lee.ourand.me

Weeknotes 26

Mai mai

  • The city is apparently replacing the sewer lines on our street. It’s been a noisy week. Looks like work continues into, at least, next week as well.
  • I got landsharked for the first time in a long time. I joined a couple neighbors to help clean up our 90-year-old neighbor’s yard. While slingin’ grass seed, a suited gentleman approached, and started talking about how Jesus’s death day is his favorite holiday, and that 60% of the information on the internet is false, actually! Fascinating stuff. I stood there like an idiot and let him do his thing for entirely too long. Hardly the first time I’ve had such an interaction, but they happen infrequently enough that I can’t help but be dumbfounded that it’s actually happening.
  • Speaking of lawncare and sewer line construction: one of the construction workers—while on his lunch break—randomly walked over, picked up a rake, and started helping us clean up our neighbor’s yard. There’s some good eggs out there!
  • Finished binge watching Severance Season 2. Really excellent overall. It got a little Lost-like there in the middle, which worried me a bit about how it’d progress from there. But they did a solid job focusing things back up for the last few episodes. Hoping we don’t have to wait another 3 years for the next installment.
  • On the topic of potatoing, we also watched the classic: Being John Malkovich. What an incredibly funny premise for a movie. And John Malkovich might just be the best sport of all time for going along with a movie that just relentlessly mocks him. 10/10
  • Hosted my biggest pizza party to date. Cranked out 10 pizzas on my little 12” Ooni Koda. That’s probably about the limit for me. The last couple pizzas I made were entering overproof territory, and were a little cumbersome to work with.
  • Mandarin learning complaint: I actually learned this one a couple weeks ago, but what the hell: I’ll complain about it now. 賣(Mài) means “to sell”. 買(Mǎi) means “to buy”. So like… not only do these words sound almost exactly the same, their hanzi characters look very similar, and they mean the opposite things, and they’re used in the same contexts. Brutal!
  • Stumbled upon the MASH stack this week. Checks a lot of boxes for me. Will have to come up with a dumb project to build to gently kick the tires.