Posted on

Head down

So school has started, the girls have been back for a few days and it’s amazing how much I’ve been getting done with them away. No longer interrupted constantly with the clamor in the other rooms, fighting, or requests for food, I’m actually able to sit down for twenty-five minutes without interruption. It’s glorious. I’m actually getting things done that I need to, to the point where I’m getting to a point where I actually don’t know what to do with myself.

I’ve been working off of a pomodoro timer, twenty-five minutes at a time, with a couple five minute breaks between them, then a fifteen minute break after a few cycles. It works, focuses me to stop task switching in the middle of whatever I’m doing, when those little mental distractions pop up in the middle of work.

I’m spending a good deal of my day in Clickup, managing the upcoming release for the dao, as well as planning the next one some months off. I actually started doing their courses, just so I can be on top of everything they have to offer. One of the issues I have right now is that a lot of the development pipeline seems to be split between Notion, which has been built up by the creative team as a database of sorts, and Clickup, which seems to be the actual task management system for the devs. So while we have requirements documents and project planning in Notion, the actual work is getting done in Clickup. So I’m trying a new approach for our v0.3 release and doing all the work in Clickup. Their docs system seems as robust as Notion’s, and it also allows me to cut out Google Docs as well.

The little five minute breaks are important as well, I think, to manage my energy. I brought my guitar downstairs so that I can fill those moments with some picking exercises, or working on songs. I’m still practicing piano every day, working on All of Me right now, as well as the beat pad. I’ve been playing around with GarageBand, Live and other programs, just messing around and trying to figure out how to compose using these tools. It’s a lot different than when I would just write a song on the guitar and write lyrics for it. Working with the keyboard and various instruments requires a lot more work to be able to live loop or mix songs on the fly. We’ll see where it goes.

We ended our summer with a trip out to the lake. It was a bit too hot, so we spent some time swimming in the lake and fried some hot dogs on the grill along with some fresh zucchini and eggplant from the garden. I had taken our bikes with us, so I did a loop around the sweeping gravel driveway that looped around the lake. It was fun, so I took Younger on a ride. After a short, somewhat easy uphill climb, we were able to coast down a ways at a brisk pace. We got to the second run, which was steeper, and I encouraged Younger to go first but she wanted me to go, so I did. It was fast, and as I got to the bottom of the hill I looked back and saw that Younger had wiped out. I bailed and ran back up the hill. She was hurt bad.

I’m not sure how she dumped herself, but she had fallen on her side and knocked her forehead directly into the rocky gravel. She was wearing a helmet, fuck all that it did. She had a gash directly in her forehead, and a goose egg was already swelling. Panic. I picked her up, threw her bike off the road, and started carrying her back to the RV. It was a good quarter mile, maybe more, but I tried to soothe her and carried her the entire way.

Missus doctored her up, we had first aid kits and ice, but I had to walk back to where I had left both bikes and walk them back. I felt like such an asshole for letting her get messed up like that. I didn’t push her to do it by any means, but I should have known that she didn’t have the riding experience on such terrain like I did. There was a good half hour where I thought we were going to have to leave and take her to the doctor, but Missus was able to calm her down and she was able to spend the rest of the night laying around watching TV.

After that episode was over, we actually were able to relax. After the sun went down things cooled off, and we were able to see the stars like I hadn’t seen in years. Away from the light pollution of the city, I was able to see every star in the sky, including the Milky Way. I managed to get Elder out to look at them for a bit, as I was fairly certain she’d never been out in the dark woods to see a view like that before.

The next morning we packed up and came home, then Monday we sent them to school, Younger with a huge, bruised contusion on her forehead.

Posted on

Exhale

Today’s Friday, and I’m feeling better today. I forced myself to bed last night even though I wasn’t feeling drowsy, and tossed and turned until after one, brain giving me todos and thinking about work. One very critical thing did pop to my mind that warranted a reminder for this morning: funds in an untouched IRA wallet that should be awaiting me, salvage from the Perpetual Protocol v1 crash. Could be tens of thousands of USDC that I should have put into BTC as I did with the salvage from my regular account.

