A Tale of Two Birds

6FPS V6#8: August 12, 2024

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

It’s August. July was hot — we had multiple days in the 90’s, and that has carried into the first few days of August, but it looks like we’re headed back to cooler weather.

July was the first month in a while that had me thinking “huh. that could have gone better.” Beside the heat nudging me inside, somehow — I honestly have no clue how I did it — I injured my right knee, which got really sore, making both walking and simply standing painful. As a result, there were about two weeks where I was very limited in moving around, and another week where I was mobile but not really back to normal. As a result, my step counts for the month took a big plunge, and things like my shop time ground to a halt. I did get some good hours in on Starfield, though, and spent some quality time with podcasts and ebooks. I only got out with the camera once, but came away with some really nice photos of a hunting osprey. Oh, and as you’ll read below, I did get out to Port Townsend to chase and add to my life list a visiting Red Footed Booby, which as I write this is still there hanging out with the gulls.

The Olympics

We’ve been watching a bit of the Olympics, but to be honest, it just hasn’t grabbed my attention. I idd watch some of the women’s gymnastics, and Simone Biles and Suni Lee were amazing, but overall, where I used to be a huge fan of this event, I’ve lost most of that enthusiasm. There are various reasons for this, including that the Olympic committee rivals FIFA for ethics, and it’s turned into this massive money grab. In previous years there was often some athletic story that would draw me in, but this time, for some reason, that didn’t happen.

Rabbit Holes

In July, I successfully fell down into two fun rabbit holes:

First is a TV show called Forged In Fire, on the History Channel and with a nice YouTube Channel. If you ever watched the cooking show Chopped, you know this show, except it’s for people building knives and swords from weird bits of metal on crazy time deadlines. Incredibly fun things to turn off your brain for in the evening.

A thing to keep your brain on for is a podcast called The Rest is History, where two British historians spends about an hour of week discussing some aspect of history. I came across it (thank you, Jason Snell) when they were talking about the beginning of World War I, which is historical catnip for me. They try to look past the “common wisdom” about what happened and try to look more at the people and the underlying things that are part of why things happen.

It’s witty, fun, they generally keep it light, bandits a great thing to listen to, and there’s a nice backlog of older episodes to fill in my listening time gaps.

New Wallpapers

I’ve released a new (July 2024) set of wallpapers for you, my 6FPS subscribers, to use and enjoy. Details and access links are below.

Vacation?

Laurie and I have been talking about taking a trip together, our first since we moved up here. A weird complication to that: the place we had identified to board Tatiana the cockatoo has closed the boarding services, and we don’t know who we can use instead. I’m doing some research on that, and if we can figure it out, we’ll proabably head up to Victoria and Vancouver Island for a bit after Labor day. If not, I expect we’ll continue with heading out solo until we do solve this.

Garden work

The garden work was limited by the knee and heat, but I did get those containers I showed last month planted. Two of the three cedar boxes we added to the deck are planted, and the third I have the plants and will finish that project this afternoon after I’m done writing this newsletter…