Author: BCM

Today was about the most archetypical day I can imagine. I worked out, ran, meditated, and had a decent day at work. Home life, not so much though. The girls came home and ran off to play. Younger was in a such a good mood when I came back and caught her coming back from a walk with her friends. Then she had a rather bad accident — bad by Kindergarten standards — and she about broke Missus’s heart. She had been in a small tree and was trying to get away from one of the smaller children and jumped out of the tree, catching the her exposed side on a branch.

Elder, not to be outdone, is having an allergy/sinus issue, so I’ve doped her up and sent her to bed.

There was a bit of fun while we were getting ready for bed. Younger has a helium balloon she bought this weekend, and she was being a bit too rough with it before bedtime, and the ribbon came off. She was in my bedroom, with elevated ceilings, and I was unable to reach it. I was not about to go get the ladder at seven-thirty, and was trying to move her to bed, but Missus started brainstorming ways for us to get it. It was too high for me to lift any of the kids, so Missus started throwing stuffed animals at it to get it further down the slope of the ceiling where I could reach it. That didn’t work, so I put Elder on top off my dresser, hoping she could climb onto a small ledge set into the wall — why it’s there, I have no clue — but she couldn’t reach it. So it was my turn. Climbing up on an old hamper, and onto my dresser, I was able to rescue the balloon and return it to Younger’s room, with her eight-foot ceilings.

I am turning in now, at nine, to read and turn in on time to recover for tomorrow.

I talk to much. Said the man who blogged daily for several years and never bothered to listen to anyone. What a day. Elder was kept home because of a sore throat last night. We had a pleasant day. Considering how yesterday ended, it went extremely well. She offered to play Mancala, and we played several games, official rules and hers, and we decided to play the official way. She beat me more than once.

I’m making progress at work. I finally figured out something that I need to do and have a project for the week. My ninety days is tomorrow.

I’m not making progress with my workout. About the only thing I’m getting out of the Whoop is enough sleep. It does do a good job of that, but I haven’t quite figured out why the GPS tracker is inconsistent with my runs. And the goddamn shoes… really should have worked out today, because I didn’t do anything physical today. Workout on the priority list for tomorrow.

Today was mostly chill. Of course I stayed up late Friday night, but managed to keep things reasonably restrained, only staying up till 2AM playing FarCry 5 with Ed G. I woke at nine to my dad coming over. He wanted to see the girls and I had told him that two of our cannabis plants needed transplanting to bigger pots and were therefore too big for me to keep here at the house. We sat around the living room, shooting Nerf guns at each other for an hour or two, then I showed him our broken hot tub and potted the plants before he left.

Elder and I played It Takes Two for a good while. Younger watched us for a bit. Missus was on a bit of a cleaning spree and even cooked us a Mediterranean dish that the kids didn’t care for. I sent them upstairs after dinner while the two of us watched Ted Lasso. So now Younger has been put to bed and the rest of us are reading books in bed. I’ve stepped downstairs to turn out the lights and type this note. I’ve started reading Alan Watts autobiography.

SAIAdao had a meeting today. It went well. We expect a litepaper from JD next week on how we’re proceeding. Going to give people an opportunity to rage-quit before we go onto the next stage. It’s all good; I’m not making decisions anymore.

Tomorrow the girls should be off to church, and I do not know what I’ll do. I know what I’ll be avoiding though, primarily avoiding taxes — doing my taxes, that is. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to game with my brother, who has been sick and I have not talked to in several weeks.

SAIAdao should have their final, FINAL payout structure. Not that we’re paying out, but after numerous revisions I believe we have the final figures for dao member exit percentages. There’s a meeting on Saturday, that should end a good deal of my involvement. I’m still managing the assets, of course, but hopefully we’ll be able to move forward with the next phase of the venture.

Econ work on POLISdao continues. I’ve been running simulations to figure out what we’re doing on the rewarder system. We have two approaches that we’re hoping to do, a simple one, and a more complicated one that is more accurate.

Cain and I made some good progress with Solana today. We had to hunker down and do some deep work, but we got through it and learned a lot. We’ll continue tomorrow.

The kids and I had a pretty good day. We played Santa Cookie Elf Candy Snowman and It Takes Two for special time. Missus and I had a good day, in spite of our fight yesterday. She got run ragged by Younger last night, who seemed to think she spent all night in her own bed.

I wound up having a late night scotch with D., who needed some electrical tape and came over after everyone was in bed yesterday. I played Tool videos and talked about Alan Watts. I don’t think there’s much intellectual rigor there on his part. Unexamined is probably the best word for it.

The kids are in their rooms and I’m going to relax with an episode of Ozarks. To bed on time tonight.

Well it was bound to happen because things have been going well for too long apparently. And just as you cannot have the day without night, or the head of a coin without the tails side, so can you not win without losing. And apparently I have been winning lately. And since the money problem has been solved, along with the house repair problems, so must our minds must create new ones to keep ourselves occupied.

I’m not taking the bait.

