For the past 9 years, I've been living on kid time.
Here's the context: me time (not to scale)
22-24: grad school - moderate
24-29: IBM - a little lower
29-33: experimented with semi-retirement - peak
33-42…: parenting; I am here! - very low, but gradually increasing
50s: menopause? - probably down a little
60s onwards: I wonder what this part will be like… - probably a decline
I'm starting to be able to have me-time again.
I want to capture what I've learned
because early parenting's energy limits might
help me plan for menopause, illness, or old
The door clicked shut. A+ had just shooed me out of her room, and she was already back at her desk waiting for her virtual grade 4 class to begin. She's got this. And all of a sudden, I had time for myself. I could have two focused-time chunks of a few hours each, straight, several days in a row. I've made it to the other side of the early parenting time crunch. I could start dusting off all those ideas that I've shoved into my notes for a long-imagined someday. That someday could be today.
Before I settle back into the world of being able to string two thoughts together, I wanted to reflect on this past almost-decade of voluntarily giving up my time autonomy. I don't know how much of my experience can translate to other people's lives. I've been so lucky in the choices we got to make. But I'd better write down my notes before I forget.
Physical limits
I knew I was signing up for a lot when I decided to become a parent, but the sheer challenge of running into my physical limits was still eye-opening. Well, eye-closing. Sleep deprivation was so tough. My sleep was as fragmented as A+'s (newborns have no idea about night or day) and didn't get back to normal-ish until 2019 or so, when A+ was 3 and I was 36. I stumbled through the day with perpetual brain fog and low energy. I had had slow days like that before, too, especially during the third trimester, but it's a whole 'nother kettle of fish when you're responsible for another human being who wants to play with you and who gets stressed if she detects you're stressed.
Mostly I dealt with this by lowering my expectations. I scaled my consulting way, way down. There was nothing urgent that I needed to work on. My personal projects could generally be postponed for a few years. I could just focus on putting one foot in front of the other, keeping this tiny human alive and reasonably happy.
If it was a particularly rough day and I knew I wouldn't make it to when she'd finally fall asleep the following night, I napped while A+ was with W-. I learned to be more in tune with my need for sleep and food and quiet, because when I misjudged them, bedtime was inevitably rough. Sometimes I just had to step back, close the door, and cry: exhausted, touched-out, overstimulated, trying to pour from an empty cup.
Days went more smoothly as we learned to go with the flow. Some days we were in sync: bright and enthusiastic and engaged. Some days were just slow days. Some days I said, "I'm too tired to think of something creative right now. I just can't come up with funny stories or interesting voices right now. Let's find something low-energy that I can play with you."
It took a few years for us to figure out a sleep rhythm that worked for us. When she started snuggling to bed at a more reasonable time and sleeping for a bit longer, I really appreciated being able to sleep again. I really appreciated being able to think again.
To be fair, I voluntarily chose this path knowing what it entailed. We didn't sleep-train. I nursed on demand instead of getting her used to a schedule. We didn't use daycare or have any external scheduling pressures. There were only a few instances when I felt stretched beyond my limits. We seem to have survived without losing too much (aside from some of my brain cells), and we might have even gained a few things along the way.
Fragmented attention span
Even after we more-or-less figured out sleep and other physical constraints, I still needed to learn a lot about adjusting to my new reality. A+ was curious about everything. As her default parent, I was her voice-activated guide to the universe. "Mom!" "Mom!" "Mom!" punctuated my day into fragments. There was no space for longer thoughts during the day. I couldn't put my thoughts together or figure out where they fit into the big picture. Sometimes, if I felt confident about my sense of her sleep cycle, I stayed up late or woke up early to have maybe 30-60 minutes of me-time. Too many days of that in a row, though, and I'd find myself slipping back into sleep-deprived zombie mode. It was a balance.
I did better whenever I broke my ideas down into tiny steps. I might not be able to code for two hours to fully puzzle out a new feature, but I could squeeze in 15 minutes to write a function. It reminded me of when I used to work on a tiny computer, which forced me to build programs out of shorter functions that each fit on one screen. Now I had to learn how to build ideas from short paragraphs that fit on my mobile phone in between the notification bar and the onscreen keyboard. If I managed to squeeze in a little computer time, I focused on tiny workflow improvements that might let me pack a little bit more into the next computer session, like a function that collected my Reddit upvotes so that I could use that as a starting point for Emacs News1, or a way to compare automatically-generated subtitles from the Whisper speech recognition engine with the speaker's script to identify things they might have ad-libbed2 (or maybe even automatically correct them). The Emacs text editor's programmability worked really well for this. I just kept sanding down the rough spots in my workflows, and things flowed more smoothly.
