Learning experiences

Wordle 493 X/6

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That was my mistake/incompetence/haste.

Yesterday I worked in the morning. Productive but not too busy - I got a draft back to the SME with questions, so that was nice. There were formatting problems with it, which are probably my fault, but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to fix them myself, it'll just be annoying. There was an all hands meeting I listened in on. Simple enough. 

Shortly before I logged off work, T., her mother, and the kid went out to get pedicures and run a few errands. I helped T.'s father set up a video doorbell, and had an uncomfortable discussion about why I don't help T. out more with her problems with her electric bike. Not sure how seriously I should take this... I also did research into some flight options winter break. After I felt like I had enough of that, I went for a walk. Nothing intense, just 1.5 miles or so, but I felt overdue for something. 

The ladies got back just a few minutes before I did. A little after that, T., the kid and I helped pick up walnuts from the orchard. The actual harvesters had come through over the past few days. We filled a bucket and a half with walnuts they had missed. Good for us.

Dinner was spaghetti. I mixed drinks and it went better than last time. But myself, I had dark beers, which a friend bought as a present for me last time I was here and no one has had since then, so I feel obligated to use them up.  

Random things I've learned in recent days, which aren't a big deal but have been annoying:

• Getting on PST is much easier when it's late October and the days are shorter than the summer. This is a mixed blessing. I had planned to start work at 6 AM local time and be done by 10. Instead it has been a struggle to be online by 7. 
• Dry air doesn't retain heat as well. Not exactly "learning" this but it made the trip more inconvenient or uncomfortable than it otherwise would have been. I packed one pair of fairly formal slacks for the celebration of life, one pair of jeans, and it was forecast to be in the 90s when we arrived, so one pair of shorts. I didn't want to pack more than that for a short, mostly casual trip. Yesterday's high was in the 70s and it was a lot lower than that at 8 AM. And it was laundry day so the jeans and slacks got washed and I was shivering in the shorts and debating bringing the computer into the sun while working.
• I'm a fast reader when I'm interested. I haven't been all that interested in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. I'll still finish it out of completionism, but it's not doing it for me, and it's hard to articulate why. The setting is a space-opera pastiche and the plot is mostly slice-of-life stuff. I'm not sure if it's not action-oriented enough for me, not grounded enough (there's anti-gravity, casual interstellar travel, multiple sapient alien races coexisting, but it's set only about a thousand years in the future or so), or not funny enough (characters tell jokes but the narrative never does, if the distinction makes any sense), but I probably won't be buying the next book in the series. Oh well. They can't all be winners.
• Entertaining the kid is challenging. Again, not exactly news. Letting her watch TV or play games on an iPad all day is bad parenting; if nothing else, she has to burn off energy. Finding books she likes can be challenging, but then again, we could try harder. Playing any remotely competitive game with her is a matter of seeing how bad a sore loser she's going to be at the moment. Playing with dolls or other pretend-type games with her is like playing Calvinball where only one person can make up the rules. Maybe we need to do more arts and crafts?