Outside of our marital situation, I’ve been a bit of a hardass at the office. I’m in a leadership position, and I’m not quite sure of myself. I need people to deliver, but there are things that no one is delivering that I’ve taken upon myself to do. Everyone wants ‘simple’, but simple isn’t a design requirement. Maybe there’s a CHEAP-FAST-GOOD triangle for technical design that I’m not aware of, but we’re talking about unsolved technical problems. Who knows? My imposter syndrome isn’t as bad because I’m realizing there’s not anyone else who knows better anyways. At some point you have to move out of discussion into ideation or implementation or production or whatever you want to call it. People want to talk but I need functionality.

The end, it’s Tuesday night and the hardest part is choosing to go to bed versus not going to bed.

Today was a beautiful day, the weather was warm and the kids played outside for a good deal of it. Missus and I slept in, then I finally kicked the kids outside around eleven or so. I filled in the hole left by the stump grinder and had to haul several wheelbarrow loads of ground wood to the back yard, where I dumped it to fill in some of the low spots.

Our friends the Gs. came by, except for C., who had just deployed for a three month boat tour. Their daughter and Elder are BFFs, and they hadn’t seen each other in a good while, so it was nice to see them. Plus their young son — same age as Younger — was missing his dad so he got some horseplay with me. At one point I had the four of them upstairs singing Let It Go during my horrible piano rendition. It was cute. They did GoNoodle and we watched Mo Willems shorts on the tube.

I downloaded the new Ghostbusters movie and we watched it this evening and ate pizza for dinner. It wasn’t great. I’m not big on this type of nostalgia, especially with the CGI ghost of Harold Ramis, it was a bit cringe.

Getting ready to sit down this late afternoon and play some games. I went to bed on time last night, and everyone got up early this morning. I can’t even remember the last time Missus was up before 9AM on a Sunday. The girls went to church, I sat silently — mostly — then Missus and I got busy with chores. I balanced the house accounts; our net worth is down about 400k since the market top. It wasn’t too painful, but it’s obvious my system needs some work. Also, tax time is coming up and we need to deal with that.

I worked out this morning, listening to AEnima, then I went out and ran errands: the library, Target, even stopped by Goodwill to get rid of four monitors and and old laptop. There’s more to do.

Been listening to Alan Watts; ordered his autobiography from the library. I keep thinking about the lyrics to Pneuma as well.

Stayed up till 4AM playing games, mainly Far Cry arcade levels with my boy Ed. Slept past noon, had a chill day. Got Elder set up with an account in Lost Ark. Watched Tool videos and went down the rabbit hole on their Wikipedia page for a bit. Watched half of Hamilton with the girls. Made dinner of fish and sausage.

The hot tub is broken again. It was reading an error code so I cut the breaker last night to keep it from power cycling every thirty seconds. Now it won’t turn on again. That was about the only downside to the day. Otherwise it was pretty chill.

I’ve been journaling here on this blog, regularly, at least, for two, maybe three years. My hit rate for consecutive posts isn’t that great, I’ve probably missed three days this February alone. I’ve probably got a max streak of less than three months.

My point is that I’m awestruck by people like Beepl or Johnathan man who have gone thirteen or five years, respectively, working on their craft. It just seems insane to me.

We’ve got a guy on the team whose job is grass. That’s it. He’s apparently the best Unreal Engine grass designer in the world, and he’s only twenty-four or whatever. Insane. Granted, I’d wager he’s not planning on hanging onto that niche for his entire life.

Younger is still “sick”. All she has to say is that her throat hurts and Missus is willing to keep her home. I wish I had a thermometer in this house I could trust. I just told her that I think she wants to be sick so she can stay home, watch Spongebob, and play games. I don’t know, she does feel a bit warm on her forehead, but I don’t know I can take another day of not getting work done. I feel guilty letting her sit in front of a screen for two hours so I can get some work done. We did have a fun day. I tried to play a card game with her, but we spent the time just explaining the card deck and getting her comfortable with holding them. I did a couple card tricks and fooled her with some obvious cheats, which she eventually caught on to. Watching her try to do her own tricks was pretty funny because she didn’t know any and was resorting to some pretty blatant tactics to do them.

I did manage to take her out for some exercise as well. She rode her bike while I ran, probably a bit over two and a half miles. The neighbors weren’t around, so she didn’t get to play with anyone else.

We did have Girl Scout cookie pickups yesterday, which precipitated a whole fight between Elder and I. I told her that I wanted her to go with me and she started questioning me, and I’m not trying to have a goddamn debate with her every time I ask her to do something. She told me that she wanted to quit Scouts, which I told her that she could do after the school year is out. She’s already been going to meetings and her troop leader just literally got me their vests and badges sewn on. No way. I told her that she wants all the rewards without any of the hard work, and Missus say truer words have never been spoken. It’s like with any activity or hobby that she does, she gets to the valley of despair and wants to quit. She doesn’t yet understand that she’s got to push through that to get to the other side.

So yea, we’ve got several hundred dollars worth of cookies here in the house. Even if we sell them all, I’m not sure that it’s enough to cover their membership, which the troop has waived. I’ll make it work.

Work on the house is progressing. The porch and garage door have been painted, and the inside is next up on the list. It looks like we might actually get the work done before the second quarter of this year. Then we can start worrying about the windows.