In 2020 I renovated the small building in our backyard which had fallen into disrepair. It was zoned for use as a home office, and had electric but not plumbing. I wrote about how I was thinking about insulating it and comparing framing options but then apparently I never got around to writing up how I finished it!

I'm generally a pretty big fan of transparency, and one way I try to promote this is writing up our finances every few years (2022, 2020, 2018, 2016, 2014). This is also useful to me: putting things into a form where others can understand it is pretty good for getting myself to really understand it!

This post uses the same approach as last year, which is almost the same as before then. Numbers are monthly, based on 2023 spending:

I haven't been playing in Boston much lately, but over the next month I'll be playing four times:

• 2024-04-19 through 2024-04-21: NEFFA. It's this weekend! On Friday night Kingfisher is playing the contra medley (9pm) and then a set of contras (9:30) with Alex Deis-Lauby calling. We'll be playing again on Sunday for a family dance (3pm) with Kristin Siebert calling. Plus Lily and I are leading a kids contra tune jam on Sunday at 2pm (tunes).

• 2024-04-27: Northboro. Adults $10, $5 students. Rick, Lily, and I are playing as Dandelion. This is Lily's first dance as a booked musician, and first time playing on-mic! It's also an afternoon dance, 2pm-4:30, not an evening one. Harris Lapiroff will be calling.

• 2024-05-11: Somerville Porchfest on Morrison Ave, Kingfisher with Harris calling. Free and outdoors, with a rain date of the next day. Here's the status of my block party application, with all the different city departments reviewing it; it looks likely that we'll be able to close the street again:

  

  We're playing 2pm until ~3:30pm, since we need to drive to Hartford to play the evening dance with Don Veino.

• 2024-05-16: Concord Thursday. Evening contra dance as Kingfisher with Julian Blechner calling.

Here's a pattern I find pretty useful:

pbpaste | some_command | pbcopy

For example:

Another round of liberating kid posts from Facebook. For reference, in 2020 Lily turned 6 and Anna turned 4.

(Some of these were from me; some were from Julia. Ones saying "me" could mean either of us.)

I've been working on building an electronic harp mandolin (previously, previously, previously). I got it all hooked up, but unfortunately I'm running into pretty bad interference, and need to redesign it.

Going back a bit, I had designed a circuit for testing and breadboarded it. It worked very well, and I wrote a bunch of code to interpret the pluck signals. [1] Here's a video of the breadboard version, showing both velocity sensitivity and direction detection: