2025-04-14 Emacs news

| emacs, emacs-news

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, r/orgmode, r/spacemacs, r/planetemacs, Mastodon #emacs, Bluesky #emacs, Hacker News, lobste.rs, programming.dev, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, planet.emacslife.com, YouTube, the Emacs NEWS file, Emacs Calendar, and emacs-devel. Thanks to Andrés Ramírez for emacs-devel links. Do you have an Emacs-related link or announcement? Please e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com. Thank you!

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Week ending April 11, 2025: sidenotes, on this day, life

| review, weekly

I enjoyed walking in the park this week, and we started gardening too. Good counterbalance to the chaos of whatever the US is doing. I also enjoyed writing more about life.

I added sidenotes duplicated as footnotes to my blog, inspired by citationneeded.news. The sidenotes should show up on my blog if you have Javascript enabled and the window is reasonably wide. I like the way sidenotes allow me to me add a little more context than a plain hyperlink. Unlike the tangents that I've been tucking into <details> elements, I don't even have to wait until the end of the paragraph.

I also added an On This Day RSS feed, which I've added to my feed reader. I've been using it more than the web view to bump into my old posts. Thanks to Memexes, mountain lakes, and the serendipity of old ideas (Interconnected) for the inspiration.1 Ooh, let me go add sketches to the RSS feed… Might add them to the web view as well at some point.

W-, A+, and I regularly played Minecraft after dinner. This week, I set up tunnels going to a trial chamber in the overworld and to a blaze spawner in the Nether. A+ wants to get more XP in a safe way, so I think I'll work on setting up some XP farms. There's a skeleton spawner not too far from our base, so that's probably a good start.

Blog posts

Sketches

Toots

  • I hadn't realized that there was an #OrgMeetup [on Wednesday], didn't notice @yantar92's email on my phone, and I totally missed both announcing it in Emacs News getting the BigBlueButton server up. I've now added it as a recurring entry on my calendar and I've added cronjobs for the next six months so that BigBlueButton will probably scale up and down automatically. I'm so glad Ihor had Jitsi as a backup. Whoops! Embarrassing… (toot)
  • I like the Hourly Comics Day in https://anhvn.com/posts/2025/weeknotes-29/ . (toot)
  • The kiddo helped me add composted cow manure to the front garden. We planted radishes (Scarlet Globe, Easter Egg II Blend) and poppies (Flemish Antique Peony, Canada Mix, and Purple Peony). (toot)
  • I saw this snippet in a 2016 interview in Psychology Today with T. Berry Brazelton: (toot)

    “BB: I've just finished writing a book, The Final Touchpoint I'd like to get that out there. There are better and worse ways to handle our aging, our denial of it, our acceptance, and—as Erik Erikson put it—our being generative, to produce as much as we can while we can. I'm 98 but I'm still trying to be generative.”

    He died two years after the interview and I don't think The Final Touchpoint has been published, but it might be interesting to find similar books.

Time
Category The other week % Last week % Diff % h/wk Diff h/wk
Discretionary - Play 1.1 3.8 2.7 6.4 4.5
Discretionary - Productive 21.6 24.2 2.5 40.6 4.3
Sleep 30.6 31.7 1.1 53.3 1.9
Discretionary - Family 0.1 1.0 0.9 1.6 1.5
A+ 26.2 26.4 0.3 44.4 0.4
Business 0.6 0.2 -0.4 0.3 -0.7
Unpaid work 3.6 2.1 -1.5 3.5 -2.5
Personal 16.1 10.6 -5.6 17.8 -9.4

More writing and drawing this week, which was nice. I still haven't gotten around to figuring out how to squeeze those front-end consulting requests in, since they take a fair bit of context and concentration. It's okay.

Footnotes

1

“Naturally there's an On This Day web feed too so these posts appear in my newsreader each morning. Some personal serendipity to start the day.”

