Weeknotes #7: foggy-day hikes

Another double-feature weeknotes covering the past couple weeks. 🤷‍♀️

On Sunday of Memorial Day weekend I went with my S.O. for a hike on Ira Spring Trail, with Mason Lake as our destination; you can also follow the trail to Bandera Mountain. Either way, you’re going to get quite a bit of elevation in a short distance.

We drove through light showers on Sunday morning, which were pretty much cleared up by the time we got on the trail. This made for a lovely view of the surrounding mountains, with fog hanging low in the valleys.

This was probably my favorite hike of the year thus far, because despite being a fairly short distance and not hiking to the peak, we had tons of sweeping views off the side of the mountain.

One of my favorite things is a strong smell of pine, which doesn’t happen consistently even if you’re completely surrounded by pine/fir trees. I’d like to look into exactly what helps bring forward the scent, but I suspect recent rains help, because this was a very piney hike.

We stopped for lunch at Mason Lake, where a food-motivated chipmunk was very inquisitive and snow still hung around the trail. A light rain hitting the surface of the lake and little bugs skating across the water made this a Very Good Day.

Trails hiked earlier this year: [Vashon] Island Center Forest and Point Robinson Park, Coal Creek Falls and a bunch of connected tiny trails in the Cougar Mountain area, Poo Poo Point (first redux in WA), Teneriffe Falls, and Little Si. We hiked Little Si when we felt too lazy to go for Mt. Si, and were pleasantly surprised by how sublime and lovely the hike was.

On the internet

• Birds that sew?! In the video, the Common Tailorbird is poking holes in two leaves with its beak, then sewing them together with more plant material.
• Zdog is a JS engine for <canvas> that creates pseudo-3D effects for “flat” illustration. Here is a good example. CW: both links contain continuous motion.
• I like that Katy Decorah’s site is a simple paginated list of personal and professional explorations, categorized by adventures, code, epicurean, notes, and playlists. It’s like “bringing your whole self” in a chill format.
• As someone interested in both typography and internationalization, I can’t wait to dig into Donny Trương’s Vietnamese Typography. (via Tatiana Mac)

TIL

Lenses are named after lentils; lens is the Latin for “lentil”. (via How Not to Die; silly title, interesting book)

Reading

Design and development

• Building the most inaccessible site possible with a perfect Lighthouse score: evilly poetic demonstration of the value of manual testing
• Reducing motion with the picture element
• Contextually Marking up accessible images and SVGs
• Baking accessibility into components: how frameworks help
• Introducing new ways to keep your code secure: some helpful new features on Github
• W3C and WHATWG to work together to advance the open Web platform

Work and productivity

• Prioritizing: I especially dig Sarah’s approach to gauging whether tasks align with her values.
• A Trick for Making Weekends Feel Longer

Other interesting articles

• The North Face used Wikipedia to climb to the top of Google search results: capitalism continues to eat the web ☹
• Burning Out and Finding Stability: always appreciate people sharing their stories; so many can relate.