Categories: review » weekly

RSS - Atom - Subscribe via email

Weekly review: Week ending August 13, 2021

| review, weekly
  • I wrote a few 11ty shortcodes and Emacs commands to make sketches easier to embed into my blog posts.
  • We visited W-'s parents.
  • We made a LEGO vending machine, drink dispenser, and ATM following some video tutorials. A- made adorable beepboop sounds and pretended to cover her PIN.
  • We built and played with the LEGO Heartlake City Grand Hotel.
  • I used the LEGO power functions extension cables I ordered to connect the motors to the train regulator. Now the Great Ball Contraptions can run off wall power.

Blog posts

Sketches

Time
Category The other week % Last week % Diff % h/wk Diff h/wk
A- 39.1 47.2 8.1 79.2 13.6
Discretionary - Play 0.4 2.2 1.8 3.7 3.1
Discretionary - Productive 5.1 5.9 0.8 9.8 1.3
Business 1.1 1.6 0.5 2.6 0.8
Discretionary - Family 1.6 1.4 -0.2 2.3 -0.4
Sleep 34.4 32.4 -2.0 54.4 -3.3
Personal 7.6 5.6 -2.0 9.4 -3.3
Unpaid work 10.8 3.8 -7.0 6.4 -11.8
View or add comments (Disqus), or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com

Weekly review: Week ending August 6, 2021

| review, weekly
  • I changed my borgbackup setup so that the server backups go to a different repo.
  • We had a big harvest of cherry tomatoes, so I started dehydrating them. I want to dry them to a crisp so that I can store them at room temperature more confidently.
  • We made vanilla mug cake to celebrate W-'s birthday. For fun, we topped ours with bitter melon slices, and A- topped hers with strawberries.
  • The Brickloot balls arrived, so we opened a bag and started using them in our LEGO Great Ball Contraptions. I learned how to use the 9V motors, so we were able to rig up the sloped stepper, the pinwheel, the ball pump, the S-capade, and the crane module in a loop.
  • I suggested some changes to the EmacsConf 2021 call for proposals.

Blog posts

Time
Category The other week % Last week % Diff % h/wk Diff h/wk
Unpaid work 7.7 10.8 3.1 18.2 5.3
Discretionary - Family 0.2 1.6 1.4 2.7 2.4
Sleep 33.7 34.4 0.7 57.7 1.1
Discretionary - Productive 4.5 5.1 0.6 8.6 1.1
Business 0.7 1.1 0.4 1.8 0.7
Discretionary - Play 1.2 0.4 -0.8 0.6 -1.4
Personal 9.7 7.6 -2.1 12.7 -3.6
A- 42.4 39.1 -3.3 65.6 -5.6
View or add comments (Disqus), or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com

Weekly review: Week ending July 30, 2021

| review, weekly
  • I noticed the boxwood in front was infested by caterpillars. They seem to be box tree moths, an invasive pest, so W- uprooted and bagged the shrub.
  • The apple scrap vinegar is starting to bubble. Whee!
  • I made peach sorbet popsicles. Yum! It looks like they're another great way to use peaches.
  • We built a few more LEGO Great Ball Contraptions based on free instructions: Pinwheel, Ball pump, Mini elevator, S-Capade
  • I started memorizing the major number mnemonic system and the first hundred digits of pi. I made up silly images using Numberblocks and taught the major number system to A-. She quickly memorized my stories and the mnemonic sentences for pi, responding with the right numbers as I guided her through the sounds in "My turtle Pancho will, my love, pick up my new mover, Ginger. My movie monkey plays in a favourite bucket. Ship my puppy Michael to Sullivan's backrubber. Have a baby fish knife so Marvin will marinate the goosechick."
  • A- noticed that the screen door was open, so we closed it and the main door. A short while later, before we headed upstairs, she noticed that one of our cats was right outside the door. Whoops! We let the cat back in. Whew.

Blog posts

Time
Category The other week % Last week % Diff % h/wk Diff h/wk
A- 36.3 42.4 6.1 71.2 10.3
Personal 7.1 9.7 2.6 16.3 4.4
Discretionary - Play 0.5 1.2 0.7 2.0 1.2
Discretionary - Productive 5.2 4.5 -0.8 7.5 -1.3
Discretionary - Family 1.5 0.2 -1.3 0.3 -2.2
Business 2.2 0.7 -1.5 1.1 -2.5
Unpaid work 10.3 7.7 -2.5 13.0 -4.3
Sleep 37.0 33.7 -3.3 56.6 -5.6

… It doesn't feel like I'm getting 8 hours of sleep on average. Hmm.

