This content originally appeared on daverupert.com and was authored by daverupert.com
In the middle of the night on the morning of July 4th, a storm parked over the Texas Hill Country and caused the Guadalupe river to rise more than 25 feet in two hours. 135 dead, including dozens of children from summer camps along the river. As a parent, this is the greatest tragedy you could imagine. My heart goes out to the families and friends who lost a little one that week.
As a Texan, this is yet another tragedy in a growing list of rare but forecastable tragedies where federal, state, and local officials failed Texans. I’m tired.
With that event casting a dark shadow on the summer acknowledged, here’s a recap of the last couple months.
A trip to the Grand Canyon
In late June my family stole away for a quick trip to Arizona. My in-laws bought a vacation place in Flagstaff to escape the Phoenix heat. We wanted to check out the new place and figured we could do something American and tag on a quick trip to the Grand Canyon.
On the morning of the second day we arrived at Grand Canyon National Park early. We found a good parking spot steps from the canyon’s edge and told our kids to get out and see the view. I’ve been to the canyon a couple times but nothing can truly prepare you for the enormity and pastel grandeur you’re about to see. I enjoyed re-living the first glimpses through my kids’ collective gasps of awe… and after about 10 minutes they were ready to go home and get on their iPads.
We milled around the park for nearly two hours making frequent stops. We stopped at the Devil’s Watchtower on the way out of the park which I’d recommend. All-in-all, we saw something truly remarkable together and my wife and I felt like we checked off a big “This is good for you and you’ll thank us later” parenting checkbox.
The next day the kids rode back with the grandparents to Phoenix while my wife and I took a short detour to go see Sedona. All these years visiting Arizona and I’d never been. We don’t buy into all the energy crystal woo-woo the town advertises, but it’s a beautiful and inspiring piece of America with incredible vistas and sculpture-like red stone mountains. I’d like to spend more time there.
We had a couple days in Phoenix to hang with cousins and celebrated my great-nephew’s second birthday. He’s a cool dude. Mid-week we headed back to Austin to send the kids to summer camp. That week could have been a great one for my wife and I to enjoy an empty house, but I ended up (over-)working all week.
Trip to San Diego
The day after the kids got back from summer camp we packed our bags again and headed to San Diego with my wife’s entire family. The next four days were beach days; digging holes, playing guitar, hitting the smashball, dozing off to books, and chasing a toddler around. I stayed in my solar fortress most of the time to avoid my enemy: The Sun.
But it wouldn’t be a Rupert Family Vacation without some calamities! On the second day my son got the worst sunburn of his life; no blisters, just red. He’d survive… but he didn’t know that. I sympathize because I had tons of sunburns as a kid. When it itches, it sucks.
And then there’s my daughter…
At the end of the week we tagged on a couple more days and visited Austin friends who spend the summer in Encinitas. Our daughters who have been besties since daycare slotted right back into their brand of silly lip sync routines and giggling. To soak up more beach time, we hiked down the cliff to Beacons beach and set up some chairs in the rocks while the girls boogie boarded their hearts out having the time of their life until…
My daughter comes to us holding her arm crying. When she reached for the loose boogie board leash she slammed her hand down and said she felt something fold over her arm and sting her. We walked over to the lifeguard stand and got the bad news, “That looks like a sting ray.”
The untold irony here is all week long my daughter was telling anyone who would listen that her two greatest fears about the ocean were: getting caught in a rip current and getting stung by a stingray. We tried to diffuse those fears but she kept talking about it. And here we were, the prophecy came true.
“I can call a lifeguard truck to meet you at the top of the hill but you have to take care of it now.” Uh-oh. That’s when I knew we were in a serious situation. We said no to the lifeguard truck but needed to submerge her arm in 115ºF water (hot tap water) for 30-90 minutes to neutralize the proteins in the venom. We hiked back up the cliff and walked the three blocks to the house. Tears the whole way.
After a couple hours everything was sore but stable. She’s a tough kid and that was a difficult situation. What a champ.
We survived: A skunk attack
Late one night my daughter (who has a sensitive smeller) said “Something smells like skunk!” I caught a faint whiff of it and thought “It’s probably some neighbors smoking weed” and opened the back door to assess the situation and in rushed my two mutts, one of them covered in skunk juice! Yikes!
We did our best to corral them to the garage where we washed them with an internet-recommended concoction. I can’t even describe the degree to how awful this was. The smell infiltrated our house and sulfur burned in the eyes and nose all night long. We spent the next day Fabreezing and disposing of any rogue object the smell might have transferred to: the backdoor mat, collars, one kids sandal, the dead skunk near the trash… Ah, gross.
A skunk attack is not a situation you can control (dogs being dogs) but it’s not one I want to relive any time soon.
Another school year begins
This week we strap ourselves into the bobsled and push the sled downhill on an out-of-control course where the breaks do nothing and it sends us crashing into Christmas. Feeling optimistic about this year, but there will be more homework for both our kids which is historically not a strength we operate in as a family. Lord help us.
Stats
Here you go, number perverts. All the dopamine deep-dives and drive-thrus I collected over the summer.
Learning
- Sovietology – Based on a space race analogy I heard at work I made a deep-dive on the Soviet space program which led me to Sovietology and trying to understand how the Soviet central planning system (“cybernetics”) failed its fellow comrades.
