The past two weeks have been full of marching band. We’ve been following our kids attending parades for eight or nine years now, chaperoning for most of those. It’s a fast and furious summer competitive parade season, and they’ve had a blast with it. Jesse and I marched when we grew up. All of our kids have marched. We are a marching band people.
As a result of the above, our summers don’t really get started until July, and I’m getting older, so the amount of tired I am right now is pretty notable. Upcoming we have some nice time with family as well as relaxing time next to a lake on the schedule.
Pika has been humming along very nicely, with our biggest update in a long time, The Pika Pulse, arriving this week. It has definitely been fun to read all kinds of different blog posts being written on Pika. There’s a fascinating diversity of writing going on there. 😻
I’m also trying my best to shift down a gear on work for the summer. I, and we, have been pushing pretty hard in 2026. For the rest of the summer I’d like to close the laptop a little earlier, and take some Fridays off to catch up on all the other things life demands.
I visited this Hacker News post at a moment with a very interesting comment count:
There was a time that our leaders took responsibility for their failures, even having the humility to prepare for that possibility before they knew the outcome. Dwight D. Eisenhower drafted a message in case D-Day failed (emphasis mine):
Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.
We recently attended both Spamalot and Six. Since the theater was quickly turning around those shows, it led to a nice playbill balance for us:
Jesse and I had seen SIX before, but our youngest two hadn’t. It’s great! I’m a huge Monty Python fan, but somehow I had never seen Spamalot before. I was ready to go back the next week. Lovely! (It was also fun to witness how much my daughters laughed at the shenanigans on stage. ❤️)
I’m nearly two years behind, and was honestly about to start a “move off Obsidian” project due to my ongoing frustration, but ahhhhh is this ever an improvement to using Obsidian on my phone with iCloud sync.
I listened to a couple of very nice podcast episodes recently. The Case of the Missing Hit was a musical mystery. It’s wild that a 90’s song just disappeared like that! And the Rewatchables’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with Steven Spielberg (h/t to Mike) definitely made me want to watch 2001 again, as well as made me want to chronologically watch all of Kubrick’s and Spielberg’s movies.
It’s been a hot minute since I wrote one of these. I’m not 100% sure a weekly update post is my thing, to be honest. 🤔