Monthly review: August 2025

Sep 5, 2025| monthly, review

August 2025: 🌻🛍️🐠🌊🎮💦🚴🦕🛒⛏️👓🎂🌹🏠🌻🎩🤸🏺🖍️🗄️🏺🎨😷🎂👧🎡🎨⛏️🎹🦁⛏️

Text from sketch

August 2025 2025-08-31-13 summer camp experiment, lots of adventures

🌻 dolls, flowers
🛍️ shopping
🐠 aquarium
🌊 damming water
🎮 played Stardew at home
💦 water at the splash pad
🚴 bike adventure - A+ rode 13km
🦕 ROM, phone moisture
🛒 KidSpark: "I would like to buy a papaya"
⛏️ Create Hypertubes
👓 A+: -5.00 prescription
🎂 birthday, Wicked LEGO
🌹 origami rose
🏠 playdate at C-'s house
🌻 playdate at our house: Duplo, flower
🎩 magic show
🤸 handstands
🏺 pottery wheel summer camp
🖍️ colouring
🗄️ opening cabinet
🏺 trimming
🎨 marbling
😷 mask discussion
🎂 Gong-gong's birthday
👧 Science Centre at Sherway
🎡 CNE (still fun)
🎨 KidSpark Pictionary
⛏️ Minecraft Experience
🎹 A+ and piano
🦁 Walk with W- and A+, Lion Dance
⛏️ Minecraft with cousins, catching up on blog carnivals

(I added more colours thanks to writing my IndieWeb Carnival blog post about colours and my thoughts on daily sketches. Progress!)

Like I predicted last month, my days were mostly focused on A+. She enjoyed the half-day pottery wheel summer camp that we experimented with, where she got to practise trimming her pottery and glazing the pieces with a marbled pattern. Aside from the pottery camp, our days were wide open. A+ took the initiative in suggesting places to go, although sometimes I let her know about events or experiences. We went on plenty of adventures.

We went to the temporary Ontario Science Centre pop-ups at Harbourfront and Sherway Gardens. It was fun coming up with more and more things to do at the OSC KidSpark pop-up. We liked pretending to be different Star Wars characters working as supermarket cashiers. We made up a game where I'd tell her "I want to buy a papaya" while holding up something different, like a pineapple. She'd correct me and tell me what to look for ("something a little pointy at both ends"), and I'd go off and find something that matched that description while still being incorrect (like a lemon). We also played another game that involved drawing the items for the grocery list and having the other person figure out what they were. We enjoyed checking out the sensory backpacks, too. (Nice fidget toys!) At the Sherway Gardens pop-up, A+ mostly enjoyed going through the adventure zone and playing with the foam building blocks.

At the CNE, we got caught in a bit of a downpour, but fortunately I had an umbrella and we were wearing Crocs. A+ enjoyed the farm building, and we checked out the kiddie midway after the rain. A+ liked the spinning rides and the Ferris wheel. She also did a good job of resisting temptations. (Games! Snacks! More rides! More! More!) Thank goodness for math.

We enjoyed petting pretend chickens and throwing snowballs at blazes at the Minecraft Experience. I had fun musing about the tech behind the scenes. We made it out to Biidaasige Park a couple of times, playing with the little dams and the snowy owl stage. We went to the ROM and tried their learning worksheet. A+ biked for an hour to get there one time. We went to the Dragon Festival to watch the lion dance. Some afternoons, we did a bit of swimming, but not much as the weather was starting to cool down.

We also caught a magic show at the library. A+ is now familiar enough with lots of science demonstrations that she can figure out many of the tricks in kid-oriented magic shows, but she's good at not spoiling it for others. I think she might sometimes get a little frustrated by the urge to demonstrate what she can handle so that people can skip ahead to more interesting stuff, which works fine in one-on-one interactions but is harder in a group class. (I remember this feeling! Even now, I'm still figuring out how to drop little signals into a conversation so that people who recognize them can code-switch to higher bandwidth, while trying to avoid overwhelming people…) Maybe this growing awareness of others coupled with the ability to quietly enjoy something more complex inside her head will help her with that.

We spent time with family, and A+ enjoyed playing with her relatives. We had lots of playdates with friends, too.

