first friday after founder's day

Today is First Friday again, and last weekend was our neighboring town's 150th birthday. This weekend is Labor Day and Teemo's birthday, and all of these are important to talk about, but I've been fighting with my Internet connection for the last hour. Also this weekend is my last day of high speed Internet. I've been canceling streaming services and refactoring my workflows over the last few months. I switched to a cheap prepaid cellular plan and scripted out some tooling to make tethering reasonable. I had in mind a future write up about how I might go to the library for upgrades or whatever other high bandwidth needs, with some walkthrough of how I connect.

I got home from First Friday festivities today ready to write about those, and how I bought a crystal from the woman who referred me to Ringing Rocks. A heart shaped piece of labradorite, what sold me was the card beside it that called it beneficial to work with during life transitions. How could I not heed the advice in these retiring times?

I also planned to write about our walk earlier today. We returned to the park we first visited at the start of this break, walking the same loop along the lake then driving over to a meadow for a picnic. Another dog walker parked in the first lot soon after we did, but we didn't see them again. We did pass two women on the trail, and one runner, who lapped us, twice. We said hi to a couple that arrived at the same time as us at the trailhead near the gazebo where we ate, though they walked a different direction, and after we ate a park ranger circled around the gazebo and waved.

We spent some time down the creek earlier this week, too. I almost forgot until I was sorting through pictures of today's events. That was part of our Monday reset, a memory almost lost in the transition.

We also walked down the powerline trail we visited a few weeks ago. We've been joining a dog walk on Sundays and last week's had us in the same area. A storm following us from the west threatened our walk, but we didn't get rain until late in the evening. Finally rain!

Last weekend's adventuring took me through a cemetery. I missed the return train again, two for two at that point. I walked home and capped off a celebration of 150 years of town history by visiting some of those early founders who'd done some of the early work necessary to have 150 years of history to celebrate. I thought I might be a ghost on a sesquicentennial release from my mausoleum, returning home to rest.

That night I passed two deer in a parking lot. Tonight I passed a fawn grazing by the station where I did finally eventually catch a train.

That's what I would have written about when I got home tonight had I not been distracted by connectivity issues. The happy path is when my VPN tunnels over a local SOCKS proxy managed by an SSH connection that forwards over a domain socket connected to my phone. Tonight when trying to open the VPN connection I received cryptic recv() errors: Operation now in progress. I still have my high speed connection until Sunday so I switched between that and cellular to no avail. I rebooted everything, but that didn't help. Full logging on the SSH connection revealed nothing. Connecting directly over the SOCKS proxy was working to any host except the VPN hosts, however, so I set my browser to connect through there and downloaded new configs from protonvpn. Those use IP addresses now instead of the hostnames I have in the configs I've been using. Trying to resolve those failed, but updating my config to use one of the addresses from the recently downloaded config finally allowed for a successful connection. I think I might be out of the loop on something, but I messaged their twitter support for advice. They're out on weekends and I don't pay, so it may be a bit before I hear back.