Monthly review: February 2025
| monthly, review
Text and links from sketch (, and) a list of emojis per day
February 2025
- field trips
- birthday
- music and art
By day:
- 👀 looking ahead
- 💃 dance
- ✅ curriculum checklist
- 🖼️ Art Gallery of Ontariqo
- 🤖 MakeyMakey
- 🐕 sheepdog realizations
- 📱 iPad experiments
- 📲 my own iPad
- 🛷 sledding
- 📸 sorting through photos
- 🎨 drew a review of A+'s 8th year
- 🏢 Moments in Modernism
- 🛷 sledding snow day
- 🎤 piano and voice
- ☃️ even more snow
- ❄️ quinzhee
- 🍪 galaxy cookies
- 🚲 shovelling trail walkway
- 📝 individual assessment
- 🧁 cupcakes
- 🧁 icing
- ⛸️ skating party
- ❄️ breaking up ice
- 🌀 Minecraft Parkour Spiral 2
- ⛸️ more skating
- 📈 results: growth, exceptionality
- 🤖 Comparing Claude and ChatGPT
- 🔍 word search
This month, A+ asked me if we could do a field trip. Since her virtual grade 3 class was doing a unit on drawing landscapes, I thought I'd take her to the Art Gallery of Ontario so that she could practise digital painting surrounded by lots of great examples. I enjoyed that enough to get my own iPad for drawing on. She asked for another field trip the following week to check out the Moments in Modernism exhibit, so we got to practise digital painting together. (We ended up back in the landscape gallery.) I wonder what we'll explore next month.
Being able to do iPad things together also nudged us to explore music and art. I experimented with paying for the Simply family subscription. A+ and I have been practising singing and piano, and W- has been practising patience. I've been going through the art tutorials too. A+ has run out of colourful drawings to work on and is not particularly interested in the pencil courses, so maybe that'll be for later.
It was A+'s birthday this month. She wanted to have a skating party with just her closest friends and their families. We made and decorated cupcakes and cookies, and then we brought her and the party supplies over to the park in our cargo bikes. W- brought over pizza and hot chocolate. I enjoyed drawing a one-page summary of A+'s 8th year, and that also helped other people get a sense of what we've been up to the rest of the year. I used parts of that drawing for little thank-you cards for her friends, too.
Lots and lots of snow this month. It's amazing how much some guerilla shovelling can make a difference. We cleared the entrance to the Martin Goodman Trail closest to our house, and W- also cleared some things in our neighbourhood and on our bike ride home.
Checking in with myself
I noticed I've been a little more fretful than I'd like to be. I think I've been letting myself get all tangled up in worries about A+ and school fit, and I've also been staying up late exploring sketching. My current plan is:
- schedule fretting for Saturdays so that I don't fret too much at A+ during the week
- remind myself of counterexamples: A+ does actually get her work done, and she's pretty good at making decisions; even if she messes up, failure is feedback
- externalize my anxiety by calling her "Gumamelon" (long story), and thank her for showing up and trying to protect us and make life easier
- try to get better at detecting when Gumamelon is sneaking up on me, write down her concerns, and remind her that she can come back on Saturday.
- distract Gumamelon with other things I can do
- sleep better
It's weird, but maybe it'll help. =)
Also, trying out this approach of answering reflection questions in order to think more deeply.
Where did I feel most energized this month? What activities drained me?
I liked figuring things out with W- and A+, whether it was breaking up the ice on the walkway or redoing the galaxy icing on the cupcakes. I also liked the calmness of going through the music and art tutorials, even if they felt quite slow at times. I'm not too keen on the frazzled feeling of fretting at A+, but I'm glad I'm getting better at recognizing the irrationality of it, and that both W- and A+ are good at reminding me to back off. I'm looking forward to finding ways to redirect that. This might be the time to get back into exploring the things I want to learn. That'll keep me plenty busy.
What moments made me say "aha!" this month?
