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We're close to the end of the school year. We chose virtual school again this year, and we applied for a full exemption from synchronous learning. At completed the required homework on time and occasionally participated in class. The teachers were okay with this setup.

What worked well?

• A+ generally did the homework quickly, giving her plenty of time for self-directed learning and outdoor playdates. Most teachers posted detailed instructions and resources.
• It was extra nice when she took the initiative to do her homework.
• I liked knowing what they were learning about in class, and following along with the homework.
• A+ likes to read at night. Working asynchronously. meant that we could usually have laid-back mornings.

What was a little challenging?

• Sometimes A+ was too tired after playdates, and homework was hard to get through. Sometimes she resisted doing homework with me. She always managed to do it, though. W- helped.
• Sometimes I got a bit antsy about what we were missing out on, choosing to not do, or not doing as well as some of her classmates (Comparison is the thief of joy.)
• Sometimes big feelings were hard to deal with.

Choosing virtual school again next year. I hope it works out just as well!

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Garden notes as we wrap up spring

• Radishes grew well in the front garden, and sprinkled everywhere: Sparkler White Tip, French Breakfast. Plant 1" deep so it doesn't pop up? Loosen with chopstick?
• Daikon & bok choy bolted in pots on patio stones. Choy did better in the terracotta pots with the tomatoes
• Wait for ≥10°C to set out bitter melon and tomatoes, or to sow cucumbers.
• Lettuce grew well in the white planter boxes. Sow thickly.
• The dianthus and daffodils came back, yay!
• We can get buckets from restaurants setting them out.
• The potatoes are are growing really well in the large grow bag with straw mulch: Innovator.
• Hostas, lambsquarters, and wood sorrel are edible.
• Pick leaves at the first sign of trouble. Squish insects. Keep a close eye on tomatoes and potatoes for aphids; radish sprouts for leaf miners. Try the sticky traps.
• 3x4 x5 Nursery cells -> cardboard -> yogurt container. (~30?)
• We were able to do a lot with seeds + a few starts. Try pansies?
• Potting mix might be reusable. Add nutrients and structure. (Perlite?)
• Putting fruit and veg scraps in a bucket of water has been fine.
• Marigolds and calendula survived splitting.
• 7-8 AM is a good time for me to garden. Also, I can move the strawberries at lunch and after dinner.
• Let's see if 19 bitter melon plants are too many… ;) (up from 3 last year)
• Might put strawberries in front garden when done. That gets more sun and warms up faster.
• Let's try peas, daikon, choy, radishes, lettuce, spinach as fall crop.
• Sprouts are great for feeling progress. Yum! I like eating alfalfa and mung bean sprouts.

I've been turning the compost every few days, incorporating fruit/veg scraps and cardboard/paper in the process. The compost heap was around 82'F on June 7. It reached 94'F on June 14 after I added a bunch of browns from the dried leaves in the other bin, and 100'F on June 24 after W- added the slightly-decomposed maple seeds he got when he cleared out the eavestroughs. Today it reached 110'F. I could feel the heat coming off it as I turned it. I wonder if I can get the pile to steam like it did in 2011. I think I can still add some new material to the middle of the pile when I turn it.

I've been working on learning more about gardening. This year, I'm experimenting with watching the garden carefully and plucking off leaves that look bad: powdery mildew, lots of flea beetle holes, leafminer activity, etc. I keep those leaves out of our compost. I've also been squishing lots of aphids and a few slugs.

I'm also learning about the different plants that tend to crop up, and which ones are edible. I've been sauteing lambsquarters along with our radish greens. Today I noticed some purslane. I haven't tried the wood sorrel or the clover. Maybe next year. I ate some hosta shoots when they emerged, and maybe I'll try the flowers soon. The daylilies are about to bloom. I wonder if I'm brave enough to try them.

Summer has just started. The tomatoes and the bitter melons are beginning to set fruit. I'll probably need to move the tomatoes into the cage at some point, since there are squirrels and raccoons who like to drop by.

