The further adventures with MelEric

This past Saturday was the last day I planned on working on my habits. I still haven't finished two of them, but I'm going to call it good enough. I am still not sure why I enjoy doing these self imposed challenges, but I had a lot of fun with all of them - even the two I won't be finishing.

In theory I should be down to one habit left at this point, but I let several days slip by without coding and there were days when I couldn't go to bed on time - mostly vacation related, but not always. 90 Days with no television or YouTube. I'm starting to look forward to all of the new TV and YouTube that awaits me in ten more days.

I've been thinking a lot about the phrase, "Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good." I use it a lot in my work when we are planning projects and it is often shorthand for "Let's just get it done even if it is 100%." And that was how I thought of it. Don't worry about getting things perfect, just make them good enough.

My first Runsploring post was last July. Here are some things about my running in 2026

Today marks 100 days of reading, but it was not a difficult challenge for me since I have been reading everyday for more than a year and over the last five years I have read 240 books. I thought I would end my 100 days of reading with another book review roundup. Privacy's Defenders: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance…

Last week I finished my "100" days of dieting. With all the travel and Hudson Restaurant Week it took me 144 days of real time to mark off those hundred days. My goal was to lose 30 pounds and in the end I lost 23 pounds during this diet. Nothing to sneeze at and I was down about five pounds from last year when I started so I'm feeling pretty good compared to earlier this year when I was at a high weight for me - maybe ever?

I'm down to just five habits now. Today ends the 100 days of connecting with my sister. Most days this amounted to sending her a video to update her on my life and she would send a text reply of what was going on with her. The videos and texts started out pretty short, but by the end the videos crept up to the four minute mark and her texts went on for pages.

90 days of at least one point of contact with my sister. The videos are getting longer and I am working on a way to preserve the whole text chain (harder than it should be). I almost missed a day last week. We had a very busy Fourth of July and I was getting ready for bed when Laura kept the streak alive with a text at about 10pm.

Each thing I do I rush through so I can dosomething else. In such a way do the days pass — Stephen Dobyns, Pursuit Good news. I am quitting one of my habits. I will no longer be applying for a job every day (this has been true for about three weeks now, once I knew some offers would be coming I stopped applying.)

I have to run further and further in Framingham to find new streets, unless Kira and I drive over to Saxonville. I have managed to do a run everyday for 99 days with a total distance of 316 miles with runs in five different states - mostly in Massachusetts (68), but a good chunk of them in California (21). I did six in Saint Paul, Minnesota, three runs in Sheboygan, Wisconsin and one in Maumee, Ohio.

90 days of running, I've run a total of total of 275 miles since I started and my fastest mile was this past week at 7:36 (my goal was under eight minutes). I also completed my goal of running a 10k in under may age minutes. My 10k time was 54:45 - which in addition to being a nice palindrome it means I made the goal I actually set out to do last year.

This blog post is brought to you in three parts I - Isn't this blog supposed to be a bout cooking? I mean, kinda. The projects that got me writing here the most were definitely about recipes and cookbooks, but even when I was writing about Damn Good Food that first year it was a lot fo stories about family and friends.

Look I read five more books. Mind of My Mind is the second book in Octavia Butler's Patternist series. Eariler this year I read Octavia's Brood, a collections of science fiction stories from the social justice movement inspired by Octavia Butler (the name of the book comes from Lilith's Brood, another of Butler's works). In those stories was also an essay about the history of Octavia Butler's writing and I decided I needed to extend my knowledge of her works beyond…

Modern WordPress Themes use blocks to create a blog post or web page For my last Tech Tuesday (at least for a while) I thought I would write a short post about how the WordPress editor works. Sorry to bore you with all of this inside blogging stuff. I started this post thinking it would just be something I could write about, but as usual it forced me to go a level deeper than I normally would on a topic and I learned quite a bit about what I could be doing with WordPress.

Blog Post 95/100. Five left before I take a break of indefinite length. Eighteen months ago I quit using Facebook and Instagram1. I outlined my reasons at the time. The main one being that Facebook took the 2024 election as permission to remove its DEI programs and their changes on how they would do fact checking - or rather how they wouldn't.

Kira and I have been lucky enough to move around a lot and explore some great cities (Tokyo, Los Angeles, and now Boston), but Saint Paul, MN will probably always feel like home. It is where our kids grew up and where we have spent the majority of our adult lives. Watching the news last winter as the Twin Cities were invaded by federal officers and the resulting deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti was heart wrenching.

MAdventure #12: Level 99 Social Gaming Playground, Natick One of the gifts we received form Melanie and Eric for Christmas this year was a visit with them to Level 99 at the Natick Mall. The external information we had about the card in our Massachusetts Adventure Bucket list for the Natick card (indoor, year round, price point, etc.) led us to believe it might be for the gaming center as well so we scratched it off to verify and yes.

When I made the Butter "Chicken" Rutabaga Potato last weekend the reason I gave out loud was because I wanted to test it as a vegetarian option for when I am doing more cooking for Melanie and Eric. It passed that hurdle with flying flavors. I will probably make some changes to my usual chicken curry recipe, but maybe not - my version is an easy weekday meal, Matty's is more involved.

90 days blogging, Wow only ten days left. 80 days of running, I'm starting to feel some wear and tear on these old bones, but I hope to keep up my schedule for 20 more days. I've run a total of total of 243 miles since I started and my fastest mile was yesterday at 8:06. 77/100 days dieting, I basically wrote off last weekend with my renewed drinking, but I somehow still managed to lose two more pounds for a total of 24 pounds.

