Oh hey, my name is Levi.

Eclipse Day 2024

Update! The eclipse ended up being one of the most amazing things I've ever witnessed.

There will be a total solar eclipse today and my home town of Bloomington, Indiana is in the path of totality. The eclipse will start at 1:49pm EST and will peak at 3:04pm. We are situated in the best viewing area in the state with maximum coverage at 100% for a total of just over four minutes. William Shatner is in town to speak at an event IU's Memorial Stadium that also includes a performance by Janelle Monáe. The population of Bloomington was expected to increase from around 100,000 to almost 300,000 for the event.

We have a perfect view of the eclipse from our front yard. Our neighbors are coming over to watch and then we're going to have dinner together after. Being in the path of totality is a once in a lifetime event that won't happen in the US for another 21 years on August 12, 2045. I'll be 54 by then and our son will be 38.

I worked the first half of the day, had one meeting, started prepping some food for dinner. All in all a pretty leisurely day so far. I'm Feeling excited and lucky I get to watch the eclipse with my family and have a nice dinner with friends.


Eggcorns and other language fun facts

I never knew there was an official term for the language phenomenon where people substitute words in common phrases because they don't know the real words. Apparently, this is a relatively new term. Language is so fascinating. Here are a few eggcorn examples.

  • Eggcorns → Acorns
  • All intensive purposes → All intents and purposes
  • Doggy dog world → Dog eat dog world
The video about eggcorns on the RobWords YouTube channel

I first heard about eggcorns via a new YouTube channel I recently discovered called RobWords and highly recommend checking it out if you have any interest in language and etymology. I've been slowly working my way through all of their videos this week. There is also an online eggcorn database if you really want to dig in.


Some things I can't remember

I keep this note in my Obsidian vault called Things I can't remember anymore. This is probably not of interest to most people, but some of these things brought up a lot of feelings when I realized I couldn't remember them anymore. Some of it made me think about how I might work to experience some of these things again one day. These are several things I can't remember anymore.


  1. What I did with all my free time before I owned a smart phone
  2. What I did with all my free time before I had a kid—mine is almost 17 and has friends that drive and mostly does his own thing. What do I do with all this new free time after 16 years?
  3. My childhood best friend's phone number—I mean like, his family landline phone that was stationery and hung on the wall
  4. What it's like to watch a whole entire movie without getting distracted (see 1. above)
  5. The feeling you get from staying up all night doing nothing
  6. The pure joy of loading up in a van with your best friends and driving five hours to play a show in a basement for no money
  7. How loud, sweaty, smelly, and wonderful those basement shows were
  8. How fun it is to sit on a roof and smoke cigarettes
  9. How good it feels to drink a cold beer in a hot shower after working on your feet and with your hands all day
  10. What it's like to be bored
  11. My Grandma's voice
  12. The names of my elementary school teachers
  13. How to dub a mix tape—like an actual cassette tape
  14. What it's like to go to a video rental store and just browse until you find something to take home and watch
  15. The feeling of brushing your teeth with your finger when you forgot to pack a toothbrush

Reviving my recipe website

I started a Git repo eight or nine years ago to store all of the recipes I use regularly. Some of them are my own and some tweaked versions of recipes I've found elsewhere. The very first version of the repo was just a folder full of markdown files. Eventually I used Jekyll to output the markdown files to a super simple site so that I could easily reference them on my phone while cooking. I've changed up the design of the site a few times over the years and eventually migrated it from Jekyll to Eleventy, but generally I don't touch the site for years at a time except to add new recipes periodically.

We recently had our kitchen remodeled and I've been cooking a lot lately. I got the itch to dust off the recipe site a couple of weekends ago and had a ton of fun doing a super quick redesign. I stayed with Eleventy for the static site generator and kept the styling super simple with all inlined vanilla CSS, leveraging a lot of modern CSS features that make things so easy these days.

A single recipe page for bread dough. The main part of the page looks like a Mead composition notebook.

I added a super simple share widget last week that uses a progressively-enhanced HTML Web Component to add a copy/paste and share (using the native share() API) buttons. I hope to write a separate post about that sometime soon.

It's been a fun and refreshing little project that has scratched an itch I've had recently to design and build something. Definitely check out my newly updated recipe site if you're looking for something new to cook!