Weeknote for 20240915-20240921

meta

It was an odd and not terribly productive week — the annual lab retreat was Tuesday-Thursday, at a small private lodge about 1.5 hours north and slightly east of Seattle. Having only Monday and Friday as “real” work days, and spending about 12-ish hours on the road (split over two days), just didn’t put me in the right spot to get a lot of things done. To be clear, it’s not like the week was a waste: the retreat was nice, it was good to get some social bonding in with all my new coworkers, and I got to see some areas of Washington that were new to me.

did

  • Spent far too long fixing (hopefully for the last time) the front-matter date parsing in this blog…
  • Spent far too long stressing about scaling up a Caesar salad recipe to feed 18 people …but as a side salad
  • Made that Caesar salad — it was okay, maybe a bit too much garlic. Notes for next time: less lettuce than you’re worried you’ll need, probably
  • Due to the retreat, this was a pretty light week in terms of demonstrable “work” — trying to feel okay with that

read

watched

  • back to binging NCIS with TheWife the evenings when we were both home — which were not that many this week! Notably, there was a really good Breakfast Club pastische episode, S14E2

played

  • am about 12 hours into Octopath Traveler; have unlocked all eight characters but haven’t taken any of them to their second chapter

cooked

  • steaks and asparagus, grilled over mesquite (Monday)
  • grilled sausages for a quick dinner after getting back home (Thursday)

photo

retreat sky

looking forward to

A week without any travel, and to putting my head down and cranking through some work