So here’s my (by now sort of traditional) Thanksgiving offering:
Enjoy! And for those who may prefer a more traditional holiday, uh, tradition:
Happy Thanksgiving everybody! Don’t eat too much, that’s not the point.
- Category Archives day by day
This is the category closest to just being a plain diary. Places I go, things I do, people I see, what’s happening in my life.
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Some Downtime
I’m out on the town right now on a tour of coffee shops. I’m currently at Johnny’s Bagels, after a visit to Bitty & Beau’s, just tapping away on my laptop and enjoying the human parade in front of me — or “enjoying;” the people near me are squabbling about their food at the moment. Anne is still out of town through tomorrow.
I visited my Mom yesterday. It wasn’t a working visit, just a “visit” visit but I did help her with a few household tech things (printer, etc); I also gave her the digital picture frame I picked up for her a few weeks ago. (I put my photos on it, the ones of my dad I brought to the funeral, and also the ones Chris brought.) I think she was pretty happy with it.
On the way home last night I started thinking about historical markers, especially the ones relating to the Walking Purchase (my drive home essentially follows the route of the walk), so when I go home I went to the Pennsylvania Historical Marker Program, downloaded the Walking Purchase marker data, and added it to the geodatabase I started for the Walking Purchase. (Technically it’s a geopackage, and I currently keep it as part of my Native Paths project. Speaking of which, I am starting to see the end of what I’ve been doing with the native paths. Not sure what comes next.) I was reading “Promised Land” this morning, but that’s a little too depressing to read in big chunks.
I’m getting ready to head back home, and watching the windy street out the window. It looks a lot more like November now, cloudy and blustery, and cool if not absolutely freezing. After weeks of warm and sunny, which was nice at first but became more disquieting as the weeks passed (and the drought conditions, and the wildfires and burn bans worsened), it was a pleasure to have two days of “wintry mix” last week. Even walking in it was nice — of course, I was dressed for it.
Well it’s not raining right now, but I’m dressed for what we do have. Off I go.
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Getting Ready for Thanksgiving
This is what I wrote, twenty years ago.
Right now I’m home alone. Anne’s sister Lorraine came down from Tamaqua last night (they were expecting snow), and they took off early this morning, picking up Laura on their way to a “sisters weekend” in Massachussetts. I might visit my Mom tomorrow, if I hear back from her, but otherwise I’m on my own… I am currently wearing a nice heavy wool sweater and eating fish chowder, and I will probably go for a walk in the drizzling “wintry mix” soon, to drop off some overdue library books. Thank goodness the weather has finally become more seasonable, though it is less fun outside now, and we still have a long way to go before the drought conditions are over.
One other thing: I just signed up for Bluesky. I never subscribed to Twitter, and I’ve been on Mastodon for years but it’s kind of boring (though this might be down to how I use it); we will see about the new kid.
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Another One Bites The Dust
So we flew out to Altadena last week, and saw this happen…
Congratulations Ben and Jenny!
We flew out early last Wednesday morning, meeting Emmi, Kyle & Iris, and David & Noemi, at the airport for our 6:30 flight. We were all flying together, Allentown to LAX by way of Chicago, followed by an hour or so drive to our hotel in Pasadena. (Anne and I also gave one of Ben’s friends a ride from the airport to where he was staying, but we were still checked in at our own place by around 4:00.) Dinner was at a local salad restaurant, and that’s where Ben and Jenny caught up with us.
The next few days were sort of a routine: up early and breakfast at a local cafe, then fun time with Iris — we really got to know the local parks and playgrounds. Afternoons were spent doing touristy things: Thursday at the South Pasadena farmer’s market (followed by a dinner party at Ben and Jenny’s), Friday at the Santa Monica Pier, including a trip to the aquarium where I got to pet a shark. (Coming home Friday night was also our first real taste of LA traffic…)
Saturday started with our typical morning routine, then we were off to the wedding venue, a park near Ben and Jenny’s home in Altadena. We got there a bit early and helped with setup, met more of Jenny’s family etc, and finally the big moment came. The wedding ceremony was lovely, and very personal, a mix of Quaker and Iranian Jewish traditions, with the mountains of the Angeles National Forest as backdrop. Afterward we all went to dinner at one of their favorite local restaurants.
