Monday, September 23 2019

Dear Journal,

Good morning, everyone. Hope you're feeling good this morning and ready to start another work week. The weather is beautiful today. It looks like up by us, we should be hanging out in the low seventies & high sixties all week. I might even finally get to bust out some cozy sweaters. Which would be a good thing about now - I went a little crazy with the snacking last night, and this morning I get the feeling that my stomach enters the room before I do. I also had a bit too much beer. I decided to treat myself to a six pack of imported Oktoberfest beer from the liquor store, and I really liked the taste and decided to keep the party rolling. But nothing that a little coffee and journaling can't fix.

Yesterday I spent most of the day hacking on my chores website. I'm deploying it on a little kubernetes cluster I've made with some old raspberry pi's I no longer need. Because the newer models come out so frequently and the specs basically double with each new model, I wanted to give the computers a nice, productive place to retire. I've even named the cluster "the farm", just to round off the metaphor. At the moment, it's just two nodes, but as soon as I upgrade my desktop to the Pi 4, I'll be able to add a third node.

Even though Kubernetes has been around for a while, I'm still pretty new to everything. The project has been moving a little slowly for that reason, but it's important work. With whatever is going on in tech, I've noticed that new skills and knowledge don't really stick with me until I incorporate it into a home project. I've been wanting to step up my kubernetes know-how for a while, and I'm grateful that I finally have the time and a good project for it. Last night I finally got everything stable. The database is up and running, saving data to a persistent disk, and there's a web server that fires up a django app. Lastly, there's a proxy that - at the moment - just kicks all requests to the web server.

In between all the hacking yesterday, we went to church, grabbed lunch at Chipotle, ran some errands, and at an impulse we bought a new ottoman. We pulled it right off the shelf at target and dropped it on top of the cart, like we were barbarians pillaging a conquered village. Our old ottoman had loose wooden legs, and we were getting frustrated with how small it was. Sunday naps are serious business, and if you don't have enough ottoman space for the whole family, then you should consider getting a bigger one too.

After we put Rodney to bed, Marissa and I hung out on the porch for a while. There was a sticker price tag from hobby lobby that had fallen on the ground during some schlepping, and for some reason Ziggy became obsessed with it. She was fearful at first, stalking this sticker on the ground and sheepishly craning her neck to sniff it, then she'd jump back, bobbing her head like an MMA fighter. She spent about fifteen minutes doing this. She was scared of it, but you could tell that she wanted to conquer her fear and see what this sticker was all about, which was endearing, and great entertainment for a quiet night on the porch. Ziggy did eventually get over her fear - so much so that she ate the sticker, and we had to intervene, pulling it out of her mouth and hiding it from sight. Dogs are weird, aren't they?

After time on the porch, I did some more editing for Marissa. I've got a bit of a video editing backlog, so I'm also trying to chip away at it and keep her fans happy. Last night to my disappointment, Instagram took down the first version because of the music, so all that time I spent lining up the camera cut with the beat drop in Frank Ocean's Mitsubishi Sony was wasted. The footage still looked great though. If you watch the time lapse on her Instagram, please play the song in the background - it was a great pick and I'm bummed it didn't slip by.

Today should be a regular week. Tonight, the Bears are playing the Redskins, and this Sunday I'm turning 29, so Birthday shenanigans will likely take place this weekend. As of now, I still don't have any ideas for how to celebrate, other than just hanging out, drinking some beer, and maybe cooking an elaborate dinner. So in other words, nothing that separates it from a regular late summer weekend. I'll keep racking my brain though. I'm sure the family would like to do something fun, and you only turn 29 once in your life.

Hope you all have a wonderful day today, and a great rest of the week. Thanks for reading.