Clouds, mushrooms, trees. Vantage point: biking.

A lush green landscape with various trees and plants is set against a backdrop of a soft pink cloud under a clear blue sky.A cluster of shelf fungi with white edges grows on a decaying tree stump in a wooded setting.

I fully support local coffee shops deploying canned brews, giving us a choice against (usually) poorly executed, mass-produced offerings at most grocers.

SK Coffee released theirs earlier in the summer, and it’s an excellent first offering; alas, just wish it was more widely available at retail.

A four-pack of tall cans labeled Cold Brew Peru, by SK Coffee is placed on a brown leather surface.

✱ A Pacific Northwest Jaunt

We decided to return to the Pacific Northwest for our summer trip, three years after our last excursion. Nine days, spanning a landing in Seattle for a couple nights, a ferry into Canada’s Victoria on Vancouver Island for a few evenings, another ferry to Vancouver to pick up a car to drive up to our favorite resort in Whistler for three nights, and back to Vancouver to regroup and fly out the following morning.

A tranquil lake is surrounded by dense green forests and towering mountains under a vibrant blue sky with scattered clouds.

Sounds like a lot of moving around, but we dialed this in perfectly with plenty of rest and relaxation, a few recreational excursions, and a lot of eating and drinking our way through great establishments.

British Columbia is truly beautiful. Everything is picturesque, especially if you’re from the midwest and used to seeing a horizon line (we did, in fact, miss our horizon line by trip’s end). Dramatic scenery is magnified by a focus on the outdoors, environmentalism, and, naturally, the best oysters found on the continent (the west coast simply has better oysters). We marauded through a half dozen spots to stuff ourselves with them, and every one of them was worth it. Kudos to Shuck Taylor’s in Victoria, though — we went back there twice.

The other highlight was resort hospitality, and we were delighted to return to a place that kept such things at a high standard with their staff. Attentiveness, recognition, and a helping hand to make moments count throughout the experience adds to the memory, especially in celebrating a milestone birthday for my wife.

A few notable places we went to this time (for anyone vaguely interested in my opinion):

  • Zig Zag Cafe (Seattle; drenched red lighting, breezy interior, decent cocktails, and a menu that wasn’t particularly interesting… yet was executed well)
  • Half Shell (Seattle; we scooted here for oysters, and enjoyed it, so much so we continued to scoot north all the way to Discovery Park)
  • Shuck Taylor’s (Victoria; wonderfully curated menu of oysters, seafood, cocktails in a seaside-esque dive bar)
  • Varsha (Victoria; I’m not sure what they do differently here, but the Indian cuisine is phenomenal)
  • JBI (James Bay Inn) Pub (Victoria; great dive to slink into for an afternoon drink or two)
  • The Empress’s Lounge for Tea Time (Victoria; allegedly the one true place to do this, and for all intents and purposes, it’s good)
  • Wild Blue (Whistler; a preeminent dinner spot)
  • Maenam (Vancouver; perfectly executed Thai… I’ll be thinking about their bite-sized scallop larb for weeks)

This may be the indication that we’re well under way with a new PNW tradition, if we’re fortunate to have the opportunity to continue doing so.

A forest trail winds through tall trees and moss-covered rocks on a steep hillside.

The Hyland Lake Ski Jump has such an ominous presence.

A ski jump structure extends above a wooded area under a partly cloudy sky.

For anyone interested… been tinkering with a fast way to insert the current date (YEAR-MM-DD) on MacOS (alas, Tahoe). After struggling to get an Automator Applescript to work, Shortcuts (I guess?) was the most elegant way to do it.

Sharing the shortcut here (it has a hotkey, but you can edit).

✱ Websites Lost in Stasis

Like several folks on the Internet, I’ve been taking the new Vivaldi 8.0 browser for a spin, and imported my Safari bookmarks to get a few favorites cooking on there. And as one does, I also took a moment to pick through dozens of websites I had organized eons ago to see if they still loaded (may of which I had forgotten).

Here’s a list of sites that still load, but seemingly have stopped updating. These sites fell out of regular visits long ago (perhaps through broken RSS feeds or interests drifting and I absentmindedly moved on), but worth a share, at the very least, to see if this resonate or remind anyone else of a bygone Internet.

I particularly remember Mandolux as the place to get photography-based desktop wallpapers; alas, that site hasn’t been updated since 2008.

I’m usually not one for indulging in nostalgia, but the pull towards it has been greater these past few years. Noah Kalina has a good reason why:

It’s probably because most people who grew up in that era are having a midlife crisis, but it probably also has something to do with enshittification and how corporations, in their pursuit of infinite profit, have turned everything we once loved into unremarkable products to be quickly consumed and discarded. We long for the days when things seemed like they had real meaning and value.

Waking up to the first snowfall of the season up here. It’s been tardy for the last several years in a row now, for whatever that’s worth.

Snow-covered trees create a serene winter forest scene.

Big move coming up. Am I one of the few who consider themselves moving enthusiasts? Yes. Organizing, packing, labeling, checklisting, and placing objects in optimal paths for trafficking this shit out of a house is high on my dopamine hits.