March Check-In

April 6, 2022

March didn't particularly feel like that busy of a month. About the only eventful thing that happened was a week-long vacation to Cape May, New Jersey at the end of the month.

Homebrew Results

I can proudly say that both the Belgian Blonde and the Red Ale I brewed both turned out fantasic. The red ale has a great malt taste to it and the blonde has a nice sweetness to it. I was worried about both since it can be too easy to contaminate a brew, but both ended up delicious.

Morning Brew

This month, I started grinding my own coffee right before brewing it. I picked up an OXO Brew Conical Burr Coffee Grinder that we keep right next to the coffee pot. I figure it will allow my wife and I to try new beans and flavors.

Continued Work on Digital Family Cookbook

I put my fitness tracking app on the back burner for the time being and have moved onto re-writing Digital Family Cookbook in .NET and a brand new React/TypeScript frontend. My big win this month was getting integration tests running succesfully. I ended up using Entity Framework for it, so I can use an In-Memory database to run the tests. It's pretty neat...at least to me.

Monthly Roundup

Running & Biking: Still cold out which limited me to some extent

Between sore legs and rain, I only ended up running 25 miles
Didn't end up biking any...the stationary trainer I have is kind of boring to me so I have to be in the mood

Lifting: I ended up setting a new PR for squats, but my deadlift is stalling a bit.

squats (335 lbs.)

Reading:

Nudge - This was a fantastic read into how we as humans can be persuaded into doing things in ways we don't always recognize. The authors do a good job going into the good and bad of it.
The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music - Dave Grohl has always seemed to be an interesting and unique person. This was an interesting memoir talking about his growth from High School punk musician, through Nirvana and eventually Foo Fighters. If you're a fan of any of his work, I'd highly recommend this.
It's Better to Be Feared: The New England Patriots Dynasty and the Pursuit of Greatness - I'm by no means a Patriots fan, but I found this to be an interesting look into the 2 decades long dynasty of Brady-Belichick and the Patriots.

Writing: Nada

Gaming - Continued my Halo series play-through.

Halo 5: Guardians - I beat this before and the story is probably the worst of all the Halo games. The battles are fun though.
Halo: Infinite - Finally got to start the new Halo campaign. The open world aspect of it is a branch from the other games. At some points it has almost become like Skyrim for me...putting off the main story to do all the side quests. The battles so far have been fun, Hunters are the bain of my existence.