Hoo boy the blog hasn't gotten much in it this summer. I think this is becoming a more annual tradition, where it goes dark from May til late August. We're outside a lot and I don't really have much happening in my mind while I take a break from school.

I'll be on a camping trip next week, so there will be a post following that with pictures. Then, I get back into school mode the third week of August and I'm sure that will propmt some writing.

Anyways, I'm still here. This isn't dead. I'll be back...eventually.

This world can often be overwhelming.

In a previous lifetime, I worked as a summer camp counselor. One of the things we did to make the morning flag routine fun was to dress up in different themed costumes. Each day had a color theme and all the counselors would put together a goofy costume on that theme and then winners would be picked by the leadership staff.

Another counselor and I, Caleb, realized we could combine our creative powers to come up with more elaborate - and hopefully more impressive - costumes to win points for our team.

I give you, the Don Quixote, and probably one of my favorite pictures ever.

This summer formed several core memories and even though Caleb and I fell out of touch, I still think back to this morning fondly. I'm glad I have such a great picture to remember it by.

Well, I did it. I started working on my fork of Anchor CMS to get it up and running with PHP 8. Honestly, most of the work so far has been updating the build system with new versions of the JS packages used to bundle everything up. I haven't needed to do much with the PHP yet.

Anyways, I can set up a new instance from scratch, create the admin user, and write some posts. I've fixed a few CSS errors and I'm going to start working on updating the Sass files because they have some deprecations since they were first written 10 years ago.

The repo is on Github if you want to take a peek.

I've been thinking about moving back to a small CMS for the blog. Specifically becuase I would like to be able to just log into something and write rather than using my current static site flow.

AnchorCMS is an old blog app I've opined about in the past and I decided to take on another project and work on a fork. The maintainers shut down the original codebase back in 2020 and it's been sitting since.

The plan right now is trim down the installation flow and tailor it for myself - it'll be updated for PHP 8 and use SQLite for a database to keep my server running with low overhead.

I have no idea what I'm in for because I haven't touched PHP in a minute. We'll see how it goes.

I was at the grocery store early this morning getting head cold care supplies. We'd managed to avoid the worst of this spring bout of sickness so far, but it caught up.

The sun was just peeking over the horizon and I heard a cardinal in the trees. I haven't heard a cardinal in weeks. They're there - they don't migrate - but I hadn't heard one in the morning since the late fall.

There was also a tufted titmouse in the distance. You've probably heard one, too. Hopefully, now you have a name to put with it.

All of the kids are quiet in bed. My wife isn't feeling well and I've found myself enjoying the quiet of the house.

I often have to resist the feeling that I should be doing something.

I think the only something that needs doing is taking these quiet moments as they come.

Toward the end of high school and into college, I developed a tase for metal/metalcore music. Super loud, really intense. One difficult part of being a metal fan is that it's kind of isolating unless you really know the other people in the room like it.

As such, I have a playlist on our Amazon music account called "Dad" which has a collection go-to bangers. My wife knows and tolerates this listening, but I don't really play it for my kids. Today, it came out, they think it's dance music.

I played about 20 seconds of "Beyond Repair" by Johnny Booth (be warned, it's intense). It started with nervous laughter and ended with, "that's enough, it's too screamy."

Good times.

This year's stoichiometry test has come and gone with less than thrilling results. We're okay on unit conversions, but when we add that extra step of using the balanced reaction to describe ratios between substances, things fall apart.

This is a tough concept that I struggle to teach well. I don't know if more labs/hands on will help - I added one this year and I didn't see better results. Granted, we had several weather interruptions last week that preceeded the test, but even today, there are still large gaps in understanding that I need to do some digging into to figure out what is going on. My hunch tells me that is a "will" issue instead of "skill" issue for 90% of students.

I've struggled to efficiently grade web dev projects this year. Github Classroom is kind of a pain becuase I need to go to each repo individually and students are struggling with the git workflow. I decided to take that out for now. The next best method is to have them zip project files and then submit the zipped archive that I can extract. It was still a lot of clicking between folders.

Then, I realized (finally) that I can just extract the directories into one parent folder and run Python's built-in HTTP server. It makes clicking around the projects much easier and I can pop open the source tab right in the browser. No more opening and closing files between apps.

I wish I'd thought of this back in September.

My students were incredible with the iodine clock lab. Given the complexity of the procedure and the accuracy with which they needed to measure, they rose to the occasion.

Everyone split into their groups and immediately read the materials lists and read the procedure before even getting chemicals. They measured stock, asked good questions ("Is tap water okay?") and delegated tasks.

The soft click of glassware and hush of partners cooperating was musical.

I wrestled hard with an iodine clock reaction this week. I haven't taught kinetics in many years, so I was re-learning a lot as I went. I'm still confused a little by the data I got vs what I expected, but I think it's a case of the real world being much messier than practice problems.

One of my kids said tonight that they want to have 84 children. Another one of the kids exclaimed, "It'll take, like, five million dollars to feed them." That got me wondering if my wife and I have spent one million dollars in our time together.

Our rough estimate using our general food budget, mortgage payment, and house expenses (electricity, gas, and taxes) would take us 40 years to spend one million dollars. We live modestly, but that number was higher than I expected, honestly.

It reminded me of the "one billion dollars" on MS notepad video (lots of NSFW language, so be careful). The fact that there are people with multiple hundreds of this kind of money is nauseating.