The radishes are flowering. I'll either saute them soon or try eating the seed pods of any I've missed.

Lots of flowers are coming up, although part of the front garden didn't end up as flowery as I had hoped. Might need more nutrients. That's okay, I can probably put other plants in there along with some of the compost.

I have some plants I'm taking care of inside, and it might be good to see if I can get some lettuce going inside as well.

The garden is doing its thing!

My peer group's not yet at the point of discussing maintenance meds, but they often discuss brain fog, fatigue, and strategies for dealing with perimenopause. Since I'll be turning 40 in a few months, I figured it would be a good idea to start anticipating some of the changes that come with age. If I look for ways to improve my systems, workflows, and habits, I might be able to age more gracefully. Here's are some age-related changes and quick thoughts about what I can do about them.

• Changing relationships, losing people: Throughout the years, I'll need to deal with the loss of people close to me, whether it's because of natural development (like A+ going off and living her own life), changing situations (drifting in and out of playgroups based on her interests), or old age and death. I can prepare for that by making the most of the time I do have with people, learning more life skills, staying engaged, and laying the groundwork for more relationships that might turn into old friendships.

  It's a little complicated because I think I'll continue to be cautious about spending a lot of time indoors around other people. Fortunately, there are a lot of outdoor socialization opportunities. Eventually, when A+'s off and doesn't want her mom hanging around when she's out with her friends, I can join some of the walking clubs out of the nearby park.

  I like the Emacs community, and I'm looking forward to maturing into some sort of community grandmother. I imagine it'll be mostly about oohing and aahing over people's cool projects and suggesting that they go talk to so-and-so who was curious about something similar.

• Brain fog, slower processing: I got a sneak preview of this during the early years of parenting, and I still have many days where I either feel slower or I don't have lots of focused time. I think dealing with this is about being kind to myself (since there's no point in wasting even more energy on beating myself up), managing my expectations, and managing my tasks so that when I do have some focused time, I can do whatever I needed to do at the time that it's good to do it.

  I've gotten a lot of use out of speed-reading, but in case that slows down, I can also get a lot from reading more slowly. I can take more sketchnotes and try to make more connections to other things I know.

  Summarization seems to be one of the things that current natural language processing systems are getting pretty good at, so that might also be useful.

• Fading memories: I hope habits of journaling, taking pictures, and drawing sketches will help me appreciate these moments that fill my years so that things don't feel like as much of a blur. Backups are important, of course. Also, converting thoughts and memories into a form that other people can bump into means that it's not limited to my brain: blog posts about things I've been learning, photo albums that A+ can flip through whenever she likes, things like that. Retrieving memories and organizing them into narratives/stories helps make sense of them too.
• Less working memory: Working memory is useful for being able to see the connections between things and solving problems quickly. I'm beginning to appreciate the difficulty of keeping lots of things in my head, especially when someone's trying to talk to me at the same time. That's cool. I can reduce multitasking and minimize commitments. I can refile information so that it's close to related information. I can chunk information differently and then spread them out side-by-side, like the way index cards and sketchnotes help me build up thoughts and Org Mode helps me compare shopping choices. External monitors help, and I can print things out if I need to. Remembrance agents might be able to suggest related things, too.
• Lower recall of words, details: It doesn't matter much if the memory is there, if I don't have a way of getting back to it. Stuff inside my brain is likely to get lost. Maintaining a centralized note-taking habit (especially if information is fragmented over different apps and devices) will probably help with this. Mnemonic techniques can help with making things more vivid. I hope that natural language search will be useful too, and I'm looking forward to seeing what large-language models for artificial intelligence can do when applied to personal datasets. Episodic search might become more viable, too, if I can use things I remember to narrow down where to find something. Recognition is easier than recall, so even having something suggest a few options might be enough to unstick my brain. If I take pictures or notes of where I've stored infrequently-used things, that might make searching easier too.

