When I went to bed last night the whiteboard was blank. Awoke to find some sort of Kirby drawing frenzy took place. I’ll be curious to hear the story when the family wakes up.
After asking for more than a year, our teenage daughter pressed us again to let her have a hamster. We decided she was ready for the responsibility to take care of it on her own so we now have a new family member. Habitat improvements in progress. 🐹
View from our back patio tonight.
Being a space nerd, I’m enjoying watching the live feed of the docking procedure between Dragon and the ISS this morning. Very chill. 🚀
Another one bites the dust: deleted the Slack app since the micro.blog/indieblog slack was the last one I still used. Glad to see it go.
The Bundesliga matches are using piped in crowd noise and it is surprisingly a good thing. ⚽️
Hidey hole
The good news today: I got my first cup of coffee just fine.
The bad news: when I tried to make my mandatory second cup it was no bueno. Part of the maker internals broke off.
The saving grace: I found one in stock locally so our world order has been restored. ☕️
After the rains 📷 ☁️ ☀️ 🌉
66F is amazingly uncomfortable when the humidity is 96%.
In other news we’re trying to decide whether to get an area rug in our den or have the first floor of the house re-carpeted. Not keen on having carpet installers in the house nor dealing with all the disruption 🤷🏻♂️
Family movie night: Onward (2020) - IMDb🍿
Coffee + treat on the back patio + a cool morning + some chillpop music = refreshing start and a clearer mind
I needed a refreshing start because there were some very loud thunderstorms spread throughout the night. I started off pretty laggy.
Doing our part: yesterday my wife took our daughter shopping for some new clothes for summer. They were thrilled at Macy's because they each got a bundle of clothes all priced at $5. Quite a deal. They were so happy they went again today. 😃💵
Neapolitan of sports these days: Korean baseball ⚾️, US NASCAR 🚗, German soccer ⚽️.
I got my latest Field Notes purchases today. I really love the unique Deader Prints special edition notebooks. The Bellroy pencil case is sweet too. It was time to treat myself a little.
My second book is another old mystery, this time by Edmund Crispin, and is considered by some writers to be one of the top 5 mysteries of all time. I certainly enjoyed it! I had fun tracking a copy down. 😊 📖
For this week I think I’ll recommend some “out of the way” books. Most people know A.A. Milne as the author of Winnie the Pooh but he also wrote an excellent mystery, his one and only. I really enjoyed it.
This morning’s sky: big sun, ribbon of cloud, tiny balloon. 📷 ☀️☁️ 🎈
Scoob! 🎥🍿
I played Dragon Quest XI on the Switch a lot but put it aside in October to pursue some other games that caught my attention. I put off returning to it for fear of being rusty but that was baseless. It is a very easy game to pick up again even after months. 🕹
The food bank I volunteer at also takes donations of goods for resale/recycling. They closed for awhile and when they reopened last weekend got more donations in a couple hours than they normally get in a week and have closed again. So clearly people cleaned house to kill time.
I've modified Swift code for some personal projects but I've never written Swift from scratch so I'm studying via 100 days of SwiftUI. Everything seems straightforward to me so far except Closures. The syntax variations are making my brain hurt. Seems too "clever" to me.
Today's retail sales report was more dismal than expected with areas like clothing down more than 50%. Over the past couple of weeks I've checked prices on some items I'd like to buy and not a single one is offered at a discount. Seems stupid to me. No incentive to buy.💵
Counting on a vaccine to help re-open the economy is a false hope
I see a lot of people counting on a vaccine to dramatically reduce the threat of COVID-19 and helping re-open "life" within a year. I think that is a false hope. It is going to take several years to get an effective vaccine deployed worldwide. It could take even longer if the virus mutates regularly. Look how long we've spent working on flu vaccines and they still haven't been perfected yielding widely varying effectiveness from year to year. It is scientifically possible there will never be a highly effective vaccine.
I hang my hat more on developing effective treatment and better isolation for those with major underlying health conditions that place them at high risk. I don't think COVID-19 is ever going away and the idea we can defeat it before re-opening is fatally flawed. We're going to have to rely on being able to cope with it effectively instead.
I just watched the Unreal Engine 5 demo running on a PS5. Mighty impressive!
But I’m more driven by smooth controls and fast scene loading than realistic graphics. I think I have about 6 months to wait to get an idea how the PS5 actually performs.