False alarm

 Wordle 226 3/6

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Yesterday the kid had a busy social calendar. At 11 we met friends of hers at a skating rink. It was only the third time skating for both she and me, and only the second time for T. We had fun. I can't count how many times the kid fell down but she didn't seem to care. The skating rink had these mobility assisting devices shaped like penguins. She generally refused to use them; her friends were more experienced and I think she didn't want to be left behind. T. didn't fall down at all, I don't think, and was very cautious. I fell down twice. The first was fine. The second time, I landed on my knee, and I'm surprised I don't still feel it now.

At 2 the kid went to a friend's to play while T. and donated a damaged chair to a used furniture/construction materials place, and went to Costco.

At 5ish another friend of the kid came over to our house to play until 6:30. After that I made a chicken stir-fry for dinner.

Saturday and while all this was going on, WhatsApp chat was hot and emails were going around between parents and the school administration. The school has a policy that if there's a positive coronavirus case and more than a certain percentage of the class is unvaccinated, then the class has to go fully virtual. On Friday the school thought we were at that threshold, but over the weekend parents compared notes, disagreed, and got the right records updated, so the kid is there now. Normalcy is appreciated.

Good but tiring

 Wordle 225 3/6

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I don't play with hard mode on, but I often play as if that's the rule anyway. It takes me longer to get from the second guess to the third or the third to the fourth, but I think I get the answer in fewer guesses. 

Daily stuff

Yesterday we kept to ourselves well into the afternoon. Lazy weekend brunch and TV in the morning. T. spend a lot of time that day cleaning. The kid helped (or was ordered) to clean her room. I spent a little time cleaning and did the laundry. A little after noon we gave her a rapid test. It came back negative. Then I badgered her into taking a brief walk to drop off some books at a Little Free Library. There are a lot in our neighborhood. The first one only had room for 5 books or so. I couldn't persuade her to go with me to another right then, so we went back home. We went out again not too much later with T. as well. We dropped off the rest of the books at another library, went to REI briefly to look at bikes, and got a growler filled with beer at the brewery around the corner. Then home. 

Aside from trying to burn off some of the kid's energy, I'm glad I got out and about for once myself.

Musing

T. definitely does more cleaning than me. Sometimes I feel bad about this. Maybe I should feel worse. My rationale (excuse?) is that I'd be inclined to clean primarily by decluttering. I'd be happy to give or throw stuff away. If she and the kid want to keep stuff, they can take a little more responsibility for keeping it organized and out of the way. But maybe I'm making them take too much responsibility for it.

Seize the moment because you never know when it ends

 Wordle 224 3/6

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 Yesterday morning was fine. Nothing too exciting happened. We dropped the kid off at the usual time and I worked fairly well. I expected yesterday afternoon to be fine too. I expected to split my time between working on a document due COB Tuesday and personal stuff, and send out a bunch of questions about that document right before logging off around 5. Then we'd pick the kid up from after-school care and take her to gymnastics class.

But then around 1 we got that horrifying announcement of these times: your kid has been exposed to covid.

Not horrifying because of safety of course. She's vaccinated, we're vaccinated and boosted, etc. No, horrifying because it means she's not going to school for at least five days or something like that (maybe six! We got two emails that disagreed with each other!) and we should curtail social or other events. So we picked her up early, cancelled gymnastics, and are waiting to figure out other things. The kid is already noticeably antsy.

Technology hates me

 Wordle 223 4/6

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Yesterday my office's network was down. I couldn't do anything for the actual job and neither could anyone else. I took care of a corporate training requirement and otherwise just read and did personal stuff until it came back. 

I finally got that new phone. The phone itself is fine, and transferring my data went better than I expected overall even if not quite perfectly. I'm annoyed that they've changed the charger cord, so I need to buy a new set of adapters for it (already bought a wall adapter for it, but I also want some way to plug it into the car and maybe my computer), and either throw away the old one or add yet another one to the heap of maybe useless chargers and peripherals. Also, I was able to get a case for the new phone, but the store was out of stock on screen protectors. I ordered one. It's due to arrive in about a week. It came with one of those standard clear foil covers and I hoped that would last until the protector I ordered arrived, but it only lasted about four hours. Now my new phone looks worse than my old one ever did, with wrinkles in the cheap protector and tape around it to keep it from getting any worse. 

