A man walks by, on a dramatically shaded narrow street.

Work, meetings, weather, family, web stuff. What one would call a very normal week. A good one. Plenty to write about too.

  • 🌧️ Weather is finally catching up with the calendar, and the rain is here. Not perfect when one has to work outdoors, but… In a week we got hit by Babet, Aline, and Bernard. Ouch.

  • πŸ“· After a big resting period, we went back to a vineyard, and got some photos/videos for the shop I shoot for once in a while. Of course the night before had to be a rough one, so I was in a very good mood waking up. A couple of coffees later, I was on my way to the meeting point, got on the Tesla bus, and we drove to the Alentejo, far far away from the city. Spent a few hours with a Danish-American-Portuguese girl who’s running a vineyard, had lunch, drove back to the city. The mandatory battery charging stops are a pain, as they add hours to an already long day. When I’m lucky, I get some photos. Added, fun, bonus: on the way back we drove by David, and he spotted me. I did not, as I was texting him. Kids, get off your phones!

  • 🌧️ Thursday was an odd day. I had a meeting, and that was postponed for weather-related issues. I did mostly nothing. Had to send a receipt, did that. Not much else. Spent a while thinking about the sweetest hug my adorable daughter gave me the day before at dinner time. Found a theme for Kagi I kinda like. Watched the news. Waited for the time to pick the little one up.

  • 🧰 Thursday’s meeting ended up happening on Friday. A work meeting, a friend needs help with her store’s social media, and website. I might be able to help. Not sure if I really want to get into this, but would like to try. I feel my skill set is almost up to this, so… Let’s see how things progress. This would be a big change of pace for me, a non-photo related job. Putting all the hours I have spent at the computer to work, whenever I have no actual photos to do.

  • 🍰 The weekend came, and the whole family got together for dinner, on movieStar’s side. Both brothers, their wives, Mom&Dad. Auntie joined us. It was a blast. And SO much food, again. Next week Auntie’s son is joining us, just back from Japan. Her kids as well, So tinyMovieStar will have her cousins to play with, and not only her uncles. We could also get back to Saturday lunch with my parents, as my mom is by now fully recovered from the cataract surgery. Every weekend is a party!

  • πŸ₯° tinyMovieStar keeps on being awesome, and being a Papi is still my favorite part of the week, every single week. She’s now enjoying her swimming lessons a lot more, but not even close to how much she loves her ballet ones. She’s doing great at school too. We’re still the ones who pick her up earlier, and most of the time we both manage to do it. We’re at home, working on something, counting the minutes until we can go. We just love having her around, she’s great company. She has an imaginary friend, for a while now, and I should have mentioned him before. He’s the most imaginative imaginary friend imaginable, of course: his name is Jovedine (I have never heard of this time), and he comes from GuinΓ© Bissau (of course, why wouldn’t he?). He has a severe disability on one of his legs, and he limps, and he’s missing an eye. He needs a bandage change every day. He has traveled the world with tinyMovieStar (Myanmar, Vietnam, Russia, …), sometimes as a friend, others as a husband, or even son. From time to time she’ll show us how he walks, and she’ll limp about, one hand covering her eye. She’s crazy. I love her.

  • πŸ“Ί Still on the Patriot train. Still odd, still enjoying it. Finished season one, taking a small break before season two. The Juul story is on pause, I was getting serious “I need a smoke” vibes from watching it. We tried an episode of the new Lupin season, but were so tired, we gave up. Not sure we’ll make it through this one.

  • πŸ“š Haven’t updated lately on what I’m reading because, well, I’m not reading a lot. Whenever I have some free time, I’ll just check the news, or Feedbin. That’s it. Books are “open”, on the app, but I’m afraid only a couple of pages at a time are read. Still, these are the ones I’m trying to go through: The Last Resort - Sarah Stodola, Please Scream Inside Your Heart - Dave Pell, Unreasonable Behavior - Don McCullin, Three Assassins - Kotaro Isaka, How to Avoid Being Killer in a War Zone - Rosie Garthwait. I’m putting it out there, maybe that’ll force me to get back to them. Also, I have been looking at Kobo, maybe I need a new ebook reader, now that movieStar seems to have kept mine forever. Reading on the phone is only possible if I turn on the sleep focus mode, where all notifications are off.

  • πŸ‘€ Gaby started it, and I tried it: shooting b&w for a while. He promised a month, I lasted a couple of hours on the first try. One photo, a single one, and then I was back to colour. Gave it another go. It doesn’t come easy for me. And I kinda cheated as well, as I posted a LOT of photos in between, photos from the archive, colorful ones.

  • πŸ•΅οΈβ€β™‚οΈ Kagi, Kagi, Kagi. It’s been going on for a couple of weeks now, I kept seeing the engine mentioned everywhere I look. And I’ve been doing what I’ve read some others did as well, carefully wondering if I should use Kagi for a specific search, saving those precious trial searches, not getting into it as I should for a proper test. So, I transferred $10, and am now ready to give it a go. By Wednesday my free trial had ended, and the first $5 were used for a month of Starter plan. I might need over 300 searches a month, but not ready to pay $10/month for a search engine just yet. I’m happy with Kagi. Not sure if pay-for-me happy, but really happy. Since I turned it into my default search engine, and stop caring if every search was worth spending one search token on it, I have been using it everywhere, and I’m really happy with the results I get. Usually there’s not a lot of scrolling when I search, as the thing I’m looking for is at the top of the list. I guess that means it’s a good search engine, right? The summarize function is pretty cool as well.

  • πŸ”© Adding a button to a site shouldn’t be that hard, but this particular one did take a while to figure out. Thankfully Sara came to the rescue, as I was about to give up. CSS can be SO tricky! Anyway, you can now find a “Reply on Mastodon” under every post on the blog. Of course someone took it upon themselves to create a plugin minutes after the whole thing was finally done (thanks, OtΓ‘vio), so now everyone can add the same feature, with a lot less trouble. The community part of both Micro.blog and Mastodon (social.lol in particular) keeps on being awesome. Happy to be a part of these two.

  • πŸ“₯ On Drafts… Greg posted about Drafts Web Capture, and this is even better than Mail to Drafts, a feature I mentioned last week. Thank you, I am now using it often, whenever I’m using my Mint install.