hiking and hacking

I've been in design and development feeling a ticking pressure to commit. It's tempting enough to push my food around on the plate instead of eating it, now I have no timelines and my dinner has gone cold. Stepping away from stepping away is its own exercise in purposefulness.

Our daily routine has been sleeping in, hiking, napping, then eating and working on this site. I spend some of our walking time thinking about creative problems. First I thought I'd write about how funny it was to be less than a week out of ops and already back in the soup.

Then I got distracted waffling between hugo and nikola (stuck with the latter), reinventing docker (didn't pan out), and duct taping together my own deployment workflow (almost done). Less than a week has become nearly two weeks, and the struggle between existing in a purely liquid form and discretizing moments out of the river rages on.

I thought we walked a lot before, lately we've been planning our days around it. We've mostly been exploring the Wissahickon, though today we went to a smaller park on Stony Creek. We've had four tick stowaways between the three of us in the last eight days, no survivors. I bathed the dogs two days ago after a trip to Fort Washington and meant for them to keep dry today. Dany didn't want to leave and threw herself in a pond.

I stocked up on shampoo and conditioner for them yesterday. I found a pair with avocado oil from Suave, 5$ for 28 fluid ounces of each, PETA certified cruelty free. In these Walden Times I couldn't believe I'm not already washing myself with vegan bulk buy soap. We're fortunate to have it now with all our walking, which the water authority might measure by how much of the Wissahickon we return down the drain.

Thinking about thinking got me thinking about what to write about, and thinking about that got me thinking about how to write about it. At least that's the abstraction I've contrived to justify mulling over blog ops in the forest. I think I'd like to post more about my operations but I also want more scaffolding for sharing and a more rigorous implementation for confidence. Until that's ready I thought I'd try writing up my thoughts in lieu of a demo.

As of today I'm authoring with nikola. I build locally then rsync to a racknerd host running nginx. Occasionally I run termux on my phone to rsync pictures to my laptop. I use geeqie there to browse my library and mark pictures to post. I have gimp do automatic magic then copy to my source directory to let nikola do more magic as part of the build process. The domain is registered with name.com and the certificate is issued by Let's Encrypt.

Implicit in there is some vague commitment to return to tend those artifacts within the next few months, lest your browser nag that my identity has grown stale. Even on vacation I can't disregard the invisible tether (or painfully visible, if you count all the powerlines). Not that I'm complaining, cut flowers wilt.