The office network came back up in stages. I was able to do some kind of work a little before 2, but full functionality didn't come back before I had to log off for the day. 

Among the problems with the new phone are linking my headphones to them. I had a pretty convenient Bluetooth setup on the old phone but haven't got it to work so far on the new one. I missed listening in on an all-hands meeting yesterday because of that. I'm not in trouble but it sounds like the news was actually interesting/useful for once. Oh well.

Yesterday evening the kid had a guitar lesson. Then I made a quick dinner. Then I had an unusually quick meeting online following up on this - more meetings than usual but we're trying to actually get something done. Then I put the kid to bed. The new bedtime plan is going okay.

Last night was rough. She got up around 2 AM and didn't go back to sleep in her own bed until almost 4, I think.

On the good side of average

 Wordle 222 5/6

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I had all the information to get it in 4 but I forgot about one of those yellow letters. Oh well.

Yesterday was fine. Got roughly half of that big task at work done (realistically, probably less than half, but a good milestone). Went grocery shopping. T. and I both went. I could have gone without her, but I wouldn't want her going without me, because she gets too much junk food. Traffic was terrible nearby due to some police manhunt or something but we made a slight detour and only got to the store a few minutes later. 

I've been rereading the Wheel of Time series between Sixth Watch and starting one of those new books. We watched the Amazon show, and that got me thinking about it again. Not the whole thing, but my current plan is to catch up with this book-club-like effort, and then switch back and forth between it and something new or other hobbies.

I hope yesterday's productivity can continue but I can't be sure. My office network is down completely this morning, apparently. I'm working on a couple corporate trainings, but they'd take less than an hour if I actually focused on them.

Time to myself

 Wordle 221 4/6

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Daily stuff

Yesterday was okay. Not much to say. At work I started the day with a to-do list of five little things and one big thing. I got all the little things done, plus two meetings, so I feel like that's good enough. I need to send one or two unrelated emails but I hope I can focus on that big thing all today and tomorrow.

It was hard to focus yesterday at work and I don't know why.

I finished Sixth Watch last night. Good book in the "urban fantasy" genre, and the last book of a good series. I actually just found it around the house. A friend of T.'s had given the series to her/us years ago. Neither of us had ever read it until I got bored a few months ago, I don't remember when exactly, and picked up Night Watch. So that's done and I can get to any of the next three novels I have lying around, presents in one form or another. I mentioned going to the bookstore Saturday because I had a gift certificate to spend - that was a present from Christmas 2020 if not earlier. 

Musing

I've already mentioned needing exercise. I think I'm also short on time to myself. These used to be the same thing. I didn't get much time to myself for the first ~1.25 years of the pandemic but of course it was drowned out by other problems. Last summer exercise was time to myself once again. Biking the kid to school this fall was sort of time to myself. Now I'm not even doing that.

I've been taking my computer upstairs to work now and then over the past couple weeks and leaving T. on the dining room table alone. I started it because I noticed our nice new chairs would creak when I leaned back. Maybe no dining room chairs are meant for office use, i.e. eight-plus hours a day. We have an office chair upstairs and T. just got one she's keeping downstairs a lot, so I often use the one upstairs and just keep it there.

Kids are tiring. Pets are tiring. Kids are pets.

 Wordle 220 5/6

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Yesterday was fine. A bit busier than usual. Definitely busier than I expected or wanted to deal with, but, eh, hopefully being busy ensures job security.

Last night I had a meeting with a parents group at my kids' school. I volunteered for a project to publicize the group. I'm not exciting about it but any progress with this group is better than nothing.

The kid slept through the night. The cat didn't. We were waked up at 2 in the morning by a horking noise. We cleaned up the vomit (on the floor, so it was easy enough) and let him out. 

This morning the kid got up when I did, which is about an hour earlier than usual. After having breakfast she got out her video camera, a Christmas present I'm not sure was advisable, and made video(s) about herself and us. I feel obligated to appreciate her creativity, and her getting experience with grownup technology stuff, and finding ways to entertain herself other than TV. Even so I can't help but missing an extra hour of sleep for her and solitude for me.

Still no resolution on upgrading our phones, unfortunately.

