This month’s focuses

The list of hobbies, events, media, and more that I’ve been focused on this month:

General

New website who dis! Happy first post, future me. 🎉

Right now, as I’m typing these words, I’ve decided to make this “Day in the Life of” thing regular! I’ll try to write at least one a month, that way I can better reflect on my personal growth.

I have found it easier and easier these days to fall into the typical work/eat/sleep routine, and I’m hopeful that this will be an opportunity to set goals and yell at myself later for not making progress toward them.

As with everything on this website, my main audience is me. My secondary audience is my closest family and friends (no idea if anyone actually stumbles their way here). My final audience is anyone else who feels they gain something out of reading what I write.

This particular series of posts is going to be directed at myself, so feel free to puruse other content accordingly!

Habits

Bicycle Commuting

I installed a new trunk bag on the bike. It was well overdue, as my main weatherproofing technique so far has been to wrap my gear in an assortment of wildly tattered and grease-covered plastic bags. I’m looking forward to breaking it in!

I recently achieved a milestone of my first 1,000 miles on my commute, hooray!

Despite the rain, I’ve maintained a pretty regular ride streak, only missing the occasional day or two. I will continue praciticing my willpower as it gets darker, rainier, and colder transitioning into winter.

Hobbies

Microgreens

After a month-or-so long hiatus, I planted a new batch of micros last week: three 1020 trays. Two are my favorites: field peas and sunflowers, and the third is a first crack at watercress.

The temperature in the greenhouse is starting to drop with the outside temperature. The heat generated by the LED light strips and the one incandescent bulb I run seems to keep the temperature between the low 50s and mid 60s. I will probably need to look into active heat and better insulation if I want keep my yields high and, looking forward, avoid freezing.

That being said, the sunflowers are doing great, the field peas pretty well, and I get an F for the watercress.

Kombucha

I’m still really enjoying my home brew! The quality of the finished product still seems to be improving with each batch. The last batch was green grapes and cucumbers.

My main goal is to improve the natural carbonation during the second stage ferment, but I’m rapidly approaching the time that I give up on that and force-carb with our soda stream. It seems to take more added sugar than I would like in the final beverage.

Self-hosted Software

This month was a big month for my self-hosted web applications. Some of the major changes include:

  • New hardware additions:

    • Dedicated pfsense box
    • LAN compute machine that runs my personal self-hosted apps

  • Cloudflare proxying

  • Implementing Wireguard VPN access

  • Switched to using Hugo for this public-facing website

New goals to focus on for next month include:

  • Backups, backups, backups
  • Implementing a DNS ad-blocker like Adguard or PiHole
  • Improving my NAS (straw house to brick house)
  • Continue building up information on this site!

Upcoming Events

Wedding Planning

Things are picking up! Some updates:

  • FAQ website is live
  • We camped at the venue (lovely)
  • We picked out our wine and food
  • Photographer and musician are locked down
  • She found her dress!