- ADHD – Been watching a lot of videos on ADHD and trying to understand it more
- Minimalism and decluttering – ADHD videos lead me into minimalism and decluttering videos and it makes a difference if you view clutter as stimulus. If I could just get the rest of the family on board…
- Drawing – I’d like to be good at drawing, so I spent a lot of learning about shapes, perspectives, sketching, and more
- Studio Setups – Because ShopTalk has a YouTube now, I’ve become a little bit obsessed with optimal YouTube setups but I haven’t done anything… yet
- Budgeting – After all our summer trips and feeling spent (physically and fiscally), I sat down one weekend and did some budgeting and ingested a lot on the subject.
Health and wellness
A lot of updates here but still untangling the Gordion knot of stress, anxiety, weight, and ADHD. I’m talking to doctors and making some changes and I believe they are helping even if it’s not fully realized yet.
Blogging
Over a dozen posts over two months with some vacations in there, that’s about all you can ask for.
Reading
Behind pace for the Book-a-Week Club and that’s fine with me.
-
System Collapse ★★★ – The last book in the Murderbot Diaries. This one was a slog, to be honest. The action at the end was good but the crescendo right before that, the big group project… was disappointing.
-
The Wrong Stuff ★★★★★ – A great book about the relative failure of the Soviet Cosmonaut program compared to NASA even though the USSR had many “firsts” they did so without regard to the safety and stability of their program and rockets.
-
Space Battleship Yamato ★★★½ – Got this from Kinokuniya to satiate my retro space manga obsession. It delivered on the space opera promise but had a lot of the early-days manga pitfalls. That wasn’t a deal-breaker for me but could be for some I’m sure.
-
Red Plenty ★★★ – A historical fictional narrative about site managers and scientists under Khrushchev’s rule. It paints a nice picture about the economics (“cybernetics”) and central planning of that time, but sometimes the narrative was too thick (like Dostoyevsky thick). Reaffirming I’m a non-fiction guy.
-
ADHD and Us ★★★★ – A good book for people in a relationship where one or more partners are neurodiverse. Recommended by my psychiatrist.
-
A Different Kind of Power ★★★★½ – Jacinda Arden’s autobiography is a bit hard to read because of how calm, cool, collected, and capable she seems compared to her American contemporary Donald Trump who was nothing but chaos and incompetence.
-
Dungeon Crawler Carl – [In progress]
-
Moral Ambition ★★★★ – I enjoyed Bregman’s other books more, but this book certainly is challenging. It asks you to consider how you can make the biggest, moral, positive change and adjust your life towards that goal. That certainly tugs at my heartstrings but is a tough call to action in uncertain times.
-
Win Every Argument – [In progress]
-
The Dawn of Everything – [In progress]
Media
Saw some good movies this period… which is rare.
Movies
- 28 Years Later – Good movie. Lots of zombie dong, or… it’s more accurate to say one notably huge alpha hog.
- Superman – I enjoyed a DC movie; a Superman movie! Unbelievable. Has James Gunn saved the DC cinematic universe? Hopefully.
- K-Pop Demon Slayers (Netflix) – An wonderful animated film and you can see the foundation of fun from the creative and technical teams come out. Great job Sony Animation.
- Fantastic Four: First Steps – The art direction in this movie is incredible… fantastic even. A real cinematic feat. Worth seeing in theaters.
TV
- Welcome to Wrexham S4 (Hulu) – Up the town. Unreal ending.
- Murderbot (Apple TV) – Loved the books… and uh… you can watch the show, if you want to, it’s fine I guess.
- Mythic Quest S5 (Apple TV) – Not for everyone but feels algorithmically generated for me.
Streaming
- Game Changer S7 (Dropout) – This season of Game Changer has managed to outdo itself and that’s an incredible a feat.
Anime
- Mobile Suite Gundam Gquuuuuux (Prime)
Podcasts I purged my podcasts and abandoned some of my favorites (like The Adventure Zone), but I think I’m better for it. Now I can focus on the ones I enjoy.
- If Books Could Kill…
- Maintenance Phase
- Living Planet
- ATXplained
Recording
ShopTalk
Gunpla
This hobby isn’t dead yet! I’ve got five or so in the backlog but three of them are practice kits for a larger project I have in mind. In service to that project, I tried my hand at anime cel-shading an Entry Grade RX-78-2. I tried half-a-dozen application techniques and didn’t find a way that I liked. I need to do more research and keep trying.
Digital Gardening
- Made my homepage tie-dyed for funsies. It’s based off the accent color and changes a bit every day.
- Built some automation for my vibechecks, will hopefully post more later.
- Added more pentatonic scales to Pentablaster… it’s in a messy state right now but I wanted to play with Ethiopian scales. I have plans to fix it up.
- Regenerated cover images for my stories page using Midjourney. I think I did better this time around.
Video games
Mostly puzzles, but I did go reopen the door to a city builder.
- Cities Skylines – I hooked up SteamLink to play my PC games from the shed inside the house on my Mac. Trying to play enough Cities Skylines 1 to justify buying Cities Skylines 2.
- Balatro – The joker addiction continues. Feel like if I beat one more stake I’ll be happy and can quit.
- Clues by Sam – A daily caper! If you’re not playing this you should be.
- Stars – A sudoku-like puzzler from Inkwell Games
- Fields – A difficult pattern game from Inkwell which I first thought was impossible but now feel like I’m getting the hang of it.
This content originally appeared on daverupert.com and was authored by daverupert.com