Gf and I celebrated one year as officially together yesterday. We went to a great restaurant that I knew she'd like. Did a lot of talking; we were one of the first to be seated, and one of the last to go home. Hard to believe it's been a year already - in what seems like a short time we've built something great together.
I've been messing with Linux today. It was bound to happen some day - getting packages to work on Windows can be a total bitch if you aren't a command line wizard. This week the two package managers I had were not sufficient to get an OpenStreetMaps data extraction tool to run, even with help from two devs, so I said fukkit and installed WLS and Ubuntu. Now I just need to figure out how to get data from here to there and back.
At work I've been setting the gears in motion to do more product development. It's a two steps forward, one step back kind of thing, but we're getting somewhere. A colleague also dryly noted that 3 million in revenue per year is entirely dependant on me as a product owner...while to me it's not even top 3 in priorities. Think I should probably ask for a raise next review cycle.
I forgot to mention last week that I started my electronic music making minicourse. Made some shitty tunes, but I am very much enjoying fiddling around with sounds for hours on end so I think this new hobby might be a keeper.
DM'ed for a few colleagues this Monday. It went amazing. The two new players had much more extensive fantasy, fiction and RPG histories then I realized and learned the ropes in no time. We're now thinking of making it a monthly campaign thing.
- I forgot to mention last week that I started my electronic music making minicourse. Made some shitty tunes, but I am very much enjoying fiddling around with sounds for hours on end so I think this new hobby might be a keeper.
This sounds pretty cool. Where are you taking the course? I'm interested to hear what you come up with!
Some weeks I have big updates, and other weeks I have small ones. Sometimes my updates are big because I have strong emotions that I need to release, and sometimes my updates are small because I have strong emotions that need to be hemmed in.
This week I have no strong emotions of either variety, and that has me feeling emotional in an unfamiliar way. It feels like I'm wearing a thick wool glove and grasping at my emotions, trying to describe the texture of them.
It sure does fucking suck to have a broken leg. I wish I could ambulate farther than a city block's length before needing a break. I wish I could ambulate with my own legs instead of metal crutches that bruise my hands and clang around when I drop them. I'll be better in a few months, but the next few months are going to continue to suck.
How's it going, Hubski?
I didn't hear about ilex or her chickens this week! How goes the conference prep? Are you already on the road?
applewood I'm still planning to watch Godzilla '54, but I've had less free time than I thought I would! It's still on the list. Have you done any crafting since last week?
Thanks for asking, friend! Conference is in a couple of weeks, thank god, because I am not ready at all yet. But, it'll come together in time.
I get the muted emotions sometimes -- usually I need a break of some sort so I can process whatever's going on in my subconscious. Sometimes it almost feels like a hangover, you know? Anyway, I hope you're back to feeling...something...soon. :)
A broken leg sounds like the perfect excuse to order delivery pizza and chinese and whatever else you can get delivered almost every day.
I've been pretty busy myself, with kind of not crafts. I've been to the park and in my backyard a couple of times this week taking pictures of bugs and birds and lizards and such. I'm gonna get a few printed out for reference and try and draw them. While not necessarily crafts or art, I collected some acorns from the yard, made sure they passed the water test, and planted them in pots hoping they'll stratify over winter. Someone already called dibs on a spring seedling if everything goes right, so maybe five or six months from now we'll have a few baby trees with homes for them all.
I was in Paris for 4 days. It changed me. I saw what life should be like. It should take 3 hours to have lunch. You should walk everywhere you go. You should only build buildings worth building. You should have the largest and most beautiful of those buildings dedicated to showcasing art.
The people have a leisurely way to them, while also having a definitive style. It’s remarkable. It’s a remarkably beautiful place. It’s the new gold standard for cities for me.
I’ll return.
I had a very romantic time with my wife. Anyone hat is married with kids will know how difficult this is unless you travel far far away :) it was wonderful. Great meals, long walks and long nights.
