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What's an itch you were finally able to scratch?
Title doesn't refer to a literal "itch" (though it certainly can!).
Instead, it's something that's bothered you for a while, or that you've been passively curious about, or that you've been meaning to get to, etc.
What was the itch, and how did you scratch it? How do you feel about it now?
I bought a bike on marketplace the other day. Got a helmet, lock, and multi-tool today. Next week: I will bike to work for the first time in 10 years.
Hell yeah dude
Go you! I did this for years. I live too far now to bike anymore though. It really feels like an accomplishment to do it regularly.
Good on you!
I started biking to work in the warmer months a couple years back. It's great because we have a shower at work so you don't even feel disgusting the rest of the day.
Yeah I am dreading the gross feeling I'll have (no showers at our office). I'll deal with it though just to keep my ticker going healthy.
Been meaning to put myself in a position to wear clothes that aren’t baggy or square for pretty much my whole life. After actual decades I finally can. The itch is scratched.
I do my job better, I move through spaces physically and psychologically at ease. There’s no meaningful criticism of my physical form to be thought or felt. I don’t even look like an overweight person that’s lost weight. I am as thin as I can be. I am a western person that can wear a size small in Asia. When clothes don’t fit it is because the cut doesn’t work with my figure to create the desired silhouette, and there are now a wider range of desirable silhouettes available. There are lots of challenges ahead in this life, but thank goodness looking at myself in the mirror isn’t one of them right now. I’ll take that.
Got a smart watch. I didn't even know I had this itch, but the Pebble Time 2 is scratching the hell out of it. I've got a calendar, clock, and weather forecast visible on my wrist 24/7, and it only needs charged three times a month. I get a text, it pops up on the screen, and I can read it and respond without ever pulling my phone out. It can launch Tasker tasks, it can add events to my calendar, it's a pedometer. I'm smitten
I went all in (maybe somewhat in anyway) on pourover coffee. Hario v60 dripper, timemore s3 grinder, timemore scale with timer and flow rate, stagg EKG gooseneck kettle. I could of course get more ridiculously niche tools, but I don’t think I’d even be able to appreciate them at this stage.
Up until now, I’ve been doing just the standard drip and an espro press. It’s like night and day. Now I can actually make proper use of light roast beans, which seemed entirely pointless before. Decaf is a fully enjoyable cup. There’s so much range in beans that I can actually taste now when a lot of the difference was mostly erased by my underdeveloped process.
Awesome, glad this opened up the coffee experience more for you. I took the leap like two years ago.
I use a v60 and also a manual grinder (Kingrinder K6) with a gooseneck kettle and some very cheap timer+scale and have been very satisfied with my results. I've dipped in a bit deeper doing "soup" on the OXO Rapid Brewer, but v60 is my go-to. Cups or coffees that were very muted before now have now opened up to a world of flavor and it's my favorite part of every new day. You're right that you can make a much better decaf cup this way too.
I've discovered that honey process coffees and Ethopian light roasts (naturals especially) are my absolute favorite but I've been branching out and trying all sorts of things.
I love it when I try some small tip/trick I found and it actually works. Lately:
Placed rubber snakes on my car's dashboard and back window and ever since the day I did this (a couple of weeks ago), the birds that were constantly crapping on my car no longer visit it. They stay in the trees/yard/elsewhere. I move the snakes occasionally so they don't get used to them, and it seems to continue working. It was a daily problem (I could clean my car off and it would be messy in 24 hours again) for weeks and I haven't had to clean my car of droppings ever since that day.
Pressing condiment bottles to squeeze out a bit of air before putting them away has stopped them from bubbling over when opened and squirting contents out unnecessarily due to the temperature of the air inside causing it to expand and push contents out. This trick has saved me this small frustration enough times now that it's SO satisfying
I'm always curious about all kinds of tech. I'm fairly locked in on my phone, tablet and laptop but I'm always curious about what things from other brands feel like to use. So to scratch my curious itch, I'll buy stuff and try things out for a few months before selling it and moving on.
I think a good example of this itch I scratched recently was folding phones. As I get a lot of use out of my tablet and my phone, the thought of combining the two into one device was attractive to me. So last year I bought a used Galaxy Z Fold 4 in decent condition and used it for the summer. Unfortunately, I found the experience to not be as exciting as I expected. I just didn't use the inner screen as much as I thought I would and I found Samsung's software to be kinda rough in terms of how buggy it was. My experiment ended after the summer and I recouped most of what I paid for the phone.
Another example is compact tablets. When I last upgraded my tablet, I went from a standard 10in iPad to a bigger 12in Samsung since one of my main use cases was media consumption and a bigger screen was more attractive to me. However, a coworker was selling their iPad Mini 6 recently for cheap so I decided to pick it up and try it. I definitely miss having an iPad and the smaller size is nice and portable. It's definitely got me looking at iPads again but I think I'll wait until my Samsung really gets on my nerves before upgrading.
A literal itch when I try to go for a casual run after weeks of not bothering. Not related to heat changes or clothing as walking and hiking doesn't trigger it no matter the duration. Casual self-diagnosis says it's due to capillaries expanding and histamine release. Popped some antihistamines on the first few weeks of C25K to make it bearable, but it's not a problem now as long as I do cardio consistently.
Frequent headaches and a stiff neck from a desk job and hours of sitting still, even accounting for hydration. Once I've been able to squat at least my bodyweight and put some meat on the traps, the headaches went away even when sitting with the most unergonomic head positions. Doing a ton of face pulls also fixed my shoulder posture, no more hunching over while typing at a computer.
Next overall goal is bringing up hip flexors and stabilizers, undoing the damage of decades of sitting around.
The relief a person feels from regular exercise makes it feel like some kind of forbidden fruit in an era of desk work.
Yes, your body is engineered to be constantly moving. No, society won't let you do it. Only repetitive motions are allowed!
My new home is scratching two itches I’ve had for a long time:
This place is amazing. Every couple of days me and my partner look at each other and say how fortunate we are to have found this place. The city is amazing and the house has loads of character. Planning the remodeling has been an interesting journey: finding out more and more about the history and seeing how the building has changed over the last 150 years is so much fun. We are just the current occupants, the house had a rich history before us and will have a rich future when we pass it on.
Now that I’m actually doing the work, it is great to learn about plumbing, electrical and HVAC. I’ve replaced all electrical and plumbing, rerouting everything in a way that lets us show off even more of the house’s beauty. Lowered ceilings are being ripped out to reveal the old glorious plastered ornaments. With every layer that’s peeled back, I feel the house sighs with relief.
These itches are thoroughly being scratched.
For your sake, I hope that all peeled back layers reveal something beautiful. No leaking walls, no Backrooms.
I can't name a specific "itch", but in software engineering a lot of things can appear to be magical. Those itches are best scratched by picking one and diving deep into it. Youtube videos, technical books, and amateur blog posts work best. It's like learning the secret to a magic trick, but instead it makes it more magical, in my opinion. This applies to any field, btw.
I learned to program when I was a kid and for years I built a lot of stuff on the web, mostly PHP in those days. When I finally sat down to understand HTTP and TCP/IP it was like the layers of reality pealing back, so many things clicked into place. Just repeated moments of interconnected "a ha!" in my brain. It was nearly euphoric.