Weeknote #92 (20260628-20260704)

meta

Thursday we got up kinda early and took Mx19 up to the airport so they could fly back to school in New York. They’re still on crutches, and their suitcase weighed in at 47 pounds, and to say TheWife and I were a little apprehensive about them doing this by themselves would be a colossal understatement — but in the end, they got back to their dorm without incident (or, at least, without any incidents they wanted to share with us…) So now we’re back to just me, TheWife, Ms23, and of course, Sammy. So it goes.

did

  • Sunday, Mx19 wanted to go over to the coast and have a corn dog before they went back East, so we all schlepped over to Pronto Pup in Rockway. A good time (and corndog) was had by all
  • In other eating related events: Friday was a cheesesteak popup at Bryn Mawr; due to scheduling of other things, I had to go by myself, but I happily fell on that sword Amaroso roll
  • This week at work, I’m running the release process for our software again, and as usual, it’s frustrating and far more time-consuming than I want it to be. That on top of a series of production problems — I’m also the on-call engineering manager this week — kept me pretty busy
  • Mostly an unremarkable week otherwise, other than the fireworks, which in our neighborhood first started up Wednesday and then (hopefully!) peaked Saturday with the 4th. We may have finally figured out a way to get Sammy dosed up enough — a combo of a CBD oil plus some “special” CDB dog treats — that she mainly just lays in a heap and quivers, rather than running all over the house trying to find a place to hide
  • Also got paged out for a production issue around 9pm Saturday, which kept me up until around 4am — on the plus side, that means the round of mortars at 0230 didn’t wake me up and make me mad, they just made me mad…

read

  • “The attack on competence”

    If we’ve ever worked together, or collaborated on, well, anything, you will have learned that “competent” is one of the highest compliments I feel I can give somebody’s work, so this post really clicked for me.

    This is a formulation of competence that is fairly stringent: it requires you, when developing competence in a field, to actually reshape your desires rather than simply learning skills. You have to reorient what you want and what you’ll work at to focus on what the field thinks is good, to develop a level of taste and judgement appropriate to the field, and to defend that against threats when the need arises.

cooked

  • Monday: grilled burgers and corn off the cob
  • Tuesday: grilled pork shoulder steaks and asparagus
  • Wednesday: grilled chicken Caesar salad