• Inattention: I occasionally get brain hiccups, and stress or low sleep makes it worse. Slowing down and not rushing helps. Processes, checklists, and repeating TODOs helps. Organizing our physical space so that there's a home for things helps when I'm on autopilot, although I still get attentional blips and put things in the wrong place. Keeping an oops fund helps.

  Cubing might be a way for me to track this. Sometimes I make a mistake and my solve time goes way up, so that's a way to check how often my attention wanders when I mean to be paying attention.

• Less energy: I'm becoming more protective of my sleep, and I've got a good mix of things I can do even when I have low energy. Walking is good, and I can ramp up to other forms of exercise slowly. There are lots of long-term hobbies I can enjoy well into old age, so there's plenty to explore.
• Hormonal disruption: I think this is mostly about getting a sense of what to expect, having good relationships with doctors and other health professionals, and being open to adapting my lifestyle as things change. My friends have mentioned a fair bit of sleep disruption, so that's probably something to watch out for too.
• Changing priorities and perspectives: This is one of the good benefits of all of this. Constraints make things clearer. Looking forward to growing wiser.

I'll also keep assistive technology in mind, since there are all sorts of interesting ways tech might be able to help with age-related cognitive or physical decline.

Going to happen anyway, if all goes well. Might as well have fun!

Some days are slow. Some weeks, some months, some years… Parenting gives me a sneak peek at what life is like being slow, and that's handy. I've written about being slow before. Every time I revisit this topic, I learn a little bit more. I can start to figure out the systems and perspectives that might help me as I grow older.

• 2013: Growing slowly, adjusting the speed
• 2015: Learning to live slowly
• 2018: Slow days
• 2018: Dealing with preoccupation and a slow tempo

One of the nice things about a slow day is that it's easy to give myself permission to dwell on all the things I gloss over on fast days. I putter around the house, tidying up. I sit with A- as she reads, and I write my thoughts by hand. I update my ledger and doublecheck my budget. I read through my backlog of books and borrow some from A-'s pile so I can keep up with her interests. I learn more about my tools and try things out. I review and update my notes. I write journal entries even for these little moments, because small steps still add up over time.

What do fast days look like? I jump into a programming task and explore an idea, turning my notes into blog posts when I can. I fly around documentation and source code. When I reach out for something, I find it. I feel proud of what I've figured out. With A- , my fast days are when I have the energy and equanimity to help us have fun while taking care of our priorities.

On slow days, I let A- take more of the lead. I might say, "My brain is having a hard time being creative right now," and then we switch to something more physical or more straightforward. When she's grumpy and I don't have the energy to help her manage her feelings, we just let the big feelings wash over us.

It helps that Emacs News and similar things are compatible with slow days, as the hardest thinking I need to do then is just which category to use. Captioning videos and adding chapter markers are also straightforward. Writing about cool stuff is easier than writing and maintaining cool stuff.

Parenting is pretty compatible with slow days, too. When I focus on A- and appreciate the things she's learning and who she is as a person, she glows. There are plenty of resources I can tap, and I don't have to be "on" all the time.

Oh, is that why knitting, gardening, and reading are popular hobbies for older people, because it gets easier to be patient with things that take a while? Oooh. I wonder if that means I might have more patience for things that require compiling or training.

I'll have other slow days in the future, and that's okay. Some people even pay big money or make huge life changes in order to learn how to live more slowly. I'd like to still be happy with myself instead of frustrated when I'm in my 70s or 80s, so I think it will be worth figuring this out (slowly).

I liked Oliver Burkeman's 2021 book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. It covered many of the things I've been working learning on for the past 10 years on this experiment with semi-retirement and parenting. Learning to sit with anxieties and uncertainties, accepting my limits and working with them, being here now… These are the lessons I find myself practising every day.