Overdue outing

Wordle 219 5/6

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Daily stuff

Yesterday I cut myself shaving. It happens often enough on my chin or lip, but yesterday I somehow managed to do it on my ear (trying to control sideburns), so I knew I had to get my hair cut. The kid had a gymnastics class this afternoon and the barber I like is just a couple blocks away, so I went while she was doing somersaults. T. and I also tried to figure out upgrading our phones. Doing two at once, when we're each using different data transfer options, takes some scheduling. After we got home, the kid practiced her guitar, and then got to play with a friend. Meanwhile T. did a lot of tidying up around the house and I did a little. I made fish and Brussels sprouts for dinner.

Musing

I was probably at my physical peak around let's say October 2019 (before holiday eating, when the weather made it easy to get out a lot). I had usually biked to work. 3 miles one way on city streets isn't very intense, but doing it 8-10 times a week adds up. Also, the kid had swimming lessons at the YMCA weekly, and I'd usually do something physical while she was in the water. Sometimes I'd try to swim laps. I say "try" because swimming full laps was a hell of a lot of work; I shouldn't overestimate how great my peak actually was. More often I'd jog on a treadmill for a while and then use weight machines. 

I cooked healthily. I drank a bit more than I needed and lunch tended to be my indulgence, something greasy from a food truck. But still, I got a lot of physical activity for someone with a desk job. We didn't have a car, so grocery shopping and other routine errands were done by bike or on foot.

Biking to work and going to the gym ended in March 2020 like so many other things. 

In the fall of 2020 we got a car, so that meant less walking.

In June of 2021, my inactivity got to me and I decided I'd take up jogging. I stuck with that pretty well through the end of August. Then the start of the kid's school year disrupted things a bit. For a while I biked her to school on most days, and that was better than nothing. That ended in November. I haven't got around to replacing the bike yet. Even if I had, it has been cold enough that she'd probably be very opposed to going to school by bike. 

But I really, really, really need to get back into it or something similar when spring comes.

What's wrong with boredom?

Wordle 218 3/6

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Not to brag but I think I'm actually getting good at this. It seems like eliminating letters is as important as guessing the right ones.

Daily stuff

Yesterday the kid had a swim class. After that we met a friend for lunch (at a place with a converted patio, so we were sort of outside, and had a lot of space to ourselves). We were prepared to go home after that but I had the bright idea of going to our favorite comic book store. Parking was a pain. I wound up getting one comic for myself. T. got two graphic novels for herself and the kid got two for herself. One was about Anne Frank. We really aren't looking forward to reading that to her. It's in a series she likes about historical figures. I think she picked up on our hesitancy - forbidden fruit.

Then T. wanted to go to a used bookstore a block away to look for another book as a present. After that, the kid asked to go to another bookstore closer to home with a more developed children's section. We agreed just because I had a gift certificate to spend. After that, a friend of the kid's came over to play with her for a little over an hour, while T. and I made dinner and tried to get some laundry and other work done.

I was exhausted by last night. It was partly just time on my feet, since I get so little physical activity. But it is also just mentally draining to go shopping with the kid. "No, you can't have three Big Nate comic books." "No, you can't have this book about the Marquis de Sade." "A used bookstore is a bad place to play hide and seek."

Musing

To some extent boredom is good, if it motivates me to do productive or at least self-improving stuff. I'm not the most industrious, driven, go-getter guy and I'm OK with that, but it would obviously be nice to get more done, not counting collecting stuff in a game. 

The house is cluttered, I might like to get a better job, and I have several books I'd like to read. I can't fix all that while T. is asleep but I might be able to make progress on some of it.

My daughter is getting older so we can enjoy some of the same things. She couldn't beat me in a game of Magic: the Gathering now, but if I offered to teach her, maybe in a year. 

Whether it's bad or not, I should be clear what the cause is. It's not gamelessness, or not mainly gamelessness. It's January and I've never found an indoor kind of exercise I like. Last summer there were many mornings when I went jogging instead or (or at least, in addition to) playing World of Warcraft, but I wouldn't do that when it's below freezing out. I like biking too. And it's a pandemic. Things almost seemed back to normal for a while but now omicron is going around. Going to any store is fraught (despite how we spent today), dining out is always takeout or outdoors, seeing friends is outdoors (also weather-dependent) or only a thing of dire need. I'll be less bored in three months whether I do anything differently or not.

