I went on a short vacation last week and didn’t get around to writing out my weeknotes so this edition will cover last week and the one before. Enjoy!

Went on a boy’s trip in Northern Morocco

It was so fun. It started with a night of incredible shrimp tacos and deep conversations about our lives when we get back to the United States. After that, we spent a few days in El Houcima on the northern Mediterranean coast.

Most of the days, we’d wake up late after a night of games and gin and tonic. We’d make a standard Moroccan breakfast (eggs and bread) with some instant coffee and get ready to go to the beach. We went to a different beach each day and they were all incredible. The beaches were busy but we had our own little table and umbrella to relax at. The water was calm and some of the clearest water I’ve ever seen. One big personal gripe that I have with vacationing in Morocco with a group of Americans is the comments and attention we get just by existing. There was none of that in El Houcima, thankfully.

After getting back from the beach, we’d usually play a few games of my current favorite dice game (10,000) or a new card game (escoba) while everyone rotated using the shower. We went to the marina a few times and had a nice dinner. After that, we’d go home and play more games and drink and talk and stay up too late.

On the last full day, we jumped in a taxi and went to a beach called Tala Youssef just a short drive West. It was the most beautiful beach I’d ever seen. We got a table at one of the small restaurants along the beach and swam in the cool water. After a few hours of swimming and collecting cool rocks, we split a couple of tagines for lunch before going home.

I said goodbye to my friend who is leaving next week. I have no idea when I’ll see him again and it felt bittersweet to say goodbye. I’m glad he’s leaving after a two year gauntlet in Morocco. At the same time, like I said, I don’t know when I’ll see him again and I’m sad that we won’t have an excuse to hang out every few months.

Bits and bobs

• I added a section about accrual accounting to my Finances and Bookkeeping piece and cleaned up some broken links that were in there
• I gave up on trying to read Transitions and bought The agile comms handbook by Giles Turnbull. I’m excited to read it!
• Departure Mono is making the rounds on the internet. It’s my new terminal font and Obsidian interface font and I love it.
• Finished reading The Women by Kristin Hannah. What a journey of a book, absolutely incredible. I learned a lot about the horrors of the Vietnam War and especially the sentiment and hardships that come with returning to “the world” after being in Vietnam. The Women is a story about invisibility, shame, and healing and I would recommend it to nearly everyone.

Links

• The Hydrant Directory by day lane. This is a public domain directory of fire hydrants where a color palette gets extracted from each one. I’m going to be using one as a color scheme on my website at some point in the future.
• The secret inside One Million Checkboxes on eieio.games. I’ve really been enjoying Nolen Royalty’s write-ups on this fun checkbox project.
• Index card system to track daily, weekly, and monthly routines by Analog Office. I really love Anna’s systems and how she writes about them. I’m interested in creating some kind of tickler system that is not just my calendar.
• HashVer versioning scheme with a hat tip to David Brownman’s Versioning as Communication post. None of my coding projects are significant enough to warrant a proper SemVer scheme so this seems perfect for most of my use cases.
• The Communal Plot by PerThirtySix. Each day, it asks you to answer two questions on a spectrum, forming a scatter plot of responses. It then shows you how everyone else answered and some basic stats on how you answered compared to others.

Created: 2024-09-01

Last modified: 2024-09-01