As an aside, has anyone watched the show Peaky Blinders? We loved it.
I watched Peaky Blinders a while ago. I recently tricked my wife in to watching it (she typically shies away from this type of show) with me from the beginning. She is liking it. We're mid-season 4. Looking forward to seeing Season 5. It's even better the second time around.
My wife loves it. We watched all seasons in like 4 weeks. Excited for season 6. I think Hitler will make an appearance. Too bad we have to wait almost 2 years. Ah well, I have Star Wars to look forward to.
Spent a few hours in the garden of my new place over the weekend - tilling, preparing then planting.
I've currently got... Carrots, potatoes, peas, spinach, and capsicum in the ground. Fuck knows if it'll work, Dunedin weather is a bit wild but apparently these should all grow nicely.
My partner was sitting on the deck picking the tunes while I dug the ground, it was a nice afternoon. She's gonna pick out the herbs and plant them herself this coming weekend, I hear mint is the devil in disguise and needs to either be heavily handled or simply not included, so we'll just avoid it.
Possibly the most fun part of a fun weekend was actually running around the stores finding things to buy. Looking at hoes, comparing carbon fibre to wood handles, picking out the seeds/seedlings and various tools and chatting to the elderly man who worked at the store about what mulch to get. He leaned in conspiratorially and said "If you want mulch, go to [nearby garden store] they'll give you three times as much for half the price of here". So I headed over there and sure enough, they basically chucked a fuckin' bale of the good stuff in my car for half the price of the other store.
Next month I go to Japan, the month after we officially move into the new house and it's Christmas/New Years/Summer, the month after that we'll adopt a cat and our family begins. All the while, the Rugby World Cup is in full swing and I've just planted a hopeful garden. Oh and Touch Rugby season has started. What a time to be alive.
Seems like I'm making new friends and spend a lot of fun time with other freshmen. Moving from institute to a bar can be surprisingly seamless, though we did build sort of a nerd corner for ourselves. There's also an air of cooperation that's very new to me, IRL at least. It's different from my general life experience, and I couldn't be happier about it.
Being a TA takes much more prep time than I expected, but I'm starting to develop a weekly routine that should be close to optimal. The commute is already solved, TA prep will likely plateau at about 2 hours per course per week, homework is nothing new (even though it's noticeably harder in general), and I'm moving through all the papers for my research assignment in a relatively comfortable pace. The fact I already have more free time than while I was at uni is weird as hell, though much appreciated.
In one word: progress.
We have started looking for a house to buy, which is exciting and mentally exhausting. Only kinda scary. Our lease is up in December.
Be careful. I feel like we are at peak market. Also, congrats, buyin a home is exciting stuff.
Thanks, we’re being careful about what we can afford, and we're keeping some safety margin in ours budget. It’s a good time for us even if it's not the best time in the market.
It's getting cool here, which means the chickens are all poofed up and snuggly at night. But they are also thankful that it's not 90 degrees out anymore. Hard to stay cool in the summer when you're wearing a down comforter!
There is a lot going on right now, but at least some of it is positive, so that's good. I feel like I'm flying and I'm a little worried because that feeling tends to precede a crash, but it hasn't happened yet so maybe this time I can manage to slow back down in a few weeks.
I spoke with my advisor some today and it seems like I am going to try to take on some more formal mentorship/lab management work. I need to think about how I want that to look and what would be good for the students in my lab. Basically, I want to help other folks make progress and not feel quite so lost and alone as grad school can be at times. I've worked pretty hard to get to where I am now, and it's my responsibility to make it a bit easier for folks coming after me. If y'all have advice, I'd love to hear it!
I closed the email app I use for school before my assignment sent, spent weeks wondering when the prof was going to send me back my mark only to find out the email sent the next time I opened the app which was way too late. So ya, stay tuned to find out if he’ll accept it or if I am just destined to fail all the time.