Summer Vacation Begins (Weeknotes
Here’s what happened during the week of June 24–30, 2024.
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🇲🇽 Lev got me thinking again about my on-again-off-again relationship with foreign languages. I have at one point or another studied Spanish, Chinese, French, and Italian. And mastered exactly none of them. Lately I’ve been feeling like I should commit to one and focus, but not sure which one. Do I choose the one I enjoy the most (Italian)? Or the one I’ve invested the most time in so far (Chinese)? Or the one I think will be most useful in the future (Spanish)? I just don’t know.
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🌵 My wife and I have been spending a lot of time discussing where and when our next chapter will take place. Before retirement? After retirement? The prevailing sense is our next stop will be in Arizona, and probably before we’re ready to retire, but the details are still coming together. Longer term, Mexico, France, Nevada, and Ohio are all in the mix too.
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🚶♂️ One of the factors we look at when evaluating a location is walkability. Walk Score is a nice tool that lets you enter an address and get scores for walking, biking, and access to transit.
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⭕️ I came across another creative challenge, the Repeating Patterns Challenge. I started a new Circles album to go alongside my blue, green, and yellow albums. It’s not so much about keeping up with the folks on the socials as of having what I hope will be a little creative reminder to be inspired and capture something interesting in what I might otherwise have overlooked. I’ll let you know whether it works.
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🐠 My work has been very busy and mentally exhausting lately. I’m trying to keep good humor about it but it seems like that’s getting harder and harder. And the thing is that when I really stop to think about it I like what I do. There’s just so much to do lately that it’s a tad overwhelming. I try to remember Dory… Just keep swimming, just keep swimming.
Starting in Seattle
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✈️ The fam are all together again for summer vacation. This time it’ll be a week in the Pacific Northwest to do a little sightseeing and a little hiking. We arrived in Seattle to an airport that is seriously showing its age, clearly unable to keep up with the demands of travel in 2024. The terminals were as densely packed with people as any airport I’ve been to, and there were long waits for restrooms that are far too small. Long wait at baggage claim too, but I suppose you get that at a lot of airports.
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🍜 We’ve enjoyed some good food since we’ve been here. Chinese noodles, clam chowder, poké bowls, and some really rockin’ musubi.
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⛵️ We’re starting the trip with a couple days in the city. We visited Pike Place Market, the Space Needle, the Chihuly museum, the infamous Gum Wall, and took a sunset sail.
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🏔️ Stay tuned. Next week we plan to visit Mount Rainier and Olympic National Park.
Watching
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Leave the World Behind is a weird dystopian film set in the present. It raises some interesting questions and is shot beautifully, but the narrative falls short.
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Finished watching season 3 of Acapulco. How long will I have to wait for season 4?!
Reading
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This old Wired article, “How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses” by Joshua Davis, is getting attention lately because Eugenio Derbez has gotten our attention and he recently did a film based on the article.
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In “Did leaded gasoline cause a huge spike in crime?” Brian Klaas examines the Lead-Crime hypothesis, an interesting study in correlation versus causation.
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Kevin McDonald’s “Leaving Texas for Greener Pastures” has me seriously considering my options.
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In “How TED talks became the Picotop of millennial intellectualism”, Joan Westenberg reminds us that the world’s problems can’t be solved with fortune cookie wisdom.
Have a great week!