Blog of James David Williams

Friday to Sunday, in recognition of the days leading up to and of Easter itself, I kept my laptop on my office desk and my office door closed. It is not something I allow myself to do often, taking multiple days away from the computer like that, but it was so refreshing.

I also filled in the time with some activities, both new and old. On Friday morning, I went for a longer hike along a lakefront loop for just short of six miles and then had a southern style brunch in one of the small towns that form exurbs of the Triangle. I’d done this loop before and while I wasn’t thrilled that I had to pay a park entrance fee this time it was still a nice walk under the trees, especially once I was on the extended loop where there weren’t any other people. Friday evening brought a church service and then a few hours with my small group hosted by a couple of the group members at their house, during which time I received a lesson in what constitutes “girl dinner.”

Saturday, I ventured to Cary to try a Laotian restaurant for lunch. It was good but not good enough to displace my regular Thai restaurant, especially given the travel time involved. It does have a great location, though, as I went on a quick stroll through the Downtown Cary Park afterwards. Then I met a friend for a beer in the afternoon to catch up as we’ve had discordant schedules the past few months. The weather was great too.

Sunday morning started before dawn as I attended my first sunrise Easter service. I followed that with volunteering with the first graders in the next service. They’re always a high energy bunch but we have fun. Most of them were coming off of spring break, so they were even more active than normal. Nobody got too dirty working on the craft and everyone was smiling throughout, so it was a success. I followed this with what was for me a spur-of-the-moment brunch, as I was invited during conversation on the lawn after the service. This meant I got to meet a few more children and play indoor basketball and work on puzzles with them into the early afternoon. It all combined to make for a restorative few days and plant a few seeds of questions in my mind.

From a weather perspective, this was certainly true this year. The temperatures have crept into the low 80s and skies have been clear and blue. It’s very much pollen season, though we did get one good soaking to clear the worst of it late last week. It has been wonderful walking weather and I’ve made more use of the neighborhood trails than was possible earlier in the year. It helps that the days are getting longer too.

The adage has also proven true from a work perspective. We’re finally clearing some of the backlog that we’ve carried through the first quarter of the year. This is also a vacation week, albeit not for me, so that has naturally resulted in fewer meetings and emails. This is a week more of managing the closing process for transactions as opposed to drafting and negotiating documents, a calmer time in the overall deal cycle, and several transactions have all tracked through their timelines at roughly the same clip.

Mind you, there is another wave of transactions coming, but this time is allowing me to improve our client workflows. With every iteration, we get a little bit better. It does feel like a treadmill sometimes, trying to improve things, but that’s still better than the alternative.

Not a ton happened in the past week, so I’m going to return to the prior week for this week’s post. In addition to having family visiting, it was also the club spiel at the Triangle Curling Club. This is an intra-club tournament and something of a club championship, albeit with a slightly different format than a true club championship would have. This was my third year participating. Each year, I’ve played with people I’d never met before. My first two years, though, this was by happenstance of being on what I call the orphan team as my team was made up of the last people on the signup list who were still looking for teammates. That is hardly the way to build a competitive team. This year, the organizers were much more thoughtful about that aspect of the process and made it such that everyone entered as an individual or couple so that every team would be a mixed up bunch. Not only did this make for a more balanced field as the rosters were hand chosen by the organizers based on experience, but it saved me from having to scramble at the end to find a team. It also achieved the stated goal, which was to make it less intimidating for newer members to sign up to participate.

My team consisted of a brand new curler at lead, me at vice, and two of the most experienced curlers in the club as second and skip. They also happen to be married and the grandparents of one of the children I interact with when I volunteer at church. I found out about that last part during the weekend. Our first game was on Friday afternoon. This was the game when I had a cheering section of visiting family, at least for the first half of the game until the children got restive and everyone headed back to their hotel. They said they had a good time, and I think the adults did. I’m not sure the kids really understood much, though, but I enjoyed them being there and seeing them through the glass anyway.

After we missed a few shots in our second game, my team fell into the C bracket. It is not intuitive (other than everyone starting in the A bracket), but the D bracket is really what determines who finishes third. The B bracket is made up of those who lost their first games, but some of them fall into the C bracket also. While AI might be involved now, the complexity of these things still gives some indication of the sorts of people who tend to be curlers. Our second game on Saturday was a comfortable victory and then I went home to rest for the potential slog ahead. And by a slog I mean we ended up playing three games on Sunday, the second and third of which were a double header in the afternoon and evening. I’m not going to complain about reaching a final and playing six games in the tournament, but I didn’t execute in that final game. Almost no one else on either team did either, and that made for an anticlimactic end to the weekend. I expect that part of the format will be changed next year as it affected more than one of the finals. I’ve also not performed as well in my couple of outings since the club spiel. Next week is a bye week, though, so I’ll be refreshed for the last few weeks of the season before the humidity comes.

