Not much journaling today, but lots spent on getting a blog set up. I’ve decided I will publish it anonymously, no comments, but with an email address where I can be reached in case anyone stumbles across it and cares to let me know. Partly a test of the “blog as reverse search engine” theory, though I don’t know that anyone with interest similar to mine will be out there looking … or if they’re out there at all.
I used Astro, a theme called AstroPaper, hosted on a free Vercel account. I can build and view it locally, then publish by pushing to the Bitbucket repository. It’s good enough to host my journaling, with the potential to support other kinds of content with a little bit of work. And Astro is supposed to be a relatively hot framework at the moment.
Finished Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, started The Dark Knight Rises. Good choices! I think I will continue the trend with the Mission Impossible films, starting with Ghost Protocol … Dead Reckoning is on Prime now. And Furiosa starts tomorrow on HBO. There are also some series I would like to rewatch — Mr. Robot, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, The Leftovers, maybe even Battlestar Galactica … but I’m not ready for that sort of time commitment right now.
Along with rewatching, I’m rereading. Just finished Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon (actually, that was for the first time, and finally) and began Imperial San Francisco by Gray Brechin. There were several other re-reads before that. What surprised me is how it was almost like reading them for the first time. Although I know many of the ideas had stuck with me, the text was fresh to me and I was engrossed.
Yesterday I rowed to music, not bad but not great. Today I put on a podcast (Syntax, which I hadn’t listened to for a long time) and it was much more engaging. So I think I will do that from now on. I also sat the speaker just underneath the digital display on the rower, where I think a tablet/phone is supposed to sit, and that gave me more than adequate sound, much better than on the floor next to me or on the chair across the room.
Notified Roofer A that I wanted to go ahead with them. The rep called me from the airport, said he had told his boss, who would stop by this evening to get some info and collect a 50% deposit. Which his boss did, and now we are set to have the job done, day after Labor Day. Texted Roofer B that I had decided to use someone else, who said thanks for letting us know.ß
C received the $10 via Zelle, so I went ahead and transferred the other $1418. This time they told me the deposit would happen next day. Supposedly it will happen instantaneously in the near future. Also transferred money from savings to cover that plus the roofer deposit.