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Week 32: A Working Payphone in 2024
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Some acquaintances who work in education were staffing an event for back-to-school programs on Saturday. We visited the event to catch up with them and see some of their work. On our way out, I spotted a working payphone next to an administrative office. These are becoming a rare breed in 2024, so I had to take a photo.
Week 31: Mobile Coca-Cola Stand
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A local motorcycle club dedicated to vintage Japanese motorcycles held an event south of town this weekend. The gathering featured bikes of all makes and models spanning several decades of post-war Japanese history. My favorite was this kid-sized Coca-Cola motorcycle, complete with side-car cooler and parasol.
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We've had tending to a home garden for the past few months, and we've harvested a few strawberries from it already, but one of the plants we've been especially excited for is jalapeños. This week we harvested a fully-ripe pepper from the garden and cooked it in a pasta.
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Our garden continues to grow and thrive, though it's growing a little more slowly than we expected. While watering our bush pickle cucumbers one evening, I was struck by how massive some of the fruits were. I'm used to seeing pickles about the size of a pencil bag, but these are much larger: one looks more like a squash than a cucumber.
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I enjoy playing StepManiaX, an arcade game inspired by DanceDance Revolution and Pump It Up. The timing windows in SMX are much tighter than in other games, and I struggle to achieve good scores and avoid missing notes. This week I managed to get a full combo on a 21-rated chart.
Week 27: Ferrets in the Hammock
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Ferrets usually sleep 15 to 18 hours per day. Our cage has several hammocks that the ferrets, Mocha and Chai, can sleep in. Sometimes they sleep separately, and sometimes they curl up together. On this particular afternoon, Mocha and Chai slept in the same hammock.
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One day this week, I was asked to pick up some meals from a nearby store and bring them home for us to eat. My wife ordered a simple salad in a to-go box, which the staff put into a bag. Upon placing the bag onto the passenger seat, it immediately tipped over, and the salad box burst open on the car floor. The staff very kindly replaced the salad for us for free.
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Kansas City has a ramen restaurant called KC Craft Ramen. Their base menu is our favorite ramen menu in the area, but sometimes they host chefs from Japan for special events. This week they collaborated with Kanagawa-based Odawara Tanmen to produce a lovely tonkotsu dish.
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Our ferrets, Mocha and Chai, love to chase each other and play with their toys when they're awake. Naturally they run around quite a bit and expend a lot of energy. When they sleep, they sleep very hard, and we often find them lying in all sorts of strange positions. Here Mocha rests with the back half of her body in a hammock and her front paws in the air.
Week 23: Super Tiny Monkey Ball
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The local arcade community supplied cabinets to a gaming event this weekend. One member builds cabinets from scratch, and among his creations is a tabletop version of the original Monkey Ball. At the gaming event, he set up the game on a small portable television from the 1980s. The tiny image and significant input lag from converting the video signal from HDMI to composite RCA made the game almost unplayable.
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We built a raised-bed garden in our backyard about six weeks ago and planted several starter plants. They immediately began to brown, and we worried that we'd already killed them, but we soon discovered that the soil was simply too dry. 41 days later and one strict watering regimen later, we now have our first batch of crops, including several strawberries and even a jalapeno pepper.
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I attended an anime convention over the weekend. The convention featured an arcade gaming room, with machines provided by an outside vendor as well as enthusiasts in the local area. A local owner received a request to load another game on his cabinet, and during the process, we got a rare glimpse of the underlying operating system for the machine. This particular game runs on Windows Embedded 7.
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In an effort to save money and eat more healthily, we decided to prep several weeks' worth of meals over the weekend. We ultimately made five different recipes of 8 servings each. The process involved cooking almost 15 pounds of meat, an amount I hadn't seen all in one place in a very long time.
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My smartphone, a budget Nokia device, has terrible low-light photography. Even at its brightest, the aurora appeared as little more than a very dark-gray blob against an otherwise black sky. This photo comes from my mother, who saw the aurora with us.
Week 18: Four Swords Adventures
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My college friends are big video game fans. In our university days, we used to host weekly retro game nights, in which we would bring over consoles from the 1980s through the early 2000s and relive some cherished childhood memories. Recently they decided to revive the tradition, and we began this week by playing a classic, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures.
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To get some exercise this week, I walked along a trail that runs through a nearby park. Several small creeks flow through the park. As I passed one of these, I found a man sitting on the side of the footpath, wordlessly staring at the water. I don't know who he was, why he was there, or what he was thinking about. But I think we could all use some time in silence, just watching the river flow.