Memexes, mountain lakes, and the serendipity of old ideas (Interconnected) (my toot)

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A typical weekday

| life, parenting, time

Text and links from sketch

A typical weekday

family time: 11/16 hours, me time: 5/16 hours

  • 7 AM: Morning routines
  • 8 AM: piano practice
  • 9 AM: gardening, recess
  • 10 AM: Walk, braindump
  • 11 AM: Lunch
  • 12 PM: focus time: code, write, draw, read, do stuff
  • 1 PM: tidying, recess
  • 2 PM: writing, hanging out with A+
  • 3 PM: hang out with A+
  • 4 PM: sometimes a play date
  • 5 PM: dinner with W- & A+
  • 6 PM: chores, evening routine
  • 7 PM: hang out with W- and A+: Minecraft; watching; Pictionary, other games
  • 8 PM: hang out with W- and A+
  • 9 PM: A+'s bedtime routine
  • 10 PM: call my mom, read

Context: A+ is 9 and in virtual grade 3. W- is retired.

https://sachachua.com/2025-04-10-01

Feel free to use this under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

I came across Hourly Comic Day1 in anhvn's weeknotes. I've been meaning to make some kind of timeline, even if it doesn't feel as insightful or humorous as other people's comics. That's a skill, I can develop it. Besides, capturing bits and pieces of my life now is likely to be something I'm glad for later on.

Some things I notice:

I'm A+'s default parent, so she comes to me for snuggles during recess and lunch, and she wants to spend time with me when she's bored. She's 9, as I keep reminding myself, so this is a time-limited offer. It's amazing. At the moment, she often chooses to hug me instead of read books or play Minecraft, or chooses to play Minecraft with me instead of by herself. Inevitably, the day will come when she'll switch to just grunting at me from time to time and then disappear into her room for hours on end. This is the time to snuggle and hang out.

I have maybe an hour of reliable focus time right after lunch. I could have more, but I like setting aside some time for playing the piano and for walking.

conscientiousness-piano.jpg

Playing the piano is an exercise in humility. I can't quite get my fingers to do what I want them to do, and my brain picks up phrases more slowly than I'd like.2 But it's also enjoyable to hear myself learn, so I continue.

Walking is good for me. It's important to keep moving. Biking gets me farther, but I have to pay more attention. Walking helps me have extra thinking time. I take a lapel mic along so that I can use the time to talk to myself. I notice I'm not the only one talking to myself in the park. I also like how I see other people out there with books, or with cameras, or with their lunches, or simply sitting on a bench and enjoying the sun. It's reassuring to see other people enjoying a slower pace.

I usually run out of thoughts to think before I run out of trails to walk. It's interesting. Sometimes I wonder how I might tinker with that. I have plenty of source material to think about from books and life experiences, but maybe I can dig into things further. Or maybe lowering the threshold with stream-of-consciousness dictation will help me bring more of my monkey mind out into the light. It's also okay to enjoy the quiet. Running into the limits of my thoughts makes it easier to use my computer time for tasks or coding instead of staring at a blank text file. When I do find myself drawn to a topic, then the braindumping gives me a head start on figuring out the parts of it that I care about.

I'm here because I choose to be. I could theoretically have a two-hour chunk in the evenings if I really wanted to, but then A+ tends to just watch videos. Sometimes if she's in a video-watching mood, I'll squeeze in some writing or some code, but it's not reliable and she might stop at any time, so I don't like to get into anything too deep.

I haven't been doing much consulting lately, since that's hard to do in small bursts. There are a couple of front-end Javascript requests on my list, but it's a little challenging for me to get into front-end tinkering because I have to load a fair bit of context into my brain when I'm trying to work around the vendor's way of doing things. I'll probably let them know I can't get around to those requests for now. Maybe someday.

I miss being in flow,3 but since that can often result in my experience A+'s desires for connection as an interruption (the Ovsiankina effect4 doesn't help), that's not a good fit for right now. Instead, I'll accept that this is the time for (mostly) fragmentary chaos, but I can still occasionally squeeze in 15 minutes here and there.5 The lack of focused time used to make me a little frustrated and antsy, but I think it's becoming a little easier as A+ becomes more independent. I can both see the light at the end of the tunnel and know that our paths will diverge.

I could have oodles of focused time during the day if A+ were to go to in-person school, but fortunately, I know from my experiment with semi-retirement that I probably won't actually end up writing a book or changing the world even if I have more focused time. Virtual school continues to be a reasonable fit for us.

