---
title: "Weeknotes: March 21–27, 2026"
date: 2026-03-28T09:00:00-04:00
draft: false
description: "A flurry of last-minute code changes and travel preparations, mixed with meaningful local outings, before flying off into the unknown next week."
tags:
  - weeknotes
  - work
  - music
  - games
  - cooking
  - art
---

*A flurry of last-minute code changes and travel preparations, mixed with meaningful local outings, before flying off into the unknown next week.*

## Shipped

Code freeze hit at end of day Monday, which meant a morning of squeezing in quality-of-life features right up to the wire. Once the gate came down I shifted focus entirely to building out performance and logging dashboards — the kind of observability tooling that will let us actually see what's happening when we go live for testing next week. All of it was new tooling to me, which meant more of the steep learning curve I've been living on since I started, but by the end of the week I was genuinely happy with what I'd pulled together. I'm as ready as I can be for the trip to San Carlos. I'm going in with very little idea of what to expect on the ground, and I've made my peace with that.

## Read

*Service Model* keeps pulling me in. I've carved out a few chapters every night before bed even when that means staying up until 2am, because I can't not. At my current pace I'll finish it on the plane to San Francisco, which feels appropriate.

## Played

Saturday Juniper and I went to the grand opening of [The Painted Heretic](https://www.facebook.com/ThePaintedHeretic/), a new game store on our side of town. It's a good mix — tabletop miniatures, RPGs, card games — and the vibe was welcoming in that particular way that good local game stores manage. We bought a few things, entered the raffles, and left feeling like we'd found a new spot to paint minis and be among our people.

On the way to drop Vivian off at Georgia State after spring break, we stopped at [Level Up Games](https://www.levelupgamesco.com/) in Duluth. The place is massive, stocked like a warehouse, with seemingly every board game, RPG supplement, mini, and trading card in existence. I'd been hunting for the new Gloomhaven mercenary packs — sold out on the Cephalofair website — and Level Up had all four, at retail. More options as our party continues to retire characters and rebuild.

After dropping Viv off, Juniper and I made one more stop: a ska festival at [Outrun Brewing Company](https://www.outrunbrewing.com/) near Stone Mountain, which I'd never been to before. It's 80s-themed in a way that's earnest rather than gimmicky, and ska has been my first musical love since high school, so this required no convincing. I caught the second half of Left Hand Hotdog's set and then stayed for Space Mutiny — an 80s neon karate science fiction ska band, and they delivered exactly that. They were fantastic. The smash burger truck outside and a very odd but very good beer from the brewery were a bonus.

![Space Mutiny performing in the Outrun Brewing Company parking lot, with a movie projected on the building wall behind them](IMG_3333.JPG "Space Mutiny performing in the Outrun Brewing Company parking lot, with a movie projected on the building wall behind them.")

## Cooked

Hot pot in Decatur on the way into Atlanta with the kids. We always go to the same place even though there are at least a dozen to choose from, and it's never not worth it.

Outrun had a beer on tap I couldn't walk past: Echo of Harvest, a graf — half apple cider, half Belgian saison — brewed with smoked malt and fermented with fresh apples. Notes of smoke, tart apple, and a crisp mineral finish. I took a crowler home.

## Noticed

Outside Level Up, tucked into the concrete shopping center landscape, was a nesting Canada Goose pair. The male was sitting on a narrow strip of dirt between the parking lot and one of the buildings. Around the corner, up on a brick wall alongside a staircase, the female was on her nest. A deeply impractical place to lay eggs, but she'd committed. It was unusually hot for March and she was panting visibly. We walked into a nearby boba shop and asked if we could have a container of water for a goose outside, which apparently caused quite a stir — nobody had realized she was there, just a few dozen feet from their back door. They filled a to-go container, we carried it over, and the goose clearly knew what it was. She let us set it right next to her before offering a perfunctory hiss, then spent the next several minutes drinking.

![A Canada Goose on her nest in a Duluth shopping center, drinking from a plastic container of water we brought her](IMG_3319.JPG "A Canada Goose on her nest in a Duluth shopping center, drinking from a plastic container of water we brought her.")

## Thinking About

Thursday evening, while Juniper was teaching swimming lessons at the Y, I went to the [Lyndon House Arts Center](https://www.accgov.com/lyndonhouse) for a presentation by [Peter Loose](https://www.peterlooseart.com/) on the mountain dulcimers he's made and collected over the years. I've known Peter for a long time — he's a quiet fixture in the Athens arts community, the kind of person who doesn't announce himself, despite having paintings in museums around the world. I had no idea until that evening that he also makes dulcimers, in his own sculptural style, and that they're highly sought after by collectors. He showed a snake-shaped one, then a blue jay, then unveiled an enormous one shaped like a lobster.

![The snake dulcimer, painted with dense dot-work patterns and the words "we could all be dazed" along its body, displayed on a wooden pedestal](IMG_3374.JPG "The snake dulcimer, painted with dense dot-work patterns and the words 'we could all be dazed' along its body.")

![Peter Loose holds up his blue jay dulcimer at the Lyndon House Arts Center presentation. The instrument is nearly as tall as he is.](IMG_3370.JPG "Peter Loose holds up his blue jay dulcimer. The instrument is nearly as tall as he is.")

![The lobster dulcimer, leaning against a table at the Lyndon House Arts Center. It stands nearly five feet tall.](IMG_3371.JPG "The lobster dulcimer. It stands nearly five feet tall.")

Unusual shapes, but they all sounded beautiful.

I made a dulcimer once, years ago, in the traditional teardrop shape. For the sound holes I carved the coat of arms of my SCA kingdom. I barely knew how to play it, but I learned enough to carry it around at events and earn as much mead as I could drink by singing songs and telling stories at campfires. It was cheaply made and didn't survive the years. My parents, though, bought and played two beautiful dulcimers later in their lives, and I have both of them now, cases closed, sitting on a shelf in my office. After seeing Peter and his work that evening I brought them down and showed them to Juniper. I keep meaning to re-learn enough to play them. Maybe someday they'll be instruments again instead of artifacts.

## What's Next

My first on-site visit to a Natera lab in San Carlos. I'm genuinely eager — to meet my teammates face to face, to see the scientists who will actually be using the software I've been helping build, and to get a felt sense of the environment these tools need to work in. Specs and tickets tell me the *what*. Meeting the people tells me the *why*, and that shapes the *how* in ways that are hard to get any other way.