This was unfortunately where Iris reached her limit. She’d been a real trouper up to this time — on the flights, in the hotel and around town, but she’d finally had enough and started melting down; Emmi and Kyle took her home not long after we arrived. We stuck around quite a bit longer — the food and the company were great, and Jenny’s family were an incredibly fun bunch.
Sunday morning we were all scheduled to go to the nearby town of Ojai for some sightseeing and a visit to the hot springs, but Anne and I offered to stay back with Iris to give her some chill time (and her parents some grown-up fun time). She got in a three-hour-plus nap, and then we just had fun playing in the hotel lobby and watching cartoons (and eating cookies) in our room. The downtime did her, and us, a world of good.
Emmi and Kyle came back to the hotel around 7:00, with Ben and a bunch of fun stories about their time in Ojai. We had dinner in our room, then went down to the hotel bar where we met Jenny and some of their friends from the wedding. This was a little bittersweet, our last time all together — we were flying home in the early morning — so we laughed and talked, and stayed up maybe a little later than we should have…
Monday was a long day, and it was all business: driving to LAX through the leading edge of rush hour, flying to Newark, and finally taking a bus back to Allentown. We were home by 10:00 PM, and we were toast.
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Back To That Old New Thing
I’m slowly digging out, getting back into some of my usual shenanigans: I went for a towpath ride today (and one several days ago), and I’m about to go upstairs to play my cello — first time in a month that I even took it out of the case…
I also found another computer chew-toy, not so much a new thing as a return to something I was playing with a few years ago: I’m looking at pedestrian crash data using R. This time around, I have my data in a geopackage, and am using a different library to access it, which makes the whole process easier; I’m also limiting myself (mostly) to location data, and keeping the geographic scope limited to Bethlehem, though I am looking at a wider date range: 2013-2023. So far I’m having fun, but who knows when I’ll lose interest?
We have Iris tomorrow, and Wednesday we’re visiting my Mom — I stop in to help her out with stuff maybe once a week. We’re also doing some backyard cleanup here, in preparation for the kayak storage racks Anne is building. Life goes on.
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Rest In Peace, Dad
My father passed away last week. I really don’t have much to say about it here, but I think I have to put this much down to clear my mind — I have a more private journal where I wrote the details of his death, and my own thoughts and feelings, but I will not be sharing them, here or elsewhere.
It was a pretty rough week: he was in the CCU for a few days before he was gone, and we were with him through to the end. His wake was Thursday and his funeral was Friday, and the only bright spot was that he’s now buried in a beautiful place in the iconic, historic cemetery in our old home town, which he loved. (An old school friend was at the funeral, and after the burial he showed us his wife’s grave not far from my dad. My school friend Mike is also buried nearby.)
I suppose I’d been preparing myself for this for a while, but it still felt like “not yet, not yet,” and I’m sad but mostly OK, but every so often the grief just comes out of nowhere and hits me again full force.
Goodbye Dad, I didn’t want to say goodbye. I love you, I love you forever.
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I Had A Good Run But I Run Too Slow
I don’t really know yet if COVID actually, finally, caught up with me, but something laid me low for the past few days. What I have seems mostly like a sinus infection: stuffy nose, chest congestion, slight fever, and just a tired, washed-out feeling. It could be anything really, but Anne just got over COVID and it seems an implausible coincidence that I would come down with something else right now. It feels weird to get it now though, after seeming almost magically immune these past few years, walking fearless through the valley of the shadow…
I tested negative, for what that’s worth — I will take another test in a day or so before I go back out into the world. Meantime, I took my usual cocktail for sinus (Benadryl, Mucinex-D, and Tylenol), sacked out in bed for a day or so, and I’m already feeling better.
What have I been up to? Mostly reading: I picked up Starfish where I left off, which is saying something for my boredom levels — I put it down months ago because it was such an unpleasantly weird psychodrama. Now it doesn’t seem all that bad.
