OLD HAUNTS: CART DRIVER

erica and i were working nights at the brewery when we first started dating so we had to find late night spots for date nights. at some point we discovered cart driver in denver’s lodo neighborhood. they have a late night happy hour from 10PM - midnight with margarita pizzas for $7 and a craft beer and shot of fernet for $8. erica would get the beer and i would get the fernet and we would share the pizza. eventually this routine evolved into an after gym ritual. for our ‘gym-date’ i would drop erica off at a gymnastics gym and then go lift weights at a nearby 24 hour fitness and then we would go to cart driver but switch out the $7 pizza for a $7 tin of sardines (you know for the gains) with fresh baked bread and compound butter (you know for the soul). they also have (sometimes) cheap west coast oysters and make amazing hot sauces and chili oil in house. definitely one of our favorite spots in denver.

JOURNEY OF THE ROVER

besides the house and the dog when my father died last year i also inherited this 1959 landrover series ii. my dad had this car for as long as i can remember and most of that time it didn’t run and sat right where it sits now, albeit in worse apparent condition. i was gifted this car for at least two middle school birthdays but still to this day have never driven it. my dad, and i to a much lesser degree, fixed it up when i was in high school, filling dents and scratches in its aluminum body with bondo, rerunning the electrical wiring, adding modernish seatbelts, and getting it repainted. it became my dad’s summer grocery runner and the car he picked us up from the airport in the first time erica came out to missoula. a about a month before his death he tried to talk tomi, balint, and i through the process of getting it going for the summer but the hungarians only had about ten days here and it turned out my dad only had a few weeks more than that. many people in my dad’s life coveted the car and so he established a hierarchy of inheritance. it just so happened that all the listed parties were present in the moments just after his death and so, after pouring a glass of whisky in his honor, we all went out back and tried to get it started. the starter cranked hard but no amount of ether in the carburetor would get it to turn over. we continued to mess with it for the next few weeks to no avail, and then the move from denver took over my time, and then winter came. now five months later the weather is improving and this 44 year old boy’s fancy is turning back towards his classic 4x4s with new modern projection headlights sitting in my office ready to install in the 4runner and new ignition wiring in the mail for the landrover. my prediction: soft-top summer. my dad, erica, and the late great gatsby riding in the rover in 2021

THE BAT HOUSE

richard and kristina ford sent me a copy of michael reily’s memoir the bat house last week. the book centers around the author buying big 100 year old farm house in his home town along the yellowstone river in eastern montana and then spending considerable time there reconnecting with the community while fixing the place up. the house, as the name suggests, turns out to be infested by bats which he has to go to war with and eventually make peace with in order to make the place his own. the book is also about loss and grieving as he describes cancer taking the lives of people he loves the most in the world.

having recently lost someone to cancer and having moved back to my home town in montana and into a 100 year old house it certainly hit very close to home. richard wrote the blurb on the cover and is cited as a help and inspiration in the afterword, and wrote me a nice note in the book and kristina a very nice email when they sent it. i only vaguely remember michael reily, but very much remember his black lab crow when we used visit them in chouteau on hunting trips when i was a kid. he called me after my dad died and invited me to his reading here in missoula but i think i was in denver that night and missed it. i wish had a got to see him and hear him read but getting the book from richard and kristina and reading it this weekend feels like how it was suppose to happen.

i hired a home inspector to go over our 100 year old montana house back in october but have been putting off doing much about the problems he found over the winter hoping i might have some inheritance with which to address them. i still don’t have the money but my friend luke is training to be a home inspector and has some time on his hands so he’s coming over later this morning to help me get started. the first order of business, just as it was with mike in his book, is to get up into the crawl space and check out the attic. hopefully ours is bat free.

TMUX FOR POWERSHELL?

so i am on a strange shell configuration journey right now. it started with wsl and zsh and tmux, and i think it is leading me on a road to wezterm. but right now i am in some strange land where i am mostly using powershell with oh my posh: so sort of z shell in powershell, sort of… in this strange land i have discovered that powershell now has some native multiplexing with some annoyingly close to but not exactly the same as tmux key bindings. i read a medium article a while back where a guy compared shell customization to a jedi crafting their own lightsaber. i don’t know that i will ever be a vim and emacs on gentoo guy but this is who i and where i am right now. hopefully i make it through without succumbing to the darkside of the terminal where i am left with a red shell corrupted with the rage, hate, and fear i had to experience to bend it to my will.

SUNDAY MORNING

high protein banana pancakes with coconut syrup and macadamia nuts, and bacon, and the funny papers, and a crossword, and a big fucking bowl of lemons because we have our shit together.

APRIL IN MISSOULA

april on mount sentinel overlooking missoula: sunny one moment, blue skies and snowing the next…

POKER

my dad played in a weekly poker game since the 70s, and since he died last summer, i have taken over his spot and the job of hosting most tuesday nights. i haven’t really played much poker. it was one of those things that my dad was so good at that trying to learn from him as a kid was boring and frustrating. but now that my dad is gone these guys, many who have been playing together for longer then i have been alive, struggle to rope together enough people for a full table, and so i feel obligated to help keep the game alive. the actual games vary, but they are often high/low games with declares and wilds and buys and weird raising rules and card passing. needless to say i am terrible. i usually struggle to make it to the end of the night without going bust and having to buy more chips. but playing feels important, and so i play, losing $16 a week to a bunch of mostly lawyers or retired lawyers, and trying, between hands, to squeeze from these mostly 70/80 year old guys some directions to good camping and fishing spots of western montana since its been decades since i last tried to camp here and the summer is quickly approaching.

ONE SCRIPT PONY

ok, auto deployment is fully functional! i write a post locally, execute a single script in the terminal and the website updates! now i just need to figure out how to do this all from my phone so i can post posts when i’m not at home. the dog is also excited…

AUTO-DEPLOY

trying to get things to auto deploy and seem to be struggling. hugo is a strange beast…

AWS

i went through an AWS certification course this week. i have worked with AWS a few times before so none of it was new to me, but they keep changing the names of things (AWS aurora?) and the labs, EC2 instances, and databases take a while to spin up so there was a lot of downtime that i filled with 90s R&B music videos. i get that the whole point of the certification is to get familiar with the different services amazon offers and how they interact with each other, but it felt a lot like i was just memorizing an AWS sales pitch:

“AWS packs a punch! With tools like EC2 for compute, S3 for storage, EBS for block storage, Glacier for archival storage, Lambda for serverless, RDS for databases, Aurora for SQL, DynamoDB for NoSQL, EKS for Kubernetes, Elastic Beanstalk for app deployment, Redshift for analytics, CloudFront for delivery, Route 53 for DNS, SageMaker for machine learning, IAM for security, and CloudWatch for monitoring, CloudTrail for auditing, Artifact for compliance, Athena for Analytics, and Snowball for data transfer: AWS has you covered, transforming scalability into innovation. AWS the right fit for you! Thanks for watching, we’ll see you in the next video!”