Month: October 2022

I have one of the most precious things in the world today: a clear calendar. No meetings at work, just the opportunity to put my head down and deal with a few things that I have on my list. Missus does come back and I have to pick her up; we’ll go out for lunch also. So not quite a ‘clear’ calendar, but at least no work meetings.

Elder and I finally got her homework done. Thank god for Wolfram Alpha and the fact I know how to plug 14 * (2 3/8) into a command line. She finally understands that she needs to write out each step and show her work. Her other papers she’s gotten in class have been A’s since we’ve been working together, so there’s progress there. Now I just need her to actually turn in her work.

I’m signing up for a climbing competition this weekend. I’m entering as a beginner, which is v0-v2. I’m tempted to do intermediate, which is v2-v4, but I’m not sure if I want to put myself in a position where I only finish half the routes.

I’m sitting on the back deck right now, hoping I can work outside, but it’s too windy and chilly. Back to the desk, I suppose. Lots of things to do, can’t wait.

I seem to have found some contentment as Missus has been gone. Not that it’s an ideal routine, mind you, but the last few days have been somewhat peaceful. I’ve been getting to bed on time and have been following a similar routine each day: wake with Younger in my bed, get her off to school, come back and meditate, take Elder in, come back, write, then spend the day working, either in meetings or in 25 minute pomodoros until 4:30, then pick the girls up; give them 25 minutes of free time, then we start dinner or do homework, eat, clean the kitchen, do more homework, watch a show, get ready for bed; I read to Younger until 8:30, then read Drizzt to Elder till 9:00. Then I get to play BGIII or whatever, watch a show, read a book, then lights out. It’s been working well so far, with a few wrinkles.

But that’s all there is to say, I’m ready to get to work and tackle some problems.

I feel like these days with the girls alone is where I grow as a parent. I’m no longer able to rely on my parter to get things done around the house, so it’s up to me. Sure, it’s frustrating to manage the girls while we prepare dinner and clean up afterward, but it’s very satisfying when we finish the job ‘on time’.

I still feel compelled to drive things and push the girls in a certain direction. Elder had the opportunity to take pre-algebra, two grade levels above where she is now. I signed her up, and I spent some time over the summer tutoring her in the 5th grade curriculum that she would be skipping. I should put ‘tutoring’ in quotes, as I’ve never been able to find a way to teach her math without getting into yelling or crying. If something is “too hard” and I try to break down concepts into first principles, she gets frustrated and shuts down, which triggers me, and so on and on.

It finally came to the point where she had no choice but to accept my help. It was a segment on fractions, and Missus was no help. Elder remembered the steps wrong and there was no way we could force that revelation.

But over the weeks since we’ve come to an understanding. She got an F in the pre-algebra class. The teacher let us know halfway through the grading period and we agreed to drop her to the 6th grade honors class. Which is still a bit tough for her. She got a zero on an assignment and I found out from the teacher that she can make up anything under a C for partial credit.

So she’s making it up. And she’s fighting me real hard on it. She’s forgotten to turn in her homework and thrown it out the next day, she’s thrown out the other paper we did make-up on because she couldn’t show her work. I’m not sure if she’s doing this intentionally or what’s going on, but she’s going to make up these assignments before she has any privileges.

Still, I feel like I’m being a good dad helping her this way.

I’m running a bit late today. Younger and I got into a spat after I ripped out the insole from one of her shoes. The thin, upper lining had come loose and needed straightening each morning, so I thought it better to pull it out and be done with it. Younger did not agree.

Day one without Missus here went rather well. No drawn out brawling so far, and I managed to handle all my business yesterday. The girls talked me into letting them watch TV a bit later than my rule, but they did good cleaning and following directions so I let them. I still had both of them down by nine, giving myself a good two hours to play BGIII and watch Andor.

Elder is loving “her” new iPhone, although I haven’t installed any apps on it and it doesn’t have a SIM card. We seem to be able to send messages with to other Apple IDs as long as she is connected to wifi. I think the recipient may also need to be, we haven’t quite worked out the bugs. I got to keep a real close eye on her, but I’m showing her how to use calendar and reminders, and letting her take pictures and such. We’ll see how it goes.

Well I sent Missus out in style yesterday, I left her at the train station — to catch a bus — for her training. I managed to get both the girls out of the house this morning without yelling, although Younger tested me when I told her what she was having for breakfast. Elder woke up a bit earlier, and I had been promising to let her play with her mom’s old iPhone, so I had to set her up an account with that. She’s super happy but I told her it’s not her phone.

Today is for project work, sprint retros and planning sessions. My big demo on Friday went over like a lead balloon. I may be catastrophising because I was anxious going into the demo. So I got cut off on my last slide, I had two people give me positive feedback so maybe I just keep pushing forward and stop worrying about it.

There’s work to do.

