Logbook 2024.G: Baby's First steps, Tree planting, Poker Simulation, Personal Postgres, Weightlifting PRs, Charlottesville

September 9, 2024 - October 20, 2024

Toddler News

Our baby has graduated to officially become a toddler. True to form, she toddles around the house and the yard, picking up rocks to bring inside and pulling utensils out of the dishwasher whenever she can get to the open door in time.

Her incoming molars have been swollen for weeks and threatening to erupt, which has caused her a good deal of discomfort. It seems to us that she sometimes wakes up in the night with her teeth hurting.

Planting 28 trees

When we moved in to our house, the back half of our lot was lined with fifty Leyland Cypress trees, all fifty-plus feet tall. They were packed together in close quarters and provided an adequate privacy screen from our neighbors, as I'm sure was the intent.

But one night this year there was a storm, and the next morning we found that one of our trees had blown over into our neighbor's driveway, landing ever so gingerly on the bed of his truck. We counted the rings on the tree trunk and it became clear that these trees were nearing the end of their life expectancy. Predictably, another tree fell down only a few weeks later.

So we bit the bullet and paid to have all fifty Cypresses felled and chipped, with their stumps ground down in place. When that work was complete we quickly became much more familiar with the views of the backs of our neighbor's houses.

I've found that when you talk to people about Leyland Cypresses they say something to the affect of: "yes, they were a popular tree for a while in the 80s and 90s, but they grow too tall and they don't live long." However, I see Leyland Cypresses everywhere in this town, so it appears to me that people in the 80s and 90s listened to the conventional wisdom of the day when they were looking for trees that were cheap and would grow quickly.

However, today if you ask people about Leyland's in real life and online, you will likely get steered away from planting them. Instead the Aborvitae tree is recommended in this part of the world as the top pick for privacy trees that grow fast.

So, in the past people heard that Leyland Cypress was the conventional wisdom tree, and now decades later their downsides are apparent, but now there's a new conventional wisdom privacy tree? Should that give me pause about trusting conventional wisdom?

Well, in the end I let conventional wisdom lead me and I procured 28 Green Giant Arborvitae trees. I was told that the trees that I bought were only three years old, but they were nearly eight feet tall. The pots they came in were 15 inches across. I rented a Toro Dingo for one weekend with a 27inch auger attachment. With some help we were able to get about half the trees in the ground on Saturday and the other half on Sunday.

We planted the trees ten feet apart from each other. The next step was to make a bunch of stakes on the table saw so that I could secure the trees with twine to keep them standing up straight.

After that we had to water the trees every three days. In order to reach every tree I connected three long hoses together so that we could reach from end to end.

Life DB

Earlier this year I built a NAS server running TrueNAS (parts list). I've been using it primarily for storing files that I want to secure and access from multiple computers. My end goal is to store our full trove of family pictures there, automatically exporting from our phones, but I haven't gotten to that point yet.

Aside from hosting ZFS storage that can be mounted using NFS, TrueNAS SCALE also allows you to run containerized applications on your NAS machine. I have used that feature to run Miniflux as an RSS reader, which I can access on my computers and phone when I'm at home. But it wasn't until this period that I realized that I could easily run a Postgres image from Dockerhub and have it be available to any device on my network.

So I now have on my home network an always available Postgres connection that I'm calling my "LifeDB". I'm working on managing the schema programatically, but so far I've made some simple tables for personal data and I use Antares as a CRUD GUI to insert basic data with nice dropdowns.

Breaking Some Weightlifting Records

In this six weeks I completed one cycle of my lifting plan and then tested my one rep maxes in both back squat and deadlift. My policy for this period was to never deviate from the sequential plan. Even if I missed a lifting day because I was traveling I would pick up where I had left off the next scheduled day.

The consistency seemed to pay off. My previous squat PR was 170kg back in 2019 and I did 172.5kg (380lbs) this time. And my prior deadlift PR was 180kg sometime in the last year, but this period I hit 182.5 (402lbs) for the first time.

Charlottesville Trip

We took a long weekend trip to Charlottesville where we stayed with friends we made when we lived there. The first group of friends is three couples who all had baby girls within one year of each other. Our baby was the eldest of the three and it was cool to see how the babies seemed to be in such drastically different stages even though in a few years I'm sure they will seem indistinguishable in age.

