Recent Locations#
- Upper 5 Winery, Talent OR
- Highlight: We went with some friends to the Upper 5 Winery Spring members party. We all had some great wine, great food, and had a lot of laughs. Spring is going off at their place, the vines are starting to get green and shoots are growing tall. Terry said that the late frost in April had a serious impact on the vines, especially the young ones.
Work This Week#
- Task 1: Helped with interviewing a few candidates for the seasonal position thats open right now. It was my first time interviewing anyone for a job, it was cool and we have some well qualified applicants.
- Task 2: Met with a hydrology class from SOU at the Bear Creek Ashland site. Bill and I talked about the USGS and what we do as Hydrologic Technicians, then we all practiced making some discharge measurements. Great group of students, and a lot of fun.
Personal Projects This Week#
- Current Focus: Digitizing Vinyl Records
- Progress: The stack of records left to digitize is shrinking, but still very tall. Borrowed like 15 records from a friend also, so the stack actually grew this week. Able to get about 3 done a night, at this rate I will be recording these records for another month or so.
- Next Steps: Digitizing will be going in the background, but I also just got a NAS and some hard drives so I will be focusing on setting that up for eventual offsite server backup.
The Week in Training#
- Training Phase: Building Volume under new plan with Coach Tom
- Key Workout: Coach Tom has me doing a bike ride once a week that includes a high-torque low-cadence interval for really building leg muscle.
- Feelings: This first week on the new plan was the biggest volume week I’ve done in awhile, and I felt it by the end. The next couple weeks are going to be more high volume, so I’m sure I will be ready for a deload when it finally comes.
Reading and Listening This Week#
- Song of the Week: Lungs - Townes Van Zandt
- Current Reading: The Devil Reached Towards The Sky by Garrett M. Graff*
- Quick Thought: Actually listened to this one on audiobook, but it was a very human telling of the development and dropping of the atomic bombs. Rather than a standard retelling of the events, this book was like 98% excerpts from journals and letters of the actual scientists, military men, and victims involved the Manhattan Project. Rather than the author putting his own spin on the story, the historical figures were able to speak for themselves.
A Cool Website I Visited This Week#
- Cool Site: (https://insidemordecai.com/)
- Why it’s worth a click: I stumbled on this site while looking for inspiration from others who are using the same website theme as I am. Mordecai’s website was on a list of those that were highlighted on the theme’s main website. As I clicked through his site, I realized we had a lot of similar interests, have done some similar projects, and appeared to have similar philosophies about how we want to be on the internet. The coolest part to me is that Mordecai lives in Kenya, and from half a planet away, I was able to feel connected to this person who I felt like I had met through their website. It was a reminder that the internet is a lot cooler and a lot bigger than just a few social media platforms. Besides that, Mordecai shares lots of other cool websites made by interesting and creative people. His site is a pure slice of internet untainted by the rampant enshittification seen in so many other digital spaces.
Rose And Thorn:#
🟢 The Best Thing#
Meeting the SOU class for a day of showing off what we do for work was awesome. They seemed actually interested in water sciences, plus I just like getting up in front of people and talking about my cool job.
🔴 The Worst Thing#
Beginning to realize that the next 3 months are going to be very busy and very expensive. Its all good stuff like traveling, weddings, work trips, etc., but its all going to add up and by the time September comes around, I will be ready for a break.
End of Log.