• We worked on rehabilitating the main planter box. It felt good to break up the packed sandy soil and work in some bagged soil that we had lying around. We moved the chives to one end of the planter box and the oregano to the other end. W- suggested planting more peas. He stapled chicken wire across the top of the planter box to protect them.
• I worked on lots of journal improvements: lightbox, ZIDList view, getting refs/IDs/image filenames from selection, navigating by year, turning other/images on and off, splitting entries, handling photos with commas, and so on. Thanks to both my journal system and the entries I've been filling in, I'm getting better at being able to look up and link to old entries.
• After I read A- a bedtime story, I told her that she could stay up late if she wanted to read. She chose “Chess for Kids.” She asked me a few times if I could read it to her, but I reminded her that it was past bedtime. I sounded out words she stumbled over, though, and she put the syllables together. The book had small text in close-set lines, so she was getting a little confused while tracing the lines with her finger. I used an index card to cover up the other lines, which made the words a lot easier for her to follow. She used the index card to cover lines too, although her hands were still a bit uncoordinated. She also tried using the corner of the index card to point to words instead of using her finger. When she was ready for bed, she stuck the card into the book and called it a bookmark. “You're reading so well,” I said. “Of course! I'm Reya,” she said. Reya is a character from Khan Academy Kids who loves reading and bugs, and A- has been pretending to be her for almost two months.
• A- read a book in Khan Academy Kids instead of listening to the app read it to her. She likes to challenge herself. Sometimes she'll start to read a book, and then she'll use the recording to check the pronunciation of a word.
• A- kept pointing out three-headed monkeys and stealing cherry tomatoes off my plate. She even asked me to reload my plate a couple of times. Whenever she did, I put five tomatoes on my plate and then counted out the subtraction with my fingers.
• It occurs to me that my interests expand to fit available time. Coding seems to be my default discretionary activity. After I finish updating my journal, I tend to write code. Coding expands to fit available time, gives me regular payoffs, and results in compounding returns instead of diminishing ones. It's hard to pick anything else unless my brain is tired. So I have to be more clever about how I use time and how I think about things if I want to explore and develop other skills. Writing can help me remember better – I look things up in my blog or journal al lthe time. Maybe I can do more of it by starting with these paragraph-length thoughts in my journal. Sewing reduces the annoyance of shopping and makes day-to-day life more fun. I can make reasonable progress in an evening, and lining up several evenings in a row is even better. Drawing helps me think. Maybe I can move more of that into my time with A- by using a paper sketchbook. Hmm…

Blog posts

• Weekly review: Week ending August 21, 2020
• Weekly review: Week ending August 14, 2020
• 2020-08-24 Emacs news

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