What did you do this weekend?

I planted another round of various herbs after my first batch all died. I think they failed due to the soil, so I’m hoping things go better this time around. I also got to hang out with my quaranteam and had a distanced picnic with some other friends. Got some cycling in and started working on some small sewing projects for my sister’s kids (masks and aprons for both of them).

Writing it all out makes me realize how productive I was!

I have far too many pine trees on my property. Not only do they kill everything under them due to shedding those poison needles, their roots have become a lawnmower hazard. Soil erosion with the increased rains the past couple years isn't helping. Busted a spindle on one finishing up last week, just got the replacements put into the deck. I need to take a hatchet out there and chop every root I can see. Someday I think I'll replace those pines with fruit trees, apples and cherries grow like gangbusters around here and don't mind the colder winters.

The new air rifle is fun too. I've capped six raccoons so far this week, got the last one just last night. Perhaps they will get the hint and leave my bird feeders and garage contents alone. Perhaps I'll run out of ammo before they take the hint. I know I'll never run out of raccoons.

Upgraded from an old VGA monitor (at 1366) to a new displayport 4K Philips (at 3840) and my brain is having trouble adjusting to the expansion in digital real estate. I was going to buy a cheap replacement, but with the pandemic supply chain disruption there's really no such thing as a 'cheap' monitor at the moment. I splurged and went for the 27". So far I'm quite happy with the purchase and $350 was a bargain for this beast. I miss my old Dell 24" set, but both power boards blew out within a week of each other last month and I can't find any replacement power boards for them, so they are in storage.

I repainted several parts of the trim in my house. It's amazing how much of a difference simply putting a fresh coat of white over trim visually elevates room appearance. (It was white before too, but was scuffed and dirty) And it's easier than painting the room itself since trim is so easy to prep for paint and the surface area is so small.

I set up and am trying out Astiga as a personal music streaming setup as a potential replacement for Google Play Music once it kicks the bucket.

The service doesn't include any music itself but instead turns music files in cloud storage into a personal music library and player. I wouldn't ever attach it to cloud storage that had any of my private documents on it, but I have a separate lifetime pCloud subscription that wasn't getting any use, so I decided to throw some of my music library on it, connect it to Astiga, and try it out.

To my surprise, it actually works quite well! I was expecting it to have all sorts of issues, and it's definitely rough around the edges and not super feature-rich, but it does what it says on the label pretty flawlessly. I've been listening to albums through it all weekend and haven't run into any issues. When first loading a new album there's a bit of a lag as the program downloads and buffers the first file, but it loads the rest in the background for seamless play, and it also caches the files on your device, so they'll play locally from that point forward (or until they get uncached). Also, I've been listening to FLAC files, which are huge, so I'd imagine the initial pause is a lot less obtrusive for, say, MP3s.

Coincident with this new cloud setup is my possible pivot back to buying music à la carte as opposed to just having access to music through a subscription model. The subscription model is certainly cheaper and easier, but it has a couple of points of friction: some music I like isn't available, sometimes music gets removed, and the scope of available content and ease with which it is acquired has a way of diluting it.

Meanwhile, buying music has other points of friction, one of which used to be that it wasn't really possible to have a "streaming library" of your music that was easily accessible from all of your different devices (this was one of the main selling points of GPM, which lets you upload your own music). Astiga does a good job of solving this for me. For other, more techy people here, there's probably less draw for a service like this given that you can easily host your own Subsonic server, but for someone uninterested in self-hosting, this does a good job of making my music available anywhere with minimal administration.

That said, buying music still does require some administration in that I have to download, tag, and organize the files, but, if I'm being honest, I actually like doing this! I hadn't done it in years, and I realized it was a big part of the "ritual" of music for me, having cut my teeth on ripping CDs for decades. It felt good to return to the tagging and organization process this weekend (though it's essentially all automated now).

I haven't fully decided that this is the way to go, especially because the financial costs for buying individual albums is so much higher, but I also like that I'm focusing much more deeply on the albums I've bought this weekend than I have to any albums I've streamed in the past couple of years. Being willing to drop $10 on a release means I find it valuable enough to come back to over and over, whereas with unlimited streaming, music had a sort of throwaway quality to it. Furthermore, I've been in a personal musical rut, listening to the same music over and over again for years now to the point that I'm bored of most of my music library -- even stuff I once loved! Part of the fun of this weekend wasn't just getting a new cloud service up and running, but it was also identifying and curating which releases were worth the money and effort to make it into my new library.

Took it as a bit of a lazy weekend. Did some cleaning and mowed the lawn, but mostly spent the weekend relaxing and planning out my new Computer build.

The state govt kept airing new classes in late July so... study? The teachers didn't say anything was off.

I've heard adult vacations are like this. The world is sad.

So, the past weekend and few days have been spent on the big move and settling into the renovated homestead, as well as recovering from the effort.

It's been both awesome and deeply frustrating - there's a fair amount of painting, patching and other details yet to be completed on the renovation. We can't fully unpack and settle in until that's completed in a number of areas (The kitchen! The garage!).

There's been a fair amount of back-and-forth about the contracted work with the general contractor. While we're grateful they were able to continue during the COVID-19 shutdowns, we're also a bit irked that they didn't keep up lines of communication. For safety, we refrained from visiting to check the work in progress. We're now seeing a lot of shoddy paintwork, incomplete or untouched contract line items, and a few things discarded or damaged that shouldn't have been.

The project manager left (quit? was fired?) just a couple of weeks before the scheduled move, but he last assured us the place would be ready in time. We checked in with the company at weekly intervals as our move approached, and weren't cautioned about any hold-ups. Come the day the moving truck arrived for packing, we were advised there was still work going on and the cleanup crew hadn't come through yet. Since we'd already terminated the apartment lease, there wasn't much choice but to proceed with the move-in.

Realistically, the work is 90% done, and we can live with completion of the remainder. We've gotten our bedroom, baths, and the home offices arranged successfully. Everything else is a massively privileged, "first world problem" to have right now. Getting out of the noisy apartment has been a huge relief. We're enjoying the beauty of the property, buckling down to the yardwork and garden tasks, and good-naturedly bickering about how to arrange things for our bourgeois comfort.

I've picked my first homegrown tomato (the garden beds have succeeded beyond expectations and the tomato plants are ginormous!) as well as a quart of berries from the bramble patches, everything is blooming gorgeously - life has been better to us than we could possibly have deserved.