Weeknote for 12/1/2024

Thanksgiving

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I flew to Texas to visit my parents for Thanksgiving. Thanks to my daily routines and my packing database in Notion, preparing for the trip was a much tidier process than usual, which was a big deal for my travel-stressed brain. The travel itself was uneventful except for the sore back I woke up with the day of my flight and my bruised toe when I dropped my computer on it coming out of airport security. Although the injuries remained for days after, I felt much better that evening when I got settled in at the house, which goes to show the place youā€™re in and the people youā€™re with can make all the difference.

Thanksgiving dinner was delicious and a nice time with my parents, but it definitely felt different and made me realize part of Thanksgiving for me is the long day in the kitchen and the buzz of conversation from a large dinner table, which we didnā€™t have with our three-person gathering and smaller meal this year. But one thing we didnā€™t miss out on was the leftovers, which still lasted us the rest of the week.

People

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The other reason I was in Texas was to attend the wedding of my old college roommate Jason. My parents drove down with me. It was held in a barn and themed after the season, with fall leaves instead of flower petals down the aisle. In Texas fashion the reception lunch was tacos. Afterward Jason and I got to chat about the various ministries in the area that Iā€™d become aware of thanks to No Compromise, and it was nice to see his family again after so many years and to meet his new bride and some of her family. The best part of the ceremony was the bleating goat outside giving its input on the pastorā€™s sermon.

Christmas

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Thanks to a late night Saturday, I got through assembling the rest of my Christmas list. This vacation reminded me vacations with my family are not a time for me to get things done. I tend to go with the flow and slow way down with all the distractions around me. This week Iā€™m Christmas shopping, and then I can get back to the Christmas labels.

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Weeknote for 11/24/2024

Holidays

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I worked through a big chunk of the Christmas gift label design and then had to switch to updating my Christmas wish list. My family needed the update to start their shopping. My wish list is always a whole research project of its own, but Iā€™ll try to finish that this week and then come back to the labels next week.

Productivity

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My project time expanded when I scheduled it before dinner instead of after. I have a principle that if I want to make sure something gets done, I do it first. Otherwise I lose track of time, and then that first activity crowds out the later ones. Plus Iā€™ve been too tired after dinner to do much of anything. So last week because I was getting nowhere fast on the Christmas labels, I resorted to the project-first approach, and it was so effective it immediately became my new schedule. Iā€™m able to get at least a couple of project hours in each day. A major goal of my productivity system has been to carve out enough project time that I could comfortably fit another round of grad school into my life, and this schedule rearrangement seems like a pivotal piece.

In Notion I added the tasks with rough time frames to my due date timeline. Iā€™m juggling a lot more tasks at work now, and most of them don’t have hard deadlines, but it’s helpful to see how many planned and active tasks I have with near-term soft deadlines. So I added some formulas to calculate those dates, and now my timeline looks appropriately ridiculous. But even a crowded timeline helps me prioritize, and it lets me adjust my expectations on some of the tasks that are waiting. The updated timeline also shows me I have more policies to set. For example, how should I adjust a task thatā€™s ā€œlateā€ according to its soft deadline? And it gives me more food for thought: If these time frames are always changing, is there a better way to think about scheduling work than deadlines?

Health

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I added a few minutes of exercise to my morning routine. My annual physical a few weeks ago reminded me again of the importance of muscle mass as you get older and that I have daily routines that let me pretty easily add activities, so I decided it was time to try a morning workout. Iā€™m starting really small with some push-ups and a plank, which Iā€™ve read is better than sit-ups. I quickly learned that I need rest days even for the little Iā€™m doing, so for now my schedule is Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It should be interesting to see what progress looks like, since I expect to be consistent.

