At least it’s not COVID: Day 26

I went in for an X-ray on Wednesday after becoming worried about my breathing issues. I had a slight shortness of breath as well as some sort of weird noises from my lungs when inhaling or exhaling deeply. Given all the various ailments that the members of my family have had, I suppose I was becoming anxious. Plus my wife has still been going to her job at the medical center, which now has well over two dozen confirmed cases between patients and staff. One of the main reasons I went was to try to get an answer, whether it be COVID, or pneumonia. I was fairly confident that I had coronavirus, and was hoping I could get it confirmed so that my wife could get her two weeks excused from work. Turns out my x-rays are “consistent with bronchitis.” I payed a hundred dollars for the diagnostic.

Last week was spring break for the kids, so we put all instruction time on hold. In line with my post about raising successful people, I stopped forcing them to do chores, and just told them what to do if they wanted to watch a show. Their task was to clean the living room floor of all their toys. They did not accomplish this, but it was fine cause they actually spent all day playing together and outside. It was a beautiful day. The next day Elder complained to me for hours that her sister wasn’t helping, and she eventually did it herself. The new approach seems to be working. Its similar to how I’d taken to dealing with dinner: you don’t have to finish your plate, but you’re not getting seconds or desert until you do. We’ll see how this approach plays out next week, but I’m rather optimistic.

Facebook’s Messenger Kids has been a bit of a godsend. One our friends said they were using it and I finally got around to installing it a few days ago. I was able to add all of our family members to it, as well as some of Elder’s friends, and it was so nice for the girls to be able to contact their grandparents or friends without my wife or I having to facilitate. Plus it’s got those silly video filters that does the silly transformations that the kids like.

No progress on the “garden”. Nothing has sprouted yet, it’s been more than two weeks. I put more tomato and cilantro in the pots, but I think the seeds are too old or have been killed by keeping them in the shed. I may have to try the old paper towel in plastic bag method to be sure.

I am so close to getting my degree. The past week has been Django, Django, Django, as our team works to get our final prototype demo read for presentation on Thursday. Them I’m done with my professional development course, which leaves just numerical methods and independent study, which I have sort of rolled into one. I’ve been unable to get much out of my professor, I’m not sure what the problem is, and I’m sort of peeved as I think I’ve done him a big favor by converting his course materials into a GitLab repo. I spent hours converting his old HTML docs into Markdown and LaTeX, and I can’t even get an acknowledgement out of him. I think it’s cause he’s basically adverse to technology. It’s so ironic for a CS/engineering professor. Hopefully I’ll be able to get some closure on this Monday, and figure out what the hell I actually need to do to finish the semester. And hopefully I’ll be able to fulfill the requirements for my independent study at the same time.

There’s not a lot to say about work. It basically involves checking in for a morning scrum call, then there’s maybe an hour or two of actual work that needs doing. There’s work on my side projects that needs doing, but not a lot of income. I’ve been spending some extra time working on coding projects: I just got another commit on the TDAmeritrade library and have start looking at how to implement websockets for real time data. It will come in handy for the GBTC estimator, and allow me to make my value averaging protocol and trade planning more sophisticated. There’s probably several posts right there already.

Now that I seem to be on the other side of my medical problems, I’m going to need to start getting back into a fitness regimen. It’s been weeks since I lifted a weight, unless you count swinging the kids around.

Been playing games to unwind. FrostPunk and 8 Billion Humans on the PC, and just got a copy of Root in the mail yesterday that I’ve been waiting for. Elder and I had a late-night session playing last night that was fun. And I’ve been doing a lot of yummy cooking. We made a loaf of bread with the kids that came out nice and have promised them we’d do a practice run of a cake and frosting — from scratch — for their mother’s birthday next month.