April Thoughts

2022-04-20

Moving House

Oh boy, where to start? Well we're buying a house and moving to a new town. The main purpose of this move is to eliminate my wife's awful commute and that goal will be fulfilled with this new house's location. We are all excited that her commute will be cut from 1.5-2 hours down to around 15 minutes. But that's not the only thing we're excited about with the move. The new house is in a really nice location close to just about everything we will want to go to. Within walking distance there are 3 coffee shops, a kombucha shop, a bakery, numerous good restaurants, a really nice park with playground and splash pad, a lake with a nice walking path all the way around it, a post office and more things yet to be discovered. Within easy biking distance there are 2-3 breweries, more restaurants and many different parks and lakes.

Another big thing about this location is that there will multiple of my wife's co-workers/friends close by, some even within walking or biking distance. It has been more difficult than we expected to make friends in our current area. The combination of it being a sprawled out suburban wasteland, the pandemic and there being no real community here have made it a losing battle. The new town, while less "sexy", appears to have more of a community and will be easier to get out and interact with people. Really excited about the prospect of making friends, being part of a community again and being able to do all kinds of things without getting in a car. We pretty much only ride our ebikes where we live currently. We live right next to a really nice path but it's quite a distance to get to anything worth going to. I predict our regular bikes will take back a lot of the riding time with the distances to get places being a lot smaller at the new place. The ebikes will still be useful for grocery runs though.

As far as the actual house goes it is old and small but charming and has everything we need and not a bunch of extra unnecessary space. In other words, exactly what I was hoping for. Ok, it's not perfect but we can live with the things that aren't ideal. The kitchen is a fairly typical old house galley style kitchen. Not the big open kitchen that my wife would have liked but she's still excited about the houes overall. She loves the charm of old houses and thinks this one is really cute. Storage is also going to take some creativity. I enjoy the process of finding creative ways to make efficient use of small spaces so this will be fun. It is small but the layout is pretty good and doesn't waste with awkward areas like some other small houses we've seen. I'm calling it small and suppose that can mean wildly different things to different people. It is 988 sq/ft officially but also has a nice large covered front porch. Some Europeans may be thinking that's totally normal and some USians are probably thinking that's tiny X-). We are quite happy with it and excited for the move. That beautiful front porch will really make it feel bigger too since we're in a part of the world that it's nice enough to sit outside year round.

Videogames

The playdate handheld console, which I've talked about before on my gemlog, is finally shipping to the first customers and media outlet reviews are rolling in. Much excite! My order is early in group 4 which is expected to ship in the second half of the year. Fingers crossed that doesn't slip back further. The reviews are largely postive with most of the criticisisms revolving around aspects inherent to the design. So, the reviews are great in my opinion. If you have an issue with things inherent to the design you probably weren't interested in the first place. I find the non-backlit monochrome display and crank to be cool unique features. If you want a traditional handheld with a backlit screen there are plenty of existing alternatives. Playdate looks like it's going to be a really fun device with emphasis on the fun. Even the "boring" parts of the interface are dripping with fun. Cute and charming animations abound similar to how the pebble watch interface had a fun personality. In fact Panic, the company behind the playdate, hired one of the pebble firmware gurus to help develop the playdate's firmware so maybe that influenced that aspect.

In other videogaming news I beat Loco Roco on the PSP. Really enjoyed that game and plan to play Loco Roco 2 in the future. I've discovered that my kids enjoy watching me play littlebigplanet more than watching cartoons so we've been making that a regular activity :D. Luckily I have almost every littlebigplanet game so we've got lots to play through still. I have a few homebrew games that I need to copy over to my Odroid Go and check out. If any of them are good I will add them to my homebrew list.

That's all for now. I'm writing this on my Palm m500 on the back patio. I've been out here for most of the day and writing on the Palm is such a great outdoor distraction free way to write. The thoughts and words really flow when I'm out here and it feels nice to wrangle all these thoughts floating around my head into soemthing more concrete.

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