I wanted to take a break this week, since it was the most special week of the year, then I kept delaying last week’s issue, and now I'm so late that this week has basically already become last week. Also, I can’t stop taking pictures of plants.

I confess: I baked bagels twice this week, and I was disappointed both times, for different reasons. The first time because even though I was following my own, well-tested recipe, I also had Richard Hart’s recipe open at the same time, so I ended up underproofing and underbaking them.

The second time I erred in the opposite direction, and proofed the dough for nine hours, which turned out to be too long. Too bad, because that dough looked and felt so nice—light and airy and just a pleasure to work with. But overproofed meant they came out a bit flat and just weird to look at—still edible, but I’m not gonna show them either.

Nonetheless, I’ll make good on last week’s announcement, and use this to soft launch a section of my website I’ve been thinking about for years and never done anything about, mostly because of a certain tendency to overproof overengineer things before I even have content to post. “Soft launch” means that it’s not linked anywhere, it contains a single recipe, and all the fancy stuff I have planned for it is still only in my head.

Is it okay to announce! that next week! I will have some exciting new content! up on the web, which is not ready yet because my sourdough starter has been slow at coming out of hibernation? Or is it just my version of “my dog ate my homework”? We’ll never know.

This would have been the worst time for a baking project anyway, since our dishwasher broke, and apparently the $400 drain pump is on backorder and it will be weeks/months/unclear before it becomes available again. So the all-consuming task this week has been the search for a new one. I thought I’d enjoy it more, given how bad the old one was, but after several days of reading blogs and comparing specs across various sites I was almost ready to just buy a new home instead. But maybe that’s a whole post for another week.

There has to be a middle ground between posting only links to videos of cats and dogs napping together, or bears being chased away by pigs (which I don’t do) and posting about “AI” over and over (which I’d rather not do, yet here we are again), as if any new link weren’t just a confirmation of the previous ones, more evidence of the same nonsense and just another way to fill everyone’s brains with the same anxiety week after week.

I obviously need to refresh my reading list, so I welcome ideas.

A reader, who claims I “hate everything”, inadvertently gave me the idea to collect and post about things I appreciate/like/love while out and about. So I’ll start with that picture of the ghost of a leaf on the sidewalk—not because it’s a particularly good picture, but because I find it a very cool phenomenon.

It’s been an eventful week, but I was finally able to take a couple of days off work, after helping launch a whole new section of the flagship website, which I think is the most important, but which for various reasons had lived in its own separate site for years.

I will eventually write about it in more detail, but the work we’ve done for that new section includes, among other things: cleaning up and moving a lot of content (none of which was my responsibility, thankfully), designing new visual elements that will eventually help us refresh the entire site (for which we had great external help), and rewriting a lot of code to accommodate my outlandish ideas about how we should build the front end of the site—this last part is what kept me at my desk for longer than I’m usually comfortable with.

I will one day blog again—soon.

First things first: Bake Off is back, and—as of two days ago—Taskmaster is back too, which means we’re all set with British brain candy for a few weeks. (Unless I decide to slip back into my covid-era fixation with Midsomer Murders, which I shouldn’t.)

That also means that our Netflix subscription is back, and we’re gonna have to make the most of it, if we can navigate its abysmal interface and find anything worth watching. Seriously, how is it that if I watch an episode of anything then it becomes impossible to even find the show the next time I open the app? We’ll never know. But this week’s discovery has been A Man on the Inside, which we’d missed when it came out in 2024. Its strong (and inevitable) The Good Place vibes are a delight, and unless the show takes an unexpected turn—no spoilers please—I’m absolutely in favor of a mystery without murders.

Given the state of everything, we all need some brain candy, and I’m trying very hard not to add to the collective pile of shit.

I’m always in favor of a short week, but this past one was another beast. It shows because my morning reading has been very limited, and I’m trying very hard not to fill my brain and my website (and these newsletters) with nothing but doom and gloom. I’ve been reading a lot about Wikipedia, though—and you should too!—and not all of it is gloomy and doomful.

It’s been one hell of a week, one of those when blocking my calendar still doesn’t get the job done. But it’s not like we have an extremely tight deadline at work to whip up a whole new section of the flagship website—oh wait, we do! I may post something about it in a few weeks. It’s actually pretty cool in a few different ways.

That’s a way to say there’s nothing new from the blog, so I just gave my many readers, who have been flocking to subscribe to this newsletter, the gift of time. You’re welcome.

Notes and links

So I’m trying this thing as a way to get myself to write more. I used to think I should save my writing muscle for things that truly mattered to me, but that meant that the only things I wrote for a long time were code (which, let’s face it, is to writing what typing is to playing the piano), emails, and Jira tickets. If you don’t know what a Jira ticket is, let’s swap brains for a couple of hours, since I could use a break.

That’s changing. I’ve written more blog posts since the start of 2025 than in the previous six years combined, and I want to keep at it. But because my main obstacle to writing has always been that I want it to be good and meaningful, and have historically failed at either or both, I’ve also added a “Notes and links” section, where I’m giving myself permission to not write excessively personal posts, and, I suppose, to not be good or meaningful. But it’s also a way to store useful or interesting links for myself, and if someone else also finds them useful or interesting, tant mieux.

From the blog