I have become fascinated with ocean tides leading to Tide Now WA being one of my most-used apps.
One response to “Tides”
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Okay, let’s risk a Live Journal emo detour for some moments.
I’ve been marinating (Michelle’s very nice description) my thoughts around the wistfulness I mentioned in the last weekly note and I’m starting to wrap my head around it all.
The wistfulness is a feeling that hits every year, but this year it’s felt super strong. I started to describe it to Michelle as a fear of losing memories, but I don’t think that’s true. I have plenty of journals and photos and thoughts that are all fun to look back on and I’m not really forgetting things.
I do think the pandemic has inspired some kind of “fear” of missing out on future memories. FOMOOF! We’ve been stuck near home for going on two years and our normal visits to friends and places have been restricted more than I ever thought they would be. I miss traveling and hanging out with people and that void is feeling fairly large right now.
But! There’s hope—obviously.
I’ve reframed a couple things to fit that inside that voidish feeling and things seem better.
First, we had a baby during the pandemic! What a way to be sure that new memories will be made at a rate higher than ever. We’re already remembering stories of how things used to be just weeks ago. At 2 months in, his rate of change is astounding.
And second—this is randomly specific—I came across the Online Academy of Irish Music the other day and decided it would be fun to start taking their courses for guitar. When the pandemic allows us to once again jam in closed spaces, I’d like to create more memories by playing music with others.
So I’m trying to focus on that a bit more right now—enjoying the current moment and working toward a future full of new memories.
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Related, because I am also going through old memories right now.
We were once locked in a pub after close (I think Katie Mac’s in Ballycastle) and I was handed a guitar after several (many?) Guinnesses. The best I was able to manage was a rendition of Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire and only because someone was able to bring up the chords on their phone. It was great, none of us were sober, we all had fun and everyone sang along, but it sure would be nice to have more under your belt than that—especially when there are other people with other instruments in the room.
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There’s another strange nostalgia that hit strong over the last couple months: instant coffee, specifically Nescafé. This one is definitely connected to seasonal wistfulness.
The flavor is not great—at all, but there’s a feeling that hits with the aroma that brings me back to hostels and backpacking. It’s almost enough to just pour the hot water over the powder and then dump it out, but coffee is coffee.
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I get a similar feeling from strong black tea, which I’ve also been drinking with milk? An act I still find very strange.
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Lucinda William’s Drunken Angel.
That’s all.
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I can remember the first time I heard Le Tigre‘s Deceptacon, circa 1999. It was playing on the sound system at a record store in St. Charles, Illinois we didn’t frequent too often. I loved the use of surround sound in the “How are you?”, “Fine thank you” bits and the way it seemed to travel across the entire record store. I don’t remember if I actually ever owned a copy of the album, it may have just been Napstered mp3s. ?
The song is still great. I wrote a post 11 years ago about how it contained some of my favorite lyrics. I didn’t realize until reading them on Genius a few weeks ago that it was a dig at NoFX’s song, Linoleum.
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See, it’s good to go back and garden your old posts. ?
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I’ve started using Ulysses to write these posts again and it’s full of all these other great thoughtful posts I started writing, but never finished. I really dug in and processed some stuff last year about WordPress that will never be published, but was very therapeutic all the same. Hurrah for journaling.
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I mostly agree with Justin’s piece on the writing experience in WordPress. I will add that I was able to fool myself into thinking the classic editor provided an ideal writing experience at the time, but it really didn’t. I also appreciate Sarah’s tweet. It would be great to one day see a world-class writing experience built in to WordPress, separately from the world-class page editing experience being built now.
IMO, a great way to start would be with a front-end view that eliminates all of the crufty old admin JavaScript and CSS and just starts from scratch with a text field.
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A bazaar of cathedrals.
Is something I wrote in a very old draft post and I’m not entirely sure what I was thinking about that day, but I like it any way.
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We’ve made variations of this Instant Pot salmon and rice bowl a few times now and it turns out perfectly each time.
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Steve has become fascinated with tides. For some reason that reminded me of a favorite podcast from 10 years ago, RTE Radio 1’s Seascapes. I listened to it most often while doing dishes in our first apartment in Portland. I know nothing about sailing or coastlines or anything, but it was always a calming and interesting listen.
Maybe I’ll pick it up again! ⚓️
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