Since I know I've only got about an hour of focused time a day, I can try to choose things carefully. It's surprisingly freeing, knowing that I'm not going to get to everything.6 I tend to:

  • Code little things for myself, because it's fun and it can make things marginally easier. I like tinkering with Emacs, although sometimes I also write Javascript or Python to automate things.
  • Writing and drawing, because then I can understand and remember things a little better
  • Working on important tasks, like doing our taxes

And then the odds and ends of time can be used for:

  • More writing: usually on my laptop, but sometimes on my phone too. It helps to keep my laptop on the main floor instead of leaving it upstairs.
  • Reading books and blog posts, especially when I can highlight and capture snippets. The iPad has come in handy for this.
  • Coding, but only things that I can put down easily
  • Tidying: always good to stay on top of things

E-mail tends to fall to the bottom of my list, especially e-mails that require thought and consideration. Even reviewing my inbox tends to be lower-priority, unless there's something I remember and want to work on.

April 2025_16.jpeg

So this is my life at the moment. This is already a big step up from before. Since A+ handles virtual school a little more independently now, I can mostly count on a bit of focused time, instead of living my days in interruption limbo.

It's pretty easy-going. It feels a little like we're making this breakwater around a bay, so that A+ can learn the ropes in a reasonably calm environment instead of being buffeted around by the stormy waves outside, and then she can sail out when she's ready. As lives go, this is all right.

Seasons come and seasons go. I'm glad my day gets to look like this. Even if it might seem pretty humdrum, I want to remember it, because there'll be a time when I'll miss us.

Footnotes

1

Hourly comics:

2

Brain speed: I vaguely remember being praised for being able to think quickly when I was younger. I think age, parental rewiring, and periods of sleep deprivation (also due to parenting) have thoroughly scrambled that part of my brain. That's okay. This is life. Gotta work with what I've got.

3

Missing being in flow: gosh, there used to be a time when I felt like I needed to rein in long programming sessions

5

Related: Meditations for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman, 2024):

  • Day Thirteen: Three hours: On finding focus in the chaos
    • Yup, definitely can't find three hours.
  • Day Twenty-one: What’s an interruption, anyway?: On the importance of staying distractible
    • My natural state isn't that of focused attention anyhow.
  • Day Twenty-eight: What matters: On finding your way

    Instead, you get to pour yourself into tasks that matter for no other reason than that nothing could be more enlivening, or more true to the situation in which you find yourself.

    I don't have to do anything that makes a big difference for humankind. I can just do the next little thing.

  • Day Two: Kayaks and superyachts: On actually doing things
    • Perhaps I can do one thing today, and that's okay.
6

Also from Meditations for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman, 2024): "Day One: It’s worse than you think: On the liberation of defeat"

But this is where things get interesting, because an important psychological shift occurs whenever you realise that a struggle you’d been approaching as if it were very difficult is actually completely impossible.

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My words will become her inner voice

| parenting

Trawling through blogs to add to my feed reader, I came across a number of posts related to the February 2025 IndieWeb Carnival theme of affirmations. It nudged me to think about the words I rub into A+'s brain with repetition.

Once a year or so, A+'s virtual school teachers typically play a video about affirmations as part of the social-emotional learning aspect of the curriculum.1 The perky narrator exhorts the listeners to repeat the affirmations after her. A+ doesn't. I don't know if many of the other kids do.

The words I use with A+ are more powerful, so I want to be thoughtful about them. There's this idea floating around: the way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.2

Here's what I find myself repeating:

