March 15 to 21, 2026

• Bright, warm spring sun peering through despite a last gasp of winter.

• This week, energy feels a little better and focus a bit stronger than last week. Perhaps the turn in the weather; perhaps Max's sleep is a little better. I'll take it.

• I'm transforming the Lark workshop outputs from last week into the components of the final report for this project. So far, I've got a solid outline but not much more. The goal is to get to a draft by EOW next week.

  • Last week's synthesis didn't unfold the way I expected. I dumped all the tagged verbatims into a Miro board, and then... realized that a whole-corpus synthesis wasn't necessary or right. Instead, parsing through the individual activities to bubble patterns up and then tease insights out that way. Sometimes mashing everything together gets you new stuff. Sometimes it just muddies the waters.

• Consolidated domains over from A Small Orange to Namecheap, so that I can kill my plan there because ASO got acquired and now is just a hot mess in terms of their IA and support. The transfer for 1/3 domains was instant; for the other two it took the full 5 days that policy seems to allow. Then, swapped DNS to point to Netlify projects for 1 of the 3 domains (the other two will point to deployments there soon). With DNS swapped, got SSL certs set up, annnnnnd this site you're looking at is deployed.

  • The basic flow is this:
    • I built the site using handwritten HTML and CSS sitting on top of Eleventy
    • I write stuff using Markdown, with YAML front matter
    • Build the Eleventy site from the command line using NPM
    • Push to Github
    • Auto-deploy to Netlify
  • In the past I've never quite nailed the "deploy through Github" pathway because I would always forget the commands in the terminal to make it happen because I published so rarely. The solve this time is getting auto-deploys set up in Netlify, and then using Github Desktop so that I can just push the buttons and have it publish. I'm a CLI baby.
    • I've pondered whether this is the right project to try something like Claude Code and it probably is but also digging into the guts of Eleventy and publishing via Github and so on is really my only rare opportunity to put my hands into something mildly technical, and there's value in doing that. It's like making your own furniture when there's an IKEA down the road. It's the ~journey~ that matters!

• A decade after moving in together, K and I are still figuring out our household money systems. We've had more of a principles-driven approach (take on limited debt; live within our means; stay cashflow positive) than a systems-driven one. It's served us weirdly well, but generally rising expenses (kids, inflation) and the desire to Do Things and Make Things Happen in a very expensive place is showing the gaps. So I'm building out a framework for financial retros and budgeting and (somewhat painfully) going back through a year of transactions across our accounts to try and get a sense of where our money is going. It's not glamorous but it's interesting to start surfacing patterns.

• On Friday afternoon, I got together with a couple pals to continue our campaign of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game. I think we immediately took the current adventure off the rails and since then it's been pure chaos (but not Chaos... yet!).

• For St. Patrick's Day, I beer-braised cabbage, leeks, bacon, and apple, and served it over mashed potatoes. It was good, although texturally a bit too one-note. Later in the week I made the Golden Diner pancakes, which I guess were a kind of social media thing a year ago? They didn't turn out perfectly, but still were fine — but I think I like my regular old pancakes just as well and they're waaaay easier to make.

• Listening: Not listening to much this week. On St. Patrick's Day, we played what I guess was a playlist of Irish popular music which was kind of fun — there's lots of tunes that I don't think I realized were by Irish musicians.

  • It's funny — we've not really been a St. Patrick's Day household in the past but our kids have more Irish heritage than anything else (the many small bits and pieces add up?) and one of them shares the Patrick/Patricia naming tradition with a bunch of ancestors, so this year we decided to lean in.

• Watching: I've binged Unfamiliar, which is a tense contemporary German spy thriller. Here's the basic premise: two retired spies have their covers blown as a decades-ago adversary resurfaces to clean up an old mess.

  • I've really enjoyed it. It's not as funny as Slow Horses but it scratches a similar itch. What I've enjoyed is the layers of mystery woven throughout which get progressively resolved, and the literal and figurative Chekov guns peppered throughout. In both cases the show did a good job of dangling them but not telegraphing too directly how or where or when they'd resurface.
  • Netflix defaulted to playing the show dubbed in English. I switched over to English subs on the original German — I figured that I should be enjoying the original performers in all their glory. A funny downside: I have a bad habit of watching things while I do other things and that pattern DOES NOT WORK when you're supposed to read the subtitles.