Recent Locations#
- Location 1: Ribbett Ranch: Ruch, OR
- Highlight: My friend and boss, Randy, got married last weekend at his property and we were lucky enough to get an invite. They call the place Ribbett Ranch because the first thing he did when he bought the 3 acre property about 5 years ago was dig a big hole in the front yard and make a pond out of it. Big as in like 75ft long, 40ft wide, 13ft deep. The pond has naturally attracted lots of critters, including a self-sustaining population of little frogs. The party was awesome: lots of good food, Bad Bunny playing on the dance floor all night, and a special appearance by my old coworker Bryan and his family. They live in Puerto Rico and we dont get to see them often anymore, so it was great to spend some of the weekend with them.
#* Location 2: Applegate Lake, OR #* Highlight: First real lake day of the year! Spent a couple hours in the sun, cooling off in the water when it got too hot. Water was definitely warm enough to swim in, though did get a little chilly after a few minutes. Still was able to get some cool Gopro shots of the dog chasing sticks, and also caught some glimpses of some fish.
Work This Week#
- Removing Cableway At Chetco River: This week I joined our resident cableway expert to remove an old and dangerous cableway at one of my sites. For those that haven’t heard me talk about cableways before, they are a large cable that spans across the width of the river, supported by metal “A-frames,” to keep the cable high above the water. Afixed to the cable is a cablecar just big enough for 1-2 people to ride along the cable in. We use these structures to collect discharge measurements, but at this site, the cableway was too dangerous to use and trying to improve it offered no benefits to data collection. It’s nice to have this lingering liability off the books.
- Prepping for Next Week’s Camera Install Trip: The big camera install trip with camera experts from Colorado is next week, so I spent a lot of time getting all equipment prepped so that the field visits are as smooth as possible. Biggest hurdle was get all the networking stuff set up on the modems, but after the first 1-2 times it became faster and more familiar. I am excited for next week, and just really hoping that I am not forgetting something.
Personal Projects This Week#
- Current Focus: Refining The Website
- Progress: Built a few more pages for the site and finally finished the big post about building my music server. starting to feel mostly done, though I’m sure I will still be constantly tweaking it.
- Next Steps: Need to get back to digitize these records, I’ve got a big backlog of files that need broken into tracks and tagged in Picard. Also need to buy some hard drives to start setting up my new NAS.
The Week in Training#
- Training Phase: Continuing in Build
- Key Workout: Some tough run and bike interval workouts this week, but they seemed to go pretty well. Most fun workout was an 2,200 yard open water swim in the lake with my buddy Roman.
- Feelings: Definitely feeling the drag of several long weeks of high volume. ready for a down week next week to soak up all the fitness gains. One more brick workout tomorrow then lots of recovery before diving back in on the week of 6/8.
Reading and Listening This Week#
- Song/Podcast of the Week: Lots of Timesuck With Dan Cummins this week, made it through 2-3 full episodes while on the road.
- Current Reading: Still working on Xenocide, but downloaded a couple of new audiobooks this week that I am looking forward to starting. Will write about one next week.
A Cool Website I Visited This Week#
- Cool Site: Fedi.tips
- Why it’s worth a click: Good resource for learning about Mastodon and the larger Fediverse. That ecosystem still confuses me a bit, but I’m learning and definitely think its the way to go over traditional social media.
Rose And Thorn:#
🟢 The Best Thing#
Finishing the long blog post about the self-hosted music server felt very good, I worked for quite a few evenings and went though multiple drafts to polish that thing up. Though it was generally a great week and there are lots of things I could write about in this spot.
🔴 The Worst Thing#
Struck out with some hard drives that I thought I was getting a good deal on. Found 3x 3TB drives through marketplace that were advertised as new and unused, but when I tried to set them up in my NAS, they all had issues ranging from very used to completely non-functional. Bummer and I think I’m just going to have to shell out for some new drives from a reputable dealer, even though its going to be much more expensive.
End of Log.