☀️ Week Notes 071
🗓️ // May 3, 2026 - May 9, 2026
Pretty slow week at work personally as students went through Finals, most of the faculty started working from home and campus started its transition to summer. Of course we'll be ramping up almost immediately with all the major IT projects that are too disruptive to embark on during the regular school year. Bike to work week is next week and I'm tempted to get one of my bike in working order so that I can do it at least once. My ebike is still out of commission, but I'm tempted to give it a go on my Trek hybrid.
⚽️ Spurs got a huge 2-1 win at Aston Villa last week to drag themselves out of the relegation zone for the first time in a couple of weeks. Connor Gallagher opened the tally with an impressively placed thread the need strike to the lower corner from outside the box. Richarlison put away a perfect header off a brilliant cross from Mathys Tel and then we continue to control the ball and deny any good chances for Villa until the game was virtually over at the end of stoppage time. A home match against Leeds on Monday is the next challenge, but I'm very curious to see how West Ham vs Arsenal plays tomorrow because of what's on the line for both teams.
🏡 Deployed Weed & Feed in the front yard to attack our dandelion problem head on and get some green back into our sorry yellow lawn. Five days and plenty of watering later it's already looking a lot better. Still lots of de-thatch raking and over seeding to be done I'd say. Still need to figure out what to do about our dog-tormented backyard because they've exposed so much dirt but Mary has been clear that the front yard is the priority right now.
☀️ It's been a warm May so far and I'm definitely not acclimated to exercising in the heat yet. The girls and I haven'gotten back to running regularly yet because they all needed new shoes due to growth and general wear and tear and the first batch we ordered didn't have enough room for additional growth. They're also all super busy with soccer practice three days a week as well so June will be the month we ramp up. I did get in a good brisk 6K walk during practice on Wednesday though so I'm not a complete slug right now.
Playing
- 🧙♂ I'm continuing to enjoy Secrets of Strixhaven draft and managed to get my gem total over 10K before I needed to dip into that supply to continue drafting. Silverquill and Lorehold have been my best drafts so far with a 6-3 run in the red and white this week. My current draft is in Quandrix, but I have yet to play a game.
Watching
📺 Mr. Monk's Last Case 👍 Watched it with the family, who are big fans of the show. I enjoyed it, especially that he got to thwart an evil billionaire and his plan to rocket himself into space, but I also find the cringe disability humor and preposterous situations a little wearing at times.
📺 Daredevil: Born Again S2E8: Southern Cross 👍 They actually wrapped up the main Kingpin plot line, but the way Wilson Fisk went out, and yet still ended up with the deal he got defied belief. Mixed feelings about how things ended up heading into season 3, but I'll definitely watch it.
📺 For All Mankind S5E7: The Sirens of Titan - Kelly goes full Baldwin when Walt tries to tuck tail and bail on the mission when the Kurigan mission has a catastrophic failure.
Projects
🤖 I've been messing around with local AI models a fair amount over the last couple of weeks and figuring out what you can and can't do with them with consumer grade Apple hardware. They're definitely still useful for a variety of tasks, but a lot more time, handholding, experimentation, and direction is required than the more powerful cloud models required. That said, as with computers in general, I feel like a knowledgable and skilled person can really
🤖 I started messing around with Claude assisted research and putting together a custom generalized markdown knowledge base system. Not much work on the latter yet (although I've got some ideas in mind), but in the former realm Claude helped me put together a script I can use to convert newspaper clip pdf scans into markdown files that can be used everywhere. Assembling a digital archive of my dad's high school coaching career is kind of a fun challenge, particularly the farther back you go. Ferris is relatively easy, but Moses Lake, and Cascade are going to require some effort.