Two anniversaries this week: Amanda and I have been married for 9 years and this blog is 14 years old. Both anniversaries are actually on the same day! I’m incredibly thankful to have Amanda as my partner in life, though all of its ups and downs. I’m also
Charlie started daycare this week and made it a whole three days before coming down with his first stomach virus, complete with fever, vomiting, and cartoonish green boogers. Poor little guy.
I spent the week with a bucket of conflicting emotions: Relieved that daycare afforded focus time at work, intensely missing Charlie while he was at daycare, feeling so sorry for Charlie that he was sick, glad we could snuggle and comfort him, and stressed about the focus shattered by his fussiness and juggling taking care of him while needing to work, thankful for the flexibility of working from home, and grateful to have such a sweet little boy who smiles at us even if he doesn’t feel good.
I often want to start this post with something like “it has been a tough week.” But I can’t start every week’s post like that. Our life isn’t hard. We have it relatively good. What, then, is making me think each week has been difficult? Perhaps I need to update my baseline expectations. Our lives are much more complex than ten years ago, so I shouldn’t expect things to be as simple and spontaneous as ten years ago, either. It is probably mostly the lack of sleep affecting how I feel about things.
Besides for changing my expectations, I can probably also do more on the weekends to make the week go more smoothly: Doing more meal planning and prep to make getting lunch and dinner ready faster.
Like I posted last week, I need to remind myself to take a wider view.
The tomatoes, tomatillos, and okra love this heat. The nasturtium and Bachelor’s Buttons do, too. Dill, peas, and kale are coming along nicely. The pepper plants aren’t doing as well as I’d hoped, but maybe we’ll get some peppers off of them in late summer.
I had a dream last night that deer got in the fence and ate every last one of our tomato plants. Thankfully it was just a dream.
We had kolokithokeftedes (Greek zucchini fritters) for the first time this week and they were delicious. From what I could tell these had zucchini, onion, feta, and dill in them. Since zucchini season is fast approaching, I think we’ll start making these at home.
Fellow Automattician Artur Piszek wrote about how he and his wife do long-term RV travel with a dog and a 1 year old while working. The part about learning to manage vs things getting easier spoke to me. I think I need to stop hoping that things will get easier and double down on figuring out how to manage. (See above!)
Kevin Kelly thinks that in 200 years very few people will use their assigned names. I think he is probably correct—betting that things will trend toward more individual choice and personal expression is likely a good bet.
Currently reading:
- King of the Vagabonds (book 2 of Quicksilver, volume 1 in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle series)
- Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte
- Working by Studs Terkel
- This is something I occasionally pull off the shelf to read a couple sections rather than trying to read it all at once. I like the short vignettes into how people view their jobs and work.
- I want to find a copy of Terkel’s “Hard Times” too. I prefer purchasing old books like this at used bookstores rather than reprints from Amazon.
I switched from Alfred to Raycast this week. I spent a couple hours Tuesday night rebuilding my workflows, snippets, hotkeys, etc, so that I could make a clean transition. It is faster than Alfred and I love all of the available extensions, which have a huge amount of overlap with other tools I use. In fact, I replaced Alfred, TextExpander, and Paste (clipboard app) with Raycast.
If you use Raycast and have built any cool workflows with it, I’d love to hear from you.
I wanted to write a bit about the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade, but I honestly don’t know what to write, partially because I’m still forming it. If you want to talk about it in good faith and we are friends, feel free to give me a call. All sides of the discourse on seem to be lacking in empathy and nuance. Spending more characters and pixels on it here will be futile.
Focus how you can help friends and family in your community who are struggling, in pain, grieving, stressed, and sad. Miscarriages are hard, failed pregnancies are hard, trying to get pregnant is hard, getting pregnant when you didn’t want to is hard, raising a child is hard, making the decision to terminate a pregnancy is hard, birth is hard, struggling to find formula to feed a baby is hard, sleep deprivation is hard, adoption is hard, struggling with shame and fear is hard, and grappling with religious beliefs is hard. Do yourself and everyone in your orbit a favor in the coming months and work on your capacity for empathy. And maybe think thrice before hitting send on that hot take.
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