🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄
Back in July, past Ryan thought it would be a good idea to try stand up for the first time on August 27th. Now that the 27th is a week away, present Ryan isn’t so sure about past Ryan’s motivations.
But in the present it is really future Ryan’s problem, so I’m in the clear!
I have no idea what to expect, but that hasn’t really held me back at work, parenting, or life in general, so how bad could it be?
Is that what’s supposed to happen?!?
The month started off strong with not only Spring Break, but a total solar eclipse!
Kolt took a fantastic picture of the eclipse:
Tara and I rode bikes out to the fairgrounds so we didn’t have to deal with traffic. Although there were a couple hundred people there, traffic wasn’t a problem. It seemed like most of the people there were from out of a town, with a bunch from Virginia for some reason.
It was an amazing experience, a lot longer than The 2017 eclipse we went to in Kentucky.
I also met another Ryan to bring into the Ryan Meetup group.
I got the chance to go to two of Rochelle’s stand-up shows, while Tara and I traveled to Akron for Grace’s dance recital.
Created a view scripts on my website to make it easier to share pics and text.
status – I give it the blog and the text of the message and it posts the message to the mentioned blogsharepic – I pass it a pictures, the name of the blog, and a caption. The script overlays the caption on the picture, publishes it on the mentioned blog, and sends it to me in Telegram so I can post it to Instagram. Next, the script makes an 8 second slow zoom movie of the pic and sends it to me in Telegram so I can post it to TikTok. I’ve been working on a way to self-host videos, my first set up is using MediaCMS hosted at video.goz2.us. Works well, except that I need to figure out storage of the videos.
I did a number on my back because of my Heelys. Fell flat on my back in the KES server room, it happened so quickly that I didn’t even try to catch myself.
I lied there for what I think was about ten seconds before I realized I stopped breathing. I took a breath while in intense pain and slowly got up. Took my breath away, literally and not in a good way.
I slept in a recliner for the first couple of weeks, it was the only place where my back didn’t hurt. After awhile my back felt fine while sitting, but not when transitioning in or out of the seated position.
It took about 6 weeks until I felt well enough to run again. At ten weeks I only notice it when I sleep, if I’m on my side there will be a pain.
I was asked if I was going to give up my Heelys, in which I replied with a solid “no way!”. My mom didn’t raise a quitter!
10 PRINT “Party like a rockstar”
20 GOTO 10
The month of March started out with a bang! I drove down to see Animaniacs in concert with Jeff & Jen at The Murphy Theater. It was a great show, I’m so glad I got a chance to go and catch up with Jeff & Jen.
The next day Tara and I traveled to Teays Valley High School to watch the KHS Top Twenty, KMS Dinensions, and Ada Varsity Singers perform.
Afterwards I talked Tara into going Easton, mainly because I wanted to go to Pins and play some arcade games.
Tara and I headed off to Akron to visit Grace and eat out at Panera. A few days later I headed back to the Akron area to present at NEOTech 2024. It was also BAUD DAY, 3/12/24. The next one won’t be until 12/24/48, so I have 24 years to build the excitement.
Near the end of the month I got to go to Camp Ohio for the counselor retreat. It was a lot of fun but I had to leave early for St. Ryans Day in Chicago!
It was a 6 hour drive to Chicago, and without cruise, it wasn’t the most fun, but I didn’t care, it was another Ryan Meetup! I got to catch up with some Ryans I met last September plus meet a whole lot of new Ryans. The meetups are such a surreal event, you just walk up to anyone and say, “Hey Ryan, where you from?” or “Hey Ryan, what do you do?”
My Instagram account is a ton of Ryans now, which is also a whole lot of fun.
I finished out the month heading to Centerville for Emo Revival Night. The genesis of this trip started only a few days before when TikTok showed me a video from a band named Matthew Lee and the Standbys. What made the video stand out was it was a pop punk cover of Defying Gravity. I was intrigued to say the least, and then I came across their cover of Someone like you from Jekyll & Hyde and If ever I would leave you from Camelot. That was my senior song for Cabaret, so I wanted to know more about the band. And then I found out they were playing with four other bands in Centerville a couple of nights later.
Tickets were $15, but VIP tickets were only $30, so I bought one and got in early and meet all of the bands. It was a great night with great music! I wholeheartedly recommend the other three bands:
Big geekin’ project over the last couple of months is switching to TickTick for my to do lists and other notes. I’m using it for tasks, repeating tasks, and also to hold on to little bits of information that I collect. Yes, I am a digital packrat.
This month I also create a script, ics2journal, which will grab each day’s events and append them to my journal. I also wanted my completed tasks from TickTick put in my journal. I start with trying to learn the TickTick API, but it doesn’t offer me a way to pull completed tasks. What I ended up doing was using IFTTT to put completed tasks into a Google Sheet. I then download the sheet using rclone and parse it to get the day’s completed tasks and append them to my journal.
The coolest thing I did was get nginx working as a reverse proxy for Backblaze b2 storage, which makes allows basically unlimited storage of files for me.
Since I use a lot of screenshots in my work, I wanted to make them look better even with my limited artistic skill. I wrote better-screenshot.sh. It will take a screenshot, round the corners, overlay it on a larger background, and add a slight drop shadow. The result looks like this:
My final project was setting up my own linktree with LinkStack, which you can check out at goz2.me/@ryan.
But this didn’t work for me.