Spirituality

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Keith Greenā€™s biography gave me challenging and inspiring food for thought. When I run across intense people like Keith, I always wonder if itā€™s everyoneā€™s job to be the same kind of prophetic figure. After this book I think the answer is no: (1) Keithā€™s perpetual evangelism was part of his personality even before he became a Christian. (2) He willingly listened to his older mentors who tempered his approach. And (3) I think the gospel needs all types of delivery, because there are all types of audiences and circumstances. Some will respond to a fiery outburst, while others need more of a warm glow. But itā€™s good to stay alert to the needs of the moment rather than becoming complacent.

How do we become people who meet the needs of the moment? In the epilogue Melody gave me a new, gardening analogy for the systematic way I try to cultivate my state of mind: ā€œThe Creator of the very first garden gave us a list of the fruit he wants in our lives. If we study just a little, we can find out what the fruit of the Spirit isā€”and know exactly what kind of seeds to plant to get the crop God is looking for. … Now letā€™s talk about how we need to be living our lives today so we can leave behind the legacy we desire.ā€

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Weeknote for 11/17/2024

Holidays

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I shuffled a little further along in my Christmas labels project. I collected a key supply and made some more decisions on the design and execution. It really shouldnā€™t be taking this long even with the other things I have going on, and Iā€™m a little impatient to get back to my productivity project. So this week Iā€™ll implement more time management hacks to get myself through the rest of the project.

Productivity

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Work is continuing to nudge forward my productivity system improvements. My experiment in email organization and tagging is taking shape, and Iā€™m starting another one on organizing my meeting notes. My approach right now does feel like a lot of bureaucracy, but time will tell how much of it is helpful and how much is busywork I can drop.

Iā€™m also finding that a new endeavor like this metadata work can really be invigorating if you have the right collaborators. I especially felt this in our dinner meeting last week with a potential vendor, an industry acquaintance of mine from way back. Even going into the meeting I felt myself absorbing the energy of the gathering. And the sense of drive has continued even on ordinary days.

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Weeknote for 11/10/2024

Politics

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I reconciled myself to the election results, at least enough to get through everyday life. The local elections went mostly the way I voted. The federal results werenā€™t what Iā€™d hoped, and I felt significant anxiety and depression Wednesday morning. But I leaned on my usual coping mechanism for cases like that, which is to broaden my perspective with a bunch of opinions from commentators, and that helped a lot. The key is to find the right commentators. Here were a couple of videos I found helpful on foreign policy: Trump Has Won the US Election: Hereā€™s Our Foreign Policy Forecast (Warfronts) and The World of Trump 2.0 (Foreign Affairs Interview).

Iā€™m thinking of this second Trump term as a do-over for me, where I try to handle it more constructively. Iā€™ll focus on the more level-headed pundits, and Iā€™ll pay less attention to the scandals and more attention to things I can actually do something about.

One of my early steps may be to move up my schedule of electronics purchases ahead of next yearā€™s possible new tariffs, which will purportedly make many devices much more expensive if he goes through with them. I have a new computer to buy and probably a phone or two. Buying early conflicts with my principle of upgrading my devices only when my old ones are dying, but sometimes circumstances change the calculation.

Holidays

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I finished the prototype for my Christmas labels and made plans for collecting the materials. I haven’t been in the mood for this project, so I was glad that at the end of the week I was able to rein in my distraction and procrastination and outsmart my fatigue. This week Iā€™ll try to keep outsmarting myself to get through a big chunk of the remaining work.

Productivity

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Changes at work are making my productivity system more important. One of my colleagues has been wrapping up a long and illustrious career, and so we’ve spent the past couple of months distributing his responsibilities to others in the company. I was given the job of coordinating our product data, so Iā€™ve been working on getting a handle on what that entails.

My semi-functioning Notion setup is feeling the pressure of the new tasks that are flowing in and the new knowledge I need to keep organized. The volume of email in my inbox has already increased, which has pushed me to reorganize my mail system a bit. And now after his retirement on Friday, the job is feeling more real.

So Iā€™ll be promoting my productivity system back to being my main project soon. And the task of learning this new business domain is pulling my memory system back to the forefront as well, and modeling too for that matter. Those projects will come later though. First, productivity!

