An Auspicious August

Last month, I set out to have myself an Auspicious August. Auspicious means “showing or suggesting future success is likely.”

Following the etymological roots of my alliterative month design led me to the Latin word auspex. It means “bird seer” or “bird watcher.” Back in ancient Roman times, augurs would watch how birds flew and ate to discern signs from the gods. This is also the origin of the noun auspice—meaning a sign, omen, or prophetic token.

At this time in my life, as I just start the search for a new job, I am hoping for favorable auspices, and I decided to take this alliteration as a sign to take up birdwatching—apparently a pretty common hobby for people to take up in their thirties anyway. Over the last month, I finally became aware of all the different species of birds around me and all their distinct sounds.

I even started drawing a bird each day. The Merlin Bird ID app was particularly useful for identifying birds by their calls, revealing to me the common birds that have long been flying around me. After weeks of learning, I decided the Carolina Wren will be my favorite bird, the one that I particularly study going forward, because of the wren’s ties to good fortune and divination.

Interpreting last month’s auspices also led me to another wildly different hobby. While looking around for birds on my walk into work on August 1st, what do I see instead but a drone flying overhead. A curious sign. After thinking about it a couple weeks, I decided to take it as a call to build my own robot— Crombot 1.0.

Basically, I am building Crombot to teach myself the basics of robotics and electronics. I am especially intrigued by the prospect of hooking him up to an AI API, but I am still working on refining autonomous locomotion at the moment.

More on Crombot in an upcoming post.

For now, I want to finish wrapping up my thoughts on August.

There is a case to be made for calling it “Archivist August” rather than “Auspicious August” since that is the project I spent the most time on. I did multiple posts on it this month, and I am still working on the next phase—a video demo.

I have decided to make this transition into creating video demos a theme of this month—Signal September. The idea is a month-long campaign to ship polished evidence of my work, broadcasting it to employers through my website with polished applications, demo videos, and blog posts.

This is also the month where I want to clear my biggest blocker to my full-time job search: finishing publishing my history book. Just recently, I got positive feedback on Cradle of the Empire and decided to move forward with publishing the paperback. I had a proof paperback shipped to me by Amazon; however, it is currently delayed for an unexplained reason. I am still optimistic, though, and plan to write an announcement post that the paperback is available in the coming weeks. After all, one of the sunflowers I planted months ago finally bloomed.