Boredom

I still haven't figured out what I do with my free time. 

The kid got up just a few minutes after me. If she hadn't, I might have read or watched something inappropriate for children. Since she had, we finished The Wizard of Oz, which we had started last night. We could engage with that together, since I had seen it before a very long time ago, and it has subtext, and I wanted to make sure she wouldn't be scared by the scary parts. (She wasn't but it's hard to predict.) But now she's on to The Powerpuff Girls, and that's doing less for me. I appreciate the occasional Aliens reference, I guess, but still.

Am I going to have to become the kind of person who's productive and spends his free time on responsible things?

General check-in

 Wordle 217 5/6

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Work was OK yesterday. Some inputs for the biweekly report were later than usual but other than that things were fine. After I finished my part in that I focused on some general clean-up tasks. 

Friday night the kid has gymnastics class. After that it has turned into a routine to get some kind of takeout. We got burritos.

Last night we tried to put a new bedtime routine into effect. She was up a little later than usual but change is always hard. I think the new system will probably be better than the old one in a few days.

Yay

 Wordle 216 3/6

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I feel smart.

Yesterday was rough due to sleeplessness and that horrifying document I'm working on. Hindsight being 20/20, if I had stepped away from my computer at just the right time, I would have had about an hour to take a nap. I wish I had done so. Unfortunately I didn't. I got a phone call from a subject matter expert on that document. He's not really easy to work with. The good news is, he agreed with me that a lot of the content of the document was horrifying. This makes it somewhat less likely it'll actually be put into effect, and beyond that it's always nice to have a kindred spirit.

Also, I got a check in the mail due to the 11/29 bike accident. Details here. So that was nice.

Last night I was in bed with lights out by 9:30, probably an hour earlier than usual. The kid slept through the night, which was nice. I woke up once or twice but got back to sleep easily enough. I'm probably the most rested I've been in over a week.

Can't keep this up

 Wordle 215 5/6

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That was very hard. Maybe not in terms of the number of guesses, but it took me a long time to think of it.

The kid got up at 2 in the morning again last night. It took her half an hour to get back to sleep in her bed and took me at least two hours to get back to sleep in mine. I'm not saying this is as bad as a newborn, and hey, at least we don't have covid like lots of our friends, but this really, really isn't great.

Work is horrifying. In terms of my workload and productivity, this week is average. Maybe a bit more than average but within the usual range. But in terms of what I'm working on? An SOP about policies for our work tracking system. Currently one document equals one task, more or less. Documents may range from 1 page to 40 pages and it's still one task. Larger efforts are tracked as parent and child tasks or tasks with the same tag. Smaller efforts are tracked as comments on tasks or not tracked at all. It's working well enough for us currently. But in this SOP I'm working on we're basically expected to track our whole day in 20-minute increments, tallying emails, with multiple types of tasks, checking in on tasks at preset intervals... it's nuts in general and particularly considering the kind of work we do.

So while I'm standardizing the formatting and phrasing and trying to clarify the intent of the text and making minor grammatical and punctuation edits, I'm also fighting the urge to add comments asking, "Are you serious?" in every other paragraph. Or actually trying to find a substantive diplomatic way to ask it.

Woo hoo

 Wordle 214 3/6

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Cool.

We need to do something for the kid. Last night she had nightmares and came into bed with us again. At least this time it was early enough that she could go to sleep with us and I could put her back in her own bed and get some more sleep myself. 

Work yesterday was frustrating. I worked nonstop... after this, and the one other personal thing mentioned below, but still, much better than usual, either by the standards of working from home or even in the office as far as I remember... and still ended the day with more tasks than I started out with. I got a new task in the morning and didn't manage to close anything out. I can hope I made tangible progress on things but there's little evidence.

Ambivalence

Wordle 213 6/6

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That was tough. The first one I happened to succeed at happened to have the same letter in it twice, which seemed sort of like a trick question, and ever since then I often get stuck thinking of words with repeated letters even though they haven't been the answer so far.

Yesterday was too open-ended. We asked the kid if she wanted to go for a drive. We thought we'd go to something MLK-Day-related, depending on traffic and crowds. She wasn't interested in anything so we shrugged and tried to work around the house. T. focused on decluttering. I did a little of that and a little writing/editing an email to an architect about an addition we're planning, and similar things. The kid couldn't find a way to entertain herself without bothering us, mostly me. I wish we had insisted on a drive, if only to kill time, and just tried to get those projects done some time later when the kid would be out of the house.

