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014: On the road again

014: On the road again

April 12, 2026
8 min read
2026
2026-04-12
weeknotes

Hello world!

Last week’s mechanical failure left me without a primary bicycle very briefly. I got a new bike this week and I got back on the road with it. I had already been planning to get a new bike this spring so I’d been doing a bit of research. I went with Trek’s Checkpoint ALR 5 and am very happy with the purchase so far. 📸 See pics.

🔖 My Favorite Stuff from the Internet This Week

🌱 Gardening

The weather has improved since last weekend’s foray. As planned, I waited until this weekend to plant anything else. I sowed seeds into 62 additional containers. Aside from four nursery pots of lavender, everything else was a sunflower of some sort. Beyond the Mexican sunflowers (Tithonia), I also planted these varieties of traditional sunflowers (Helianthus anuus): Arikara, Autumn Beauty, Chocolate Cherry, Ice Cream, Lemon Queen, Mammoth Gray Stripe, Mongolian Giant, Teddy Bear and Titan.

I anticipate having to bring these containers inside next weekend to overnight.

🎧 Music

💿 1001 Albums

Tuesday’s album is my absolute favorite album so far from my 1001 albums journey. I didn’t really know much about Muse beyond Starlight before this week. The album that contains that track is a fantastic introduction to the band. My commitment to this journey is rewarded by gems like Black Holes and Revelations.

📊 Stats

  • 🎶 Total tracks played: 341
  • 🦄 Unique tracks: 237 | Unique albums: 51 | Unique artists: 26

Top Genres

  1. 🛹 Alternative Rock (67 plays)
  2. 🍿 Pop (49 plays)
  3. 🔌 Electronic (44 plays)
  4. ✨ Rock (37 plays)
  5. 🎷 Jazz (33 plays)

Genre Stickiness

I have more I want to do to refine how genres are reported. I collect this data from MusicBrainz and to a bit of normalization and refinement. A genre of pop/rock/rap is pretty unhelpful.

Daily Genre Breakdown

You can see how much that Muse album dominated my listening this week!

Top Artists

  • Muse (57 plays)
  • The Prodigy (42 plays)
  • The Tallest Man On Earth (28 plays)

Top Albums

  • Muse - Black Holes and Revelations (57 plays)
  • Spacemen 3 - Playing with Fire (23 plays)
  • Thelonious Monk - Underground (21 plays)

Top Tracks

  • Take a Bow (10 plays)
  • Starlight (8 plays)
  • Push Ups (7 plays)

📘 Reading

I finished 3 books and 1 graphic novel this week!

The second half of Demon Copperhead felt like a chore though I did enjoy the final scene when it finally arrived. I really admire what Barbara Kingsolver approached with this book and that will factor into my eventual rating.

A friend excitedly recommended Strange Houses to me so I had to give it a try. I highly recommended reading a physical copy of this book as I did before loaning it along to a few others to read. This book was a bit scarier than I’d normally choose but it was enjoyable and kept me curious. If you read it, I recommend taking a long look at the first set of floor plans to see if you can spot what’s strange.

With Unabridged, I finished my first non-fiction book of 2026. Bonus: this book was selected for the 2026 Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle reading list. I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it.

In Progress:

I am not sure if I’ll finish Bel Canto. I am far along enough to get the premise. And yet, I do not care much how anything is resolved. There are too many great books to find and the strongest feeling I can summon about this one is ambivalence.

🔗 Social Reading

🙌 The list at brie.dev/books is up-to-date once again. Next up: I do have quite a few books to rate and review.

I keep track of my reading in various places across the Internet. I track every book I read as @bbrie on Hardcover and as brie on Rambling Readers. I also track each IRL Book Club.

🕹️ Gaming

The weather was gorgeous this week. Accordingly, my non-Ingress gaming went to zero.

🕵️ Ingress

I completed another streak as I work towards the Platinum Epoch medal. I also earned another tally towards the Gold Second Sunday medal. My post-recursion progress back to LVL16 continues.

🍿 Movies

I watched 19 (super) short films this week: the Minions movies. While I won’t count these towards my 2026 goal of watching 26 movies, I am really glad I saw these. A few of them were exceptional, a few were awful and the rest were kinda cute.

Here are the shorts I felt compelled to rate:

See them all on my Letterboxd profile.

🐾 Movement

All of this week’s cycling was on the new bike.

MetricTotal
Total distance29.8 mi (48.0 km)
Total on foot3.4 mi (5.5 km)
Total on bike26.4 mi (42.5 km)
Active time3h 49m
Elevation gain201 m (659 ft)
  • Tuesday: ☀️ New Bike, Old Haunts 🚲
    • The inaugural ride with my new bike was along Montour Trail and within Montour Woods. This was a bit of a test to get used to the new bike. I now have right-side only shifting. The entire cockpit is different and that requires some getting used to. I took the bike on as many different terrains as I could and I am very happy with how well it handled.
  • Wednesday: 🗑️ Litter Collection 🤭 🐾
    • I was using OpenLitterMap while I walked. This exercise definitely succeeding in making the overwhelming amount of litter more visible. I think I’ll continue clearing litter on some walks, when I don’t mind a slow pace.
  • Sunday: ☀️ Montour Morning 🚲
    • This ride was the highlight of my week! After Tuesday’s test ride went well, I got to Montour’s mile 0 as early as I could Sunday morning. I am definitely rebuilding my stamina and conditioning from last season but I still managed a few personal records on this ride. These new records feel meaningful because they are on sections of trail I ride frequently.

📯 Mastodon

Aside from sharing about my new bike, the rest of my Mastodon activity happened on Plop’s account where he celebrated the two most important feline days this week:

I invested an hour or two in improving my weeknotes workflow this week. The format I’ve landed on over the last few months is stable enough for me to build it into a script. I have also added a few more image types in the music section. I’ve also been wondering whether I should take a different approach to all this:

  • weekly
    • handwritten #TinyWeeknotes on Mastodon
    • automated weeknotes here on lastweek.brie.lol (probably but possibly elsewhere)
  • monthly
    • handwritten long posts like the one you’re reading now — something akin to the monthly media diet approach I experimented with briefly

I definitely want to continue to write weekly. A fresh approach could permit me to write something more valuable to me with my limited time.

🤷 Who knows?

Thanks!

— Brie