Week 12 2024

My weeks have been dominated by intense workloads recently, and so I've tended to focus on that in my notes. But where possible I think I'll make an effort to prioritise reflecting on non-work aspects of my life.

I find that by the time I've mined out all the positive aspects of my personal life I have a limited amount of energy / space left to obsess over work, which is as it should be.

Good things

Reading to K

Against my better judgement we went straight from finishing first Mysterious Benedict Society book to the second. This is a tempting move when reading a series you enjoy, but tends to end badly in my experiece — something to do with pacing and over-exposure?

So far so good, though, after a few chapters. The material is perfect for his age and interests and well-constructed for reading aloud.

I'm very conscious of this as being, perhaps, the best possible use of my time and energy. Lying in bed, enjoying a story together every night… it creates this kind of timeless zone that's about as close to the essence of Good Fatherhood (and hopefully Happy Childhood) as I've ever experienced.

Walking home with R

In a similar vein, the experience of holding R's little hand as we walk home from school together is something I'm trying to soak up while I can. K had definitely stopped holding my hand by the age of six and I feel lucky that R is still unselfconscious about it.

As with the reading thing, being in those moments and knowing there's nothing to do but Be In The Moment is… I don't know.

Enlightening?

Other kid stuff

Yesterday the kids and I got on a train to drop of R at her aunt's house for the night. The kids spend so much time in such close proximity, it feels really healthy for them to be apart, and nice for my sister to start forming an independent relationship with R.

K and I finally got around to watching the D&D film, and although it didn't quite live up to my expectations (which weren't high by the way), we had a good few laffs while eating popcorn and it was fine.

Spacetime!

I watched this video about spacetime and gravity and it blew me away.

Just as parallel lines in 2D space can converge when the plane is curved (on a globe, say), we can think about gravity as being a convergence in space and time due to distorting effect of mass.

It's one of those things that once you grok it, it seems weirdly obvious.

Picotron

I got Picotron in its beta release sale. I have absolutely zero idea what to do with it, but it's there if I ever do get an inkling.

Handheld tinkering

The ins and outs of my retro handheld fetish are best covered in a separate blog post so I'll just make a note here that I've been enjoying the challenge of getting things set up just so.

Once again I'm trying to summon the willpower to do some PICO-8 development so I can have the fun of playing my own games on my own portable console (K too).

Less unhealthy stuff

I'm making some kind of effort to reduce my mindless phone use. I've got a physical book on the go (Double Whammy by Carl Hiaasen) and my journal (while still very neglected) has some new pencil scratchings in it for the first time in many weeks.

I'm on another teetotal push, making an effort to avoid meat, and generally trying to not consume garbage. Every little helps.

Work

This sprint isn't INSANE, but it's still A LOT. They tried to make it insane — I had to ping my manager saying:

"Once I take away mandatory training time, leave I'm owed from last sprint, ceremonies and other meetings, and assuming I don't do any of my elective training and assuming nothing else comes up, I have approximately 4 days to work on this sprint.

In that I'm being asked to

It was bonkers. Anyway, in the planning meeting I just said my focus was the main site and the rest was not happening. Turns out it was the right call because it's slow and painstaking work.

Each day I have a big list of components to update and I need to make sure I get the PR in at the end of each day so it can go to test while I'm working on the next page. It's fine, but it's still not a sustainable page of work.

Conclusion

That's it! Kind of a long one this week, but that's OK. Whose time am I wasting?

END