Hey, look, a new email! Thanks to folks who subscribed. This should be a fun little project, and I’m excited to have a spot to stash things that isn’t social media. It’s more meditative and feels less hostile. (For now >:-) )
This week and last have been a bit of a slog — I’ve been really bogged down with projects, in my head too much about dog training, irritated about everything, slightly teetering on the edge of overwhelm and in need of a break.
So I’ve been taking one. I took a really long night walk, something I haven’t done in a while, and stopped by a local ice cream place to shell out an indulgent $16 on a pint for me — vanilla, but their vanilla is really good — and a heart-shaped puck of peanut butter ice cream for the dog.
I spent the mornings at cafes and just worked, headphones in, keeping an eye on the folks around me for some people-watching: two people on what was either a date or a overdue catch up, one person hogging a four-top table, a group of young boys pushing tables next to each other to sit together. It was nice.
Then I’d come back and do some intensive dog training with Louie, working on the basics and getting him back in the motions of “look at that” with some high-value treats (cut up pieces of Kraft singles, which smeared all over my hands and the leash) and lots of praise. He’s doing great, no surprise, and is getting better every week at watching me while we walk. (But not when it comes to not barking at the neighborhood bunnies.)
It’s kind of cold and humid today in Chicago, a reminder that we live on a swamp next to a big, big lake. Crosstown Classic was driving traffic all through the North Side over the weekend, but I don’t mind. It’s nice seeing everyone outside.
Anyway. I revisited the junk drawer image that’s in my first email, and looked at the Wikimedia Commons page to see if there’s any fun metadata. And oh, is there fun metadata:
Obsessed. I appreciate how detailed it is, and love that it’s also identified by its geography. It makes me want to know what international junk drawers look like.
The number one question I get asked that I don't think I've answered for this group of people yet: “How is the Times/fellowship/work?”
Short answer, good. Great! Depending on your comfort level, I'm either in the home stretch or crunch time. I have four months left, and while I feel like I've made massive strides (see my note at the end) in my reporting process, my confidence and my work, I ammmmm soooo tired.
I'm pushing myself harder than I think I ever have in a job, which is saying a ton as a perennial workaholic. But I'm able to do so much with the time I have that it feels like breathing in that oxygen in a can that they sell at the Denver airport, and I had better take full advantage of every week I have here. Hard to not operate with a scarcity mindset when you've come from newsroom after newsroom that have all been a bit tight on resources.
Ironically, that's something that I keep coming back to as a mantra of sorts to ground myself: I’ve done this before. I’ve routinely hammered out projects with a team of one, a budget of nothing and far too little time. I know I can do it, because I’ve done it.
So yes. Things are going well. And I can’t wait to have this story out in the world, so I can keep chugging along on this beat afterward!
Where in the world have I been over the past few weeks?
The southwest suburbs, for the most part. I spent my days driving around reporting and my evenings wrangling the dogs, taking Louie on long walks around the suburbs and rolling my eyes while he barked at the deer (and squirrels and raccoons and coyotes). I’m pretty sure that my parents’ neighbors think he’s the devil incarnate. (Maybe he is.)
I always bring my camera with me, and this time took a lot of photos. None of them will probably end up in the story that I’m working toward publishing, but that’s okay. I’ll post a bunch when I’m done with the fellowship, probably here, and also probably on Instagram.
I don’t mind bouncing back and forth between the burbs and the city, though it does present a little bit of a challenge with the pup. Thankfully, Louie is a very good sport, even when the Stevenson is a hellscape and it takes over an hour to even get out of the city proper to begin with.
We’ll be headed out next week for more field reporting to round out some data analysis. That’s the great thing about working with a team that actually understands the benefits and limits of using data — they encourage me to spend more time doing field reporting than behind a computer screen, especially because this project is driven by my lived experience.
