Category: Journal

I’ve decided to enter the Portland Adult Soap Box Derby this year. Whew. The hard part’s over with that decision. All that’s left is designing the car, sourcing the parts, building the car, gathering a crew, meeting deadlines and balancing all my obligations surrounding this endeavor. No sweat.

I don’t know why it’s a constant problem for pytest to find the modules I’m importing. Adding __init__.py files, removing __init__.py files, updating the path in the conftest.py file, blood sacrifice, deed signing, and it still doesn’t work. What more do you want??? I just want to test my code.

I’ve woken up at 6AM for two days running. This is in the face of knowing that I can sleep in until 7 without any problem. Let’s see if I can keep this up for three.

I’ve been putting time back into my linguistic project, but I’m having some issues moving forward. I think the fastest way to do so is load up a local DB with this data, and crank out a few UX prototypes in python or javascript to test my assumptions. I see this living on AWS services eventually, but for now, this can be completed on the gaming computer I have running downstairs. I also need to approach some ML technology to decide what works or not. That will all come in time. For now, I just need to move it forward and build up momentum.

Monica commented that she always uses her down comforter, regardless of season. It’s not entirely true, but it’s true enough.

Today we saw the largest St Bernard outside of Trader Joe’s. Its owner introduced him to us, and then the owner snagged a viscous strand of drool from its jowls and flung it out onto the parking lot.

Zavian seems to have warmed up to me some. My time away in Chicago must’ve reminded him how great of a dad I am.

I unintentionally missed one day of blogging, and then I kinda unintentionally missed the next day. This was after I spent a couple days emailing myself the blog posts rather than actually posting them. So, it may have seemed like I missed a bunch of days when I actually just missed a handful.

I’m back, though. In addition to being back and posting on the blog, I’m back from a brief trip to Chicago. It’s a good city, that. I spent the time split between my team and strolls along those windswept streets.

I have a plan to help my productivity. I will go to bed at 10PM each night and get up at 5 to work for at around 2 hours on my personal projects. It’s already 10:11PM, so I’m failing as I begin. That’s how I roll, though.

Today we bought Zavian a balance bike at a consignment shop. This is after we bought him a $5 bike from a yard sale a few months back that’s a bit too big for him. This is also after we bought him a wooden balance bike from a consignment shop in 2017 that was both too big and too heavy for him. I guess I’ve been trying to get this kid on a bike for a while now. He walked it all over the neighborhood today, and he seemed like he really enjoyed himself. Now I need to start worrying about threats to his safety and life when he’s biking on the street. Actually, I still have a few years before I need to start worrying about him biking on the street; this isn’t even a real bike yet. Well, I guess I can still start worrying now for extra credit.

I spent most of my work day managing a project I’m working on, but not actually working on that project. I’ll have to spend some of the weekend making up that time, but what can you do. I’d like to spend some of that time on my stagnating linguistic project, but at least I’m learning things that I can apply over there.

I rode my electric skateboard to the supermarket, and I waited around with it inside. A guy asked me to buy him a burrito, but I was too distracted to immediately understand his request. After I asked him to repeat himself, he played it off. I assume you can’t ask for food or money in the supermarket. I should’ve told him that I understood, and then bought him a burrito. Instead, I just let it pass. I once tried to give a guy a taco in Chicago, and he was upset that I presumed he couldn’t afford one. Never make presumptions about people, but at least try and push through the confusion to communicate successfully communicate.

Poor sleep hygiene leads to bad blog posts. A day of meetings and a grumpy afternoon followed by a nice evening with Monica. We both fell asleep way too early, waking up at midnight to brush our teeth and fill the humidifier. 

Today’s regrets include selling my Nintendo Switch before Tetris 99 announcement. I shipped out my HTC vive today. I assume something awesome will be released for that platform shortly. 

I took the day off today to spend it with Zavian and Monica. In the morning, we took Monica to get new eyeglasses while Zavian and I explored an independent pet shop. We listened to some live kid’s music, grabbed some bagels, and then hit up the Mt. Scott playground. The afternoon was similar, but punctuated by Zavian throwing a fit when we tried to convince him to go outside with us to run some errands. It happens to the best of us.

I spent the evening trying to catch up on some work, so I made no progress on the linguistic project. I’ll come back to that tomorrow.

I sold my HTC vive on eBay, and I boxed that up today. It will be replaced by some new tech in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, the onerous setup of that system is what’s kept me from playing it more. I got my money’s worth as I dipped my toes into the potential of VR.

Making new friends as an adult is always intimidating. How do you make connections after you’ve already established yourself and you life? One aspect of moving to Portland a year and a half back is that we’ve lost almost all of the friends we had in Chicago. For me, that’s not a big deal. I’ve never had a ton of friends, and I’m fine with that because I have a lot of fun making things. For Monica, it’s been harder because her friend base was much larger in Chicago.

We’ve both had two recent situations where a potential new friend has come into our life. For me, I met a fellow dad at Zavian’s school, and stumbled through the dance of making a play date. For Monica, it was a friend of a friend is making the same transition to Portland from Chicago. Even if these friendships don’t pan it, this and every attempt at one is worthwhile.

I’m still taking Zavian to the arcade for every week preschool drop-offs without any fussing. I need to find an exit strategy on this plan. I’m getting tired of going to the arcade each week when the true purpose of these trips is to earn enough tickets to win the same knockoff lego car. Well at least he’s not crying whenever Monica leaves him in the morning.

Not a super productive day at work, but I researched a lot on the my current task at hand.

Monica and I have been playing a couple rounds of Blokus each night. It’s a solid game, and she really has taken to it much more than I expected. It’s a good exercise for spacial reasoning, especially if you don’t use those skills regularly.