It's interesting to see how both A+ and I respond well to impersonal feedback from a computer and to breaking things down into bite-sized, gamified learning. The pitch visualizations in the singing app have been helping her pay more attention to melody. I like the way the notes in the piano app don't let me move forward until I get them right. I'm going to experiment with pitch detection to practise singing scales. I want to see if I can get Claude AI to give me reasonably-useful writing feedback, too.
Emoji summary
Nudged by Gina Trapani's My Life in Weeks (found via HN) and the Life in Weeks app (also discussed on HN), I'm noodling around the idea of having a quick but expressive overview. I have a journal covering most of the days since 2016, somewhat spotty coverage of weekly/monthly notes before then, and yearly reviews going back to 2005. If I wanted to summarize each day with an emoji, February would be:
Which is promisingly compact and could be fun to experiment with over the year, and then maybe I could pick weekly highlights too.
Anyway, in March, I'd like to:
- Practise being calmer and more easygoing; get better at thinking in terms of experiments
- Take A+ on more informal field trips: Royal Ontario Museum, pottery class
- Start digging into the ideas and tasks I've been postponing
- Finish the Simply Piano course and start working on sheet music for the songs A+ wants to sing
- Practise singing scales while waiting for A+ to catch up with Simply Sing
- Automate the BigBlueButton setup a bit more so that I don't forget about meetups
Blog posts
- Drawing:
- Org Mode:
- Tech:
- Life:
- Emacs News:
Sketches
- 2025-02-04-05 Lispy Gopher Show – podcast community mindmap.svg
- 2025-02-04-08 Saint-Mary Lake – painting landscape.png
- 2025-02-05-02 Saint-Mary Lake sketch 2 – drawing.png
- 2025-02-06-01 Beaver, goose, squirrel, sparrow, flower, sheepdog, sheep – drawing.png
- 2025-02-09-01 Sliding down the steps – painting art life winter.jpg
- 2025-02-14-01 How to fail without feeling like a failure – parenting experiment life kaizen.png
- 2025-02-16-06 So much snow — daily moment sketch.jpg
- 2025-02-17-04 Giraffe – drawing SimplyDraw.jpg
- 2025-02-17-05 Koala – drawing SimplyDraw.jpg
- 2025-02-18-03 Lispy Gopher Show with screwtape and yduJ – podcast sketchnote history emacs community lambdamoo.png
- 2025-02-18-07 Acorn – drawing SimplyDraw.jpg
- 2025-02-19-08 Fir – drawing SimplyDraw.jpg
- 2025-02-20-01 Productive procrastination – productivity parenting.png
- 2025-02-20-04 Lotus – drawing SimplyDraw.jpg
- 2025-02-20-05 Cactus – drawing SimplyDraw.jpg
- 2025-02-24-01 Evenings – parenting.jpg
- 2025-02-25-01 Learning and feelings – parenting learning school homeschooling.jpg
- 2025-02-25-03 Totally made up mushrooms – art drawing texture SimplyDraw.jpg
- 2025-02-26-01 Things to remember by – family.jpg
- 2025-02-26-06 Crate of apples – art drawing SimplyDraw.jpg
- 2025-02-27-01 Generative artificial intelligence – llm generative ai tech.png
- 2025-02-28-01 Getting used to SuperNote A5X and iPad Air 13 – drawing supernote ipad tech.png
- 2025-02-28-04 February 2025 – monthly review.png
Time
| Category | Previous month % | This month % | Diff % | h/wk | Diff h/wk |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A- | 35.6 | 41.9 | 6.3 | 63.5 | 10.6 |
| Business | 2.0 | 2.4 | 0.4 | 3.6 | 0.7 |
| Discretionary - Family | 0.0 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.2 | 0.2 |
| Discretionary - Play | 0.6 | 0.2 | -0.4 | 0.3 | -0.7 |
| Discretionary - Productive | 11.7 | 11.2 | -0.6 | 16.9 | -1.0 |
| Personal | 8.6 | 7.4 | -1.1 | 11.3 | -1.9 |
| Sleep | 35.4 | 33.9 | -1.4 | 51.5 | -2.4 |
| Unpaid work | 6.2 | 3.2 | -3.0 | 4.8 | -5.0 |
Hmm, definitely want to get more sleep.
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