Back Home, and My Latest Project (Weeknotes

Returned Home

✈️ We spent most of Monday traveling back home to Columbus from Seattle, so I didn’t really do much of anything. Our trip was loads of fun, and we collected a few more family stories. I’m very grateful for the time we all got to spend together! During our layover in Phoenix, I bought a tiny Giant Saguaro.

👨‍💻 I took an extra day off Tuesday to decompress from travel and relax a bit before returning to the office Wednesday. I used some of that time to make a big change to this site. I removed the tabbed navigation and began moving toward a more consistent look and feel (one shared style sheet and common fonts) across all three blogs. So far, this blog and my photos blog are aligned, but Scraps still needs to be folded in. I’m also still going through and doing some clean up on older posts here.

📝 I wrote a short post in which I expressed the opinion that using the visual mnemonic of “dots and dashes” is detrimental to learning Morse Code. I initially had asserted that all hams should have a working knowledge of the code, but after reading this comment I (happily) refined my position; hams should perhaps have at least “an appreciation for” the Code, much like they must have an appreciation for electrical theory and electric circuits. This makes a lot of sense to me since, in the modern world, most hams will neither build and maintain their own radios nor operate using what is arguably a very antiquated communication mode.

🍑 I found my long-sought Peach Coke Zero.

🎧 I bought a pair of Shokz OpenRun bone-conducting headphones. Detailed review coming soon.

My Latest Project

📖 I recently purchased and started reading The SBL Study Bible, a scholarly (rather than devotional) edition of The Bible that is based on the newly updated (2022) New Revised Standard Version (NRSVue). I chose this edition because of the large number of reputable scholars who contributed introductory essays, sidebars, and comments on the text. It attempts to balance the best possible literal translation with readability in modern English.

🎯 I’m setting a personal goal to read it cover to cover. It is 2,234 pages, including 30 pages of front matter, so it’s going to take me some time. I’m hoping to finish within a year. (I don’t intend to focus solely on this, so I’m giving myself a long runway.)

📈 Since I just started reading on Saturday, I haven’t made much progress yet. I’ve read the front matter and the section titled “Introduction to the Bible.” That’s about 2%.

🤔 My first impression is about the print quality. It’s printed on extremely thin paper (almost like tissue paper) which I assumed was a chosen to keep the size of the book manageable. The result however is pretty bad ghosting, which makes it challenging to read at times. I’m fairly certain I’ll tear some pages at some point, but I’m trying to be careful.

📮 I’ll post updates here on my blog as I work my way through. Wish me luck!

Watching

📺 We’ve been without a live TV streaming service for a few months now, and we’ve been missing out on a lot of interesting sporting events. So I caved in and subscribed to YouTube TV. They’re giving me a promotional discount for three months, so that’s nice. As a result, we were able to watch (bits and pieces of) the Wimbledon gentlemen’s final, the UEFA Euro final, the Copa America final^[1], and an Indiana Fever game. Also looking forward to being able to watch Jeopardy! again.

🥂 Resumed watching season 2 of Loot.

• Episode 6 (“Women Who Rule”): Made me laught a lot. No one does cringe comedy like Maya Rudolph.
• Episode 7 (“Camp Wells”): I totally can relate to Molly’s big blow up.
• Episode 8 (“Grace”): Seemed like a filler episode. Meh.

🐻 We finally got around to starting season 3 of The Bear.

• Episode 1 (“Tomorrow”): It’s beautifully filmed, but it took me nearly the entire length of the episode to figure out what the heck I was watching.
• Episode 2 (“Next”): Sets up the season, looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.

✈️🎸 Airport 1975 is the second campy “Airport” movie, and my favorite of the bunch. Most of the material covered in Airplane! comes from this movie.

✈️🌊 Airport '77 is the third installment in the same series. It’s definitely the worst of the first three—although I haven’t watched The Concorde, Airport 1979 yet.

💙 A Family Affair is a forgettable film (even as rom-coms go, which is saying something) despite its talented cast. (As I’ve said many times before, good acting can’t save bad writing.)

Listening

The Foreign Desk (Monocle Radio): “How will Keir Starmer relate to the world?”

Reading

🍷 The Drops of God, by Tadashi Agi, Volumes 20, 21, and 22.

⏳ “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang (from Story of Your Life and Others) is the short story upon which movie Arrival is based. It’s a very so-so story; the film is way better.

See you next week!