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Weeknote for 11/3/2024

Holidays

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I made about a third of the prototype for my Christmas labels. Making it is already teaching me the needs of the project, so Iā€™m hoping I can get through the rest of it this week and make whatever preparations I need for the actual labels.

Productivity

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I didnā€™t do much of anything on the productivity system. Itā€™s only a side project at the moment, but the slow progress on both that and the Christmas project remind me some weeks will be more projectful than others. Sometimes youā€™re too busy working late, blogging, practicing music, and otherwise dragging yourself tiredly through your evenings. But I do want to increase my project time even then.

Nature

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I took my first water sample of this seasonā€™s chloride testing. I decided to volunteer again this year (see my blog post from last year), and this time I was able to get an early start before the first snow like the organization prefers. I chose the same sampling site, both to make the setup easier and to let the organization compare data for the same site over multiple years. I found out that last year my siteā€™s chloride numbers were only sort of high compared to some other sites, so I have a bit of context for judging how well the numbers turn out this year.

My friend Jeremy tagged along and helped me grab a decent amount of water in the bucket, which was fighting our attempts to fill it, maybe because we were tipping it in a downstream direction rather than upstream. So far, so good: The chloride level from this test was 119 PPM, a little less than last yearā€™s first sample from mid-December.

 

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Weeknote for 10/27/2024

Holidays

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I didnā€™t do anything on the Christmas labels last week. Too many other activities crowded my evenings. Iā€™ll see what I can do this week. The good thing is I already have my idea and I donā€™t think itā€™ll be too hard.

Productivity

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I finished setting up the Notion dependency timeline. I was especially pleased with the way I got it automatically laid out in an outline-like arrangement like this one by giving each task a sort key made of the item IDs of its ancestors. Now Iā€™m linking the tasks I came up with for making my system more usable so I can use the dependency view to find out which tasks to focus on first.

Nature

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I solved the mystery of the depth of one of my regular lakes. One of my walking spots has a couple of lakes with piers that extend to the middle of them. Iā€™ve always wondered how deep they were. The water is pretty opaque, and I was imagining 3 to 6 feet. I sometimes feel uneasy around dark water. You never know what could be lurking in the murk or how far down youā€™d fall if you tumbled in.

But the day I walked there, the low water level made me wonder if these lakes were actually pretty shallow. So I found a stick about 2-3 feet long with convenient branches to divide its length. I took it to the end of the nearest pier, crouched down, and, with a little trepidation, dipped it into the unknown.

When the water was almost to the first branch, the end of the stick encountered something squishy. I pictured a layer of seaweed at the bottom and cringed a bit. But I tried again and struck solid ground under the mush. No lake monsters leapt out to grab me, and I determined that the depth was only about a foot. The squishy layer was mud, which billowed up when I lifted the stick.

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Weā€™ve reached peak fall again. Iā€™ve learned that this is the best time of year for me to be in a bad mood, because when Iā€™m driving around and a brilliant tree comes into view, it instantly captivates me and blows the clouds out of my mind.

Posted in Christmas labels, Nature, Productivity, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Weeknote for 10/20/2024

Politics

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I finished my election research and made my ballot decisions. Thanks to newspaper interviews and endorsements, the local races were much easier to evaluate. Some of the propositions were tougher, and in those cases I usually end up voting with the status quo, since I donā€™t understand the situation well enough to recommend changes. This electionā€™s research (for example, this discussion on the property tax amendment) reminded me that just because politicians have identified a problem and proposed a solution doesnā€™t mean itā€™s the right one.

Holidays

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This week Iā€™ll start working on my Christmas labels. This is an annual art project where I create gift tags based on something in my life over the past year. Hereā€™s last yearā€™s. Theyā€™re a secret till Christmas morning, so Iā€™ll only give general updates while itā€™s in progress. For many years Iā€™d either wait till the last minute or let the project drag on for ages, and it was rather stressful, but in recent years Iā€™ve gotten myself more organized and I’ve streamlined the designs, so Iā€™m aiming to get through this one in the next couple of weeks.

