Books I finished reading in June 2024. Another short list this month, but one of them was _long_.
The Rain by Joseph Turkot
Kind of a generic post-apocalyptic story, but told as a first-person narrative and was enjoyable.
Something happened and it started raining and then just never stopped. We’re going to set aside even where all the water would have to be coming from to raise the ocean levels as high as described, but fine.
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Stephenson is known for his fairly-hard sci-fi. He does a great job of including solid math and physics and then going beyond in a fun way. His work is definitely more challenging to read than much other sci-fi stuff, but that often is because of the richness of his worlds and the accuracy of the science.
I had little information about Anathem before diving in, which I think made it more enjoyable. It’s 1000+ pages though, and without the reputation of the author behind it I may have given up after the first couple hundred pages. For a novice author it could easily have been an rambling mess with no coherent story thread, but for Stephenson it tells an interesting story–he just takes his time doing so. He could easily have published it as a trilogy instead but I think that may have made the story inflection points feel more arbitrary.
Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot and it didn’t feel like I was slogging through 1000+ pages, it felt like I was walking the path of the story and enjoying the journey.
For our 15th anniversary Jess and I took a hot-air balloon ride. Sarah watched the girls for us and we drove out to Rancho Murieta (a tiny town southeast of Sacramento) and stayed the night at a hotel before getting up at, ugh, 5am to get ready and out the door for our dawn departure time.
It was fun and I’d do it again. I’d probably ask the pilot for a recommendation on time of year though because apparently summer can be a bit less exciting. When the air is hotter your balloon has fewer options for maneuverability (which is achieved by moving up or down into different thermoclines which have different wind directions). We found that out by getting “stuck” below 1000 feet, the air at that altitude was part of a heat bubble sitting over the valley and we couldn’t ascend through it. So we didn’t go very far, very fast, or very high, but it was fun regardless. Which is all preferable to going too far, too fast, or too high–so there’s that.
We landed in a field and then the balloon minions dragged us over to the road, over a fence, and into someone’s yard where they could safely tear down the balloon without needing to carry it hundreds of feet to the truck.
Once the balloon was packed up in the truck we got back to the van, then back to the hotel, had breakfast, and then headed home.
Mom said she’d take care of our cats for a couple days so we could do a short trip to Monterey.
We stayed at the Best Western in Marina which is almost as close to the beach as you can get. So after checking in we walked down to the ocean. It was cold. I wore pants, a long-sleeved shirt, a windbreaker, and a hat. I also went to Walmart and bought a couple blankets and was wrapped in one. I was still chilly. The girls pranced about and played in the waves. I don’t know how they didn’t freeze, but once Corinne was shivering we packed it in and went back to the motel.
The next day we drove into Monterey to go to the aquarium. We parked downtown and walked around Old Fisherman’s Wharf a bit. But before we got to the wharf we passed a patisserie and bought crepes. We had considered waiting until our way back, but it was good we didn’t because they were closed then. They were pretty good, though they took an oddly long amount of time. On the wharf the girls found a cow-bench to sit on.
At the wharf there were sea lions basking, and barking, on the shore. We walked the length of the wharf and then along the shoreline trail a while before hopping on the free trolley to finish the trek to the aquarium.
Corinne and Heather have very different approaches to such places, so I went with Corinne while Jess stayed with Heather. Corinne was upset when the bat rays wouldn’t come over to her for petting, but on our 3rd visit to the touch tank she was able to reach them and was very pleased about it.
Then it was back to the motel and the next day we headed home. And the day after that (Father’s Day) I took Mom & Dad back to the train station.
We got to sit in the actual-size Mercury capsule (smaller than I thought!), the girls made and launched paper rockets, we saw a show in the planetarium, and built a cart.
And then it was time to head to Martinez because….this year Mom & Dad were in the midst of one of their around-the-country trips and they arrived by train on my birthday.
So we picked them up from the station and drove back to Livermore to have dinner at a Chinese restaurant and then home for cake and presents. Lots of games to add to my oversized collection. Going to need to start pruning them really soon.
With a 3D printer, I feel I should catalog the things I’ve designed and printed this month. I imagine there will be fewer in general in the future.
Sliding-door latch cover
First was a cover for the sliding-door latch. The original one came off many years ago now. I think we found it but didn’t know what it was. So it sat on the kitchen counter for months until we gave up and threw it away. Of course, it was only then that we realized it had probably been for the sliding door–which was now just a bit of bare metal. But not anymore!
Designed in Bambu Studio. I would export to an STL, but it fails due to self-intersections in the mesh. But it prints fine.
The little cowl that holds the curtain rod in place snapped off many years ago and the rod has sat lying on the window sill since then. But, less than 1 cent later, it’s back up and working again.
My most ambitious project so far, I designed a set of organizers for the Kinfire Chronicles game. They stack in the box where the riser, loot box, and spacer foam originally sit.
Tan would work better for the color scheme than the yellow I used, but I didn’t have any tan filament.
I designed this entirely in Bambu Studio and again had issues trying to export STL files. I started recreating it again in SolveSpace as a way to learn that program, but I haven’t finished yet.
I had to take a detour to implement text kerning in the SolveSpace code base. I have an open pull request on that project to get the new feature merged into the application.
The cardbox models came out ridiculously large (96 and 10 MB each) when I converted them as much to meshes as I could. Hoping that won’t be problem when I finish re-implementing them.
I bought an R/C car from RadioShack when I was in middle school and it’s followed me around since then. Several years ago I pulled it out and let Heather drive it around. She ran it into a curb and a bracket that attaches the front-left wheel to the chassis snapped. Not really her fault, the plastic was just old and brittle.
So it went back on a shelf in the garage waiting for me to figure out a way to repair it. I tried a number of things, but nothing functional. It needs to hold a smooth cylinder for the wheel joint to pivot in, so I couldn’t just glue stuff together.
I took this as another opportunity to learn how to effectively use SolveSpace and carefully measured all the parts and recreated the bracket. I printed two, making adjustments each time, before realizing that was a dumb way to fine-tune it. Especially since I couldn’t actually see what the problems were. Instead I took a picture and overlaid it on the part I was designing to make the final adjustments (which were down to tenths of a millimeter).
That worked great, the part fit, and the car is back in business.
Designed in SolveSpace. The original file, a STL export, and a STEP export:
