Just sitting here, staring at the Catskill Mountains much like three weeks ago. I’ve been coming up here a lot especially in the autumn. I should bring my shot gun and get my license but I’m fine just sitting here. I don’t eat that much meat anymore.

I know that cabin for sale out here that stole my heart out here was much too far from work,🏚️ but I do love it out here. Years ago when I was young – decades before this was state forest I used to come out here and just sit at the end of the road looking at the mountains. ⛰️ Plus out here was a good place to seek out homesteads with burn barrels to look at even in years after the ban. 🛢️ Mostly all gone fifteen years later. But even if I lived remote, I’d have those shit gun 🔫 laws of New York. My apartment is a mess, it needs a good cleaning but I’ve been away so long. Facing another winter there, I need to get more weather stripping around the door 🚪 that continues to rot away. Still it’s fairly cheap. Been quiet 🤫 the past few weeks as the landlord – dairy man has been busy harvesting not working on the unit next door. Money 💰 has been good this past year, between the high interest rates and the booming stock market. I can make the leap when I want but I don’t want to fall flat on my face, ☺️ and still kind of want to get in twenty years with the state for the higher pension amount.

Smoked some grass and forgot to tighten my kick stand 🏍️ before I went out riding. Bolt 🔩 bounced out and is gone but I found the kickstand and it’s a standard water bottle cage bolt 🍶 so I stole one from there and will replace by stealing another part of my old bike 🚲. Made me cranky for a while this morning but after lunch and some riding I’m feeling better. Plus that whole issue of my eyes 👀 being irritated from the contacts. I’m out of paper towels 🧻 so I didn’t wash my hands 👐 well enough before putting them in it seems.

Been thinking 💭 a lot about my use of the R statistical language. Is R a real programming language? It’s not a general purpose language like C or even Python and I wonder what value I get out of learning and using it every day. I think that’s why I’ve been so interested in learning and getting really good at C and now Rust. I do like a lot about Rust. But I’ve also been study a bit of modern Javascript and Java. Truth is a lot of the concepts can be used from language to language and for a lot of things I do R and the tidyverse are perfect. 🖥️ Still when I tell people I do most of my work in R, I just get snickers. Of course, a lot of scripts in the office are based around good ol Awk which is if anything far less of a language then R.