Hello and welcome back. This is Issue 12 of “a bit of bird words” and I’m currently on vacation. It’s a much-needed break from the intense pace that’s been the norm at work for the last few months.

It’s still sometimes such a surprise to me that I can take long vacations like this, and especially in the summer when historically all of my jobs have explicitly forbidden time off during the summer. It might convince me to like summer again one day…

What did I do this month?

The first big thing I did was launch another website! I’ve written quite a few haiku at this point, and while I could just keep them to myself and maybe polish them for official publishing, I thought it would be more fun to put them online myself.

Enter: wren.compost.party!

I’ve written all the haiku on this site. When the page loads, a random haiku will be displayed. You can refresh the page to see a new one and you can tap the emoji at top-right to change the site theme.

The real special thing about this site, though, is that it’s being hosted on compost.party, which is actually an old phone, hooked up to solar panels, that has been repurposed as a web server. When I learned about it, I knew I wanted to make something for it, and I finally had the time to do it! Definitely check out the other sites linked there as well, but do know that it isn’t online all the time. If you can’t access it, check back later!

The other big thing is that I made a puzzle for Daily Akari! I just happened to find out that they accept puzzle submissions and thought, “well, hey, I like these, I bet making one would be a lot of fun.” And it is fun, but it’s also quite challenging! It gave me a greater appreciation for the setters making the really hard ones as well as for variant sudoku setters. I would like to make more of these sometime if I can.

Not as big, but still interesting: we’ve been doing more bird surveys lately. I’m kind of torn on if it would be a bit pretentious to call myself a “citizen scientist” or “citizen researcher” but I end up just going with “birder” really. The most exciting part of our latest surveys was getting some very up-close looks at juvenile Eurasian coots who wandered out of the lake toward us unprompted.

On the reading and gaming fronts, I got a real itch to play The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap and ended up full-clearing it in just three days. Just a beautiful little gem of a game. I also read through Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson and walked away feeling kind of conflicted about how the book tries to say both “progress is inevitable” and “there’s still value in tradition”. The story was a fun enough romp, though.

Also I’ve had Jamie Paige’s Constant Companions on loop in my head for weeks. Great music. This might be what restarts my CD collection.

What else?

This month marked four years since I moved to Europe! We had a nice dinner out to celebrate and are hoping the number will only go up. Sometimes I still can’t believe I live here, how fortunate and privileged I am to have been able to move here and build my life.

On a smaller note, we were gifted a basil plant and we finally made something—panzanella—with basil from the plant. Genuinely cool. I’m crossing my fingers that the birds and squirrels don’t take a liking to the plant, since it’s really thriving outdoors.

In the spirit of compost.party, my recommendation this month is to take something you might have thrown out and try to repurpose it! I do this a lot with boxes (they become fillers behind my games so the spines are closer to the front of the shelf) but I could always do more. It’s to the system’s advantage if we throw things away; the practice of repurposing is a small way we can resist that system.