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We have a decorative wooden box mounted on the wall of our porch near the door, which holds a few fake plants. A few weeks ago we found that a robin had made its nest in the box and laid four eggs. All four eggs hatched on Wednesday. This picture was taken when the chicks were just six days old.
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Monday saw a partial solar eclipse pass over the area. We had solar-rated glasses to be able to look at the sun, but we discovered that it was impossible to get a picture on our phones: the remaining glare was just too powerful, and the glasses darked the solar disk too much. However, a crescent was visible in the camera's lens flare. In the absense of more sophisticated equipment, this was good enough.
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We spent a lot of time on trails over the weekend. The area was heavily wooded, with few features to explore, but one section had some lovely clearings and small meadows tucked alongside. This one looked particularly favorable as a campsite to us.
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I used to dye hard-boiled eggs as a kid, when my family visited my grandparents. The tradition died out by the time I was about 11 years old, and I had never dyed eggs since. My grandmother passed away not long ago, and this year we all had the independent thought to dye eggs as a fun way to remember her. My mother bought a food-safe dye kit, and we went to town on Saturday. Strangely, only the red and blue dye stuck to the egg shell, and only the green was absorbed inside.
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When I visit Kansas City, a favorite stop of mine is Strawberry Hill, just west of the city center. St. John the Baptist Catholic Church provides one of the best views of the KC skyline anywhere in the area. Surprisingly, even most residents of Kansas City don't seem to know about it.
Week 11: Cloud-to-cloud Lightning
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This week a powerful storm system hit the region. We avoided the worst of the hail and high winds, but we still saw quite a bit of lightning. I wanted to take a photo of the bolts, which was surprisingly hard to do. This was the best shot I could manage.
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On one of my evening walks, I came across an old tree with a sagging branch. Years of love from the locals--or abuse, depending on one's viewpoint--have left the tree requiring some support. The sign reads: "Please do not climb on ME. I am old. That is why I have a crutch. If they see you climbing on ME, they will cut off my arm. So please, no climbing... but hugs are okay."
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One of my cycling routes takes me through an industrial park on the outskirts of town. There are many large warehouses and a bustling train yard nearby, but undeveloped farmland surrounds them, and I don't have to share the backroads with pedestrians or other cyclists. Of course, most of the warehouses are designed with intermodal shipping in mind, and stacks of containers are littered everywhere. This one seemed rather najestic to me, like a series of cliffs.
Week 08: What Happened to Greenland?
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My wife and I visited an arts and crafts shop a few days ago. I hadn't been to one in a while, and while she picked out decorations and tools, I wandered down the aisles. This scrapbook, adorned with a world map stylized to look like paint splotches, caught my eye. Most of the world looked okay, but Greenland was in bad shape.
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We have owned a Pump It Up arcade machine for many years, but when we moved into our current house, we discovered that the cabinet did not fit in our basement. We decided to take the metal dance pads downstairs by themselves and set up a community build of PIU on a standard computer. I finally got around to configuring the dance pads this week.
Week 06: Chai and Mocha Eat an Egg
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Ferrets are not treat-driven animals: on the contrary, they tend to imprint on the food they eat regularly and dislike trying new things. One treat the ferrets love, however, is an egg yolk. Chai (left) and Mocha (right) are seen enjoying the snack here.
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After a rough few weeks with busy work shifts and freezing temperatures, I had a chance to get out and visit a park in the city. The weather was beautiful, the melting snow revealed still-green grass underneath, and the sidewalks and trails were packed with walkers. I caught this shot of a pond in the park when relatively few people were nearby.
Week 04: StepManiaX Improvement
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On of my friends from the arcade community has agreed to exercise weekly with me. Our routine usually consists of going to a local arcade and playing a dance game there for a few hours. StepManiaX is rapidly becoming one of my favorite dance games, and we decided to play it this week. My accuracy in the game is much improved since I first played it in 2022.
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An unusually-strong cold snap hit the American Midwest over the last few weeks; in our region, some days had a daily high temperature below 0 F (-18 C). Many filling stations have a container of wash fluid that customers can use to clean their car windows, but the stations usually empty the containers before it gets this cold. I had never seen the liquid actually frozen before today.
Week 02: In Emergency, Break Case
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A family friend flew into town to visit for a few days this week. We arrived at the airport quite early on the day of his flight, so we decided to park and wait inside the terminal. A fire extinguisher was mounted on the pillar next to our parking space. Its metal case had seen better days.
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A cabinet in our bathroom has three doors, each covered with a mirror. I keep my things on one side and my wife keeps hers on the other. It's not common for us to use the cabinet at the same time, but when it happens, the doors create a series of reflections similar to a hall of mirrors. One particular pattern caught my eye this week.
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