  • "You worked hard on that." I'm not 100% clear on the results of the meta-analyses of growth mindset research, but it makes sense to me to focus on acknowledging her effort rather than things that might be considered fixed characteristics. It's a good contrast to the "You're so smart!" that she might get from people impressed by her skills at solving Rubik's cubes or her enjoyment of math. She likes it when I see what she's doing, so I also add specific descriptions, and I extend it with a long-term perspective. Today she excitedly told me about how she worked together with a classmate on their literacy groupwork, so I echoed that back to her and connected it to her growth over time. I also often say "You did that!" and flesh it out with details.
  • "You got this." Because it's important for her to feel my belief and trust in her, and to enjoy confidence and self-efficacy. She's been doing well with increased personal responsibility for things like homework. Sometimes I say "We got this" instead, when we're working together.
  • "You know the way." Because it's extra fun (and extra effective) to sing the things I want her to remember, and because often she already knows the next thing she needs to do and this is a fun way of sending her off. This one is from the We Know the Way song from Moana. I like how I can use snippets of Disney musicals and bring in all the emotional storytelling connected to them. I occasionally touch on another line from that song: "We set a course to find a brand new island everywhere we roam." She's going to have to find a brand new way. She can do it. We're wayfinders.
  • "I got you." Because sometimes she stumbles and falls, and that's okay. We're here. Sometimes all she needs is a snuggle. Sometimes she needs a bandage or an energy bar or an emergency frozen treat. Sometimes she needs an extra pair of hands or someone to brainstorm with. We can figure things out together.
  • "You're wonderful." Because it's good for her to know I'm glad she exists, in a way that focuses on her wonderfulness rather than my act of loving her. Along these lines, I also frequently say, "You're awesome!"
  • "It's your experiment!" Because trying things out will help her learn, and this reminds me to back off and let her decide.

Over dinner, I mentioned this list of things I often say to A+. She wanted me to add these ones:

  • "I appreciate you, child."
  • "I love you."
  • "I'm going to pounce on you." Which is usually interrupted by her pouncing on me. This amuses her greatly. I like this playful way to offer a hug.

It is easiest to say these things when we're both well-rested and in good moods, so part of my job is to manage myself so that I can be in that state as often as possible.

A+'s beginning to echo these words back to us. She tells me what she'd like to use her allowance to experiment with. Yesterday at dinner, she told me, "You're awesome!" in the same way that I often tell her. Sometimes, as I send her off on her next task, she sings, "We know the way."

One night, as I was tucking A+ in, she asked for snuggles. I burrowed under the blankets and said, "I got you." She said, "You always do."

Footnotes

1

A1.3 Positive Motivation and Perseverance in Health and Physical Education (2019)

2

Hard to pin down a specific attribution. Goodreads has a page attributing this quote to Peggy O'Mara, but I can't find a citation. There are also plenty of variants on the Web, like this "The way we speak to our children becomes their inner voice" article from Kurtz Psychology. Anyway, handwaving this as a pithy concept I didn't come up with.

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Cases of mangoes, coolers of freezies

| parenting, life

Assumed audience:

  • Future me, when mango freezies are a distant memory
  • Maybe other parents who might consider splurging on fruits
2025-04-08-cases-of-mangoes.jpg

We have two cases of mangoes on our kitchen counter: the last case of Ataulfo mangoes W- could find at the Nations supermarket a short bike-ride away from the house (slightly underripe at purchase; it's been a few days, so now A+ says they're perfect), and a case of Tommy Atkins mangoes that are greener and tougher. He had meant to buy Hadens, but accidentally picked the Tommys up instead. That's okay, I said. I can turn them into mango shakes.

Wikipedia describes the Tommys as:

Although generally not considered to be the best in terms of sweetness and flavor, it is valued for its very long shelf life and tolerance of handling and transportation with little or no bruising or degradation.

Thomas Atkins submitted the fruit to the variety committee of the Florida Mango Forum multiple times during the 1950s, which rejected it due to its unremarkable eating qualities and considerable fiber in the flesh.

2025-04-08-mango-turtle.jpg

A+ has definitely developed mango preferences. Like me, she likes the smooth, sweet creaminess of Ataulfo and other Philippine-type mangoes. She's the one who regularly checks the mangoes for ripeness and reports on their status, letting us know as soon as they're soft. After a good meal, she often prepares a mango for herself, using a paring knife to skim it close to the seed. Sometimes she cuts a criss-cross grid and flips it into a turtle, or scoops out the insides for chopstick practice. She's gotten much better at getting most of the mango out; there's usually very little for me to scrape off the rest of the skins. Without prompting, she remembers to wash her hands before and after. One evening, watching her deftly cut her mango, I said, "People pay good money to send kids to cooking classes so they can pick up knife skills. Could buy a lot of mangoes for that money." We had fun joking about the short-term and long-term benefits.