Productivity

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I started experimenting with Notionā€™s dependency timeline feature. Iā€™m using it more for prioritizing than for scheduling, since I canā€™t really predict how long things will take. Even though I donā€™t know exactly when tasks should happen, the dependencies can tell me in what order they should happen. This week Iā€™ll continue that setup, which will take some fancy formulas to keep the timeline sorted in a readable order.

I got a much better understanding of Kanban from Jeffrey Likerā€™s The Toyota Way. It seems to cover the ideas of Lean and Kanban in more breadth, depth, and clarity than the other books Iā€™ve encountered. I think a large part of the clarity is that its subject matter is a physical assembly line, which gives me an easily imaginable analogy for thinking about more cerebral processes like software development.

I also found that the Toyota Production System gives me permission to dig deeper into my preference for checking things out, thinking carefully, defining standards, and working with other people to get things right. Along with the incremental experimentation Iā€™ve been trying to absorb, these seem to be traits Toyota has built their success on. In this way the book is a nice companion to Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto and the mis-en-place approach I appreciated in Dan Charnasā€™s Everything in Its Place.

Spirituality

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I added devotions to my morning schedule. Early in the year I started having daily devotions in the evening, but I dropped them in April during my post-vacation slump, although I more or less kept up with my Bible listening. After getting my life back in order, I was reluctant to add them back to my evening schedule because I was spending so much time on them before, but now that I have extra time in the mornings, I decided to try squeezing in a simpler version then. Itā€™s worked very well this first week, so Iā€™ll see if that continues. Last week was the gospel of Mark, and this week Iā€™m starting Luke.

Nature

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Wednesday my lunchtime walk was preempted by meetings, so I took a nice evening walk at one of my usual nature spots. Twilight adds so much character to a setting even as the darkness hides the detail.

 

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Weeknote for 10/13/2024

Productivity

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I got close to finishing setting up my priority tasks for the upcoming work on this project, my productivity system in Notion. Iā€™m creating items in my task database to correspond to the plain text list I assembled in my analysis of my Notion workspace. This project is currently a side project, so itā€™s moving more slowly than before. This week Iā€™ll finish the setup, and then Iā€™ll start working through the tasks, probably starting with a visual map of the task relationships using Notionā€™s dependency view.

I listened to an old thread on Hacker News with lots of helpful productivity advice for grad students, a situation I may find myself in again someday: I’ve procrastinated working on my thesis for more than a year. The glimpses I got there of PhD life reminded me I still donā€™t really know what to expect from that kind of program, and Iā€™ll need to do a deep dive before I embark on it so I can make good decisions and try to shape my experience there.

Election

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I made the easy decisions on my election ballot. Iā€™m taking my usual approach of researching the races, filling in my mail-in ballot, and taking it to a ballot drop box. Now that Iā€™m past the easy races, Iā€™m researching the propositions while I wait on newspaper endorsements to help me with the harder ones. I find that my voting decisions canā€™t only be informed by lists of the candidatesā€™ positions on the issues. I want to know if they have the right experience and a good track record and if theyā€™ve had any controversies I care about. Since I donā€™t follow those things regularly, I need the media and other online postings to help me out.

Music

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Another song caught my attention from my worship teamā€™s set on Sunday, ā€œThere Is a Redeemer.ā€ It was originally recorded by the legendary Keith Green but written by his wife, Melody. Listening to it as I practiced, I was struck by its earnest simplicity, and I thought that in the unlikely event I ever led worship at a missions conference, Iā€™d definitely want to include it, somewhere toward the end where it could be a response to all the sharing.