Watching
⛴️ Gourmet food with lo-fi tunes and glimpses at luxury vacations
I’ve raved about this in person with friends, but there’s this YouTube account, TheCrewChef, that I cannot stop watching. (And I mean, like, “smash that like button, subscribe and hit the bell and watch the video as soon as I see it pop up” sort of behavior, not in any sort of casual way.)
It’s a video diary-ish of Australian yacht chef Nina Wilson, who works on the motor yacht Loon (aka MY LOON, etc). While I’ve been watching her videos for quite a while now, I’ve gone down such a superyacht rabbit hole: a highly-publicized accident in April with the yacht (ran aground in St. Barts!) combined with her being out of work rotation made her stop posting for a while, and the speculation about her and the yacht were bonkers.
Anyway. Every time she posts, I get excited. There’s something so soothing and fascinating about watching her and her team work in a galley the way she does: she’s methodical, calm, collected, and able to spin up incredible-looking dishes in the middle of the oceannnnnnnn like. It’s so cool.
🦅 Saying “well, that aged well,” over and over to yourself at 11 pm
Also watching season 4 of West Wing. I keep falling asleep (sorry!), though, to be fair, it is after Bartlett has won re-election, and they haven’t cut to the inauguration yet. It’s wild how dated some of the beliefs are from douche-mcgee-with-a-golden-heart Josh, and I’m trying to decipher whether I was having a stroke or not with Toby’s father’s backstory cut scene?
Whatever. I’ll inevitably rewatch the same episodes and make things make sense while catching up on work. Donna deserves better, always.
I’ve also enjoyed watching:
Phil Edwards published a really great video on the ubiquity of the Virco chair, aka the chair you probably sat on at school
I, lover of Illinois trivia, didn’t know that Kraft cheese (and Kraft in general) is actually from Illinois, until I watched this BI video from a few years ago. (How!! Did I not know!!) Kraft’s first factory was in Stockton, in Jo Daviess County. (!!!!!!!!!!!) The Stockton Heritage Museum site says that there’s Kraft swag for sale in their gift shop.
(^^^ and on that note, Twinkies are from Illinois, too!!!!)
I very recently (last night) finished watching America’s Sweethearts, the docu-series on the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. I have a lot of thoughts, genuinely, and I feel like the series was very well done. It doesn’t, though, sit super well with me that there’ll be a second season coming out in a few weeks (and I probably will watch it, only driving home the point they make about the DCC franchise in the first place).
Listening
Made a new playlist this past week: “did you just say cauliflower to me?” is the start of a Logan Lucky-themed playlist. Generally, though, I’m flipping between “if i had an orchard” and “till the well run dry”, which is skewing everything toward “currently playing at Revolution Brewing” sort of vibes.
I’ve also really enjoyed The Beths’ new release (“metal”) and Wet Leg’s new release (“catch these fists”), and I’ve been finding myself listening to Beck’s Modern Guilt (2008) from start to finish.
And on the throwback side, I don’t know if I’ve been Baader–Meinhof-ing myself here, but “In a Big Country” (by, of course, Big Country) has popped up everywhere, and I mean everywhere. I appreciate XRT’s willingness to reach into my brain and play the song that I’ve listened to for a little too long, a little too loudly, a little too closely, and blast it across the metro area.
Between In a Big Country, INXS’s (iconic!) Don’t Change and Animotion’s Obsession, I’ve been crafting a solid roller rink/hammering out grafs/singing in the shower shortlist.
Tinkering
🚨If you don’t want to read multiple paragraphs about Python + coding, skip this section lol 🚨
Work-wise, I’m playing around with matching up different datasets, and overcoming some challenges with gdal and geopandas.
The challenge: two different datasets where each row is the same event on the same day, but geocoded to slightly different places, and there’s not an exact overlap in rows nor places. Some events might be in the same place but at different times. Others may have the same times but different places. No unique identifiers between the two to join against.
The goal: link the two datasets, in which each row is describing the same event, with certainty and without pulling in incorrect row matches.