We also were able to stay with my friend Robert on his eco dairy farm. We walked around the farm and watched the cows, chickens and geese. They served us Paw Paw fruit that they got at a Paw Paw festival.

Games

Arcs

My copy of the new board game Arcs was delivered and I was able to get people together to play a three-player game.

The time between when I ordered the game and when it arrived was over a month. During that break I felt a mild compulsion to look at posts about the game on Reddit and Board Game Geek. A Dropbox link surfaced with a PDF of Arcs' rule book and I pored over it, attempting to retain every rule so that I could successfully teach the game. I remember several times in my head going from start to end of my plan to introduce all of the game concepts and rules, starting at the highest conceptual levels and filling in the fiddly details later.

I won't claim that this was a worthwhile use of my brain's idle state. If The most justifiabable behavior would have been to put it out of mind until the game arrived. Alternatively I could gotten it out of my head by writing down my plan teach the game, maybe even creating a little spaced-repetition deck to test my own understanding. People say that the anticipation of something can be better than the thing itself, and I can fall this trap at times.

However, I did have a blast during the one game that we played when it finally came. I had what looked like a strong lead in the mid-game, but I floundered a bit in the final two chapters and I ended up in last place out of three players. The next time we play we will mix in the Leaders and Lore cards for the first time.

Poker Simulation

In the fall and winter I often go to poker nights hosted by my father-in-law. On the second game of the season I had a terrible night where I didn't win a single hand in the entire four hour stretch against nine other players. It definitely wasn't a night where I was getting dealt winnable hands with regularity, but the next day I was wondering what tactical mistakes I had made along the way.

We play Texas Hold 'Em and Omaha for the first half of the night, and the back half of the night is dealer's choice, where a lot of wacky poker games get called. There many games that we play that have very complex odds compared to Texas Hold 'Em: wilds, high/low split pot games, many cards out on the table and in our hands. I end up playing many of those games with my gut. But there are a few games regularly called that are simpler than Texas Hold 'Em.

The next day I worked on a basic poker simulation program that I could configure to work with custom poker games. I can set the number of opponents, and the sequence of cards dealt to players, and then generate many thousands of hands where I start off with a specific hand, e.g. a pair of eights.

I was able to get some insights I didn't previously have about when it the expected value said that I should fold certain hands in some weird games against certain numbers of players. Most online resources for poker odds only care about Texas Hold 'Em so I'm glad I have a little tool to probe the odds for the weirder fringes of the poker world.

Magic: The Gathering

I took apart my "Enchantments Matter" Myrkul, Lord of Bones commander deck and used some of the pieces in a new "Auras Matter/Pillow Fort" Eriette of the Charmed Apple deck.

Music

Listened To

I listened to a lot of MJ Lenderman this period. The other band that I spent time with has been around for over a decade but is new to me: All Get Out. All Get Out have varied their sound a bit throughout the years. To my ears there are some shades of Southern lyric-based rock music like Drive-By Truckers, but pulled farther toward the emo punk side of the spectrum.

Electric Guitar

Over the last year I've let the "Musical Instruments" line item in my budget build up for a year with the intention of spending it on an electric guitar. I would occasionally look at facebook marketplace for something that would fit my budget but I thought I could be happy playing.

I ended up picking up a guitar and and amp in the same weekend from Facebook Marketplace. The guitar is a G&L Legacy Tribute and the amp is a Postive Grid Spark 40-Watt Amp.

I surprised myself a bit by picking this amp. Earlier in the year I inquired, but didn't end up buying, a vintage Fender tube amp I saw for sale online. The Spark is the polar opposite of that one: solid state, controllable with an app on your phone, and the thing works as bluetooth speaker!

But I actually think it was the right call for me for a few reasons. It has a headphone jack, so I can play without disturbing anyone after our toddler has gone to bed. I can stream a song from my phone through the amp and play along. And I can get a bunch of built-in digital effects that can get close enough to the song I'm trying to emulate to keep the experience enjoyable.

The amp also has USB out on the back that lets you record directly into a computer, but I don't have a plan to take advantage of that yet.

Movies Watched

We watched American Beauty, which was a movie I had never seen before. I don't have a big treatise to write here about the story or themes, but I'll say: it was a funnier movie than I expected, and the acting and cinematography was great throughout.