Weekly review: Week ending April 22, 2016

Posted: Apr 24, 2016 - Modified: May 29, 2019| review, weekly

Lots of medical-related conversations this week. I called the eye clinic to follow up on A-'s timeline. She's scheduled for an impression under general anesthesia in June. I also called the cardiologist's office to ask about her slow ~~wealth~~weight gain, and they recommended seeing the pediatrician earlier than our scheduled appointment. We saw the pediatrician, and she isn't worried about A- yet (she's in the 25th percentile for length and weight). A- was definitely not happy about the physical exam, though, and the vaccine injections didn't help. She was a bit fussier for two days, and now she seems back to normal. We'll see the pediatrician again in two weeks for another vaccine and another weighing. Sometimes I wonder if I should also be building up a record for A- at home, but since it doesn't seem easy to get a copy of medical notes, I guess I'll have to leave that up to her primary care provider.

The downside of all this phoning around was that I've been stuck playing an embarrassing game of phone tag. I'm currently looking around for more options in terms of pediatricians or family doctors in case I can find someone with excellent rapport. I forgot that I had meeting assist turned on and plenty of optional activities on my calendar, so I missed a few calls. I've set up call forwarding and I'm experimenting with a free service that provides voicemail (fongo.com), so we'll see if that helps.

It was a good week for cooking variety. I prepared lots of ingredients last weekend for Cobb salad and an assortment of burger toppings, and we turned leftovers into pizza. I like this new habit we're building. Cutting up ingredients in advance makes complex meals easier to throw together.

We took advantage of the warm and sunny spring weather to rake the yard and start the garden. The strawberries and sorrel have already started coming back. I planted some peas, bitter melon, and coriander. Maybe in a week or two, when frost becomes much less likely, I'll buy a few cherry tomato starters. I wonder if I can get lettuce and spinach growing this year, or if there are other things I can grow for salads and herbs.

I joined the babywearing walk in High Park, but bailed halfway through because A- was getting a bit fussy. Good timing, actually, as she had one of those big poops when I got home. It's starting to become hat weather, too. I tried making her a hat, but the dome was too shallow and the brim wasn't stiff enough. Fortunately, I have lots of spare fabric, so I can just try again. I'll probably start by trying a stiffer brim.

Quite a few other social things, too. W-'s mom brought some soup over, and I visited Jen, Ewan, and E-. Lola and Lolo also virtually dropped in via Facebook video calling, and A- cooed at them for a while. =)

I took some time to systematically think about kaizen: continuous, small improvements. One of the little improvements I've been planning was making Emacs survive X freezes a little more gracefully. I got emacs --daemon working on my system and I managed to write a blog post about it. Hooray for being able to tinker! I also tweaked my tracker a little bit more. Now that I save the state on the server, I can use other apps without worrying about losing the start of my nursing timer, which means I can read stuff in Google Play Books or Overdrive while nursing. Yay!

Also, while updating some paperwork, I noticed that I'd used a 25% gross up rate instead of 18% for the past two years. It turns out that there's a straightforward web interface for updating both T5s and personal tax returns. Yay Canada Revenue Agency!

I'll probably pull back a little on social things next week as I sort out communications and return various calls, although I'd like to make it out to the Hacklab members' meeting on Wednesday.

Slowly making things better!

output

Blog posts

Sketches

Focus areas and time review

Business (1.3h – 0%)
- ☐ Pay myself a dividend
- Earn (0.0h – 0% of Business)
- Build (0.6h – 43% of Business)
  - Drawing (0.0h)
  - Paperwork (0.5h)
- Connect (0.7h – 56% of Business)
Relationships (2.0h – 1%)
- ☑ Take pictures of baby clothes from Jen
- ☑ Have W-'s mom over
- ☑ Maybe check out babywearing social
- A-
  - ☑ Ask breastfeeding clinic for other places that take patients
  - ☑ Call cardio nurse and ask about slow weight gain and possibly fortifying
  - ☑ Follow up with Eye Clinic
  - ☑ 2-month appointment with pediatrician
  - ☑ Call Four Villages
  - ☑ Call midwives and ask for other referrals
  - ☐ Call TD and ask about RESP
Discretionary – Productive (15.3h – 9%)
- Coding
  - ☑ Plot baby weight
  - ☑ Add bath note
  - ☑ Add duration column
  - ☑ Label axis nicely
  - ☑ Set up search engine
  - ☑ Add ending now / after start buttons
  - ☑ Move nursing timer to database
- Emacs (0.6h – 0% of all)
  - ☑ [#A] Do another Emacs News review
  - ☑ Keep Emacs alive through X crashes by running it in the background with –daemon
  - ☐ [#A] Do another Emacs News review
- Gardening
  - ☑ Clean up yard
  - ☑ Plant peas
- Kaizen
  - ☑ Set up home screen shortcuts to things I'm reading, or organize them in apps
  - ☑ Line up better reading on my phone
  - ☑ Normalize recorded audio
  - ☑ Think about phone
  - ☑ Disable touchpad in init script
- Sewing (2.3h)
  - ☑ Look for a baby sun hat pattern
  - ☑ Go to Fabricland
- Writing (2.3h)
Discretionary – Play (0.8h – 0%)
Personal routines (31.1h – 18%)
Unpaid work (58.5h – 34%)
- Childcare (50.7h – 30% of total)
Sleep (59.7h – 35% – average of 8.5 per day)