Widow's Bay

07:44 Saturday, 13 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 65.91°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 79% Wind: 4.27mph
Words: 142

I'm not a horror guy, but I am a humor guy.

I love this series, mostly because of the characters. It reminds me of Deadloch in that way.

It's a genuine horror story, there is some supernatural evil going on, which shouldn't be too much of a spoiler.

But it's also a lot like Deadloch, because you have a fairly "normal," level-headed protagonist surrounded by a bunch of decidedly abnormal characters confronting something frightening and unexplained.

It's not as funny as Deadloch was, which was mostly played for laughs with some suspense on the side. Widow's Bay is mostly played for the scares, with some laughs on the side.

But I enjoyed the characters in both series, and I think that's the key.

I'm looking forward to the season finale, and I've read that it's been slated for a second season.

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Criminal Record

07:29 Saturday, 13 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 63.14°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 81% Wind: 3.69mph
Words: 233

A quick comment on this British series on Apple TV+. We just finished watching season 2. I started season 1 last year, but didn't make it through the first episode. I think I got the impression it was going to be mostly about a black woman cop fighting white patriarchy, and that didn't exactly draw me in.

Perhaps partly out of dumping Prime and having fewer shows to watch, I gave it a second chance this year and I'm glad I did. Now, I will say that season 2 is much better than the first one. It is about a black woman cop fighting white male patriarchy, but it's about much more than that too.

I haven't read any reviews of the series. I expect that season 2 will be criticized for the very things I found compelling, though perhaps they might also be called "manipulative."

But the evolution of the strained relationship between June and Dan was fascinating to observe.

The one part of the show that never felt credible to me was June's relationship with her husband. I never felt any empathy toward him, though I could see how I was supposed to. He just didn't seem to be a very relatable character.

Anyway, good show. Worth watching. You have to watch the first season to understand the second one, but all episodes are available now, so that's not a problem.

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Catching Up

06:48 Saturday, 13 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 61.36°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 85% Wind: 3.69mph
Words: 512

It's been busy around here, mostly in a good way.

The big news, such as it may be, is that we finally have signed plans in hand. The bad news is that this process has been bumpier than I think it should have been. Part of that is on us for not having a clear idea of how the process should have worked.

We're having a post and beam deck and porch attached to the house. The plans from the designer included notional drawings of what those features should look like. We'd known from the beginning that that portion of the build was going to be performed by a third party. What we didn't understand going in was that most third parties are going to do their own design and engineering calculations. So we didn't communicate that to our architect, and he did his own thing that we have to pay him for, which we aren't going to use.

That and some other things have caused a bit of a mess that's going to cost us a couple thousand dollars more than we'd planned; but this isn't the kind of thing any of us understood going in, so it's been an expensive lesson.

We just received the plans yesterday afternoon, they were supposed to be here earlier in the week, and we haven't taken a close look at them yet. I expect we'll find errors. The post and beam engineers are supposed to meet with the architect by Zoom on Monday to go over the details of how the features attach to the ICF walls. Hopefully that all goes smoothly.

In other news, I've made some progress in finding a low voltage DC LED lighting solution from a company called ATX-LED. I'll be requesting a quote from them on Monday. Our builder's electrician has never done anything like this, but since it doesn't involve pulling Romex through a cathedral ceiling, he might like it.

It runs on 48v DC, and instead of having dozens of little power supplies converting 110v AC to DC at the light fixture, there are two DC power supplies providing power to all the fixtures in the house. There is some redundancy or fail-over capacity if one of the power supplies should fail, so you're not without lighting throughout the house. I'll probably buy a couple of spare power supplies to have on hand should that ever happen. The LED lights should last a lot longer. When conventional ones fail, it's usually that little power supply that fails because of heat.

There are a lot of other advantages with DC lighting in that they're dimmable without using pulse width modulation, which some people can detect as flicker. It's never been a problem for me, but good to know. It's very automated, but doesn't rely on cloud services, everything is local to the home.

I'm sure I'll flinch when I see the quote, but it just makes more sense to me. More to follow on that.

If the weather cooperates, we should be breaking ground next week.

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