# Next Eleven Years: Extremely Official Blogging Tracker $days = 89 $goal = 100 Write-Host "You have been blogging for $days days!" Write-Host "Next Eleven Years marches on..." Write-Host "Only $($goal - $days) days until the big 100. Keep going!" I had with this month's topic for the geeky blog party known as T-SQL Tuesday. It might be my first top ten list on my Tech blog.

This month, Koen Verbeeck invites the blogging community to write about their thoughts on returning to on-premises. What could be struggles, things we have to re-learn, etcetera. When I read the invite, it immediately sparked inspiration, because there are increasing rumours around cloud exits. People musing about 'what if'. Some clients reference these questions, but so far no one has directly asked me one with the intent of moving forward with it.

Happy T-SQL Tuesday! Our host this month is Koen Verbeeck (see his T-SQL Tuesday invitation here) Koen asks an interesting question: So, dear reader, I want you to think about what would happen if suddenly your company or your client asks to build everything on-prem again (or maybe a hybrid architecture). My first reaction to this sentence was: Oh look, he assumes that everyone is in the cloud…

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday topic is a bit of a thought experiment from Koen Verbeeck (blog | bluesky) where he asks us to consider “what would happen if suddenly your company or your cl…

Since I started my reding a chapter a day habit I've finished nine books. Here are short reviews of the first five. The River Has Roots is a sharp, folklore‑driven story about two sisters, Esther and Ysabel, who spend their days singing to keep the magic of the River Liss in balance. When Esther refuses a local man and instead falls for Rin, a fae being, everything unravels.

"Who doesn't love butter chicken? It's a perfect meal. Now get rid of the chicken and just use rutabaga 'cause it's the greatest of all root vegetables, and with the paneer you have a match made in heaven. Matty Matheson, Home Style Cooking I've been thinking about Matty Matheson's Butter "Chicken" Rutabaga for a while now. There have been a few weeks where I've added it to the menu and then stuck it off, making my own Chicken Curry recipe instead because I didn't have time to figure out a new recipe or because I couldn't find any rutabaga.

As of today my year of no drinking, with all the extra caveats and substitutions, is officially over. When I first mentioned this idea last May I said I would update periodically with how it was going, but I didn't. Probably because of the ten habits I did this spring this one was certainly the easiest.1 Mostly it was just checking a box each morning, knowing that I probably wouldn't even think about having a drink.

There are strange things here in the WordPress sphereBy bloggers who chase some praise;Where the half‑done drafts leave a mind half‑daft And the nights stretch into days;The laptop's glow has shown odd shows,But the oddest it ever displaysWas the night by the glare of a screen laid bareWhen I blogged for one-hundred days. Now Mike, not Mitch, was writing a post with a fire that only he knows;

YouTube video by The 4 Big

“Many Cultures, One Heart” is a public art project designed to highlight the artistic and ethnic diversity of Framingham through a series of heart sculptures painted by local artists and placed around the Cultural District and the City of Framingham. The artists on this project represent the many communities that call Framingham home, and include Black, Indigenous, Asian, Brazilian, Latino, white, multiracial, Jewish, LGBTQ+, and disabled artists from all walks of life, ranging from teens to seniors.

I've spent the better part of the last week working on setting up my own Fabric and Azure DevOps testing environments. The end goal was to have a place where I could use the fabric-cicd python library to deploy changes from one Fabric Workspace to another. A lot of the work was getting my access from my free Azure tenant to my 60 day Fabric Trial.

(I Came, I Grained, I Ate) My various dabbling with meatless cooking has left me with several half-filled bags of grains in my cupboard. I have some bulger, some barley, some quinoa, and some farro. I've made some meals that I liked well enough using these grains, but when I pulled out the bag of farro and tried to think of one I just couldn't get excited about any of them.

It has been 100 days since my daughter and son-in-law's wedding, when I had a glass of champagne that ended my year of no alcohol before the year was up. So I set a new goal of no drinking for the next 100 days. But then I thought what if I did nine more 100 day habits and overlapped them by ten days each.

I have managed to do a run everyday for 69 days with a total distance of 201 miles. 96 miles since retuning from California. My fastest 5k run of the year was a little over a week ago. My total time was 27:03 with a pace of 8:40/mile1. I don't expect to beat that time again during my 100 days, but I'm hoping to use that pace for some longer runs.

It is becoming clear to me that I did a fair amount of cooking in March that I was expecting to blog about, but hadn't yet started blogging again.1 Last year I made the Moqueca Vegetariana recipe from Authentic Brazilian Home Cooking and it was quite good, but it was a vegetarian version of the "real" dish Moqueca Baiana…

I made this recipe for Pork and Hominy chili that I found on So Many Dishes back in March and never wrote about it. I'm a sucker for a good pozole recipe1 and this seemed pretty close - the biggest difference being the addition of tomatoes (and Ken's addition of pinto beans). I followed the recipe pretty much as it was written (which is getting rare these days).

Tonight I am studying PowerBI, Dax, and more about Fabric Model Context Protocol. Again for Reasons.

Now that I am juggling ten 100 day habits at once I'm starting to evaluate the sanity of this project. The numbers are definitely slipping for a couple of them. Running and Blogging are the only ones with perfect records so far. But it could have been worse. Top Ten Rejected 100 Day Habits No Meat - I considered this one for a while and eventually talked myself out of it.

I've been holding on to this one for a while, but when my parents were out here for the wedding I asked them a question about how they met. We were driving to a pancake breakfast with the bride and groom and I hit record. This is pretty close to how that went. Me: I don't know if I really know this story.

Today's blog come to you in three parts. Natick Farmer's Market Natick is the next town over from us and their outdoor Farmer's Market runs from May to October. We never made it there last summer so with not much on our agenda today I thought we should check it out. It was pretty active with a lot of booths, not a lot of produce options yet, but we did pick up some lettuce, asparagus, and some potted herbs.