I spent all weekend playing Baldur’s Gate III. It is somewhat perfect, the culmination of the current blend of DnD 5e rules and isometric camera adventure games. I love it. Maybe it’s because I’m so deep into Dnd right now, reading Drizzt both to myself and out loud to Elder. I even found a stream on Spotify that has the audiobooks. I also picked up the first of the Dragonlance books as well.

So I wound up playing BGIII till 3AM Sunday morning, and got up with Missus to be her chauffeur at 7AM. We dropped the kids off at Momo’s and went to a GOTV event with the union and local congressional rep. By the time we got home with the kids we barely had time to take a nap before I had to take her back out to the train station.

Then it was just me and Elder at the grocery store. Myself, making promises and breaking them just as quickly just to get her to comply. It was challenging.

But I managed to get to bed at a decent hour, and although I haven’t meditated this morning I am focused and ready to do my job.

I’ve spent the last few days in a bit of a rabbit hole, generating rustdocs, typedocs, and trying to get an overall sense of how all the code in our main program repo is put together. It’s a bit of a slog, but I’m learning things. Especially from my mistakes. I spent a good chunk of time yesterday trying to figure out how to streamline the process of going from a Solana program written in Rust to a Typescript one, and then on to some sort of documentation structure. It’s slow going.

There needs to be better automatic tooling to do this. Typescript requires many helper functions to interact with the on-chain tools: getters and setters for the Rust code, PDA generators and the like. There’s no consistency between our programs, and we keep pushing forward with new designs.

I’ve been able to spend the last week or two this sprint just digging in from the outside, not just my team’s code, but the other programs that are already finished or still in development. And I’ve got so much to learn about the way monorepos work. We’ve got one repo for rust code, another for the TS code (factory) and yet another or React and other tools that use these bindings. I don’t spent nearly enough in these repos from day-to-day, so it’s driving me a bit mad to be looking at these now.

On some level I feel like I’m procrastinating, trying to avoid some other task that’s more important, but I’m not sure what it is other than the reports and presentations that are due this week. The team has been doing their own thing, behind the scenes work, and I guess part of me feels like we don’t have enough to show, so I’m stepping out of my lane to see what my beginner’s mind can come up with. Unfortunately it’s lead me down some dead ends. Still, I feel like I may have picked up a couple of useful things that might be worth sharing.

Other than that, the week is going by smoothly. I lie, yesterday was a bit of a mess, and my back has been hurting over the left shoulder for some time now. I don’t know if it’s posture, or the result of climbing and biking, or whether it’s from lack of weight training. It’s just starting to get on my nerves.

The weather is chill, but the skies are clear, and life is good.

Well I am still excited to wake up and work, and why wouldn’t I be? Working for a startup in one of the hottest segments of gaming and crypto? I am part of one of the best teams in the space, working on cutting edge projects with a lot of smart people.

I’m working on developer relations this week, which mainly means writing documentation for our code. Our developers each have their own ‘style’, and we quickly need to develop our own style sheet for the team, or at least our own interfaces.

I wish that TDD was a thing, for the most part we’ve been flying along at warp speed, bringing in auditors to validate things before we put money in them. We’re starting to catch up now, and I’m thankful that I’ve got a dedicated QA resource on our team.

My ideal workflow would look something like this:

Feature is requested; voting, analytics whatever signaling is used to prioritize; planning starts with an eye for design (UX and program), blockchain and web, QA, infra, comms/revops, docs, analytics and BI. Program design should specify the IDL as early as possible, to pipeline with web. Rustdocs should be required to make sure that admin and public functions are documented – this information can later be used for devrev, but makes a handy tool for the web and analytics teams.

I also have some funky ideas for the dao that I need to get down in a less public place.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in code editors, not writing code, but reading through our repos so that I can understand everything that’s going on with my areas of responsibility. The real fun, however, starts when I start poking around outside of it.

This weekend was pretty damn good. We swapped babysitting with the neighbors, so the kids got lots of time together. I managed to keep them off their screens almost the entire time.

Friday night the T.’s asked if we could watch the kids so they could go on a date, I said sure, we’ll go out Saturday while you watch the kids. So we made camp in the back yard. We fired up the wood pit and had a blaze in the back, and heated up some leftover dogs and sausage. I even broke out a couple of the freeze-dried camp food so they could sample some of it. Verdict: the water didn’t quite reconstitute all the food, the beef stroganoff was tasty, but some of the noodles were still hard and the meat was quite chewy. The quinoa was not a hit either.

But we made s’mores, and the kids loved it. We had set up T.’s five-man tent in the back yard and the kids had an adventure. It got cold, and the T.s ran into traffic so they didn’t get back until after ten, and put the kids straight to bed.

The next morning, I slept in, then we went to a STEM-event that was geared toward girls, and both of mine had a great time. We picked up a pizza and drove to a park for a half hour for the girls to run around and eat it. Then we went home and Missus and I got ready for our date. We made late reservations for a wine bar, so we had a round at a new brewery, then got our dinner: martinis, several glasses of wine, delicious crabcake toast for app and a filet mignon to split, with some of the best Brussels sprouts we ever had. We made it back to the house with several hours to spare, and we enjoyed every minute of it.

