Monthly review: May 2020

| monthly, review

I've missed reviewing my journal entries. My weekly and monthly reviews had gotten a little unwieldy because my daily journal entries captured so many of A-‘s adventures.

  • Household
    • I experimented with using Grocy to track our pantry inventory, and I tried to modify the source code to make it easier to get the views I wanted. We decided to just keep things untracked, since we get through stuff in a reasonable time.
    • I set up a Tasker profile to lock the screen after seven minutes of watching videos, since I didn't like fighting A- about it.
    • W-‘s takoyaki pan arrived. He made shrimp balls, and we enjoyed eating them.
    • W- took apart the garden boxes near the shed. He built another one near the bottom of the dock stairs, and he moved the mint closer to the house. We added another container for the bitter melon, and we took off the chicken wire and added pea supports.
    • W- dug a trench around the shed and started stapling wire mesh around it.
    • We experimented with making ice cream cones and cups.
    • W- practised cooking outside with the butane stove. We tried baking bread outside too, since the toaster oven is portable.
    • I wore a mask and picked up my business mail. It was the first time I'd been out for a long walk in a couple of months.
  • Education
    • A- finished the online kindergarten readiness program.
    • I printed out the ELECT framework and updated my kindergarten readiness checklist. I think this will help me focus on specific areas and take notes. I also reflected on learning how to have fun with A-. I started reading through the kindergarten curriculum expectations. It has a lot of tips on how to respond, extend, and challenge kids while playing.
    • W- moved the printer upstairs to accommodate all our printing. I started printing worksheets for A-, since she sometimes asked for them. In addition to the worksheets I downloaded, I also created a bunch of worksheets about chess, taho, and other interests.
    • A- carefully completed a colour-by-number worksheet that had eight colours. She sometimes coloured outlines slowly so that she could scribble inside them faster. She tried to keep most of her crayon marks within the lines. It was pretty amazing.
    • A- breezed through almost 30 Christmas-related worksheets, asking for more. Towards the end, she developed the routine of doing two thumbs up after completing a sheet. She grinned and asked, “What's my reward?” I said, “That feeling of being proud. And more challenges, if you want them.” She asked for another sheet. I think we had that exchange four or five times.
  • Tech:
    • I started making a font of my handwriting using FontForge. I wrote a Python script to generate a font template, figured out how to compile autotrace against GraphicsMagick instead of ImageMagick, and experimented with class-based kerning.
    • Well, that was really exciting. I upgraded to Focal (Ubuntu 20.04) from Bionic (18.04), broke my server config in half a dozen places, and stayed up late to fix most of the pieces (I think). And I even ended up dockerizing Quantified Awesome (although the app directory is still mounted), since Passenger was getting annoying.
    • I set up a Docker container for developing Quantified Awesome, and I managed to initialize my database and log in. Whee! Next step: remember how tests work…

Blog posts

Sketches

Time

Category Previous month % This month % Diff % h/wk Diff h/wk
A- 45.1 48.8 3.8 84.8 6.4
Discretionary – Productive 4.1 5.3 1.2 9.3 2.1
Sleep 32.2 32.8 0.6 56.9 1.0
Unpaid work 5.2 5.1 -0.1 8.9 -0.1
Business 1.4 1.3 -0.1 2.3 -0.2
Discretionary – Social 0.3 0.0 -0.3 0.0 -0.5
Discretionary – Family 1.4 0.4 -1.0 0.7 -1.6
Personal 5.9 4.9 -1.0 8.5 -1.7
Discretionary – Play 4.5 1.3 -3.2 2.3 -5.4
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