ohhey[blog]

I was looking over my ride history for this year and I noticed that today I passed my 2024 riding total. Two years ago when I started riding more regularly, I finished the year with 448 miles over 34 hours of riding. I didn't ride much in 2025 (not really sure why...), so I'm skipping that. This year, I just logged my 449th mile over abour 31 hours of riding. This week also put me over 1,000 career miles, which feels kind of like a big deal even though I know people who log thousands of miles…

I've been using Strava for a couple of years and it's always felt a little bit...not right. I couldn't ever really place my finger on what it was until I tried Ride with GPS. It's the same kind of thing - ride tracking and planning - but it felt better. First, it wasn't trying to upsell me with every scroll. Second, it gives a lot more functionality in the free tier (route planning, in particular). Third - and this was the game changer - nothing was in my face about how fast I was compared to…

I was thinking about my trip last year to the Boundary Waters and I remembered that I had done a small sketch of Fourtown Lake from our final campsite. It's a small thumbnail, but I think it's become one of my favorite in my sketchbook.

I finished two books in June during my first month off of school for the summer break. Much better than the zero books I finished in May. Raising Hare: A Memoir - Chloe Dalton Very similar in tone to James Herriot or James Rebanks, I really enjoyed this slow reflection of rescuing and raising a hare without trying to domesticate the animal. The care given to adapt to the hare's natural requirements gave a lot of points for reflection on how we interact with our own environments. The Man in the…

I've gotten back into riding a lot this year and I'm tracking rides with Strava. I don't like the upselling the app does, but I can overlook it because it also gives me a live link of my route I can send to my wife while I'm out. It's a little extra layer of safety given that I'm riding on backroads most of the time. One thing that really bugs me about Strava is that my data is locked behind the subscription. I can't filter by time very well, I can't see maps, and I can't really look at…

I rebuilt my blog last winter during the school break and since then, it's kind of just sat. There a quirks and rough edges, but they're things I can live with. This summer, I'd like to make some updates which will smooth out some of those cut corners. Add a media picker for posts. Right now, I can upload pictures to posts directly, but I can't browse pictures which are already on the site. Add a live preview in the editor. The post editor right now is a textarea element. I don't need live…

May was a failure for books. I finished none. To be fair, I started two or three but gave up because I lost interest or never really figured out what was going on. I tried This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, but I was confused for more than the first quarter and decided to give up then. Next, I tried The Will of the Many by James Islington and also felt very confused for most of the first third. I guess I did finish one - The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien. I read this…

Chemistry students are finishing this year with redox reactions (very basic redox) in the context of electrochemical cells. They learn about oxidation numbers, half reactions, reducing/oxidizing agents, and predicting cell potential from reduction tables. It's a lot of conceptual work as well as application. They do well because I have some good hands on labs, but it's a lot to push through. I've been trying to get more creative work into my class (see the adopt an atom post) and redox is a…

This weekend, we celebrated our 17th year married. We took our annual bike ride, this time on the Pumpkinvine Trail which gives a nice corridor between Elkhart and Shipshwana in northwest Indiana. It was a beautiful ride through farms and had plenty of places to stop and rest to make it more of a meander than a workout. Early into the ride, my wife's handlebar stem was loose and some other trail riders lent me an allen wrench to get it tightened back down, but not without a small amount of…

Since I haven't written in a couple weeks, here is a simple list of things happening in life in no particular order. The spring planting season has started. We've been starting seeds for several weeks, but now its time for them to move out into the field. We had one major frost scare which led to some last-minute frost cloth, but so far, things are doing well out in the ground. They'll really start to shoot up soon. School is winding down. We have about three weeks left and I'm working hard to…

I can't believe it's already May. I finished three books in April. Farewell, Earth's Bliss - DG Compton 24 convicts are exiled on an automated ship for a one-way trip to Mars. Along the way, new names are adopted and they do not discuss their crimes. Once on Mars, they're faced with the harsh reality of the environment as well as the harsh reality of the Settlement. The narrative focuses on nine main characters, each with a unique perspective of their new life in the Settlement. The reality of…

We're nearing the end of the year and this is when I do my simplified acid-base unit with first year chemistry students. We've just finished solutions and concentration, so this is a good extension unit where all of the same ideas are present (ions, concentrations, etc) in a specific context. It's also a good unit to probe students for previous learning because, at the surface, they all have a general idea of what acids are and I'm able to push into that knowledge to help them build a fuller…

I've got a small app I use to keep track of student progress toward learning goals. I break my chemistry class down into simple "I can" statements for each unit and give feedback on students' abilities on performing those skills. They range from lab skills like "I can prepare a solution at a given concentration" to conceptual material like "I can explain why water's properties allow it to dissolve different substances." This gives students specific goals for making improvements and allows me to…