I started helping Bike Brigade with their e-mail newsletter. I read through their Slack history and a couple of years of newsletters to build up a library of newsletter blocks. I made a collage of the Jane's Walk photos. I didn't get around to editing the photos and posting them on Facebook. Maybe next week. We also did some more deliveries.
We biked to the Stockyards so that we could buy clover seeds, flower seeds, plants, and other gardening supplies from Canadian Tire and Rona. A+ also took the opportunity to have har gow and some quick playtime at the arcade. I moved the strawberries into pots. I potted the dahlias (including the new ones) and scattered many of the flower seeds we bought. I also pruned the mini roses.
We attended an IPRC meeting to confirm A+'s exceptionality.
We went to the dentist. So far so good.
A+ improved the organization of the bathroom by putting away less-used things.
I dropped my phone and damaged the screen protector. Fortunately, the screen was fine. I found the other screen protector and applied it.
“The truth is I still put a lot of pride into being Very Good At Ruby. I
cling to that pride, sometimes. I want to show that I've “still got it”.
In a life drowned in caregiving and homemaking and survival, I often
feel like I'm vanishing. Like I have so much still to offer, if
only—and then there is screaming from another room, and I must defuse
a meltdown, or mediate an argument, or make a belated dinner, or chase
down a meds prescription, or or or…”
This is something I remember struggling with. I
think I've come to terms with it now, mostly by
giving up the idea of being good at stuff. I've
been making peace with the fact that I make
silly errors, and that's okay. I've come to
realize that it's not even entirely due to the
distraction and time constraints of parenting,
and that I like how I'm growing even if it feels
less certain.
‘This morning, as I wrote my morning pages, I felt a little fearful. All
my life I've yearned to be creative. I frequently think, “If I only had
more time, I'd…” All those things I've said I wished I had more time
to do — write, draw, learn French, exercise, meditate — now it's
time to see if I really do want to do them. What if time was just an
excuse? I guess that would be okay. I'd learn what really does matter to
me. Maybe it turns out I like the idea of being creative more than I
actually am creative. Maybe what I really love is long walks and sitting
in the garden reading books.'
This feels like a related thought. I'm glad I
did my experiment with semi-retirement. That
period of having plenty of time autonomy showed
me that I tend to be more of a slacker than a
hustler, and that's also okay.
A+ enjoyed the pottery painting class at Clay
with Me. She painted a small bowl, a tiny dish,
and a rainbow.
I let A+ scoot ahead to her class. I didn't even
see her when I got there, but I did find her
scooter and her helmet neatly put away, so I
assume that she made it there safely. Another
big step towards independence!
We did a few Bike Brigade deliveries as a
family, and I decided to help with their
newsletter.
We visited Popo and helped her with tech.
I wrote some code to visualize a specific day or
set of days, and I added that to my blog post
about time.
The weather was often warm and sunny, so we spent
more time biking and walking. We brought bubbles,
sand toys, and popsicles to the playgrounds. That
was nice.
A+ has been practising crossing the street by
herself. She's quite proud of being able to go
ahead of me. She was also proud of making her own
choices at the farmers market, carefully counting
out $5 and a collection of coins that all together
summed up to $12 for a bottle of very dark maple
syrup, and choosing a sourdough loaf after some
discussion with the baker.
A+ enjoyed doing an Easter Monster Math Hunt, as
is apparently now our tradition. I drew lots of
Minecraft mobs on brightly-coloured sticky notes,
labelled the front sides with letters and wrote
equations on the back sides. A+ wanted to practise
solving for variables, so I wrote two-step
equations of the form 2 * n + 3 = 7. As she
found each sticky note, she brought it to me and
figured out the answer in her head, and I wrote
her answer down. When she collected all of them,
she sorted them by number and then figured out the
phrase using the letters in the front (CHOCOLATE
EGGS), whereupon she received the chocolate egg
I'd brought along for snack.
In Minecraft, we switched from Create: Perfect
World to the Create: Ultimate Selection modpack
because A+ wanted to use Create 6.0. Fortunately,
this didn't mean restarting our world from
scratch, since it was an upgrade. After we got
everyone on board, I built a full enchanting table
setup, got myself a Fortune 3 pickaxe, and started
caving. We also experimented with a Minecraft
Create Mod club on Outschool, but it wasn't really
A+'s thing between the lag and the overwhelming
experience of stepping into a world that's already
quite built up. We'll probably just keep playing
ourselves. If A+'s cousins or friends from the
playgroup want to join in, we figured out how to
set up port forwarding, so we can set up a server.
I experimented with analyzing my time. I updated my color scheme a little, cleaned up the graph, and made it responsive.
I added sketches to my On This Day RSS feed.