I’ve been attempting to buy an entire bitcoin the past few weeks, since the bottom dropped out of the market I’ve been aggressively throwing setting stinkbid limit orders up on FTX. I still have them, all the way down to 18k, but I doubt we’ll be seeing that price action anytime soon. Every time we run up I set more orders, 22050, 23050, and so on, trying to catch any dips. I’ve still got cash orders, and am more than halfway to my goal.

I find I don’t have the energy to keep up with everything as I did before. I’m sure not as active as I was during the last bull, aping into anything and everything. I’m not even interested in what’s going on outside of the ETH merge and SOL development. There’s just too much to worry about, and Star Atlas has enough going on there to keep me busy.

Speaking of work, I’m trying to step up my PM game. The ATLAS locker is almost out of my hands at this point, so I’m turning my attention to the proposals system and everything that encompases. Since we’re not under any pressure to deliver that, I’ve got a bit of room to sit back and think about the overall product pipeline, and flesh out my process. We mainly work out of two apps, Notion and ClickUp. Rather, I should say that the engineers work out of Clickup, but it seems that RevOps and most of the game development planning goes into Notion. Sometimes it feels like my job is literally copying and pasting from one to the other, but that’s not quite the full story.

I had lots of ideas last night that I need to add to my various backlogs. Plus I plan on cooking hibachi for the neighbors, since they fed the girls earlier this week. I got pounds of chicken, shrimp, and steak, and bought everything to make yum yum sauce and fried rice. Thankfully I only have one meeting today.

Posted on

Eeyore

It’s been a while since I’ve sat in this chair, but I’ve been going slightly crazy and I guess I need to talk to somebody, even if it’s only myself.

Missus has been out of town since Sunday, on one of her Union-related activities. She’s been 100% for the last week, and I’m feeling 100% certifiable. I kid. I can’t count how many times I’ve yelled or lost my temper at the kids. They are doing their damndest to drive me insane, with what seems like constant bickering. Younger especially seems intent on testing boundaries. I vaguely remember Elder going through this and it driving me over the edge. I’m trying to handle it.

Working with them in the house has always been particularly tough, I remember COVID vividly. And work has taken a particularly serious tone lately, with some overdue airing of grievances and growth pains related to scaling. So I’m doubly stressed. I’ve turned into Eeyore.

It’s incredibly difficult to leave them (the children) to their own devices. Both of them gravitate toward the lowest common denominator of media, Elder to YouTube videos of Lord knows what idiot, and Elder tends to gravitate to sitcoms full of idiots. They’re already up half an hour or more before I wake up and they’re already at it, and there’s hell to pay when I ask them to put it down and find something else to do for a few hours. I’ve stuffed this house full of books, games, toys, musical instruments, and tons of activity books, crafts and so on.

We have had our moments though. Usually Younger gives me a very hard time at bedtime, she always reaches a point where she’s done with me reading her books and runs out of the room to get her mother, who lays with her in the dark until she falls asleep. I’ve managed to put her to sleep by reading An Incredible Journey, the classic book about two dogs and a cat, and I only need to read a page or two to her before she falls right out. It’s nice, and it feels good to be able to read the words and have my voice calm her, instead of the refereeing or mediation that I have to do.

I have not been taking good care of myself — obviously, it’s been over a week since I’ve sat here. The only exercise I’ve had the last week was cutting the grass, so I decided to go to the rock gym today. Of course the tunnel was backed up, and what should have been a twenty-five minute trip across was extended by an hour, mostly bumper to bumper as we tried to traverse the quarter mile to the on-ramp. Curse me.

We got there, eventually, and I had a somewhat middling session, since I was having to run back and forth every attempt or two to keep an eye on the girls. But I’m impressed. Elder is giving it a try, and is doing well, but she seems to be do a mostly head-on, centered approach to it, compared to her sister who seems to have picked up something of climbing’s natural hip-shifting, fluid movements.

The main source of frustration I seem to be having is the lack of flow. Now, with them in bed it’s not a problem, but every minute they’re awake that I’m trying to work I’m either getting interrupted every five minutes or feeling guilty because I’ve been letting them watch too much TV.

The good news is that they’ll be back in school in three weeks or so. The bad news is that Missus comes home late Saturday, then leaves again on Wednesday for another four days out of town. She’ll only be forty minutes away this time, and we’ll be able to visit her, but still, I may need to disappear completely when she gets back.