Coding project generator
🙂
I made decent progress last week, though I might’ve gone a little overboard on the comments. Even if I don’t finish everything on my list in the remaining three weeks of this sprint, I expect to complete enough that I can call whatever I end up with version 1.0.
Life maintenance
😐
I’m currently in June on the Thinkulum project calendar, which is based on the International Fixed Calendar. The next month is the extra one called Sol. My version of Sol will start on June 16 of the normal Gregorian calendar.
For this extra month I’m going to take a break from my content-oriented projects and do as many life maintenance tasks as I can fit into four weeks. Hopefully I can do some investing I’ve been putting off, revise my budget, do some cleaning, come up with a cooking plan, and continue tidying and setting up my apartment. Yes, normal people get their apartment set up in a week or something when they’ve moved. For me it takes a year or more.
Fiction
🙂
During Sol I’ll take the opportunity to catch up on some fiction listening along with some narrative non-fiction. One of the novels on my list is something I won from L. Marie’s blog last week, The Contract by John W. Howell. The author wrote a creative and entertaining interview with himself to introduce it.
Movies
🙂
Sunday Tim and Jeremy came over to watch The Hidden Fortress. It’s an old black-and-white movie about two peasants in feudal Japan who are recruited to smuggle a fortune across enemy lines. It was one of the inspirations for Star Wars. Our consensus was that it was good, though it was a simpler plot than I expected, probably because I had Star Wars in mind. I congratulate the Criterion Collection for agreeing with our opinion. And then afterward the special features were helpful for showing me why I should think it was good.
Saturday I watched Venom, the non-MCU Spider-Man tie-in from last year. I didn’t really know the character, so I only vaguely knew what to expect. For an alien blob, he was surprisingly wisecracky. It kind of disappointed me really. I was hoping he’d be more serious and inscrutable. Instead I felt like I was watching Men In Black. Maybe Upgrade will be more what I had in mind.
This movie also highlighted the realistic turn in comic book movies, because it had clearly missed that turn. Venom felt much more like the new superkid on the block than a strange new threat that humanity now had to deal with. I’m pretty sure in the real world the movie’s events would have a few more consequences.
Still, I liked the movie okay. Once again, the special features did a good job of selling it.
Nature
😍
Saturday it was a little too warm in my apartment, but I didn’t want to run the air conditioner unless I had to, so I opened the windows instead. I rarely do this. The weather turned out to be perfect–breezy and peaceful with puffy clouds and all the typical suburban sounds in the background–so I left them open the rest of the day.
Toward evening I stood out on my balcony to enjoy the tranquility a bit more, and when I turned to go back inside, I saw something between the vertical slats at the other end. A bird’s nest! It was a little too high to see inside, so I walked over and lifted my phone to take a picture.
I love birds. I was going to say this nest was the bow on the gift of a perfect day, but really the day was the wrapper for the nest. The robin parents seem a little wary of me, so my plan is to keep a respectful distance and check up on them every once in a while through the glass door.
Hope you enjoy John’s book!
Glad you mentioned The Hidden Fortress. I’ll have to add that to my movies to watch list.
Birdies! How cool. You’ll probably have a bit of clean up when they go, but if you don’t mess with it, you could get them coming back each year.
I hope so, because they’re already gone! They grow up so fast.