Wow! Time flies. Our trip on the East Coast lasted two weeks. We went to connect with my wife’s family, who lives out there. We spent a few days on Prince Edward Island (PEI), a week in New Brunswick, and then finished up with a few more days on PEI. Travelling with a toddler in diapers and bottles is a lot. Many of the conversations with my wife ended, “This will all be so much easier once our youngest is five.”
Despite the difficulty, it was an amazing trip. Years ago, an Esperanto friend told me that the point of vacationing with your kids is to watch them grow. During the school year, everyone is busy either in school or working. You don’t get a lot of un-interrupted time with your kids. The East Coast trip was an amazing opportunity to really spend time with each other. I could see the kids grow day-by-day.
I bought the Kobo so that I could read War and Peace on the road. It didn’t disappoint. I’m really glad that I brought it. As I get used to it, I keep finding new and interesting features. Right now, I’m loving the ability to look up words by touch. Usually, I never look up words1. The time-cost of getting a dictionary and finding the word is just too high. The Kobo has got me looking up lots of words that I vaguely know, but don’t have an exact sense of. For example, seemliness. Also, words that I have no idea of about: e.g., scrofulous.
When I got back from the trip, a library hold on The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano showed up. Oh my goodness! This book is incredible. It’s flash literary non-fiction. Very brief and poetic stories, often about real people. All suffused with the magic realism of Latin America. An instant favourite.
I wasn’t able to post a week note on the Friday August 8th because the computer in my office turned off while we were travelling. I do all the editing of my webpage on that computer. A colleague tried to turn it on for me, but the lacked the magic touch.
This suggests that my computer setup is too fragile or centralized.
If I’ve got access to the Digital Ocean VPS hosting this website, I should be able to update the website.
Figuring out the git shenanigans to have copies of the repo in multiple places is a project for another day.
While we were travelling, I got deep in to Blaugust. A few bloggers that I really like, but who rarely post, are participating. I’m looking at you Axxuy and ribo.zone! It has been nice to send a few e-mails back and forth; to cheer from the sidelines. Somewhat relatedly, I got an e-mail from Dave pointing out a broken link on feeds page. There was a bit of a blog kerfuffle about comments. Some people came down pretty hard on static sites, like this one, that don’t have live dynamic comments. Turns out, chatting by e-mail works great.
Stephen wrote an interesting post Are Weeknotes Worth It?
I think that, as a sort of hobbyist, nothing in blogging is worth it.
You’re just blogging for fun.
I’m enjoying writing week notes, but don’t gain anything from them.
If nothing else, they’re a convenient place to put bloggish thoughts.
I type hugo-week-notes and get a nice place to lay down some thoughts.
It’s almost no-friction blogging.
The other day, on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, a neighbor I hadn’t seen in a long time said hello as she walked past the house. “I hope your family is doing well,” she said, and then looked concerned. “As well as you can do in times like these. You must be even more worried, with kids.”
“Uh, well,” I said, “The kids live in the present, and we try to enjoy the present.”
Obligatory shout out to James Somers’s piece You’re Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary and, in turn, John McPhee’s New Yorker piece Draft No. 4. ↩︎
Published: Aug 8, 2025 @ 11:00.
Last Modified: Aug 15, 2025 @ 14:58.
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