I assembled the UGears Steam Locomotive moving model. It was my second UGears project. I assembled the Chronograph a couple years ago. UGears models are very intricate and the working gears, mostly driven my rubber bands, add a fun aspect to them.
The Chronograph was 107 parts and the Locomotive is four times more at 443. I found the Chronograph directions confusing numerous times. The Locomotive was much more complex, but UGears has vastly improved their manuals.
I made one mistake with the side panels, putting them on the wrong side and reversing the text. I realized too late and didn’t want to try and disassemble it to fix it.
The Locomotive has an impressive set of gears. I haven’t had great luck getting the rubber bad “engine” to smoothly move the gears. You use a lot of candle wax as lubricant for the wooden gears, but mine catches too much to work reliably.
The coal car has doors that rise up when you move the lever on the side.
The doors that open and even a retractable ladder are nice details.
Here is the Locomotive sitting next to the Chronograph.
Family friends joined us and we beat the Diagonal Alley room at Trapped North Loop. The room was exceptionally well done, highly recommended! 🧩
My daughter made me the most amazing birthday card! She made a broken laptop out of cardboard and I had to fix it by connecting cables and putting In the “backup email” to unlock her message! It was a puzzle on its own! So fabulous! 🧩🥳
We went back to Missing Pieces on Thursday and successfully completed the Final Frontier room after failing in November! 🧩
Our family plays Clue every year on New Year’s Eve while we await the new year, and this year I actually won! 🧐😊
Went to Bohemian Rhapsody tonight and thought it was great! 🎬 Turns our New Year’s Eve is a busy night at theaters!
Played the last of our new Christmas board games, Azul. Fun hidden strategies. Didn’t make sense at first a lot of fun after we figured it out.
Watched Isle of Dogs tonight. Very fun, original movie. 🎬
I’ve been throwing a bunch of content at Blot and have been very impressed. Speed is okay even with 10,000 posts. There is a lot more capability in Blot than I thought! 🧐
Maybe Blot?
There is a bit of a trend on micro.blog to use Blot for longer form blog hosting. I’ve not dug in too deeply largely because it seemed to put Dropbox in the middle of everything, and my initial impression was that it would be a bit too simplistic. Blot has added git support as an option outside of Dropbox, and I really like how they did it. Your Blot site is a Git repo by itself, so there is no dependency on GitHub. If you add an iOS app like Working Copy to the mix you can have robust editing on mobile as well. My other concern about being overly simple is just good user experience. There is a lot of power where you need it, but you don’t have to dig through it all to get the basics.
I’m going to give this a go as well. For some of my sites, particularly my photography one, I think this might be a very good fit.
