New bike lanes on Foster looking really nice. Sky is being all moody.

Spring in the neighborhood.

At C Bar a few days ago.

☁️⛅️🌦🌩⛈🌧🌤. Repeat. #pdxtst

Mac Pro always felt like something I didn’t need but would be nice if I were to upgrade to it. With this new one I’m like, yea, I’m not even in that ballpark anymore.

I will add it to my Amazon wishlist though, along with that $10,000 lens, in case someone wants to be bffs.

I’m feeling a love-hate relationship with activity streaks. While it is nice to have a streak and motivating to keep it going, I feel some anxiety coming along with it.

So, in an effort to avoid the unhealthy side effects, I am going to willfully break streaks.

This one has gone for some time. And today I’m ending it.

A positive effect of a streak is that it helps to develop a habit, and I’d like to think that it has been the case this time. Let’s see if that lasts.

P.S. For those unfamiliar, these charts show the activity tracking that is done by my Apple Watch.

Sunset on Foster Road. Portland, Oregon. 26th May, 2019.

We made a raised gardening bed last weekend, filled it with dirt yesterday, and Jenni planted yummies today.

The mail and keys organizer located just inside our home entrance had to go. It couldn’t handle our lifestyle, by which I mean, hold a bunch of mail of varying sizes for a bunch of days. Oh, and some keys and the super long IKEA shoehorn (the best!).

I began to dream up a new replacement as a woodworking project. I made a Pinterest board to get some design inspiration. Then one day I just sat down and sketched it out using GoodNotes on my iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil.

I’d imagined that the plywood would be 1/2" thick, but after some discussion with Jenni, we decided to go for the chonk look that was distinctive of the tabletop shelf/box I made a couple of months ago. This lowered the costs as well since I already had enough scraps of the baltic birch plywood. All I needed was the dark walnut stain, a birch dowel, and hanging hardware. The mail holders are held together by glue, and attached to the back by screws drilled in from behind. The pegs are held in by glue. There were a couple other changes as evident from the sketch and the photo of the final piece.

The groove detail in the pegs was Jenni’s idea. I tried a couple of ways to cut it out and landed upon just keeping the table saw blade low and using my crosscut sled to spin the dowel in place over the blade. That worked wonderfully!

I finished the build a few weeks ago but the hardware I bought to hang it didn’t work well. Then other things took up some time so I finally procured some new hardware and hung it up this week. We’re both very happy with how it turned out.

And in parting, here’s a photo of the old organizer trying hard to keep up.

So Nationalism tightens its grip on India as well.