You may have heard that we had an election this week. That gets its own section in this week’s note. Check below if you’re interested, or skip it entirely if you’ve had enough. This is your content warning.

Did some personal project work this week: I thought it would be interesting to see how my blogroll has changed over time. The result of that is in the history section on the new Blogroll page. It needs a lot of work, but I think that’s the general idea. This work started at Observable. Their notebook format is a really nice way to work on visualizations, being able to capture thoughts as notes while working through things is wonderful.

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Thoughts on the Presidential Election

Some thoughts on this week’s election: Not shocked that the former president won, but I didn’t expect that it would be over so quickly nor did I expect the popular vote to swing in his favor. The people have spoken and now we have to deal with it. The question, for me anyway, is how to deal with it. I know for sure that the stress eating and drinking I’ve been partaking in needs to stop.

Another thing I’m going to stop doing is following and (re)posting all the antics. This really hit home when I saw the headline in The Times on Friday about Trump putting Musk on the phone with Zelenskyy. Seeing this, I realized that it’s already started, the non-stop bullshit, all the time. Historically, The Times spilled a lot of ink on Trump and Musk separately. The only thing the times seemed more concerned about was pickleball. Now that Trump and Musk (Tusk) are joined at the hip, it’s going to be so much worse.

This is not to say I want to bury my head in the sand. Well, I do, but I don’t think that’s a good long term solution. It’s just that I don’t have the energy to keep up with the tomfoolery, which can be paralyzing. I think keeping up with current events may be possible while avoiding the high jinks of this administration that are just a distraction much of the time. I’ll reserve any attention I want to give to national and international affairs to the more in-depth analysis others are providing.

Beyond that, I’m not entirely sure what to do at this point. I want to help, somehow. I want to resist, somehow. I want to put what I have to offer to use. It will be a work in progress and there may be some starting points in the links below. Good luck and godspeed everyone.

US Political Links

There’s no shortage of analysis on who and/or what is to blame. I’ve included a couple interesting links on that below, along with couple on the future.

Screenshot of a map of Manhattan showing a route on Broadway from West 232nd Street in the Bronx to the Battery in Manhattan. The route indicates that the walking time is 5 hours and 22 minutes and the distance is 14.2 miles.

As I mentioned last week, my sailboat, Uno was sold. The deal was done. All that remained was getting her hauled out of the water and onto a trailer at the appointed time. I was anxious about everything coming together, but all that worry was for naught. The haul out was the most chill one I’d ever experienced and the hauler was a total pro, no issues at all–quick and easy.

We voted early this week, that was also quick and easy. If you haven’t voted yet, please, please, please cast your vote.

On Saturday, my friend Jonas and I walked Broadway from the Bronx to the Battery. This was a trial of sorts to see if we might be able to circumnavigate Manhattan. We walked about 15 miles, which is a bit less than half of the walk around Manhattan, but we were feeling pretty confident that we could make that longer trip. We might try to tackle it in the spring when there’s some more daylight to work with.


Links

Political Links

The big news this week is that I sold SV Uno. Unfortunately, she’s moving out of state. I spent a good portion of Saturday getting her ready to haul out, but couldn’t do the actual hauling out due to high winds. I hope to finish the job on Sunday, fingers crossed. A hauler is set to pick her up Wednesday morning. As I write this, I’m a little stressed about the whole thing and I hope it all does go according to plan–or something close to it.

The links are light this week. There were loads of political ones I could have included. However, like most people at this point, am exhausted by the coverage and state of affairs. So, I’ll spare everyone, for the most part anyway.

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Black double doors with a sign printed with the text "Public Beyond".

On thing about writing these weeknotes, is a better awareness of the week numbers. Just about ten left in 2024, which I expect to fly by.

We had a rare Sunday jam this week due to scheduling conflicts. The vibe is different on a Sunday evening–looking down the barrel of another week verses having just wrapped one up, I guess. A good jam nonetheless.

On Saturday, we had the privilege of a behind the scenes tour of the Perelman Performing Arts Center courtesy of Open House New York. The PAC made several appearances in my One a Day project (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), but this was only the second time I’d been inside. This tour gave me a whole new appreciation of the design challenges at this site. The doors pictured here separate the “spine” of the building which serves as backstage from the outer corridor. There are better pictures from our visit on insta.

While we were in the area, we had lunch at Blue Smoke. As mentioned last week, they will be closing soon. In my 20+ years of dining at both this and the original 27th street location, I can’t recall a bad experience. They will be missed. I’ll especially miss that macaroni and cheese–delicious.

Thanks to @geniodiabolico, I started to re-watch Homicide: Life on the Street while listening to to the Homicide: Life on Repeat podcast (not simultaneously). I was a fan when it was on NBC, but I missed a lot of the episodes when they aired, especially the latter half of the series. I usually wasn’t in front of the TV at 10 on Fridays and I wasn’t recording it. Looking forward to seeing it all this time around.


Links

A whole slew US political links some terrifying…

I’ve been thinking about changing the tech underpinning this site more and more lately. I’ve wanted a static site for a while, but the continuing uncertainty around WordPress might be what pushes me over the edge. I’m just not sure which direction to go. I’ve been hearing a lot about Eleventy lately, but that might be more effort than I’m willing to expend right now. Perhaps, I’ll try one of the static site plugins first as that might have the lowest time commitment.

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Political Links