I don't think I did most of what I set out to do this week, but I had a good time and read a lot of books and cooked a lot of food.
After a week of tons of meetings, things felt more fluid with fewer meetings. I had three more infrastructure-y conversations, and I'm pretty sure I'm more interested in infra that enables a specific end user case (not infra for the sake of infra).
I went to Ethan and Julie's Zoom vows and ring exchange! I finally got to catch up with Nikki. When we were both in SF we had dinner every Tuesday, but when she moved this fell by the wayside. We didn't manage to pick it up right away during quarantine, either, but now we're back to a standard weekly meeting. The highlight was remembering the grilled cheese wok fire of 2010 and realizing my cooking has come pretty far since then.
On Monday we made lemon goop with salmon. Tuesday was Tom's family recipe for potato pancakes and pork tenderloin. Wednesday was tofu with snap peas. Thursday for lunch we had a goat cheese potato tart, and for dinner we made my mom's potsticker recipe with a garlic-shallot green bean. Saturday we made meyer lemon chicken (with a mix of lemon and orange instead of meyer lemons). Saturday night we managed to forage a Chicken of the Woods Mushroom!
I caved and got a Remarkable this week. I'd long admired Lee and Vivek's, and I figured now would be a good time to spend more time doing "analog" writing that I might want to access later. So far, I love it. Remarkable :: Notebook, Kindle :: Book. I'm planning to upgrade to a Remarkable 2 and give this one to Tom in October. The rest of my family was also excited about it.
On the flip side, I don't get clubhouse yet, probably because I haven't really tried. 1) The onboarding (lots of suggestions of who to follow) in retrospect seems too aggressive. I was getting so many pushes about conversations that I had to turn off notifications, which means I now get 0. It seems to try to trigger FOMO. 2) The lack of awareness of what's going to happen once I join a conversation is weird to me. On Twitter and other written networks, you can get the norm first. Not so, here. Seems to reward a sense of confidence. 3) Aspirationally, I want it to be like an emphemeral real-time podcast. Maybe that's how I should think about it, and see if anyone else wants to join a room.
I want a better tool for tracking books still. I started writing some notes about what I'd want. In the meantime, this week I read 8 books, in some semblance of an order, though they're all so different than I'm not sure "ranking" is truly appropriate:
I can watch romcoms again! After a couple years of not being able to stomach them at all, I'm able to enjoy it. This week I watched Palm Springs and The Boy Downstairs (but honestly I always just see Zosia Mamet as Shoshanna). I'm still watching The Bold Type. My mom and I are watching I'll Be Gone in the Dark. Played hours of pinochele and Hunt a Killer. Added Google analytics back into Gatsby for this site. Figured out some CSS tweaks.