I grew up eating mangoes in the Philippines. Sometimes they were on the breakfast table. Sometimes I had them at merienda (afternoon snack). Mangoes were either yellow, kidney-shaped, soft, and sweet, or the tart green mangoes that were also delicious in a different way, either straight-up or with salt or with bagoong (fermented fish or shrimp paste). (It took me a while to appreciate bagoong, but eventually I got the hang of it.) Green mango shakes were also a treat.

2025-04-08-mango-treats.jpg

After I moved to Canada in 2005, I went a long time without regularly buying mangoes. Still mentally converting costs to Philippine pesos, I balked at the expense of individual mangoes. The supermarket rarely sold good-looking Ataulfo mangoes, mostly just other mango cultivars that were more fibrous. If they did have the yellow kidney-shaped mangoes of my memory, the ones sold individually tended to be wrinkly and sad. A case of mangoes felt like overkill for just me, and I never quite got around to seeing if any of my friends wanted to, I don't know, rotate mango buying.

I think we only started buying cases of mangoes last year or the year before that. Now we're more comfortable knowing that even if we buy cases one after the other, we'll eat them before they go bad. We'll never say, "I'm all mangoed out." (And if we ever do get to that point, I can just dehydrate whichever mangoes are left.) It is definitely a frill and we're lucky to be able to enjoy them.

2025-04-08-blender.jpg

When it's warm enough for the kids to complain of the heat, we tend to ramp up our mango consumption even more. For the past two years, I've been bringing a cooler of frozen treats to A+'s park playdates. It started as a way to fend off temptation from the ice cream trucks that like to prowl around parks, and as a reaction to the ridiculousness of retail/wholesale pricing when it comes to summer refreshments. My days in A+'s sphere of friends are numbered, so I may as well make the most of it. It's a splurge, but time-limited. She will probably not invite me to lurk in the background with a cooler of popsicles when she's 18 years old. So yes to all the things, for now: home-made mango freezies; strawberries and peaches from the farmers market when they're in season; freezies made from pick-your-own strawberries when we make it out to a farm. (Child labour!) Raspberry freezies are sometimes too intense or too seedy for the kids. A+ is not a fan of cantaloupe freezies, but I like them. For the watermelon freezes, we're a bit divided. I like to add a little bit of sugar to the watermelon if it seems like it needs it. A+ takes pride in not adding any sugar to home-made freezies, so whenever she wants to be in charge of making them (which is almost always), I let her go with whatever she wants. She likes to use the mini-watermelons and add a splash of lemon juice. It always tastes refreshing.

Sometimes we bring Chapman's ice lollies (the kids prefer the single-flavour ones) or other store-bought treats. Sometimes A+ proudly insists on paying for these herself; early experiences of prosocial spending, hooray! When the fruits are in season, I prefer to make home-made freezies. We don't follow any recipes. We just prepare the fruits and put them into the blender.

2025-04-08-popsicle-bag.jpg

I use disposable popsicle bags from AliExpress since I haven't found a local source I like, and have determined that:

  • Zipper seals are nice for filling, but difficult to open. The best bags have a little notch for tearing under the seal, but this is hard to see in product photos. I often bring scissors if the bags don't have notches.
  • 22cm x 5cm: just right
  • 28cm x 5.5cm: too much

We have a couple of reusable freezie molds that we sometimes use. I save those for A+ and me because I know they'll find their way back to the cooler.

I used to walk to the playdates with A+ in a stroller (she still fits in the Thule Chariot Cheetah XT, even at 9 years old), with the cooler balanced on top of it. It took me 45 minutes to an hour to walk to her usual park playdates, but the freezies were fine if I packed the cooler with lots of ice packs. With the cargo bike, I can get to the playdates in 15 minutes or so, which means there's plenty of time for A+ to play and get warm before she decides it's time for a freezie break, and the freezies are all still nicely cold.