I left the theater after watching Civil War with a gnawing feeling that I couldn’t quite place. It wasn’t until the middle of the night when I realized what it was.
The movie is not about another America Civil War, the politics and meanings behind why a Civil War would take place are implied in parts, but never fleshed out for the audience. This, I believe, is because that’s not what the movie is about.
In the movie with have Kirsten Dunst’s Lee, an experienced war photo journalist who’s been disenfranchised by her life’s work. She had the belief that what she was doing around the world, showing America the horrors of war, would have an effect on American’s appetite for war, and she now realizes that she was wrong.
That’s it, that’s the whole movie.
There are no reasons, no politics, and no motivations given for the actions of each “side” of this civil war. And that is the problem. Without knowing the why, it’s hard for us to care. This unknowing extends to the characters, who are barely fleshed out. Lee is joined by Joel, who drinks away the horrors of what he’s seeing. Sammy, an aging reporter who still wants to be involved. And finally Jessie, a wannabe photojournalist who just happens to be at the same place as one of her idols, Lee, at the beginning of the film.
Character development takes a vacation. We do get one scene of Lee and Jessie providing a little back story on themselves. There is also the absence of any sort of character arc for anyone. Jessie is the only one to develop into more of a full-fledged charater by the end of the movie.
I had no reasons to care for anyone in this movie, or for the state of the nation. There were no stakes, no high tension, nothing. The ending felt like a forgone conclusion from the opening frames.
So what was causing my unease when I left the theater? As luck would have it, Tara and I saw the 85th Anniversary showing of Gone with the Wind last Sunday. While some of it has not aged well, it shows us what Civil War is missing, character development. We began to know who these people were, what there motivations, aspirations, and dreams were, and what they were capable of.
I was also reminded of 1917, the World War I movie from 2019. Since the people fighting WWI really had no idea what they were fighting for, it fit right in with Civil War.
Maybe I went in expecting too much. I wanted a commentary on what a civil war could be like in today’s day and age, and how others may react. Instead I got a cookie cutter travel movie with characters I barely cared about. There was no suspense, no surprises, especially in the end.
I believe the goal was to show the horrors of war. We know that war is terrible, but a war where we don’t know the why is not a way to do this.
The Colorado trip continues with watching a production of Kiss Me Kate at the Central City Opera House. This was one of the productions that Delaney worked on as a costumer. I bought the tickets online before we left, and I messed up paying way too much on them because I was on the wrong website.
Well, even though I spent too much on them, there was a mistake in the tickets and we got moved to the third row, so it sort of worked out. Sort of. The performance was fantastic!
After the performance we went to look at the Rocky Mountains. This was an experience due to us needing to be there early so we could get in to the national park. To make sure we were there early, we slept in the car in Estes Park. This was not fun, but we survived. After a little clean up at McDonalds and some breakfast we were off to the Rocky Mountains!
It’s was a very cool drive, which included a visit to the Alpine Visitor Centre, the highest facility of its kind in the National Park Service.
Afterwards we visits Estes Park, which had a ton of people walking around. So many people that each crosswalk had a police officer directing the walkers. Of course I wasn’t paying attention, so I got yelled out for crossing out of turn.
We ate lunch at The Sandwich Mafia, a little out of the way shop.
That night we went back to Central City to eat supper with Delaney, Aunt Elia, and Tara’s cousin Rick. The pizza was good at Dostal Alley Brew Pub.
On the third we rode the Georgetown Loop Railroad, which was a pretty cool ride. We finished that up with a meal at Cooper’s On The Creek, a fancy restaurant in Georgetown.
We spent the morning of the 4th of July going to downtown Georgetown’s parade. I rained a little bit, which didn’t really damper the parade.
Later on we went to Kashif and Karen’s house to visit with the family. Grace got to meet her (2nd?) cousins and we all got to catch up on things.
Alas, all good things must come to an end. We had some time to kill, so we visited the Park Meadows Mall before dropping off the rental car.
The traveling for 2023 continued with a drive to the Smoky Mountains for Kolt’s wedding. The venue was the fantastic Foxwood Manor, and Kolt was married with the Smoky Mountains in the background. After the ceremony, the reception moved inside with some great food and good dancing. The festivities continued a week later with the Hardin County reception out at the community building.
The next morning I ventured out to get some steps in, and downtown Gatlinburg was an interesting place. Tons of places already opening on an early Sunday morning. There are a multitude of activities and food places to take advantage of, a little something for everyone.
On the way home we stopped at a Buc-ee’s in Richmond Kentucky. Our first visit was a little overwhelming! There were a million gas pumps and a million people inside, with some great bathrooms. The service was so quick, I don’t know how they did it.
New tires on the Fit on the 10th and then a meal at Salsa’s on the 11th.
Unfortunately, we had a funeral visitation on the 13th with Jenny’s dad passing away. But, we also had Jerry’s 80th birthday party, along with a whole family visit at Caesar Creek State Campground. The rain didn’t slow us down.
I ended the month with another great year at 4-H Camp, and the 4-H festivities didn’t end because Grace had her last state 4-H judging at the Ohio State Fair.
On the 27th I got to go see Rochelle’s sketch comedy at the Cafe Kerouac.
A very good month for movies!
TV I watched (number of episodes in parenthesis):
I don’t think we’ve ever traveled as much as we did in July, 2,251 miles by car and 1,152 miles by air.