June 2024 Check-In

I can’t believe the year is already half over. But whether I believe it is or not makes no difference. The highlight of June was my birthday trip to New York City.

New York City

For my birthday, my wife and I continued the tradition of spending it in New York City. We changed it up a little bit by staying in a new hotel. We stayed at LUMA on 41st Street. The hotel was nice. We chose it because rooms come with a little sitting area which was just nice when we needed to rest a bit between activities. The primary reason for the change though was to put us closer to Bryant Park. We spent most mornings getting up, grabbing coffee and a pastry and sitting in the park reading or writing. It was just a nice way to charge up and start the day. Even when the heat wave hit on our last 2-3 days, Bryant Park wasn’t too bad early in the morning in the shade.

The rest of the trip was fun. We seldom go to NYC with any real plan. Most of the time it’s just walk around and see what we find. This trip, the highlights ended up being:

• Seeing Book of Mormon, which was raunchy and funny.
• Visited the Starbuck Roastery in Chelsea. Was kind of cool to see some of their roasting process.
• Checked out a number of breweries in both Long Island City and Manhattan
  • Fifth Hammer
  • Focal Point
  • Talea
  • Other Half

Fitness

I’ve made a concerted effort to eat healthier this month and the scale is starting to show it. I’ve put the effort to building in some runs, lifting more, and even found a nice day weather-wise to go for a bike ride.

The heat wave towards the end of the month got me lifting more, which isn’t a bad thing. Going outside to run would just make myself miserable. I’m hoping to start dragging myself out of bed earlier to maybe get some morning pre-work runs in since it’s only going to get hotter as summer really starts to sink in over the next 2 months.

Media Repository

I’ve been hard at work on building my media repository in Blazor. I’ve gotten the management movies, video games, links, & podcasts all built. Still need to find a good way to import the data from Notion, but I can figure that out later. I still have some open questions on how I want to handle the completed project, but I can cross that bridge when I get there.

I do plan on sharing the code once complete. I don’t see myself customizing this to make it usable for others as I’m building it only for myself, but if the code can help someone build a solution for themselves faster, they would be welcome to reference it or fork it.

Site Updates

I’ve done some small tweaks to my site. I’ve added pinned posts, a works in progress page, added music & movies to my now page, and added a WebC component for social media embeds.

Monthly Round-Up

🏃🏼‍♂️ Fitness

• Running: 31.96 miles ⬇️
• Walking: 0 miles ⬇️
• Biking: 27.38 miles ⬆️
• Lifting: 186,761 lbs. ⬆️

📚 Reading

• Finished State of Fear by Michael Crichton
• Finished Holly by Stephen King
• Finished Wanderers by Chuck Wendig
• Finished Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow
• Finished Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow
• Finished The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow
• Started Wayward by Chuck Wendig

✍🏻 Writing

• Reading Log
  • June 3 (#79)
  • June 10 (#80)
  • June 24 (#81)
• Week Notes
  • May 26 - June 1
  • June 2 - 8
  • June 9 - 22
  • June 23 - 30
• Wrote about personal sites, connections & 11ty
• Wrote about my experience with 11ty, 6 months in
• Wrote about adding some CSS to help with accessibility

🎮 Gaming

• Continued Mass Effect 3

📺 TV

• Continued The Sopranos
• Continued Designated Survivor

🎬 Movies

• Patriot Games
• Anyone But You