Sprint 2: Stepping Out

As an Eagle Scout, watching the demise of the democratic process/order in this country is a helluva bummer. It's been tough enough trying to wrap up a divorce an wonder what did I gain from the last ten years... the horrors of the last week between ICE disappearing several people two degrees away from me, political assassinations, let alone constant AI b.s... I'm glad I'm making a practice out of pointing out the things that are good because there's a whole lot that's not.

Today's topics include

• Funemployment
• Home, Garden and Grill
• Sprint Goals
• Stuff to Share

Funemployment

I went biking on the North Branch trail with Santi to start this sprint out. Met up at Bust Outs on Foster and then hit the trail for a beautiful sundown.

Last weekend kicked off PRIDE in Chicago, and on Saturday night I was at Ravinia to see Janelle Monae and Grace Jones in concert. Janelle is the second coming of Prince and Grace Jones is... well, she's still Grace Jones and that presence is something you feel from 80 rows back as well as 20 feet away when she's strutting by.

The setlist for the show is here if you want to try and recapture the spirit.

I've been playing a lot of disc golf this sprint, getting out almost every other day and hitting two new courses (to me), including a drive out to Round Lake with Logan and Norrin for a Father's Day round.

Home, Garden and Grill

Last time my guy Santi (biking with me above) was in Milan for work, he picked up some herbed salt for me with sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano, marjoram and other spices. I used it to brine/rub a trio of spatchcocked chicken, a lamb shank and a tri-tip roast, smoked over pecan. That shit turned out absolutely delicious for carved pita sandwiches.

Gardening-wise, of the six cannabis plants I started from seed, four are doing pretty well. It's legal to grow up to five plants per household and considering how much cannabis I consume for medical use, I'm hopeful that this will put a dent into some savings come fall and winter.

Sprint Goals

Increase activity; stay on budget.
I need to be doing a lot more exercise given I have this gift of time. It's been fun to go biking with others along the North Branch trail, but I need to find my rhythm, and I'm hoping I'll start barber college sometime this summer so that I can figure that out. I'm applying for roles daily, but it's dejecting not getting a single interview, and on days with crap weather it breaks what little momentum I get going.

Start dj'ing; try live-streaming regularly.
DOGE'd: A Love Story is a musical celebration of living in the moment while living in THIS. MOMENT; truthfully shared and artistically curated with eclectic musical genres and original compositions to air every other Thursday at 9:30pm Central, starting June 26 with Volume 1. I'll send out a reminder closer to the shows, but so far I stubbed out

• June 26 - Volume 1
• July 10 - Volume 2
• July 24 - Volume 3
• August 7 - Volume 4

Stuff to Share

I was feeling a little rowdy to start the sprint and put on an hour-ish set of hardcore and hip-hop music.

I felt the muse early in this last sprint and started playing with Bengali samples and then programming some sitar-like sounds

Meanwhile, on a more serious AI-criticism kick, stories like this one help assure me that tapping out of learning, education and technology entirely and going into an applied trade is exactly the right move. Teachers "describe trying to grade “hybrid essays half written by students and half written by robots,” trying to teach Spanish to kids who don’t know the meaning of the words they’re trying to teach them in English, and students who use AI in the middle of conversation. They describe spending hours grading papers that took their students seconds to generate"