Sounds a little extra, but there’s data in the second dataset that isn’t in the first. And I want it!
After overthinking it, and considering writing a weird for loop where I iterated over each row and each date and etc etc etc, I mostly solved it. I created a concatenated field for overlapping date-a (eg, YYYY-MM-DD-HH (because in both datasets, the time was in military and hour was broken out specifically)). For this case, hour should be specific enough.
Then, I made a 100ft buffer zone around each row in the first dataset, and simply joined it to the second. Then, a quick boolean to check that the date-time matches between both files. If it doesn’t, it’s not the right row to match it to, and I flag it for a manual re-check.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy. And I could make it even easier, without using geopandas altogether: I could just look at the raw latlongs, drop a sigfig, and join based on the coordinates and date-time field. (But here we are.)
I’ve really come a long way in the past six months specifically in turning to scripted solutions for my reporting and data analysis; I used to code every day, especially when working on graphics and visuals for Chalkbeat and Votebeat (now Civic News Company). But as I shifted to being in a role where I was the sole data reporter, and often turning stuff around for one-off projects or with folks who didn’t speak the same technical language, it was easier to default to Sheets or QGIS alone.
Thank god for constant encouragement and light shaming (thank you Cheryl) to shift to a more reproducible method of doing my work; I’m constantly pulling from different notebooks, and I’d wager that for this current investigation, I have at least ten different repos (that’s another issue altogether), all with snippets of code and approaches to pull from.
I anticipate as my fellowship starts to come to an end, pending places to land, I’ll probably start rewriting old analyses from BGA into something scripted. I did a lot of work I’m proud of there, but in the past few months, as I’ve been writing more and more and more and more Python, the gears have turned in my head as to optimizing and rewriting things I’ve already done. It’ll be good practice.
Misc
The junk drawer of junk drawer. Other related highlights of the past week or two:
🦐I made shrimp ceviche this week, and it slayed. I’m always hesitant making ceviche even though I’ve made it and ate it a thousand times. I used fresh shrimp, prepped it all myself, and used (gasp!) no onion, just tomato, cucumber, serrano and avocado. I thought about making aguachiles but wasn’t that bold with the shrimp I had.
For one person or two people playing nice: ⅔ lb shrimp (I had fresh 26-30s), tails off, deveined and cut into thirds. Dice half a tomato, mince a whole serrano and mini cucumber. (I’d probably use about a third of a regular cucumber?) Juice three and a half big limes. Lots of salt to taste. Finely chop cilantro. Stick it all in a bowl, stir to combine, and make sure that the juice is covering the shrimp to the best of your ability. Fridge. Check on it and stir every couple hours. Eat within a day.
💪 We got first place at trivia last week, the night of a tornado watch. There’s something funny about it being all the regular teams going head to head without the din of other tables. We all sat on the same side of the bar and often went quiet in hushed tones. There was a three-way tie for first by the end, and our longtime host said that she needed “one of us to do really well, and one of us to absolutely tank” so we didn’t have to do tiebreakers. We walked out with first for the second week in a row by one point.
📚I’m pulling together a curriculum for a class on visualizing data for investigations for IRE this year, and I’m pretty excited. It’s daunting to piece something together from scratch, but I have plenty of clips and work to pull from, and working through a process that I haven’t yet taught but have done hundreds of times is always eye-opening. I’ll also be on a panel talking about using historical records for reporting. You can check the IRE schedule here. I’ve never been to New Orleans, so all recs welcome.
🔎 I also want to be proactive in saying that I’m looking for open roles starting in August/September for a place to continue doing investigations and enterprise reporting. I have a little one pager here — bit.ly/cam-rodriguez-one-sheet — that outlines my skills and experience, and what I’m hoping to continue to do.
I think that’s it from me for now. Louie and I are gearing up for another week or so out in the burbs, and I’m on deadline. More TK on everything, probably.
Cam
(well, and Louie:)