I did some consulting and managed to get that front-end prototype mostly sorted out.
Wayne and I worked together to figure out how to do port forwarding so we could host a Minecraft Java server at home and possibly share it with A+'s cousins or friends.
We planted more radishes, lettuce, peas, cilantro, and spinach. We also
started marigolds, petunias, chrysanthemums, jalapeno peppers, cherry
tomatoes (Sweet Million), and mini bell peppers inside. (toot)
I planted some more radish and lettuce seeds. (toot)
It was nice getting some reasonably-continuous
thinking time done. There was still one instance
where I hadn't wrapped up properly and therefore
felt a little frustrated when A+ wanted my
attention, but that was on me and something I can
do better next time.
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.
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.
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)
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)
“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.
“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.
“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.”
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).
I added Mastodon links to my blog. I think the process will be: post the blog post; toot to Mastodon; edit the blog post and republish. I might be able to save time and just copy over the blog post during the first go-around, from make serve.
Oops: I forgot to check on Emacs Berlin and it turned out that the NAS timezone was set to GMT-5 instead of America/Toronto, so I scrambled to get it set up. I also got distracted while trying to figure out how to revoke the token the NAS was using so it wouldn't downscale automatically, so that might have wrapped up the meeting early. I set up cronjobs on xu4 for next time.
Next week:
Continue to reduce fretting about homework.
Work through intermediate piano course in Simply Piano. Practise1 more songs, too.
Take a look at that inbox and start dusting things off.
“One thing that really fascinates me is how I'm reminded of events and
readings that I'd completely forgotten – but, once reminded, I find
that these things are once again in my mind. Perhaps I can say what I'm
thinking more clearly — though I'm more than a little frustrated by
having absolutely no memory of experiencing or reading something I
describe in an entry written only a few years ago, I'm fascinated by how
reading what I wrote has brought that experience back to mind rather
vividly. Of course I'm reminded of what I described in the text that I'm
now re-reading, but I can also remember other things associated with
whatever it is that is described there. It's as though the small bit
that I wrote and can now read is the key that unlocks a much larger
trove of memory. Funny how the mind works.”
I am also quite fuzzy about things that happened, and I'm glad I've got
notes to help me sort of remember.
Although, as well researched and as thoughtful as Houston might be
there's a messiness at work here that I love; it is the true great
quality of a blog. That permission to roam, to let your curiosity grab
you by the lapel and hoist you across fifteen different subjects over
the course of a single paragraph; blogging is pointing at things and
falling in love.
Bull sharks and respiration (toot)
My 2021 post on A list of sharks that are obligate ram ventilators continues to pop up
every now and then. Someone had a question about whether bull sharks are
obligate ram ventilators, so I did a little research and added whatever
notes I could find there. I think maybe they aren't, although they're
sometimes described as such? Not sure, maybe someone can chime in. =)
Programmable Notes(toot)
Oooh, it could be fun to trawl through these for ideas for things to
port over to Emacs.
The Smartblocks plug-in for Roam Research is the system I personally
use to build these types of workflows. It offers a set of triggers,
variables, and commands you can chain together into fairly readable
statements like:
<%SET:topOfMindToday,<%INPUT:What's on your mind today?%>%> or
<%RANDOMBLOCKFROM:Writing Ideas%>.
Even with limited programming knowledge, many people in the community
have been able to fashion their own Smartblock flows. Plenty of them
have published their workflows to the community Github for others to
use.
Books are maps to territories that are completely internal to the
reader. By focusing so heavily on extracting the surface symbology of
the map itself, these process-heavy note-takers risk losing sight of the
territory. A book's territory is the reasoning and argument that the
book presents to you as a path you take through your own psyche. The
goal isn't to remember everything the book contains. Remembering a
book's contents is useless. The book exists to contain what it contains.
If the contents are important, you keep a copy of it for you to look
things up again.
But that isn't the point of reading. The purpose of reading is to be
changed. Sometimes the change is trivial and temporary – a piece of
fiction that brings some joy in your life. Sometimes the change is
profound – a shift in your perspective on life. “Action items” from a
book are external and forcing yourself to follow through on them is
exhausting.
Added Pagefind search (toot)
I'm also experimenting with using Pagefind to
provide search for my static site using client-side Javascript. It
currently analyzes 10934 files and indexes 8183 pages (87272 words) in
40 seconds. The data is 125MB, but a search for, say, "sketchnote"
transfers only 280KB, so that's pretty good. I think I'm adding the date
properly and I know I can set that as the default sort, but I haven't
yet figured out how to make it possible for people to sort by either
relevance or date as they want. I also want to eventually format the
search results to include the date. Maybe
Building a Pagefind UI – dee.underscore.world will be useful.
