Another back to school week, this time my daughter going back for her 3rd year of college. My son and I are home for two weeks on our own. The house is very quiet during the day when I’m here by myself and he’s at school all day.

For the last four years my family as been going to the Tchaikovsky Spectacular concert at Ravinia. This year it happened to be on my daughter’s 20th birthday so it was a fun evening out.

cannons

This year the cannons they shoot off during the end of the 1812 Overture were back with the addition of a balloon drop. Last year they were silenced in respect to the community and the people who lost their lives in the July 4th mass shooting that happened in Highland Park.

The funny motto this year from the conductor was “We came for the cannons and stayed for the Tchaikovsky”. People really love the show and this year they turned out in droves. It was a packed house!. There is a couple there that has been going for 39 years in a row that we have seen every year. Hard to miss them, they have a sign!

I wrote last week about my social media use. That has turned out to be a bit of a problem this week. Finding out that it’s very easy to get carried away and spend far too much time. It has affected almost everything else I did this week. That is an area of concern and something I need to address ASAP.

I’m still experimenting with some new tools this month to try and find some local-only, privacy-friendly replacement for other tools I’m using right now. I’m planning on writing up some posts about that in the near future as mentioned last week.

I went back to Fastmail this week after a short (1 week maybe?) time away. The intent was to save $50 a year and use a combination of Gmail, iCloud, ProtonMail/SimpleLogin, and the Thunderbird email client as a replacement. That would have worked but still left me wanting over a solution that has all of the features those services provide in one package. So I contacted support and had them restore my account. It took a couple of days but I consolidated all of my email back in Fastmail, got my contacts in shape, and am back in business.

What I wrote

Unfortunately a repeat of last week: not much this week other than micro posts. A couple of reasons for that, mostly my usage of social media.

What I read

Nothing of note this week. Read quite a bit but it felt a lot more like snacking than getting a good meal and nothing was memorable enough to write about here.