Last week was spring break for my school-age cousins. It was too cold for them to go to the beach but the family still wanted to take them somewhere for a few days. So that meant that I had eight guests for a few days last week on about a week’s notice. I don’t have enough beds for eight other people so they stayed at a hotel nearby, but I had a fun few days of family time.

They arrived on Wednesday afternoon, and after I gave everyone a quick tour of my house and I finished my workday we trekked to one of the craziest urban parks I’ve ever seen. This was not my first trip to the Downtown Cary Park, but it was the first time I’d visited with children. They loved it, each enjoying a different part of the play area that suited their age. We followed this up with barbecue and plenty of macaroni and cheese for the kids.

Thursday was colder and it rained most of the day, so the original plan got scrapped and I went with them to a park much closer to my house so that they could play in the morning before the storm hit. My guests then spent several hours shopping at the mall before we ate pizza and had ice cream downtown in what turned into a cold evening. Red velvet was the hit flavor, but I stuck to vanilla as is my custom.

Then on Friday, I worked through the morning (meaning I missed the continuation of the shopping spree) before meeting everyone for their first ever curling game in the afternoon. It was the opening game for me in the annual intra-club tournament. While the adults had watched curling during the Olympics and I’d prepped them some, the children had little idea what was going on as they’d only ever seen hockey as a game played on ice. It meant that I received some very funny videos later, but I couldn’t hear them through the glass while I was playing. Then I worked a little more before meeting everyone again for hamburgers or chicken tenders and then for gelato at a place that was on the back side of a strip mall and that I’d never heard of before. While I probably won’t go again as I prefer the more established local ice cream places, there was a steady stream of people going in and out the whole time we were there. My family left on Saturday morning and the remainder of the weekend (starting at 8:30 A.M.) was dedicated to curling, but that may be next week’s post.

This year, I’ve taken a plunge into vibe coding and have really sunk my teeth into a few projects. First I built a few tools to do specific tasks, both administrative-type items and discrete parts of our legal workflow. Then I’ve taken on a more ambitious task to construct a custom backend for the law firm. The administrative tools became features, we’ve migrated into a centralized tool for tracking everything, and there is a reports dashboard in place that shows me the information I want to see. We’re also making some significant upgrades to our project management type work that will save time and mental energy once completed and will be responsive to a number of client requests we’ve received in recent months.

Right now, though, while almost all of the bones of my initial vision are in place, only parts of the system are working as intended. At the start basically nothing worked correctly, and that was frustrating and disappointing. As I’ve never developed software before this, I’d never dealt with the period of bug fixes that is an integral part of the process. I also wasn’t building in a sandbox but with our actual workplace, something that isn’t best practices but there were backups of everything and guardrails in place so I took the risk. Almost every day, for several weeks now, I’ve made bug fixes. Some days it’s just a couple of things that went wrong; other days it’s entire functions that broke. It seems like we’ve turned a corner, but some of the most ambitious features are the ones that still have kinks that need to be worked out. Nobody talked about this part when vibe coding first became all the rage.

While it will never be enterprise-grade software, it is already making certain things easier and will improve our operations and expand our capabilities even more once fully built out. Building this has also forced me to learn things like how to set up a virtual cloud server and engage in systems thinking in a manner I’ve enjoyed. I’m unlikely to stop building things once this project is in a sufficiently good place; I already have ideas for what could come next. Yes, it is a little addictive. But only when things work. It’s very frustrating when they don’t, and that’s why this stage is called integration hell. 

I like to take miles-long walks on weekend afternoons. I have for many years, and in all seasons. Not too long ago, I wrote one of these short posts about taking such a walk in the snow for the first time in a few years. Barring a substantial deviation from current trends, that won’t happen again in this part of North Carolina for a while.

This week, for the first time in months, I took my Sunday afternoon walk comfortably in shorts and a T-shirt. Now, I would not have been able to do the same on Monday or yesterday, but the forecast for the rest of the week suggests that I will be able to do so should I find the time for an afternoon walk (though the temperatures will drop to more normal levels next week). The trail was not as crowded as I expected it to be, but I didn’t start until after 4:00 so perhaps I was just later than most.

There are already a few trees along roadsides in full bloom, which seems premature but I suppose the pollinators are already active and so it won’t be in vain, and several others that are starting to bud. The birdsong is also increasing in the mornings. The only regular wildlife along the trail I was walking on is squirrels, but there was also a hawk perched on a limb over the trail right at the little connector I take to a park where I start and stop by out-and-back stroll. The turf soccer fields in the park were certainly getting some use, but the grass still hasn’t come in on the baseball fields so those are still closed.

Otherwise, it was a very calm weekend and I’ve had little activity during the week that was unplanned. I’ll start to get busier again in the coming weeks, but for now it’s head down to get transactions closed for clients.

On Saturday, I took a trip to a movie theater downtown for a matinee. I don’t go to the movies often, but it’s awards season. And awards season in films means that there is a crop of short films nominated for the Oscars. There are categories for animated short films and live action short films. I watched the live action shorts, something I started doing in law school and have kept up in many of the years since. Not every movie theater shows these films, but living in a city does have certain benefits.

