September 2025: school, playdates, coding, drawing

Oct 2, 2025| monthly, review

2025-09-30-11 September 2025 -- monthly review

Text from sketch

September 2025 school, playdates, newsletter, EmacsConf infrastructure 2025-09-30-11

Science Centre adventure zone
First day: Grade 4
play group
farmers market
First week of Gr. 4! Celebration ice cream
Biidaasige Park, 9x
Trying the loom at Riverdale; also, Happy Kingdom
Bubbles at the park
KidSpark with friends
composted bitter melon, moved strawberries
A+ donated some clothes to the kids clothing swap; Little Miss Light Rye
reusable wipes dispenser
Turns out I needed a nap.
Sortbot
swimming
catch-up day
a good talk; popsicles at the park
newsletter HTML
magic show
taking a break from fretting
had fun coding
Etherpad 2.x
line art
taxes
towel slide
C-'s hat was stuck
Nature Club: poison ivy (okay so far)
A+ caught up with her homework
emergency kit
drawing icons

School: A+ started virtual grade 4. After we figured out that we needed to check Google Classroom instead of Brightspace for assignments, she was able to catch up with her homework. She often complains of boredom, but that's expected. Sometimes she tries the extra math topics I introduce. In general, though, she'd rather have the slack time to explore her own interests instead of doing more of the same. Totally understandable. I'll read through the CEMC math problems anyway so that I can keep some of them in my back pocket.

Play: Most days, we made it out to the playground after school. A+ had lots of fun playing with her closest friends, and she was also fine hanging out with me whenever they were playing a game she wasn't keen on. Sometimes we'd do math while waiting: algebra, binary conversion, geometry.

Independence: For my part, I think I've managed to mostly wrangle my school-related anxiety back to the occasional weekend check-in. It helps to remind myself that it's a good way for her to practise making her own decisions in a low-stakes environment: what to do when, what kinds of breaks to take in between. Better to try things and possibly run into things she needs to figure out or get help with now than wait until university. The more I step back, the more I can appreciate how she's growing: getting stuff done during class time, stepping outside to self-regulate when a party's getting too noisy for her. Compared to last year, it's much easier for me to say, "All right, you're in charge. I haven't even checked what's due when. What do you want to work on first, and do you want any help from me?" Usually all the help she wants is hugs, although sometimes I still type what she dictates when the assignment is really boring. It's nice that she can tell me what she wants. I also like seeing that carry over into her social life at the playground. She can think ahead about potential reasons for conflict and stick up for herself when her predictions come true. She enjoyed expanding her emergency kit to cover more scenarios, and it was great to see her satisfaction when the pencil and paper she'd packed came in handy.

My own time: An easy way to tone down my fretting is to redirect some of that nervous energy into my own projects. It's good for me and it's good for A+, who likes it better when I treat her as a 9-("and a half!")-year-old instead of a 5-year-old. I went from spending practically all day with A+ in summer to having more focus time. I'm settling into my own rhythms. There's usually one big chunk I can dedicate to something that might take a long time. Monday is Emacs News, Tuesday is for consulting, Wednesday is my own stuff, Thursday is Bike Brigade, and Friday is Bike Brigade feedback or other things as needed. The other chunk of time might be for miscellaneous tasks: writing, tidying, errands, and so on. The long focus time chunk helps me feel like I'm making tangible progress on things that require coherent thought, and having another chunk for odds and ends lets me putter around with things that might not flow as smoothly.

Thanks to this rhythm, I managed to resist the temptation to focus on just the consulting requests. I finally got to implement a few of the Emacs tweaks that have been collecting dust in my inbox. I upgraded the Etherpad we use for EmacsConf. I felt a little more solid about it because I did it via an Ansible playbook I tested in Vagrant instead of doing it ad-hoc.

I also changed my Bike Brigade newsletter workflow to convert the Google Doc draft into a big mass of HTML that I can just dump into one block. I've been using it for the past few weeks. This is difficult for people to squeeze last-minute edits in, but getting rid of all those mouse clicks makes me a lot happier, and nothing has been truly urgent. It's a trade-off, but I'm okay with choosing to increase my happiness (or at least reduce annoyance).

Fun: In addition to these small technical improvements, I've been practising drawing, too: mostly simple little black-and-white icons, sometimes drawn with references. It's a reasonable way to use the time I'd otherwise spend waiting at playdates. I like it, although I'll probably mix more thoughts and colours back in. The icons are like babbling with words. Sometimes I still want to unwind tangled thoughts into sentences and paragraphs. Sometimes I can't think of anything in particular, and working on visual vocabulary at least keeps me moving forward.

I haven't been doing piano as much, so I decided to just stick with the Simply Piano subscription instead of adding Piano Marvel. I want to get through more of the songs I've marked as favourites. There's still much for me to learn, and it's fun practising with music that we recognize.

I also haven't been playing as much Stardew Valley lately, probably because I'd rather spend that time tweaking Emacs instead. Sometimes A+ likes to interleave homework sessions and Stardew Valley days, so we're still making a little progress on our Stardew Valley Expanded farm. I enjoy playing co-op with her.

The weather's getting colder. I'll be wrapping up our real-life garden soon. Eventually I'll need to shift my playdate time-filler to things I can do outside even with gloves on. Maybe less drawing and more dictation as a way of fleshing out thoughts, or maybe some reading too. Last year, her playmates shifted indoors as the weather cooled down. We might see if this year we'll have more outdoor playdates with new friends, or if the two extracurriculars A+ is in (along with some more bike adventures with us, now that W- is retired) will be enough for us. There's a definite seasonality to my life at the moment, which feels nice.

Next: In October, I probably should record EmacsConf introductions so that I have more space for handling captions once the videos come in. I've scheduled some TODOs for the different e-mails I need to send speakers, too. On the personal side, I want to keep giving A+ space to take ownership of her learning. A+ wants to experiment with gymnastics classes, so we'll try that out.

Blog posts

Sketches

Time

Category	Previous month %	This month %	Diff %	h/wk	Diff h/wk
Discretionary - Productive	10.3	16.7	6.4	27.1	10.7
Sleep	30.7	32.1	1.4	52.2	2.4
Personal	10.3	11.6	1.3	18.9	2.2
Business	2.5	3.7	1.3	6.0	2.1
Unpaid work	4.7	5.1	0.3	8.2	0.5
Discretionary - Family	0.2	0.2	0.0	0.3	0.1
Discretionary - Play	1.9	1.4	-0.5	2.2	-0.9
A+	39.4	29.2	-10.2	47.5	-17.1

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You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.