Month: March 2026

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.