So I made my usual playlist of covers and then decided to start listening to Melodyā€™s memoir of their ministry, No Compromise. Iā€™d picked up the ebook a while back on sale and didnā€™t really think Iā€™d get around to reading it, but clearly you never know. Iā€™m listening to it in bits in-between other things, and it does a nice job of humanizing this larger-than-life, radical figure who I only vaguely knew of because he was a little before my time.

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Weeknote for 10/6/2024

Productivity

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As a way to prioritize, I analyzed the rest of my dashboards in Notion for tasks that would make them more usable. Most of the week this project was competing with other evening activities plus fatigue, so I didnā€™t get much done, but I got through this round of analysis and started matching my ideas with items in my task database. The next tasks are to (1) finish matching and creating tasks, (2) try relating them to each other with Notionā€™s dependency view, and (3) get a sense from that of what I should focus on next. For the next few weeks at least, this project will have to take a backseat to the election and holidays, but hopefully I can spend some morning project time on it.

Video

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I spent my workdays in vaporwave liminal spaces with NightDriveProphecyā€™s videos as my wallpaper. My grand plan for October this year is to dig into the Wikidot version of the Backrooms by listening through a bunch of the levels to get more familiar with the territory, but until I get that set up, Iā€™m wandering other liminal spaces. I ran across this channel a while back with its ļ¼„ļ¼“ļ¼„ļ¼²ļ¼®ā€Šā€Šļ¼”ā€Šā€Šļ¼¬ā€ƒļ¼Æļ¼¦ļ¼¦ļ¼©ļ¼£ļ¼„ ā„¢ video, and last week I binged a bunch of its others. I like to imagine that whateverā€™s on my desktop background, thatā€™s where Iā€™m working. So last week I did a lot of ā€œtravelā€ for work to a bunch of slightly surreal malls, superstores, aquariums, spas, water parks, museums, resorts, and random peopleā€™s weird homes. The videos are basically slide shows with a background song for each image, so later Iā€™ll be mining their playlists for additions to my Backrooms music.

Nature

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I think there were bald eagles at one of my weekly parks. I saw a big bird circling in the sky and thought it was the usual hawk, which Iā€™d seen earlier flying low through the park, but then I realized this new bird was dark with a bright white tail, and then I realized its white head probably meant bald eagle! So out came my phone for a video. I only noticed one until I looked back at the video and saw another farther in the distance. I knew there were bald eagles in this region, but I always think of them as ā€œsomewhere else,ā€ not places I frequent. But my boss, who lives near that park, told me the eagles sometimes nest on the light poles there, so maybe Iā€™m in for a closer look!

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Weeknote for 9/29/2024

Productivity

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I added another feature to my Notion setup and then stepped back to look at the big picture of this project. Things I did:

  1. I created a timeline view for my task history. This lets me review my recent activity to write these weeknotes. It also gives me a convenient way to find the normally hidden completed tasks I need to refer back to in my current work. Plus itā€™s just nice to see Iā€™ve been accomplishing things, since everythingā€™s normally lost to the fog of my memory.
  2. I paused the project to trace some of its task dependencies. The task list was getting unwieldy enough that I needed to step back, organize a bit, and pinpoint the most important tasks to get done. Iā€™m taking an outside-in approach, where I look through the various dashboards in my Notion setup and ask myself (1) what their purpose is and (2) what Iā€™d ideally need to do to make them as usable as possible. Then to trace the logic of the dependencies, once I had some tasks that would improve a dashboard, I asked about their prerequisites. Some common prerequisite tasks that have come up so far:
    1. Decide how to relate knowledge and action items.
    2. Determine my policies for refiling old projects and tasks.
    3. Refile the old projects and tasks for statuses that already have refiling policies.
  3. I settled on a policy of trying out manual processes before I commit to making them easier through automation. The problem with jumping into automation is that I may have gotten the process wrong, and designing and implementing an automation takes time that can add up. For example, Iā€™m not sure the Advised Status formula I spent so much time on will end up being that useful, depending on how I end up managing my tasks. I shouldā€™ve put up with the inconveniences and waited till I was further along in my redesign. So Iā€™m planning my task dependencies in terms of experimenting with workarounds first.

