May plans

This weekend we celebrated my wife’s birthday. Saturday night I grilled hot dogs and brats, made cheesy broccoli and rice. I also made dinner rolls from scratch, as well as a pan of brownies for the cake. We gave her presents and then she watched Marvel movies. Somehow, the kids suggested that we camp outside, so I wound up setting up the tent in the dark then tried to do some star gazing with them before telling them a story till they fell asleep.

It was really a beautiful night, very still. We could hear cars, bikes, and the occasional siren off in the distance, but there was no wind, and no insects making noise at all, just the occasional gust of wind. Missus came out at some point and crawled in the tent, the four of us all snug in our sleeping bags and blankets. It didn’t end too well. I didn’t fall asleep till the wee hours because of snoring, and the stillness. Then the baby woke up and her and Missus went inside cause sleeping on the ground was hurting her back. So I stayed out there and slept with Elder till some strange bird cry woke us both up and we went inside, around 5.

The girls also spent some time over at my mother in laws house Saturday morning. Just an hour or two. Was the time the girls went anywhere in six weeks, and will probably be the last for a while. MIL said she was going to a “party” Saturday night, so we’ll be staying away if she’s not going to at least try to isolate.

Sunday was mostly cleaning, and fighting with the kids over chores and television. I spent a few hours working on my independent project, putting a GitLab document together on Git, Markdown , LaTeX, and starting on something for CI/CD, which needs it’s own page. I’m finally done with my numerical methods class, after a bit of a disaster: the professor had originally posted that the exam would be due this Sunday at noon. I actually finished mine Friday night. I was checking my email Saturday and had an email from a classmate that the final was missing. So I checked Blackboard, and, yep, sure was. There were also several discussion board posts to the same. I should mention also that this was following an incident earlier this week where the professor seemed to have lost what was left of his class web page — probably a permissions issue or something, but the point is that he is completely helpless when it comes to dealing with things — great guy though. Anyways, since I had already turned my exam in, I was able to go under my grades and pull up the question. I still had the sample data files, so I posted them up on the Git repo that I had been working on for the class, and emailed it out to everyone, telling them not to panic.

Part of me wonders whether the whole thing was a setup, so that he could blame Blackboard and use it as an excuse to not grade the exams and just give us all a pass/fail on the course. We’ll see.

So I should be completely done with school in another day or two, another hour or two of writing guides on how to deploy static websites via CI/CD and some back in forth with my professor and I should be done. May 8th is supposed to be the day they award our degrees. I can’t believe it.

After talking to Missus yesterday, we both agree that I should stay with my current company as long as possible, since the work is mostly part time at this point, and is paying the bills. After I update my resume, I’m going to start applying for any job with a posted salary at least 130% of what I’m getting right now. I’m also going to make sure that I’m getting at least two hours a week for my two retainer clients, as well as the other FOSS or programming projects that I want to work on.

Now let’s see how May goes.