View or add comments (Disqus), or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com

Weekly review: Week ending July 23, 2021

| review, weekly
  • We built a step-based LEGO Great Ball Contraption and modified it to go in a loop.
  • I started steno again. To my surprise, I'm now at ~50 wpm on the simple drills.
  • I updated my business books, fleshing out my GIFI table and cleaning up a few entries. Now the taxmap generated from my GIFI table matches the taxmap ledger file I had manually written.
  • We arranged flowers into two little vases. A- put one in the bathroom.
  • We harvested and dried some mint. We did lots of canning, too.
  • I revived my sourdough starter from the backup in the freezer. Room-temperature water and some time in slightly warm incubation seems to have helped.
  • We made steamed buns and meringue cookies. It was a little stressful juggling two recipes and worrying about the effect of the humidity, but it worked out.
  • I sewed a nose wire onto one of A-'s free masks from St. Joe's.

Blog posts

Time
Category The other week % Last week % Diff % h/wk Diff h/wk
Discretionary - Productive 1.3 5.2 3.9 8.8 6.5
Unpaid work 7.1 10.3 3.2 17.2 5.3
Discretionary - Family 0.0 1.5 1.5 2.5 2.5
Discretionary - Play 0.4 0.5 0.0 0.8 0.1
Sleep 37.2 37.0 -0.2 62.1 -0.3
Personal 8.6 7.1 -1.5 11.9 -2.5
A- 38.1 36.3 -1.8 61.0 -3.0
Business 7.3 2.2 -5.1 3.6 -8.6
View or add comments (Disqus), or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com

Weekly review: Week ending July 9, 2021

| review, weekly
  • Ugh, I broke my journal database by C-c-ing too much in panic. Thank goodness I had a backup of the MongoDB and I had copies of many of the entries in my Org archive. I tried reconstructing other entries from my steno strokes. I ended up restoring my journal from the Linode backup by making a new node.
  • I wrote an Emacs Lisp function for generating my invoices.
  • We got sick with a bad cold.

Blog posts

Time

Category The other week % Last week % Diff % h/wk Diff h/wk
Sleep 30.9 38.0 7.1 63.8 12.0
Business 2.6 4.8 2.2 8.0 3.7
A- 40.0 41.0 1.0 68.9 1.7
Discretionary - Family 0.0 0.7 0.7 1.1 1.1
Discretionary - Play 0.3 0.3 -0.0 0.5 -0.1
Personal 5.5 3.2 -2.2 5.4 -3.8
Discretionary - Productive 9.7 6.4 -3.3 10.7 -5.6
Unpaid work 11.1 5.7 -5.4 9.6 -9.0
View or add comments (Disqus), or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com

Weekly review: Week ending July 2, 2021

| review, weekly
  • Steno:
    • I added frequency-sorted completion with stroke information to Emacs, whee! I'm using the JSONs for completion info at the moment instead of checking with Plover directly, but maybe I can figure that out someday (or get the enabled dictionaries from the config).
    • I want to be able to undo with fewer mistakes, so I started to look into sending completion info from Emacs to Plover.
  • Other:
    • W- made chocolate cherry jam and canned more of the sweet cherries we bought. Tita Joy dropped off more cherries too.
    • A- and I started doing badminton drills. She really liked them.
    • We wrapped up the first year of virtual kindergarten. Yay!

Blog posts

Time

Category The other week % Last week % Diff % h/wk Diff h/wk
Business 0.6 2.6 2.0 4.3 3.4
Personal 4.5 5.5 0.9 9.2 1.6
Discretionary - Play 0.1 0.3 0.2 0.5 0.3
Unpaid work 11.1 11.1 -0.0 18.6 0.0
Sleep 31.5 30.9 -0.7 51.8 -1.1
Discretionary - Productive 10.5 9.7 -0.8 16.3 -1.4
A- 41.6 40.0 -1.6 67.2 -2.7
View or add comments (Disqus), or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com

Weekly review: Week ending July 16, 2021

| review, weekly
  • I got my second COVID-19 vaccine, whew!
  • I accidentally set the oven to 160F for an hour instead of 120F for one minute because I didn't check it, assuming the Warm setting was what I had set before. This cooked my sourdough starter, whoops! I'm trying to revive the one I stashed in the freezer, but it's going more slowly than I remember. The last time I had to restore yeast from backup, I had used the yeast I dried, so I guess it worked better. (Spoiler alert: the sourdough starter came back after a few days of feeding, yay!)

Blog posts

Time

Category The other week % Last week % Diff % h/wk Diff h/wk
Personal 3.2 8.6 5.3 14.4 9.0
Business 4.8 7.3 2.5 12.2 4.2
Unpaid work 5.7 7.1 1.4 11.9 2.3
Discretionary - Play 0.3 0.4 0.2 0.8 0.3
Discretionary - Family 0.7 0.0 -0.7 0.0 -1.1
Sleep 38.0 37.2 -0.8 62.5 -1.3
A- 41.0 38.1 -2.9 64.0 -4.9
Discretionary - Productive 6.4 1.3 -5.0 2.2 -8.5
View or add comments (Disqus), or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com