Next up:

  1. Iā€™ll keep sorting out the task dependencies so I can focus my attention more intelligently.
  2. Iā€™ll try out Notionā€™s task dependency view to see if itā€™ll be useful, though Iā€™ll try not to go overboard so I donā€™t waste time on it.
  3. Iā€™ll continue the task reorganizing I started a couple of weeks ago, which should give me a better starting point even if I end up reorganizing again later.
  4. Iā€™ll keep digging into the current philosophy of my system so I have a more concrete basis for deciding the new design.

Elections

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I made a spreadsheet that models all the possible combinations of swing state victories by each party in the presidential election: Presidential Election 2024 Battleground Scenarios. This mini-project was inspired by watching videos from Letā€™s Talk Elections. Making it gave me a much clearer picture of the electoral situation, which is explained well by this Politico article on the key swing states. I might use the spreadsheet on election night to narrow down the possibilities as the results come in.

A guide to understanding the spreadsheet:

  1. I listed the state columns sorted by the number of electors, which is given in the column header (19 for Pennsylvania, 16 for Georgia, etc.).
  2. To make the formulas easier, in the state columns I used numbers to represent each partyā€™s win: 0 for Republican and 1 for Democrat.
  3. The BG columns show how many battleground electors each party won in that scenario.
  4. The States columns show how many battleground states each party won.
  5. The Total columns show how many total electors each party won.
  6. The Winner column shows which party won the election or ā€œ?ā€ if it was a tossup.

Nature

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I rescued a yellowjacket at the park. It was lying helplessly on its back on the path, flexing its body and waving its legs in the air. After trying a couple of other solutions, I held a leaf over it so it could grab on, and then I was able to lift it and set it in the grass, where it was able to right itself and crawl around, though still in a wobbly, tumbly fashion. This is something I never wouldā€™ve done growing up, when I was always scurrying away from potentially aggressive creatures, but since starting my nature walks and especially using the Seek app to identify things, Iā€™ve learned that in many cases curiosity is truly an antidote to fear.

 

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Stormwater management

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I toured an old quarry that the county had converted to a giant stormwater reservoir. I tried to sign up for this tour a couple of years ago, but it was sold out by the time I got around to it, even though it’d only been an hour or so. This time I leapt on it as soon as registration opened, and itā€™s a good thingā€”one of the tour guides told us it sold out in three minutes!

The tour was very effective at introducing the department and giving a clear picture of how the reservoir works. Ever since becoming interested in stormwater management, Iā€™d pictured the department employees as these faceless, nameless, unapproachable figures. But it turned out they led the tour, trading off speaking about different parts of the system, and now theyā€™ve transformed in my mind into these smart but approachable and quite regular people. I also learned that this reservoir wasnā€™t just a random addition to the stormwater management system but is actually the centerpiece of its operation and was a key part of the departmentā€™s inception, which occurred after some disastrous flooding in the late ā€˜80s.

Appropriately it rained on and off throughout the tour, but only a little. Fortunately they didnā€™t need a flood to demonstrate the first part of the system. They only needed to open the sluice gate, because itā€™s built into the side of the creek and opens from the streambed, so the creek would have to be a trickle to keep the water out. The far side of the quarry has a scenic view open to the public, so Iā€™d love to come back after a heavy rain to watch the reservoir in action or just on a normal day to watch the wildlife. But if I feel like staying home, there are also live images from the facilityā€™s cameras online.

After the tour I spent another surprisingly interesting hour walking through the past century of the movie industry at the cityā€™s history museum, which co-sponsored the quarry tour. Then I walked some more around a neighboring park, walked down to a local diner for lunch, finally sat down for a while, then walked some more back to my car for a longish drive home with some road work congestion, and then had a several-hour nap. All in all an exhausting but excellent Saturday.

 

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