Some things have gotten easier. I've become comfortable with an ever-growing task list that I know I'll never clear. My default task status is SOMEDAY, and I treat the list like a buffet of ideas that I can choose from when I want to. Which is hardly ever, since I'm still living on kid time and have very little focused time for myself. Most days I'm okay with this, as childhood is fleeting and my main challenge is to really be here for it. This is tough. I've been learning that I'm very human. I turn into a hangry ogre if we're out too late. I grump at A- if I get too tired. I work on separating the shark music of my anxiety from what's really going on. We joke about my squirrel brain and find ways to deal with its limits. I've given up many of my illusions about control. Knowing that I still have lots to learn even though I'm almost 39 makes it much easier for me to appreciate A-'s being 6. My journal helps me see how the days build up into months and years. I'm still on the anxious side, but W- helps balance that, and developing resourcefulness and resilience will help too.

While the book is mostly about confronting and working with the limits of being mortal, it also had some interesting thoughts about the value of being in sync with other people. Tangling my life up with W- and A- has helped me learn about things I would never have stretched myself to do on my own. I can see how A- enjoys playing with her friends. We've decided to go with virtual school for Grade 1 to minimize COVID risks (and I've been keeping an eye on monkeypox news too, ugh). I wonder if we can get a full synchronous exemption again this year. It's been nice following A-'s interests. But we did kinda miss out on group experiences of music and dance, and I'm not sure I'll find outdoor classes for those within walking distance. Online classes exist, but then we'll need to sync up with someone else's schedule. Maybe someday, if A- wants it strongly enough. Here I remind myself not to worry too much about her future, not to try to orchestrate things too much. It is enough to observe, support, and join her in learning. Besides, we can still have fun with clapping games and tea parties.

Anyway. Mortality. Cosmic insignificance. I can attest that thinking about these things can be surprisingly reassuring. All we can do is what we can do, and that's enough. Tomorrow I will dress and eat and brush teeth and play and tidy and do other things that I do every day. Against this backdrop of mostly-sameness, A- grows. If I pay attention, I may even notice it–for just as unexpected lasts sneak up on you, unexpected firsts do as well. If I pay attention, I might notice I'm growing too.

Chenny asked me what kinds of things I'm concerned about, so I started reflecting on the kinds of questions I usually ask myself. Here's a rough list with some examples:

• What could make things a little bit better? How can I compound those improvements? A few notes on kaizen
• Which trade-offs might be worth it? Which ones do I decide against? How can I experiment?
• What do I want from this stage? What has changed? How can I make the most of that? What's coming up next?
  
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• What could awesome look like? How can I tell if I'm on the right track? How far do I want to go? Example, other posts
• What might failure look like? What are the warning signs? Example: Experiment pre-mortem, Update
• What are the risks and downsides? How can I mitigate them?
• How can I make things easier for future me?
• How can I test and work around my current limits? Ex: squirrel brain
• What do I want to remember, reflect on, and share?
• What do my decisions tell me about my values? Do I agree? Do I want to change things?
• What are the results of past decisions and experiments? What can I learn from those? A few notes on decisions
• How do I want to grow?
• What do I want to learn? How can I learn it? What do I know now?
• How can I get better at seeing, noticing, asking, reflecting, organizing, sharing, improving?
• Where can I take advantage of leverage or comparative advantage? Where is it good to not optimize along obvious dimensions?
• What would I do if I were starting from scratch? Which sunk costs should I ignore?
• What can I break down, connect, or transform?
• How am I different from alternate universe mes? How can I make the most of that? Example
• What happens if I look closely at my discomfort or fear? Where am I shying away from something, and why? Example: uncertainty, working on my own things, the experiment
• Where does it make sense to take on more difficulty or do things worse so that I can do things even better later on?
• What have I forgotten or neglected? What do I want to reclaim, and what do I want to let go? Some thoughts
• What do I not know to look for? How can I bump into stuff like that?

At the moment, I'm focused on time and attention. I think about what's worth giving up sleep for, and how sleeping more might help with some things like thinking. I think about time with W- and A-. I think about week-to-week changes and how I can adapt. I think about how we can use little bits of time to improve things in order to more effectively use time. There's definitely a lot to figure out!