2021 goals

2021.md

General:

• Save 20% of our income
• Take a family vacation
• Get a nice (professional) family photo taken
• Unsubscribe from at least half my current RSS feeds
• Find a better system for organizing and sharing family photos and videos

Cooking:

• Cook five new things, from at least three from different sources (cookbooks, websites, etc)
• Find a good dairy-free ice cream recipe

Projects:

• Launch at least one project from my brainstorm list
• Automate link updates on my personal site
• Build something involving physical computing (Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc)
• Make a game other people can play

Exercise:

• 50 pushups a day (or 350 a week)
• 60 minutes of cardio per week
• 60 minutes of stretching per week
• Find an indoor workout I can stick with

Books to read:

• Song of Achilles
• Light of the Jedi
• Victory's Price
• Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat
• The Rising Storm
• The Rancho Gordo Heirloom Bean Guide
• An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace
• Cerci
• Dune
• Dune Messiah

Books in consideration:

• Killers of the Flower Moon
• A Gentleman in Moscow
• Iraq + 100
• 1984
• Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
• The Fifth Season
• Battle Cry of Freedom
• Grant
• The Kid Stays in the Picture
• A Plague of Doves
• Moby Dick
• For Whom the Bell Tolls
• The Great Gatsby
• Common Ground
• The Library Book
• The Inner Game of Tennis
• These Truths

Books:

Started the year with Song of Achilles, which was great. Going to read Circe soon.

Light of the Jedi is good. Not amazing, but good enough. Lots of world-building and table-setting.

Read Victory's Price to finish out the Alphabet Squadron trilogy. Good, kind of a downer, fleshing out the Star Wars galaxy a bit more.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is fantastic. Wish I'd read it a decade or two ago.

The Rancho Gordo Heirloom Bean Guide: I might be going hard on beans these days.

The Rising Storm is better than Light of the Jedi. More happens. The old jedi are kind of boring, though.

An Everlasting Meal is another book I wish I'd read at least 10 years ago. Honestly one of the best books I've read about food and cooking as practice.

Cerci might be the best book I've read all year, maybe in a while. I hope Madeline Miller writes more books.

Dune is great. I read it in 2003 and it was nice to go back to it before seeing the movie.

Jumped right into Dune Messiah after reading Dune. Don't regret it.

Side projects

Got two in one project: Built a Raspberry Pi music player using Pi Music Box. Reasonably easy setup, with the five-year-old helping. Not as smooth as the Sonos (and honestly, not much cheaper when accounting for time spent) but it's a nice little project.

Migrated my site to use SQLite and Datasette, which let me automate updates. Good to have that done.

Built and released two datasette plugins: datasette-geojson and datasette-geojson-map. Trying to build out my own little Datasette GIS stack.

Cooking:

Feb. 28: I made Kenji Lopez-Alt's orange chicken, which is maybe just chicken nuggets in an orange glaze, but in the best way possible. Now I need to deep fry something else with all the leftover oil.

May 5: Going to count the Tuscan-ish chickpea soup with Swiss chard I made, mostly out of my own head, trying to recreate something I had in Siena in 2003 from memory. It was good.

May 9: Another Kenji Lopez-Alt winner: Hollandaise in two minutes. It actually worked.

May 27: Making Alison Roman's tangy braised short ribs. Hardest part is leaving them alone in the oven.

June 22: Did a version of this salsa verde from Rancho Gordo (using parsley, basil and mint) with white beans. Very good.

July 26: Made Tichi's Moorish chickpea stew from Jose Andres' tapas cookbook. Would make it again, but would probably cook the chickpeas longer before adding the vinegar and spices.

Laura got some nice family photos taken, by surprise. Now just have to print one. Update: She got that done, too.

Went to Maine and Vermont for the last week of summer. Did not realize how much we all needed that.