2025-04-08-friends.jpg

A+'s favourite friends get first dibs by virtue of proximity when she decides it's popsicle time (after A+, of course, who gets first pick). It feels quite satisfying when A+'s friends sidle up and ask very politely if there happen to be any more of those mango popsicles. Then we extend the selection to everyone else in the playgroup, and then, when everyone's sorted out, the occasional brave soul who wanders up to the strange woman handing frozen treats out to kids. I try to make eye contact with their grown-up first to check if it's okay. Sometimes when I'm distracted, I ask the new kids if their grown-up is okay with it, but I get the feeling that their quick nod might not be entirely reliable as it tends to be done with their eyes fixed on the prize. Gotta find their actual grown-up. I know A+ likes to go back for seconds or thirds on really hot days, so sometimes I keep a special stash for her in a nylon drawstring bag in the cooler. Sometimes I have one too.

2025-04-08-mango-heart.jpg

I'm Filipino. Part of my love language is food. Taste can anchor memories, and I hope these are part of her core experiences of childhood. I want these to be part of my memories of her. That's worth the mangoes.

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2025-04-07 Emacs news

| emacs, emacs-news

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, r/orgmode, r/spacemacs, r/planetemacs, Mastodon #emacs, Bluesky #emacs, Hacker News, lobste.rs, programming.dev, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, planet.emacslife.com, YouTube, the Emacs NEWS file, Emacs Calendar, and emacs-devel. Thanks to Andrés Ramírez for emacs-devel links. Do you have an Emacs-related link or announcement? Please e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com. Thank you!

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Week ending April 4, 2025: blog tweaks

| review, weekly
  • Thanks to Pictionary, we caught up with all the illustrations that A+ needed to do for her homework.
  • I tweaked my blog navigation and headings. I also exported the comments from Disqus and took it off my site.
  • I got rid of some clutter.

Blog posts

Sketches

Toots

  • The Experimental Parent | Psychology Today (toot) I saw this snippet in a 2016 interview in Psychology Today with T. Berry Brazelton:

    “BB: I've just finished writing a book, The Final Touchpoint I'd like to get that out there. There are better and worse ways to handle our aging, our denial of it, our acceptance, and—as Erik Erikson put it—our being generative, to produce as much as we can while we can. I'm 98 but I'm still trying to be generative.”

    He died two years after the interview and I don't think The Final Touchpoint has been published, but it might be interesting to find similar books.

  • Memexes, mountain lakes, and the serendipity of old ideas (Interconnected) (toot) Hmm, an On This Day RSS feed might be worth writing a tiny script that I can add to a crontab.

    “Naturally there's an On This Day web feed too so these posts appear in my newsreader each morning. Some personal serendipity to start the day.”

  • Oh Hello Ana - In defense of unpolished personal websites: (toot) On the value of legible source code for websites, especially personal ones:

    “Today's heavily optimized websites have largely killed the "view source" learning experience. The code is minified, bundled, and often incomprehensible to beginners trying to understand how things work.
    I got the ick from my own small optimisation. My personal website is small and it isn't an urgent service. It's hardly ever visited from a mobile phone. Maybe I shouldn't be using the little time I have to focus on that side of front-end development in this instance?
    But deep down, all I want for my personal website is to give back to the web. I want anyone, regardless of skill level, to inspect elements, understand the structure, and learn from readable code. And I am fully aware my code isn't perfect. It's old and there's a lot of room for improvement.”

    Found via Favourites of March 2025 | Brain Baking

  • The Surprising Richness of Correlations (toot) I like the way this post explains the math behind statistical analyses of correlations with clear words and hand-drawn graphs.
  • On homework: (toot) Homework experiments continue. So far, we have determined that homework is more likely to be done if the kiddo is on top of me (2 instances) or if she's dictating answers while eating lunch (1 instance) or playing Minecraft (1 instance).
Time
Category The other week % Last week % Diff % h/wk Diff h/wk
Personal 9.9 16.1 6.3 27.1 10.5
Discretionary - Productive 20.1 21.6 1.5 36.3 2.6
Business 0.8 0.6 -0.2 1.1 -0.3
Discretionary - Family 0.3 0.1 -0.2 0.1 -0.4
Discretionary - Play 1.6 1.1 -0.5 1.9 -0.8
Sleep 31.1 30.6 -0.5 51.4 -0.9
Unpaid work 4.7 3.6 -1.1 6.1 -1.8
A+ 31.5 26.2 -5.4 44.0 -9.0

More walking and just chilling out this week.

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