Indoors, we've been having fun going through the unit lessons in the LEGO Spike Prime kit. At first, A+ just wanted to deliver parts to me. Then she took over some of the coding, and now I've been assigned to the parts department while she builds. "It's not your set anymore, it's our set," she says. Mwahahaha! My evil plan is working.

Looking at what we've enjoyed this summer, I can see that she really likes the things that give us new ways to play with each other, like KidSpark or LEGO Spike Prime. Next would be the places that give her new things to explore even on her own, like Biidaasige's water play features, the pottery camp's lessons, or the CNE's rides. As for me, I appreciate that we can spend on classes where she can take advantage of someone's expertise or specialized equipment, and I wonder what else she might want to explore. A+'s getting more adept at considering a wider palette of places we can go or things we can do, and index cards and sketches help with that. I wonder what else Toronto has along those lines. In terms of play, A+'s drawn to mimicry more than competition, chance, or strong emotion.¹ I can see that not just in her role-playing, but also in the way she enters into our activities. I think that's my form of play, too. I like to share her interests, and even with the things I do in the Emacs community, I like to mimic and build on ideas.

Speaking of things I can strew in front of her to encourage mimicry… She occasionally flips through my Noteful notebooks, so it might be interesting to sneak some pedagogical documentation in there, laying out her growth in pictures and sketches so that it's easy for her to comprehend, and maybe sketching out some ideas for things to explore. This can help her see things over time, and it might also help show her the power of taking notes. Next time we go to KidSpark, it could be fun to take pictures of her at the supermarket checkout and then scribble on the images to portray the characters, or maybe we could learn how to draw the interactions as comics.

The summer camp gave me an opportunity to enjoy a lot of focused time. I used it all for consulting, finally finishing some tasks I'd been putting off for weeks. I also had some focus time in the evening. I made a few small improvements to my Emacs News publishing process, tweaking the plain text formatting based on suggestions from readers. I modified my journaling system to be able to see entries from this day across all the different years, copy all the displayed journal entries to the clipboard, and use more consistent CSS. I've been writing a bit more now that I have a Bluetooth keyboard on my bedside table. I've been drawing and doodling a little more, too, and I've been doing colouring sheets at the library.

I finished the Pre-Advanced III course in Simply Piano and started thinking about whether I want to switch to a different app, stop the subscription, or continue with it. I like how Piano Marvel has more advanced lessons, but I'm still getting the hang of timing. Then A+ started exploring the Simply Piano app again, so I guess we'll continue with that. There's still plenty for me to learn before I can fluidly play the Pre-Advanced II arrangements in the Simply Piano library without a lot of practice, so that's fine.

The cherry tomatoes in the garden are doing well. Four tomato plants (Sweet Million variety) give us more cherry tomatoes than we usually eat, so I can either increase my tomato consumption or consider growing three plants next year. Our 11 bitter melon plants are a bit slow, but W- says this is just about the right level of bitter melon production he wants.

Next month will be about settling into virtual grade 4 and figuring out our new rhythms. I'll probably do about 4 hours a week of consulting, saving the rest of the time for writing, drawing, coding, and slowly ramping up EmacsConf (coordination, infrastructure, captions). A+'s becoming more independent and more interesting, thinking about what she wants and using parent-speak to pitch her ideas to me ("We can always buy more [paint sticks]. You wanted to fuel my creativity.") I can't wait to see where this goes.

Blog posts

Life:
Emacs:
- Emacs elevator pitch: tinkerers unite
Tech:
- Nginx maps: How I redirect sketch IDs to blog posts or sketches
Emacs News:

Sketches

Time

Category	Previous month %	This month %	Diff %	h/wk	Diff h/wk
A+	34.3	39.4	5.1	66.2	8.6
Business	0.5	2.5	2.0	4.1	3.3
Personal	9.4	10.3	1.0	17.4	1.6
Unpaid work	4.0	4.7	0.8	8.0	1.3
Discretionary - Family	0.0	0.2	0.2	0.3	0.3
Sleep	30.7	30.7	0.0	51.5	0.0
Discretionary - Productive	10.7	10.3	-0.4	17.4	-0.7
Discretionary - Play	10.5	1.9	-8.6	3.2	-14.4

We only have so many summers together. Makes sense to make the most of them.

Footnotes

For more about this theory of play, check out the Wikipedia summary of Roger Caillois's Man, Play and Games.

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You can comment on Mastodon or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.