Weekly review: Week ending April 29, 2016

Posted: May 1, 2016 - Modified: May 29, 2019| review, weekly

This week felt like a good one for making progress in a variety of areas. =)

We've been learning a little more about A- and sleep. I don't mind letting her sleep whenever she wants, even if it means she might be up at an awkward time. It's easier to deal with a well-rested and curious A- than a cranky and overtired A-, anyway! I can manage the occasional middle-of-the-night fussing. When I'm too tired or if W-'s going to be up anyway, A- spends time with W-.

I've been researching flight options and tips for super-long-haul travel. It looks like getting a separate seat for A- could be worth the cost. I'm not sure about taking care of her on my own for the ~22+ hours it takes to go from Toronto to Manila, so any trips may have to wait until either W- files for parental leave or gets more vacation days next year. Anyway, we need more information about her medical needs first before I'd feel comfortable planning any travel. Hard to plan with all these uncertainties!

Speaking of medical stuff – after lots of research and calling, I've learned that our current situation (having a pediatrician) is actually pretty awesome and that it can be difficult to "shop around," so we'll probably stick with what we have. I got on the waitlist to switch my family doctor relationship to someone closer, though, in case I can find a good fit. We'll find out more about A-'s heart and eye in June. In the meantime, May will be busy enough with breastfeeding clinic follow-ups, routine vaccinations, and a visit from a nurse in the Healthy Babies Healthy Children program. (Talk to all the support organizations!)

I spent some time consulting, too. I finally figured out how to animate data in d3 by working on my personal visualization of baby data, so I felt ready to transfer that knowledge to visualizations of client data. Building up the skills on my own time meant I didn't feel guilty about charging my client for fuzzy-brain-learning-time. =) I'm looking forward to tweaking the visualizations based on their feedback, and building some more.

Since I'm doing all this stuff at home and outside, I decided to leave Hacklab. I really like the community, but I didn't think I'd make it out there often enough to justify the membership. I wasn't quite sure I could make the most of the space while also taking care of a baby. It's easier to code or sew at home, where I've got everything I need for A- and where W- can take care of her if I need to focus on something. I'd been mentally treating my Hacklab membership as more like a donation to support something I like. Now that Hacklab's finances are more solid, I can turn that money to other uses. I might consider rejoining it if I figure out how to make it work, as volunteering to help make Tuesday open house dinners was lots of fun.

Slowly sorting out new routines. Yay! =)

Blog posts

Sketches

Focus areas and time review

Business (9.5h – 5%)
- Earn (8.9h – 92% of Business)
  - ☑ [#A] Prepare invoice
  - ☐ Earn: E1: 1-2 days of consulting
- Build (0.4h – 4% of Business)
  - Drawing (0.0h)
  - Paperwork (0.4h)
    - ☑ Check if I need to amend T5
    - ☑ Transfer from savings
    - ☑ Issue and print resolution
    - ☑ Write and deposit cheque
    - ☑ File dividend in Quickbooks
- Connect (0.3h – 2% of Business)
  - ☑ Retrieve my things
Relationships (4.1h – 2%)
- ☐ Take A- for vaccinations
- ☐ Call TD and ask about RESP
- ☑ Check with OHIP re name change
- ☑ Braindump notes for flight
Discretionary – Productive (10.2h – 6%)
- Emacs (0.6h – 0% of all)
  - ☑ Do another Emacs News review
- Coding
  - ☑ Apply d3 update to histogram
  - ☑ Save last activity when we start nursing
  - ☑ Go to W-'s extended family thing
  - ☑ Disable touchpad in init script
  - ☑ Fiddle with image composition
  - ☑ Figure out why ssh was asking for passphrase
  - ☑ Radial tree for status
  - ☑ Figure out what's going on with BEGIN_HTML
  - ☑ Set up Tasker to forward to home phone when I'm on home wifi
- Sewing (1.4h)
  - ☑ Peasant top
- Writing (0.0h)
Discretionary – Play (0.0h – 0%)
Personal routines (15.4h – 9%)
Unpaid work (69.8h – 41%)
- Childcare (62.4h – 37% of total)
Sleep (59.0h – 35% – average of 8.4 per day)