Taking notes helped a lot, too, especially whenever I could use the literate programming technique of having my code, notes, and links right on the same screen. It meant that I could use those notes as a jumping-off point when I got back to something after fifteen minutes of conversation about what A+ learned about Star Wars characters had wiped the context from my mind.
Sometimes I felt too time-starved to take notes, or I told myself I didn't need to take notes because it was still in flux and I hadn't figured out how I wanted to solve the problem yet. Whenever I tried to move quickly without notes, I always ended up regretting it later because I needed to figure things out all over again. In 2022 I did a mad scramble to make EmacsConf 2022 a two-track conference so that we could fit all the talks in, and I spent much of my EmacsConf 2023 prep time trying to figure out how I pulled it off.
The fragmentation of my attention span might have been manageable if it had been predictable. Many people like the pomodoro technique for breaking up intense focus with breaks, after all, and I'd reflected on the value of interrupting my own momentum even before I had A+. But "predictable" definitely didn't describe my life with A+. Knowing how much it helped me to surf the ebbs and flows of my energy, I wanted to experiment with going with A+'s flow too: helping her learn the things she wanted to learn at the time she wanted to learn them, letting her tune in to what she needed and when. I figured it might be interesting for me to open myself up to as much as I could get, even if it meant tough days from time to time.
Unpredictability
Things got better as A+ grew. A+ got the hang of reading fairly early. When she learned how to read silently faster than I could read to her out loud, and she began to lose herself in the stacks of books I strewed around the house, I started to have unexpected pockets of free time when no one was talking to me and I could actually think my own thoughts. This was unpredictable, though. I couldn't use the time for coding or consulting, because she would invariably wander back while I was in the middle of a complex thought, and then the Ovsiankina effect meant that I was trying to hang on to that task in my head so that I didn't lose all progress. It would rattle around in my brain until I got a chance to finish it or at least properly braindump some notes. Eventually I was able to get A+ to understand me when I said, "I just need five minutes to finish this thought," but I definitely needed to be able to wrap things up in that sort of timeframe instead, of, say, spending an additional thirty minutes trying to figure out how to un-mess-up a production environment.
I shifted to things I could pick up and put down easily. Emacs News mostly involves collecting and categorizing various links, so that was much easier to interrupt as needed. Writing and drawing got better as I got the hang of following an idea across different tools for thinking about it: audio braindumps, sketches, bouncing writing between my phone and my computer. The laptop was cumbersome to move from room to room, but I could clip on a lapel mic or pop in some earphones when I was doing chores by myself. My SuperNote A5X (and later on, my iPad) was light enough to take to the playground if I happened to have a moment to myself during a playdate, although I was still ready to play with A+ in case she didn't feel like joining the games the other kids wanted to play.
Lack of momentum
Short, unpredictable fragments of time could probably still have been pieced together into something more useful if they had been denser, like when a cluster of puzzle pieces gives you enough of a sense of a picture to motivate you to keep going. But I didn't have enough of them close together to build momentum. Coding requires holding context in your head: what the task is, where files are, what functions do, how to run the code, even the syntax of the particular programming language I wanted to work in. I couldn't make much headway on projects since I kept forgetting the context in between sessions, caught up in the whirlwind of life with a small child. It's as if I was trying to put together a detailed jigsaw puzzle, and then this whirlwind would come and scatter all the pieces. Not only that, I felt stretched between the different things I was juggling, all the puzzle pieces jumbled together with no clues. I eventually accepted that bigger puzzles would have to wait for someday, and that it was time to enjoy the moment instead.
I knew, intellectually, that things would be different and I wouldn't be able to put my thoughts together for a while. For the most part, I was able to just capture ideas on my phone using Orgzly Revived and postpone them to the far future when I'd have time to explore them. I might not have expected an ongoing global pandemic to mess up the usual timeline for being able to get chunks of time back, but I had theoretically signed up for the possibility of, say, having a child with major support needs, so it was part of what I'd considered and assented to before we started down this path of parenting.
Still, there were times when I felt like declaring: "I am a person and I want to be able to complete this thought and solve this problem." When it got to that point, W- was usually able to give me a few hours (or even a few days, like the weekends I ran EmacsConf) to feel like me again.
Things I learned
Now A+ has settled into the rhythm of virtual grade 4, and new possibilities are beginning to open up. Time to crystallize what I've learned before it dissipates into forgetfulness.
