schneefink

I am trying to find a website that was some sort of general resource about bicycling to airports. I have some vague memory of encountering such a thing several years back.

I'd been using DuckDuckGo, but I think I'm DuckDuckDone with it. So far this morning I am amusing myself with Yahoo, although it looks about as enshittified as the Goog and Bing, which isn't much of a surprise.

Here is a story from KQED (pls support public radio) about Californians doing small-scale solar installations. While that by itself is interesting to learn about, I found it even more interesting to learn about the legislation passed recently in Utah to make it easier for people to put in these kinds of installations.

I also appreciated learning more about some of the logistical and legal complexities associated with this type of installation. When I learned about them becoming popular in Germany, the major issue raised in that article was concerns about fire safety, but clearly there's more to the story.

I was originally scheduled to take a pretty terrible return redeye flight, departing from SFO at 11:40 pm Monday evening, arriving in Albany at 9 am Tuesday. But shortly before I was about to head over to the airport, I received a flurry of notifications from the airline to inform me that my flight would be egregiously delayed to the point where there would be absolutely no hope of making my connection in Detroit.

After fighting with the online rescheduling software, then fighting past their help chat chatbot, I eventually reached what seemed to be a human who helped me reschedule to an 11:30 am flight on Tuesday. That meant I had time to make pancakes on Tuesday morning, which also meant my sister and I had the amusement of her finding a container of huckleberries in her freezer that I had accidentally left there last fall.

Anyway.

The daytime flights turned out to be generally civilized. On the longer one to Detroit, I watched Madres Paralelas and found it to be one of the best Pedro Almodóvar films I've seen, for its political subtext (and gorgeous, fun sets). I'm predisposed to be fond of Almodóvar films because we watched so many of them in Spanish classes in high school for both the linguistic and cultural context.

Then I watched most of a documentary called Urbanized, about urban design and planning. Some aspects were really interesting, such as the commentary on what it is like to live in modern Beijing, and on how slums form and what can be done about that for the long term. Some parts were a little overhyped, but I could overlook those for the sake of the more interesting parts of the film. Okay, maybe "some" is an underestimate and more like half of it was overhyped. But oh well. That might be hard to avoid just because of the nature of the subject matter.

I did not attempt to watch anything on the shorter flight from Detroit to Albany. But I did appreciate that flying through Detroit was pretty direct, and that airport was amusing enough with its indoor people-mover.

I'm glad I wore the elastomeric respirator. It's not as comfortable as not wearing a mask, but it's much more comfortable than a disposable KN95 or than catching some nasty bug from flying. Hard to talk while wearing it, though. Maybe that's actually a benefit, too?

Now I need to go see what has happened with the saltwater tank while I was away. I got a call that two of the four horseshoe crabs had died, argh.