Pieces

Recently I’ve been met with paired astonishment, me at them and them at me, when I under-indicated my skills in conversation. It doesn’t matter what skill in question. Taijiquan, writing haiku, or software development. My perspective is that I’m a beginner, maybe advanced beginner if I’m being generous. Not impressive. Theirs is the opposite. I’m flabbergasted at the praise and they seemed incredulous I don’t get it. It’s not a new occurrence but with it happening twice in quick succession, once with my taijiquan…

I was working on my taijiquan haiku series and then lost steam. Part of it was the double haiku’s weren’t all as strong as each other. I decided since that was holding me up to simplify and do one haiku per each. Again these are in no way meant to speak like the classics or be authoritative. But crafting them has given me time to really think and dig deep on each one. My ultimate plan is to put these to watercolor and calligraphy and hang them in my home office. Peng spine long and crown high sunk deep buoyant chi…

This month’s Indieweb Carnival is on “Masks, Identities & Cosplay” and this post is a response to the prompt “I invite you to consider what masks and cosplay mean and how they interact with identity, for you.” The Mask In the Mirror I don’t have many mirrors in my house. It never occurred to me to have a bunch, a simple one in the bathroom and a longer one somewhere to see outfits seems plenty to me. My teenaged daughter disagrees. One reason not to have them is they make me uncomfortable. Not in a “I don’t like…

I wrote this draft on 7/28/2025 when I wanted to expand a reply into a full post but then shelved it. Now, almost one month later there is another post complaining about the Micro.blog discover feed. Anyway, I thought it might be nice to gather all of my ideas on the subject in one place. My Ideas When I first started, I found the account Micro Monday very helpful to find people around Micro.blog. It was an account that posted occasional roll calls about common topics and people could reply with links to other…

Writing, Spelling, Grammar, and Literature Science and Mathematics Interdisciplinary Studies Art, Physical Education, and Health So last year and this year so far have been intense. And not in a good way. Which is why it’s taken me so long to write down what my kids have been doing for homeschooling. But better late than never 😅 I did make some micro posts about the school year. You can check them out if you’d like Homeschooling costs for the 24/25 school year Homeschooling 7th Grade Schedule My child decided that…

History, Writing, and Literature Science and Mathematics Interdisciplinary Studies World Languages So last year and this year so far have been intense. And not in a good way. Which is why it’s taken me so long to write down what my kids have been doing for homeschooling. But better late than never 😅 I did make some micro posts about the year. You can check them out if you’d like Homeschooling costs for the 24/25 school year Homeschooling 9th Grade Schedule So last year I sat down with my son and looked at some of…

One of my goals when transforming my website into a digital garden was to include backlinks on my posts. A backlink is a link to a post that refers to the current post that you are viewing. There are several blog posts out there that explain how enable this for Hugo blogs that I used for inspiration. Here are the steps I used to get this functionality on my blog. You will need to edit your theme for single blog posts which is located at layouts/posts/single.html (or if using a theme that supports Matt Langford’s…

The eight silk brocades are a set of Qi Gong exercises meant to work and warm up muscles groups commonly used throughout the day. Especially the legs, hips, and back. I tend to use them as cool down exercises after a longer Tai Chi workout, see Long Yang, but the movements are also quite nice in the morning to wake up. Eight Silk Brocades Perform each exercise eight times breathing slowly. The mouth should be closed and your tongue should lightly press on the roof of your mouth. You should only take the movement to…

As my Sifu always says “This is your form” and it should feel like “coming home.” After many years of practice, it finally does. The goal for beginners is to complete this form in about 15 minutes and as you advance you should slow it down. Every movement should flow into the next one and there should never be a moment where you are not moving. Advanced practitioners should aim for 40 minutes or longer. Traditional Yang Tai Chi 108 Movement Long Form Part One YouTube Video YouTube Video Beginning form. Energy ball…

History, Writing, and Literature Science and Mathematics Interdisciplinary Studies Art and Music Health and Financial Literacy Physical Education Wow, eighth grade. How is this possible??? Note: This has been updated as of 3/13/2024. Course of Study History, Writing, and Literature History With the broad social studies aspect of his Falcons co-op we aren’t doing a large formal study of history. On his own he reviewed some Ancient history and the Middle Ages with the audiobooks from Curiosity Chronicles. There is…

#homeschooling I can’t believe we are done! Seventh grade was a whirlwind and high school seems like it is just around the corner. I definitely felt like this year went by faster then last year! Now here I am putting together a progress report for my local school system and I decided that I should post it here on my blog. Now the school system gets a boring bullet list, but here I can have some fun. Hopefully this gives someone else some ideas about homeschooling the middle school years. Mathematics: Algebra is…

#homeschooling We did it! Fifth grade is done! This year was tough. My daughter is a reluctant homeschooler. She wasn’t thrilled when the pandemic shut everything down and sent her schooling at home and she wasn’t thrilled waiting for reliable vaccines and until I felt like schools had returned to a somewhat normal state. But I like to think that even with all bumps we had some fun 😁 Mathematics: We actually cycled through a few different math curriculums to find one that worked for my daughter. Turns out she…