I learned about my failure modes, and I learned about asking for help. It was good to find out where and how I fall apart, and how I can piece myself back together after a nap or a good playdate. I accepted that sometimes I would just totally blank out on things to say or do, and I grew to appreciate Toronto's playgrounds, libraries, early childhood centres, and activity places. I got more acquainted with my anxiety and we figured out ways to work with it. I learned that yes, I can still love a tiny baby even after she has clamped down hard with her mouth on part of me that doesn't like getting bitten (that's all of me, really; why?! why would you do that?!), and I can quickly learn to keep my hand nearby so that I can pry her gums apart.
It was interesting to see who I was and what I did when everything had to be stripped down to the essentials. I mostly stayed regulated. I still picked experimentation and curiosity. I didn't have the brainspace to consult, code, or untangle complex thoughts, but I enjoyed putting together Emacs News and capturing moments through drawings. I used little bits of time for incremental improvements.
I've learned a little bit more about our kinds of play, mostly by taking advice from cartoon dogs. I had a hard time with pretend play in the beginning, but it's easier now that we have so many interests to draw on. I'm not very physical, but I enjoy biking and skating. I like wordplay, drawing silly things, making up songs, and figuring out life together through experiments.
Looking ahead
So what can I take from this crash course on my constraints?
The results of this stress test give me some ideas for skills I can develop. Paying attention to my needs for sleep, food, and quiet helped me through the tough days of early parenting, and failing to do so had pretty clear consequences. I want to get even better at tuning in and taking care of myself. Then I can both go with the flow and notice when I need to make longer-term adaptations. Those years of brain fog and low energy made it clear to me that I'd really rather not have to go through that again earlier than I need to, so I may need to get better at protecting and advocating for health. As I move into a time when I won't be able to capture significant moments with pictures or videos (because of privacy or simply because many important things are invisible or unrecognized in the moment), I want to get better at observing, reflecting, writing, and drawing. Sketching my thoughts and observations might help me capture more in a compact, expressive way. Anticipating the physical and mental upheaval of menopause, I can get better at untangling and processing my feelings. Knowing that I'm going to run into things I can't do on my own, I can learn more about available resources and practise reaching out. There's also a whole bucketful of practical life skills that might be good to learn. There are also interests that are good for me, like gardening and piano. All of these things can work in the long run. There are people who write or draw into their 70s and 80s, even with physical challenges.
If I want to do this long-term, knowing that more of these challenges are likely to be in my future (if I'm lucky), I can work on processes and systems that can help me. A habit of writing as I go (and the tools to make this easy) will help me if menopausal brain fog messes up my attention span. Calendars and reminders can help me stay on top of things I need to do. Exploring alternative user interfaces like speech might help if typing gets difficult. Who knows, by the time I need this kind of support, maybe large language models will be well-situated to help me with tip-of-the-tongue, similarity search, and other information retrieval tasks.
Cognitive processing speed tends to decline over time, but crystallized knowledge accumulates.3 If I may have to think less, at least I can try to think more deeply, connecting ideas and experiences. Instead of looking back at the end and trying to conjecture about what I must have been thinking or feeling, I'd love to take good notes along the way, kinda like the mnemonic slurry Cory Doctorow mentioned.4 I want to keep improving the flow of ideas in and posts out. I want to keep adding to my stock of notes and inspiration. (And I want to have good backups and a way to shift from one thing to another as needed.)
Getting through early parenting was challenging, even though I was already playing on easy mode compared to lots of other people. Things are a little smoother now, but I know it's going to be tougher in the future. There might be big projects in my someday pile, but I'm not going to tackle them yet. I'm still easing into thinking again. Tiny steps, incremental improvements. It's good to start getting ready.
My composition is greatly aided [by] both 20 years' worth of mnemonic slurry of semi-remembered posts and the ability to search memex.craphound.com (the site where I've mirrored all my Boing Boing posts) easily.
A huge, searchable database of decades of thoughts really simplifies the process of synthesis.
Next step: Add more to soil to get more out of it:
replace front garden with compost & radishes
get the pots set up for lettuce
Things that get in the way:
Heat
Poor soil weeds > seeds
Other priorities
Waiting
First frost: ~ Oct 13
get strawberries back in the ground
another crop of lettuce & radishes
The weather's getting cooler. I probably have a
couple of weeks more before the cherry tomatoes
get too cold. A+ hasn't been interested in
harvesting them lately, so I get to do the
tomato-picking now. We have a little over a month
until the usual first frost in Toronto. I moved
the strawberries to pots during spring/summer so
that I could keep them in a cage away from
squirrels, but now it's time to put them in the
ground. I'll see if I can still pick up some
compost from the garden store so that I can amend
the soil before I replant the strawberries. It's a
good time for me to get some more lettuce and
radishes going, too.
