Instead of pretending I'm writing this in early March, let's just cover February and two weeks of March 2025 in this one.
Nature's dormant winter is never ending and then spring happens. The early snowdrops and daffodils, and then crocuses and cherry blossom are quite ignorant of our boredom of languid winter. They appear when they appear. I am further enraged how how they act as though they were always going to appear.
I'm not sure if they know how heralded they are. How I, and several others I watched, stopped, and marvelled at them. We take a photo on our little pocket computers – the near universal symbol of our time that something special is happening, but we don't quite know how to handle it.
While taking a lunchtime walk around a local park, and admiring the blossoms two lovely ladies asked me what species the tree was. Nobody tell my darling, gardener spouse that I hadn't the slightest idea. My phone said it was a pear tree, but that same phone misidentified holly as an olive tree in that same park, on that same day so it may just be a walnut or redwood.
And the mornings. The mornings ! The sun is now up before I am, and natural order returns. I can make my coffee in daylight. With the exception of one glorious four-day period, it's bitterly cold (I write this with sun beaming off the frosted dew on the grass), but the sun helps.
It has been great to get outdoors in it, camera in hand. I don't intend to become a fair weather photographer, but when we're getting conservatively four hours of sunshine a week, for weeks on end, it's hard to plan one's life around when being outside won't be grey and miserable. Also I take photos because it's fun, so actually I think I will stay inside and read my book some more, thank you !
I've also been toying around with the idea of electronics and microprocessors for a while. A friend of mine is creating a sound-responsive light-up head dress for their upcoming civil partnership celebrations and I thought a) that's really cool, and b) I wouldn't even know where to start with that.
After a little but of thinking and research, I purchased a Raspberry Pi Pico W 2 (for like £7 from The Pi Hut), some header pins, and a soldering kit, and I said to myself "how hard can it be?". It's fun to learn new skills !
I picked up the Inventor's Kit from Kitronic (link) which included a bunch of little sensors, and a hat/mount for the micro-processor. I'm working my way through their little "experiments" (really, pre-designed set-ups using various components and sensors to demonstrate functionality) and I'm having a lot of fun. I seem to be having a few issues with some parts of the kits (the switch buttons don't work in the given circuits) but at this point I don't think I can distinguish much between debugging a problem and learning. It's certainly how I learned to build and maintain software systems, and that's going well for me.
I haven't paid formal attention to electronics and the physics of electricity since I was sixteen. I've had no need to. So I've been relying on YouTube, my very clever physics friend (thanks, Matt!), and Claude the LLM, to help me understand some basic physical concepts.
Finally, some books:
- "Jade Empire" (read) and "Jade War" (presently reading) by Fonda Lee. These are books one and two (respectively) of a trilogy and I am loving them. They're mid-twentieth century fantasy in an East Asian setting. I cannot give enough praise to Lee's ability to write of power systems of family, economy, politics, history. Her vision is so coherent and thorough. I've still got one more book to go, but unless she absolutely tanks this last book, I think I have a new top-tier fantasy series on my shelves.
- "Inventing the Renaissance" (reading) by Ada Palmer. Exactly as described, Palmer examines the idea of the Renaissance, and of the Middle Ages vs. The Renaissance in general. She brings a funny, earnest eye to the question "how can we build data-informed portraits of lives during the renaissance?". I'm only about a third of the way through, but so far it's been wonderful