Dude, quit beating your Mic.  It's not plugged in to anything...

Got out on a hike with the wife yesterday. Five miles up to a waterfall not far from Washington's deciduous rain forest. It was such a break from the nattering nabobs of negativity. Green moss completely pwning a 40-foot birch. 200-foot-tall firs. A beautiful lake. The freshest air I might have ever breathed in my life made one minute ago by {looks around} probably that fern right there.

Then I got home and loaded yet another fresh OS on my raspberry Pi so I can try USB booting to take advantage of the SSD I just got in the mail. It's mounted on a nice little plank of poplar I've dyed red mahogany. And my kids are starting to harmonize spontaneously, especially while they do chores, which is beautiful and funny. This morning I put another coat of polyurethane on my cottage office floor. I'd better stop and call it good, but it's been fun to see how perfect I'm able to get it compared to what a wreck it was when I started. Feels somehow purgative. I've been working on it since November ten minutes at a time, lol. It's the kind of work I love, though. I got the wiring through the wall last week.

Real life is heaven compared to social media. I think people don't know they're voluntarily living in hell.

I want to call them all out here to Bali Ha'i where their own special hopes, their own special dreams, loom on the hillside and shine in the streams.

This is perhaps the most awesome post I've ever read on a Citadel. 

We are talking about a beach house in Oregon. Relatively affordable - and we like cold, pines, mountains and ferns. We miss those things. I'm also somewhat fond of craggy cliffs and fogbanks. 

The kind of place where you go and lock yourself in and sit by a fire and look out at the gray ocean and read Science Fantasy books for an entire week. 

Wed Feb 24 2021 12:16:37 MST from Wangiss

Got out on a hike with the wife yesterday. Five miles up to a waterfall not far from Washington's deciduous rain forest. It was such a break from the nattering nabobs of negativity. Green moss completely pwning a 40-foot birch. 200-foot-tall firs. A beautiful lake. The freshest air I might have ever breathed in my life made one minute ago by {looks around} probably that fern right there.

Then I got home and loaded yet another fresh OS on my raspberry Pi so I can try USB booting to take advantage of the SSD I just got in the mail. It's mounted on a nice little plank of poplar I've dyed red mahogany. And my kids are starting to harmonize spontaneously, especially while they do chores, which is beautiful and funny. This morning I put another coat of polyurethane on my cottage office floor. I'd better stop and call it good, but it's been fun to see how perfect I'm able to get it compared to what a wreck it was when I started. Feels somehow purgative. I've been working on it since November ten minutes at a time, lol. It's the kind of work I love, though. I got the wiring through the wall last week.

Real life is heaven compared to social media. I think people don't know they're voluntarily living in hell.

I want to call them all out here to Bali Ha'i where their own special hopes, their own special dreams, loom on the hillside and shine in the streams.

As you can see, I've been blogging and working with NEW old tech pretty heavily. It has been keeping me away from here more than I would like - and I don't have much left to say when I get here. 

But I'm getting tremendous engagement from my FPGA blogging - and I feel like I have to nurture and grow that. My audience had dwindled to where a couple hundred hits an article a month and I was happy. These FPGA posts, I'm getting a couple hundred hits a DAY. 

Mon Feb 22 2021 19:42:10 MST from ParanoidDelusions

yeah I've been reading books a lot lately, it's nice to unplug now and then