There's a conversation 1 about whether blogging
is lonely
and I wanted to reflect on that
from the perspective of 24ish years
of sharing notes on my
idiosyncratic interests.
Blog conversations remind me
of the Great Conversation
between book authors2
sometimes with centuries
in between. In contrast, blogs.
are quick, open, convivial.
When it comes to developing ideas,
I like public writing more than
the ephemeral cacophany of
in-person conversations,
social media @replies
or private e-mails.
My notes are often for my present understanding
and sometimes for my future selves.
If they resonate with others: bonus!
I think this might be a useful way to think about it.
Write out of self-interest.
Leave the door open for serendipity
Then it's not about
"No one's liking or commenting"
or even
"Why can't I find other people like me"
It's more like:
I'll keep exploring and taking notes, because it's fun.
Maybe I'll bump into others and swap notes someday. Who knows?
There's a conversation about feeling lonely while
blogging that echoes through the years. Here's a
recent instance: Do blogs need to be so lonely? -
The History of the Web; I also liked The silent
applause | Robert Birming and Blogs don’t need to
be so lonely – Manu. Me, I mostly write for
myself, and I don't feel particularly lonely doing
so. It's a pleasant surprise whenever I hear from
someone, but it's not my main goal. I'm content to
plod along, trying to untangle my thoughts and
leave some breadcrumbs for my future self. This
has been very handy not only for technical posts,
but also for things like being able to remember
what it was like to be a twenty-something. Writing
into the quiet without expecting a reply is like
enjoying a comfortably silent beach and
occasionally being delighted when you discover
someone else's message in a bottle.
Blog conversations are so much faster than book
conversations. We don't have to pass through
publishing gatekeepers, we don't have to wait
years… just ideas bouncing back and forth.
Marvelous.
Commenting is easier than writing from scratch, so
it would be nice to give people that space to
share their follow-on thoughts more easily, but
it's becoming more of a hassle as parts of the Web
become more hostile. (Thanks, spammers and
advertising cookie-trackers.) I turned off
comments on my blog back in March as Disqus had
gotten overbearing with ads and tracking. I didn't
feel like figuring out another commenting service
or self-hosting my own. I don't miss wading
through all the spam. I do miss the ease of public
comments and the tips people shared, mostly
because it was convenient to see and share those
replies in one place. Still, there's space for
commentary. Some people comment via Mastodon or
their own blogs. Once in a blue moon, a post will
strike enough of a chord to get shared via Reddit
or something like that. And there's always e-mail.
I like blog carnivals: someone proposes a theme,
people can choose to write about it, and the host
links to all those posts for easier discovery.
There's one for IndieWeb and there's one for
Emacs. It's fun seeing all these different takes
on the same topic.
I wish it was easier for more people to share what
they've been figuring out. I don't think the
technology is the limiting factor. My mom used to
keep a blog on Blogger, and she also wrote some
posts in the self-hosted Wordpress I'd set up for
her before. My sister writes long stories on
Facebook and Instagram so that she can untangle
her thoughts and capture the memories. Never mind
that Facebook is a walled garden that's hard to
follow outside its algorithmic feed; at least
she's writing. I think it's more that the process
of sitting down and turning your thoughts into
words takes time and energy. That's the hard part,
but that's also what's worthwhile. You can't skip
it by using a large language model.
Is writing lonely? I wish more people had the
space to sit with their thoughts and figure them
out, and I wish they were easier to find. I'll
settle for reaching across time and space: to my
future self, for sure, and maybe to others whom I
may or may not interact with. Send enough bottles
out to sea, comb the beach often enough, and I'll
find plenty of people who like to take that quiet,
thoughtful approach to life (even as we gently
poke fun at ourselves for possibly overthinking
things). Fortunately, if they blog, it's easy to
keep in touch lightly: not limited by anyone's
energy or interest at a particular point in time,
but just open to serendipity.
: A few more thoughts I want to connect to this one:
I came across Twilight Journal via r/stoicism today, so I wanted to link to that too. Messages in bottles.
And another thought about the night sky and how it's filled with stars, even though there are unimaginable spaces between them… (Not that I've seen a clear night sky lately, but I have one clear memory of it as a child that stays with me.)