I'm ambivalent about how much I use my personal computer for work. Back when I was playing World of Warcraft, it was awesome being able to alt-tab between emails for work and easy quests for the game. Not great for my productivity, but I managed when it really counted. Even now it's nice being able to do stuff like this or other definitely-not-work-related things, whether for fun or for productivity in a personal way, in between work tasks on slow days. There are more personal things I can't do on my work computer than work things I can't do on my personal computer. 

But one of those few work things I can't do on my personal computer is coming up in about an hour, so I'll really, really try to finish just one more thing here before plugging the other one in...

Falling behind

Wordle 212 3/6

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Woo hoo. 

Yesterday was good but I worry it wasn't good enough. The kid had a swim class. (They aren't normally back to back, but we missed a few over the holidays so this was a makeup class.) Then we picked up two chairs. Yesterday we could only fit two in our car, so we had to go back for the other two today. We got home in time to give away three of the old ones to someone who had answered an ad. Then we baked cookies, a perfect activity for a snowy afternoon. Then I took the kid to the park. She met a friend there. There was a little interpersonal conflict but overall they had a lot of fun playing in the snow and sledding on a slight incline in the park. We also got through all the laundry.

Despite that, I was still feeling anxious as we finished dinner and got ready for bed. We're still ahead in the count of unnecessary chairs taking up space in our house. Yesterday T. and I discussed other minor problems but didn't make any progress on them. It feels like I can't keep up.

Then again, that might just be depression triggered by fatigue, or burnout on virtual school. It's more than just having the kid around more than usual. For most of the past week the kid woke up with me or even earlier. Sunday morning she came into our bed around 5 AM due to unspecified nightmares. To top it off, Saturday night T. and I had stayed up after 11 watching Eternals, so we were burning the candle at both ends.

This morning she slept in until 7:30, more or less back to normal, so maybe today will be better? Who knows. Knock on wood.

Title goes here to keep Wordle from appearing in the sidebar

 Wordle 211 5/6

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 So far I'm playing other, simpler, free games, like Wordle or sokoban puzzles.

Yesterday was busy. The kid had swim class in the morning. Then T. had a haircut appointment. The kid and I got lunch. We planned to get more done during the haircut but pizza and stuff took a while and T. was done before we got more than a block away. Then we let the kid have a nap. We eventually woke her up to go grocery shopping. Then we went to buy chairs. We have seven dining room chairs in the house and five of them have something wrong with them - ripped upholstery, wobbly legs, something else - so we got four more and plan to give away the broken ones soon. By the time we got home it was almost 5. The kid's friend across the street came over to play. Her mother brought pizza later. By the time the kids stopped eating, it was bedtime.

New goals

 I'm thinking about trying to write more regularly. I quit World of Warcraft Jan. 9, so I have to do something else with my time...

One problem with it is there's not much to write about. We're still working from home and the kid's schooling is still disrupted by covid.

For the fall semester it was only a little disrupted. She missed a week or so of school due to an illness or suspected exposure, but other people missed a lot more. The school couldn't offer us after-care, but we made do by hiring a nanny for a few hours each day with a couple other families at the school. Other than us working from home it was like being back to normal.

We had a lot of fun for the holidays. The three of us went up to my parent's place in Vermont for a week. Then T. and I came home while the kid stayed there for another week. She got to play in the snow with her cousin and my parents' neighbors' kids. T. and I got to do grownup stuff without worrying about a kid, for the first time in... two years? She had a similar stay with them in the summer of 2021. We've had a few days to ourselves, over the summers of 2020 and 2021, but not as long and it wasn't as relaxing.

But then school didn't come back for us. It did for some people, but the kid's class was fully remote due to covid. So for most of last week we hosted a pod again, just like most of the 2020-2021 school year. (Which I realize looking back that I didn't write about all that much. Whoops. Maybe I'll make some of those up?)

We hope school will be back in person next week. We hope the omicron surge will subside. This really does seem to be the one everyone is getting, anecdotally; we've had two positive cases among our kid's group of friends.