August 2024 in review

This is the twenty-second post in my Month in review series.

My fiancée and I celebrated 4 years of meeting eachother 🥂❤️. We went on a date at SITE Santa Fe contemporary art gallery, then we went out for dinner at Wolf & Roadrunner downtown.

Riya performed in a bellydance showcase event with performers and companies from all over New Mexico and even other states. There is some really great talent and artistic expression! The event was fun and rowdy! It was in a restaurant and brewery in the Santa Fe Railyard neighbourhood, so we had good food and drinks too.

On one Friday, as I was picking up my girlfriend at the bus stop after work, we decided to turn left, back towards Los Alamos, to see the sunflowers on the side of the road. Riya commutes to work by bus, and the view on the route is wonderful year long. At this time of year, there are thousands of sunflowers, just outside of the town. Riya had been wanting to go back to take pictures before they’re gone, so we did! Then we headed back home. It made me happy I also got to see them!

We went to Los Poblanos Ranch in Albuquerque for a dinner date, and watched the moonrise from the restaurant terrasse. It was particularly poetic and mystical, we nailed the celestial timing and view angle.

I love watching the movements of the Sun and Moon, in general. Clear dry skies on most days in Santa Fe make this very straightforward. I know exactly where the Moon and the Sun are, most of the time.

There are two small mountains in Santa Fe, at the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. They look a bit like boobs, and they are called Sun Mountain and Moon Mountain.

I climbed a little bit on Sun Mountain to get a view of rainy weather over Santa Fe. The cloud and weather patterns here are fascinating. Rain and sunshine combined is very common. So are rainbows. Clouds are rarely very thick and homogenous. Instead, because they are usually quite thin, they often present glass-like effects such as transparency, layering, shining, and haloing. Then I got caught in the rain, but I can’t say I didn’t see it coming!

The rain, it’s often hyperlocal. You can see distinct columns of precipitations above different spots. Another thing that is common here that I didn’t see back in Canada: rain columns descend from clouds, but it doesn’t touch the ground. It just… dries out midway.

The theme of the month is: weather.

Activities

Photography

Learning and professional development

My learning curiosity got me absolutely absorbed by the PostgreSQL database and the TimescaleDB add-on. I spent many hours reading about it, installing it at home and learning how to use it and how to program applications with it.

The databases I work with at Grafana Labs are hyper optimized for very specific needs that arised in the past 15 years, so it was eye opening mind blowing to explore the functions and features of more traditional databases. SQL is not new or recent at all. PostgreSQL has matured over 28 years, and the SQL standards even longer than that. This is what you use when you want a boring database that is very very reliable and just works for 90% of business needs. I’m just revisiting this topic from different professional eyes now, and it puts my domain of expertise into perspective and context.

I really like PostgreSQL because it’s phenomenally reliable, performant and full-featured, and it’s free and open-source. I love that. I CONSUMED the technical manuals “from cover to cover”. And sometimes from cover to cover without quotes, because I will definitely buy hard cover books on PostgreSQL and Data Engineering with my job’s professional development budget.

I continued studying Javascript too, but that slowed down. I need to pick this back up at some point, because I’m at the chapter about asynchronous Javascript functions and event-driven programming, which is all of what Web applications are made of.

Month favorites

• Beer and pizza at Paxton’s with neighbourhood friends.
• Mosaic performance at 2nd Street Brewery and at the Mono Mundo international dance showcase on the Plaza.
• Farmers Market at the Railyard on Saturday mornings.
• Yamas, Greek cuisine restaurant on Cerillos Road.
• Campos restaurant at Los Poblanos, at moonrise.
• SITE Santa Fe art exhibits.
• Bear Grease live musical play. A Native American twist on Grease, the movie. Featuring our friend Raven.
• Little road trip to Los Alamos and back to see the roadside sunflowers and landscape.
• Hike partially up Sun Mountain to look at New Mexico weather.
• Mushroom hike with Riya.
• Dinner at Izanami restaurant, at the Ten Thousand Waves spa resort on the road towards the ski bassin.

Next month little preview

• We spent a day in Taos with a friend of Riya, for lunch and shopping.
• The peach tree in our backyard produced basketfulls of peaches again this year!
• We went to a Hozier concert in Albuquerque.
  • He’s an Irish folk/pop singer on tour in America.
  • Here are two of his most popular songs:
    • Take Me To Church
    • Too Sweet