It was a very diverse set of short films this year in terms of theme, language, and geography. The most politically charged was Butcher’s Stain, but it is set in Israel and not in the United States. The filmmakers tried to do too much and left too much unresolved (though they’d probably respond by saying that was the point). Two films drew the strongest audience reactions. One was Jane Austen’s Period Drama, which drew laughter from the audience and was short and punchy even if teetering over the line into absurdity by the end. The other was Two People Exchanging Saliva. It was the most unique of the set. French. Black and white. Crazy premises but against the backdrop of contemporary Paris. And it was my favorite, though that opinion was not widely shared. Of the others, A Friend of Dorothy was well-executed but I wasn’t in the mood for a sentimental, poignant sort of film and The Singers was both vulgar and ridiculous in the sort of way that only something based on an old Russian short story could be.

It is the variety of these five films, which collectively lasted about two hours, that makes the short films so appealing to me. Not only are they more experimental and novel than the slop coming from the big studios, but if you don’t like one then you only need to wait a few minutes and a new one will begin.

Basketball was a large part of my childhood and youth, so much so that I’ve had a complicated relationship with the sport for about two decades. Part of conditioning for basketball was running suicides. You run from the baseline to the foul line, then back. You run from the baseline to the half court line, then back. You run from the baseline to the other foul line, then back. You run from the baseline to the opposite baseline, then back. And that is one suicide. To be faster overall, I always planted and turned on my left foot. Now, I wish I hadn’t done so. I had a few ankle problems then, but nothing catastrophic. My left ankle has just been weak ever since.

This winter, I signed up for church basketball. I hadn’t played in several years and I missed the game. I knew I wouldn’t shoot very well, especially at the start, but I wanted to feel the ball in my hands again. My team’s attendance record has been abysmal and more than once we’ve had zero subs available. We even played one game 4 vs 5 because that was how many people showed up. That wasn’t fun for anybody, but we still walked and jogged our way through it and called it getting some exercise.

During the most recent game, though, my left ankle gave out on me. I didn’t step on someone else’s foot and roll it. I just planted the foot to go up for a layup and my body said no. All I could do was to hobble over to the bench. It was a dejecting feeling, and it was prolonged by limited mobility over the subsequent days. I’ve known for a while that I should have been doing ankle-specific exercises and prehab type work given my earlier history. Now though, it appears that that’s not going to be optional if I’m going to make my way back onto the court. Suffice it to say, it’s not been the basketball comeback that I wanted thus far.

With the winter Olympics on currently, I’ve had more than one conversation about curling. Some of those conversations were at the curling club, so those were expected and much more educated about the competition. After all, the people who are there for my Monday night league have chosen to be there and to participate in the sport. The others have been much more varied.

One was a conversation with some people at the gym. We were watching one of the skiing events and someone asked what people thought was the most boring of the winter Olympic sports. While there is a range of correct answers here, none of the curling disciplines are among them. And sometimes you need to let people know. This was one of those times.

Then yesterday, I had a conversation with someone who acknowledged going down a YouTube rabbit hole after hearing me mention curling the prior week. You’re welcome, but know that it’s not nearly as easy to execute shots as they make it look on TV. You should also know that you’ll look more like the Kelce family and their recent video of trying curling than you will the people competing at the Olympics, at least during your initial period of acclimating to the sport and the ice.

I welcome these sorts of conversations. I expect I’ll have a few more during this Olympics cycle. After all, watching it on television during the Olympics was how I first became aware of the sport that I’ve now played for several years. If you think that somehow you’ve found your ticket to gold you’re dreaming, but if you live somewhere close enough to a curling club now is a great time to try it out as most clubs conduct plenty of events for new curlers around this time.

Saturday evening into Sunday morning we received 3-4 inches of powdery snow, not good for sledding or snow cream but the neighborhood kids found it good enough for snowballs and snowmen after some compaction. It is mostly gone now, but it made for a nice scene on Sunday morning. It was certainly better than the half inch of ice we received the prior Saturday evening. I opted not go anywhere, not that I felt up to going far anyway. By the afternoon, though, with it sunny and with the temperature hovering in the mid-thirties, I took a short walk on some of the paths that wind through the neighborhood. It was a flashback of sorts, hearing the crunch of snow under my boots. It was a much more familiar sound when I was in law school trudging off to the grocery store (or even to class). I cannot say I miss the winters in Boston. The temperatures were okay, but it was so gray for so long.

This particular walk was one of the shortest loops available to me. It was not nearly as long as the several miles I often walk on a Sunday afternoon. I was still feeling the effects of what robbed me of the early part of the week, but it was the first time that I felt well enough to venture forth for the sake of venturing and not for some express purpose like picking up groceries. And while I’m still metaphorically digging out from having missed those days last week, I am mostly recovered now.