Sunday we were supposed to take the girls with us to a Breast Cancer awareness walk at the city park, but the girls got up and went to church before I got up. I figured they’d sleep in, but no. Missus and I went out there, and it was a beautiful day. The weather was perfect and I was sad the girls weren’t with us. I had planned on bringing out bikes along so that we could take advantage of the trails. The walk itself was only two miles, and we made it back shortly after lunch.

The kids were watching TV at T.s when I got back, so I told them I was taking them for a bike ride to the park. All four of them. We had some issues getting the kids on the road. S., who’s Elder’s age, didn’t have a decent bike, so I tried putting him on Missus but he wasn’t able to handle it, so I had Elder swap with him. We rode to the park, about a mile and a half from the house, and the T.’s met us there with their younger kid. We spent an hour or two out there. I packed plenty of food and drinks. We had three bags total. I hit up the BMX track and the kids raced down hills and played on the playground, and explored the park.

I decided to treat them to dogs and mini-Blizzards at Dairy Queen, which involved another mile-long ride. The trip back was the most stress-inducing, as it involved riding down the sidewalk on the busiest street around, which we had to cross several times.

In short, I wore the kids out. I put over eight miles on my GPS, but the kids probably did six of that. I was real impressed with them all. I was totally beat last night. I pushed myself hard in spite of the carousing I’d been doing. I think my Whoop recovery was under twenty percent.

I slept good last night. It’s my week to take the girls into school, so I have to refrain from staying up too late at night so that I can get up early and be a hundred percent.

Another Friday rolls, around, and another Payday weekend. Money is burning a hole in my pocket, but I’ve been judiciously saving as much as possible. I already double my contributions to the shared account Missus and I use for paying bills, on top of another sizable chunk to replace our windows in the house. Another chunk goes toward a new car fund. And a lot is going into crypto, an amount that’s almost equal to my former salary. I’m buying a lot of BTC.

I’m watching the geo-political and macroeconomic news with a bit of distance. I’m not really paying attention to the news at all. National politics is of little interest to me right now, and while I voted early last week, I didn’t know several of the local candidates and left a few boxes blank. I’m more concerned with bond rates and Fed policy, and where things are going to break next. I was waiting for a collapse in the used car markets, but since I’m not actively shopping for anything yet I’m just relying on what comes up in my TL. The mortgage market is of more concern to me, there are rumors that some with adjustable-rates now find it cheaper to rent, and that may have some effect on housing prices.

There’s an old saying, “if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” I think it’s Yiddish or something. Maybe I heard it from a rabbi, or maybe it was Mel Brooks. Anyways, it’s a point that I’ve carried around for a while, which is funny because I tend to run my mouth and fantasize about grand goals. Which is why I am truly amazed that life is going so well. Missus and I have been so happy with our quality of life lately. I know what people mean when they say blessed, but I don’t like using that word.

The stoic in me can’t help but tell me memento mori, it’s not going to last. I was sitting in the pharmacy parking lot yesterday and found myself fantasizing a rather grizzly accident — think 127 Hours — and you’ll have the gist.

I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Things can’t really be going this well? Can they?

Part of this mood is probably from hanging out with my FIL this last weekend. He just bought a new house so his wife can work in the city when she gets her degree, and his resort mountain home is too far away. It’s nice, but part of the reason is that the end of the bear market took $600,000 of value out of his brokerage account, and now he’s got too many toys.

And I threw a bunch of junk out of my house Monday as well. I’m somewhat less hesitant to fill it back up with junk, although I did pickup a cart of shit at Goodwill when I dropped off that carload of computer equipment and old clothes.

Computers, books, musical instruments, board games. I think if I just had those things with me I would be happy. Hmm, there’s that word again. Happy. Be careful about giving yourself the things you think will make you happy. Chasing that high may lead to immense disappointment. I’d still want more. Even writing these words I thought of five more things, and basically came back right to the spot that I’m at now. I can’t add any more to the things I have, I can only take away.

There are still too many broken things around this house, unfinished projects. Clutter. Oh god, the clutter. I can mind driving a dirty car with stained panels, carpets, and cushions, but I can’t abide so many clothes that the jackets pile on the floor. No.

I went through our “subscriptions” with Missus this weekend as well, cancelling a bunch of stuff that we had accidentally purchased or forgotten about. We still have too much. Too many options for our attention. I had to change the Netflix password last night, after the girls got in a fight. It wasn’t because they were watching Netflix, it’s because Missus and I were trying to get a show in while the girls played outside. They were perfect until we called them in to get ready for bed and sent them upstairs twenty minutes too late. They were disregulated.

I think if we had turned the TV off and helped them get back on track we could have gotten them both down before they attacked each other. Lesson learned.