In February, I started adding emojis to my monthly summaries. I added emojis to the lines for the text versions of my monthly sketches, then used a little bit of Emacs Lisp to convert that into HTML code with the text as a tooltip. I wondered what it might be like to represent a lot of days very densely. Would the constrained vocabulary of emojis be enough to give me a sense of the time, combined with the ability to hover over the emojis to see the keywords I wrote for that day?
Not bad. I can see the campfire and s'mores days (🔥), the time we were sick (🌡️), the shift from skating and sledding to biking and swimming, the days when I focused on sewing. In contrast, here are the monthly calendar sketches:
Hmm. I'm primarily interested in episodic memory retrieval and pattern recognition. The emoji summaries might be better at showing repetition because of the constrained vocabulary and the density is neat, but they're not quite expressive enough to resonate with me. I don't like hovering to see the tooltip, but by itself, the emoji doesn't usually have enough information to trigger my memory (either on its own or as part of the episodic context). Emojis and text also open up the possibility of an "on this day" slice, but I can get that with the plain text or by adding an on-this-day.rss to my web-based journal viewer with maybe some kind of private feed in our local network.
The sketches are more fun to flip through, especially now that I'm adding more colour to them. I can show repetition through background colour or icons in my monthly sketches. If I click on these images in my blog post or in my public sketchbook (ex: monthly sketches) using either my laptop or my tablet, I can page through them quickly, like the idea of rapid serial visual presentation 1. (This is great! Now I'm tempted to figure out how to disable all animations for BiggerPicture for just that bit of extra speed, which I think is a matter of tinkering with mediaTransition…) I wonder what it would take to have an automatic "on this day" slice for my monthly calendar sketches. Maybe if I was stricter about using a template so that I can automatically extract boxes from it, or maybe if I can use recognized numbers to figure out the layout… Definitely a someday thing, but could be an interesting challenge.
Do I want to do these emoji summaries long-term? Someone summarized 5 years of diary entries as emojis, and of course there's an app to do this too. Even on a larger scale, though, I think I might just get a few "huh, how about that" moments out of it rather than "wow, that's amazing." I think that if I continue with my daily sketches, that's probably more fun for me to make and review, and it still contains enough information to allow me to map the days to emojis later on if I want to. I can probably discontinue this emoji experiment. I'm glad I explored it, though.
In case you're curious about the Emacs Lisp code for extracting the emoji summaries, here's the function. It looks for the top-level blog post, scans for lines matching "dayNum. (emoji) text summary of day", and then turns that into the appropriate span, including links if there are any.
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.
Considering the format of daily sketches
2025-09-03-06
The iPad is comfortable to draw on in landscape mode, so for the past few months, I've been drawing my daily moments as monthly calendars. Before then, I used to draw a dozen daily sketches on one page. And long before that, daily index cards.
Some people draw fancier sketches. These ones are ArneBab's.
How he started in Aug 2022
Latest one: Aug 2025
I like the varied sizes, colours
Tanny McGregor has a colourful calendar. (5 minutes a day? Hmm…)
Maybe I'll try putting more time into it. Just doodle. It's okay to slow down.
What do I want from my sketches?
Moments I might not have photos of: sketches don't have to be photorealistic, although it might be good to get a better sense of what we feel like, and then what we look like
Playfully stretching my skills
details
shading
colour
Maybe I can try Procreate? Easy layers, colour fill.
Stick with Noteful for now - nice to work with notebooks
I've been regularly drawing daily moments for a
while now. Now that I have a little more time for
myself, I want to think about how I can make this
even better. I think I'd like to start with more colour, especially as the cooler months approach.
(I used to struggle with the desaturated bleakness
of winter, but now I'm beginning to realize I can
add the colour myself.)
I also want to play around with more expressive
faces and figures, and drawing more types of
things. That probably means doing a daily drawing
(or drawings) in addition to my moment of the day,
so I can play with things that might not show up
in our everyday life. I can start by focusing on
cartoony illustrations: simple lines and curves
and colours. It doesn't have to be realistic.
Fancy shading can wait.
It's okay to keep things simple with a monthly
grid. Maybe eventually I'll relax the grid and
play with different sizes. Eventually I might
start to mix in more text, like the way some
people do travel journals. I tend to write a lot
of text in my sketches by default, though.
Starting with the grid forces me to keep text to a
minimum.
Someday I'd like to be able to tell stories in
comic form, like Drewscape does. I can develop an
ear and an eye for stories. Much to learn.
Links for inspiration:
ArneBab's daily sketches: I love that he shares his monthly sketches publicly and is still at it. =)