#homeschooling This page was created 03/20/2024 as a look back to our earlier years homeschooling. Mathematics Math Mammoth Topical Books ALEKS Middle School Course 3 Upper Elementary Challenge Math by Edward Zacaroo. English Language Arts Michael Clay Thompson Language Arts Weekly paragraphs and small essays on topics from literature, social studies and science. Spelling: Evan Moor Daily Practice Evan Moor Daily Practice and lists of commonly misspelled words Reading & Literature The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary…

#homeschooling This page was created 03/19/2024 as a look back to our earlier years homeschooling. Mathematics Math Mammoth Topic Books ALEKS Level 5 Primary Grade Challenge Math by Edward Zacaroo. English Language Arts Michael Clay Thompson Language Arts Fable and Song by Cottage Press Spelling: Evan Moor Daily Practice Reading & Literature A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling Redwall by Brian Jacques Science Comics: Coral Reefs by Maris Wicks Human Body…

#homeschooling This page was created 03/19/2024 as a look back to our earlier years homeschooling. Mathematics Math Mammoth Grade 5 Upper Elementary Challenge Math by Edward Zacaroo. English Language Arts Michael Clay Thompson Language Arts Elementary Sentence Composing by Killagon Institute for Excellence in Writing - Style and Structure Evan Moor Daily Practice and lists of commonly misspelled words Reading & Literature Hatchet: 30th Anniversary Edition (Brian's Saga Book 1) by Gary Paulsen Harry Potter and the…

#homeschooling This page was created 03/14/2024 as a look back to our earlier years homeschooling. Mathematics Math Mammoth Grade 5 Primary Grade Challenge Math by Edward Zacaroo. English Language Arts Grammar: Michael Clay Thompson Language Arts Writing: Elementary Sentence Composing by Killagon Writing: Institute for Excellence in Writing - Style and Structure Spelling: Evan Moor Daily Practice Reading & Literature Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede Igraine the Brave by…

After last mini-coding adventure where I was exploring a simple command-line browser idea I had there was a comment by @sod that mentioned I might enjoy looking into Gopher or Gemini as alternative protocols to http… and he was 100% correct 😁 Making a blueprint 🗺️ After exploring some gemini sites (called capsules) I decided I wanted one. But… I didn’t want to make extra work for myself by having to publish blog posts in two different places using two different tools. So I thought of two options. One, make a gemini…

So last weekend I was a bit tired of the internet. Which will probably be another post at some point. But suffice it to say that the invasive tracking browsers are up to just turns my stomach. Which lead me back to an old desire of mine, building my own web browser. I’ve never gotten very far. Browsers are so very very complex and as soon as I get started I get overwhelmed. So maybe instead of tackling something so gargantuan, I start a bit smaller. That lead me down a rabbit hole of text-based browsers. The one…

Back in October I posted a bit about using YAML front-matter with Micro.blog private notes to extend it’s functionally. I ended up releasing that to Lillihub users earlier this year. I’ve moved over to using analog index cards for most of my daily note taking but I still have several collections of notes I’m growing. And I needed a place for them. Why not use Micro.blog? Is what I asked myself. Now that Manton has built out a versioning system that saves note changes for 60 days I feel more confident using the…

I bounce around tools a lot trying to keep my life organized. Everywhere I look, the tasks I need to get done just keep multiplying. I’ve probably tried dozens of apps by now over the years. I really liked Notion, but didn’t like the lack of portability for my data. Logseq was fun but keeping things synced was hard. Obsidian was close to what I wanted, but ultimately the freedom to endlessly tweak the system made it more of a distraction to me. Then came 2024 and my life getting exponentially more difficult in an…

Here are the steps I used to make my Micro.blog hosted blog list only the titled posts on my homepage and still paginate correctly. Note: This does require editing your blog theme. 1.) The file you need to edit is: layouts/index.html 2.) The line you are replacing should look something like this: {{- $paginator := .Paginate (where .Site.Pages.ByDate.Reverse “Type” “post”) (index .Site.Params “archive-paginate” | default 20) }} (assuming you and/or your theme haven’t already customized this) 3.) You are going to…

Looks like my little gaming group can get together this weekend to play some Dungeon Crawl Classics, DCC. Yay! During our last game I noticed that we spent just as much time looking up what the characters can do versus actually playing the game. I think that’s because we only get to play every four-six weeks which is just enough time to forget everything. So I hunted around for some good fan-made character sheets that actually explained what a character class/race could do. There were a couple of options that were…

Life has been way too much lately and most of my hobbies were put on pause while I dealt with keeping up with the unexpected. One of those that was dropped was writing down weekly notes that focused on my development side projects (and honestly, even coding side-projects took a nose-dive). My last post was on March 1st 😱 So I’m doing a little reframing to make it feel a bit easier to write, thus the “Coding Adventure”. I want to keep these posts more along the line of “Hey, here’s something fun I played around with…

I haven’t played a good table-top, dice slinging, rpg game in about six years. So the urge to play has been building for a while. But my schedule is absolutely packed to the brim and my old game friends also have schedules that are equally packed. There isn’t a way to fit in a gaming session with any regularity. Then Wizards of the Coast pissed off a huge portion of the D&D community with some rumored changes to their OGL and I decided to look around and see what else was out there. I came across several new-to-me…