I also have been re-reading SSH: The Definitive Guide, and just got a book on PHP the other day. I’ve been searching for a new tech “sugar high” ever since I got that SSL certification automated. If anything ever makes me a Buddhist, it’ll be the cycle of buzz and crash that defines my relationship with technology.
UPDATE: Yeah it’s COVID. Just took another test.
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Fun With Bash
I got to play with shell scripts a few times over the past few weeks, thought I’d talk about them:
Wordle Helper
I have a script I use to help me make my guesses when I play Wordle; it basically generates a list of available words based on my results, analyzes these available words (by checking the overall letter frequency, then scoring the words based on which letters they contain), and returns the word list with their scores, sorted by word score. This is especially helpful as a process of elimination, and most especially in the first rounds — I can confirm or eliminate the most common letters and quickly narrow down my choices (well, usually).
I decided at a certain point that multi-letter combinations might be even more useful, so I wrote another script to score words based on the frequency of two-letter combinations. This worked well enough that I wrote a three-letter scoring script, and then realized that I should just write something generic that would score based on however many letters I would want in my combinations.
For some reason I brought my laptop on vacation, and when things got quiet I broke it out and wrote the multiple-letter scoring script — it works like a charm. What I found though, is that there are diminishing returns for the letter combinations: there is no real advantage to use more than two letters. Still, this is a script that I use every day.
Getting SSL
Every 90 days I have to get a new SSL certificate for this website, so I can use the more secure “https” rather than plain “http.” This was once a pretty easy process, until my (free) certificate-generating organization got taken over by someone else. I found a much more onerous (but still free) web-based method and have used it for years, but I knew there had to be a better way.
I eventually found something called
getssl, a bash script that automates the process used by that onerous web-based approach. Ufortunately it’s meant to be run on the computer where the website resides, rather than on my local machine which is what I preferred, so I never really messed with it… Then one day I just set it up and ran it, and it basically did 99% of the work, generating the certificates and storing them on my laptop. All I had to do myself was install them manually, which was pretty easy. Awesome! The whole process went from an hour to about a minute, and I’ve been usinggetsslfor almost a year now.But it still bothered me that I couldn’t get the whole process automated, and then last week I found an extra feature in
getsslthat would get me that final one percent; the only problem was that the extra feature would need to be modified to run on my machine rather than remotely. (This modification turned out to be fairly straightforward, which was a bit of a surprise actually.) I managed to make the code change just a few days ago — again, while out of town with my laptop — and my current certificate was installed, fully automatically, using the modified feature.Neither of these little projects were hard, but it’s so seldom that I do anything like this anymore that I was pretty proud of my accomplishments.
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Vacation Photos
Here are some photos from our Adirondack vacation. These photos are the ones not connected with any activity or event in particular, just shots I took while out and about.
Anne and Iris 
Lake Placid: Anne and Me 
Sailboat on Mirror Lake 
Ausable River Behind Our Cabin 
Ausable River 
Ausable River Rocks 
River Bank By Our Swimming Spot 
Duck Prints 
Adirondack Plants 
Adirondack Plants 
Flowers Near Our Cabin 
Ferns A lot of the nature shots were from walking around behind the cabin, near the Ausable River which was literally in our backyard. I also got a few good photos of some tree trunks behind the cabin:
A Birch Tree 
The Birch Tree 
Cedar Tree 
Cedar Tree We did a few bike rides and a hike, and I got some photos on those as well but I think I’ll give them their own separate posts. Enjoy!
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Greetings From The Adirondacks!
Our Cabin We’re away in the mountains near Upper Jay, NY — the AuSable river runs behind our place; Whiteface Mountain and Lake Placid are only a stone’s throw away. It’s Anne and me, Emmi & Kyle with Iris, Joe & Laura, Lorraine who arrived yesterday, and Ben & Jenny who arrived today. (The bulk of us have been here since Saturday.)
We’re just hanging out, going for hikes and bike rides and brunches and shopping sprees — today I bought a hiking book, then coming home, dipping our toes & butts in the river, and just sitting around reading or playing with Iris. It’s been unseasonably warm for this area, but not too crazy.
I’m feeling kind of lazy, and I’m pretty deep into “vacation mode” so I probably won’t post more until we get home, but we are having a great time.
