Category: General

Well the last week has been somewhat ho-hum for me. The girls are wrapping up school on Friday and Saturday morning we get on a plane and head out for a week at Disney, so we’re preparing for that. I’m not really excited, I tend to save that energy for when we’re actually doing the thing, unlike Missus who turns into a nervous anxiety ball of cleaning and preparing the house. Younger is obviously happy, but I don’t think I’ve heard Elder express any feelings about it at all.

I’m no longer stinging from the loss of our Hawaii trip that we missed due to COVID. My swag bag came from work, a bunch of hats, t-shirts, and gear with Star Atlas Hawaii 2022 embroidered on it. So maybe I’m just trying to spare myself the emotional disappointment I experienced after that vacation disaster. Not that I think that anything will happen on this trip; I’m just not hyping it up in my head at all. I have no agenda for the trip or even thought about what I want to do. I paid for tickets to the park for three days, and we’ll probably spend the rest lounging in the hotel pool. No expectations whatsoever.

The broader economic and crypto markets are a dumpster fire. I don’t think I wrote much about the LUNA collapse last month. The news this last week has been about Celcius going insolvent, and now it looks like 3AC might be having issues as well. I’m personally surprised, but I still have funds on PerpFi, which is kinda strange because the spot market breached my liquidation price several times over the last couple days. I haven’t looked into it. Fifty thousand dollars, already down some thirty K. It’s just a number on the screen to me at this point. After getting liquidated on my ETH position earlier this year and losing money in the CREAM hack I’m already acting like these funds are lost.

I’ve been staying fit. I haven’t been jogging much, but did manage to get to the rock gym three times this last week. I went last Friday by myself, brought the kids on Saturday — and their cousins — and went again on Tuesday, where I pulled a small muscle in my hip that bothered me very much so. It’s mostly better, and I’m hoping I can squeeze another session in today, but I’m not sure it’s going to work with everything going on to get ready. I was also looking up gyms near Disney, you know, in case we get bored and want to go get a session in. Missus thinks I’m crazy, but I might bring my climbing shoes with me.

Work is going well. The team is working, and I’m trying to fill the gaps, writing marketing materials — or attempting to — and doing some CI/CD work to integrate testing into our Github process. I spent some time working on that yesterday but have a lot of work to do today and tomorrow for the end of sprint.

We also got new neighbors in the house catty-corner. A Puerto Rican Navy couple. They’ve got three kids close in age to ours, so I’m looking forward to becoming friends with them. That will have to wait until we get back from our trip.

Yes, the insomnia is over, I decided not to read in bed last night and turned out the lights right after laying down. It was the right call. I got a whopping 6h30m of sleep, and woke up — or was woken rather — feeling more refreshed than I have all week. It’s like anything is possible.

Yesterday’s cross-functional feedback meeting for the dao went well, it’s been a while since I came out of one of them without any disappointment, so that’s good. Things are moving forward and the end is in sight; at least for our version zero. I’ve been reading some books and have actually been doing my damn job now that I’m healthy and catching up on my responsibilities, so I’m looking forward to righting the ship and getting things back on track.

Caig Roeschel said that if you don’t have an “I used to do X, but now I do Y” story then you’re not growing as a leader. I wasn’t comfortable delegating when I came onboard and started managing a team, I’m used to being the one doing everything, but coming into the team and having people who were more experienced with their craft — and frankly more professional — intimidated me and I didn’t want to micromanage them or presume to tell them how to do their job. Now I’m a bit more comfortable in my skin, as far as my role as the project owner for this, and so I’ve started taking more of a hands on approach to prioritizing work for the team. I own the vision, and I need to direct the team as to what the priorities are. We’re coming down to the wire. I also have to credit the fact that I have lots of colleagues outside of my team, other project managers that are helping me get my shit together and are holding me accountable. It’s all very chill, but setting the tone or culture is important here and we’ve got a tight-nit group that I’m spending one-on-one time with.

Outside of work, I’ve been trying to focus on my parenting as well. I’m reading Parent Like It Matters. I’m not doing the exercises or anything, but I think it’s important to focus on my role as parent as well. Elder and I came at odds a few days ago and I had to ground her. She needs to understand that if I give her a chore to do, then she doesn’t get to whine and complain. I think part of the problem is that chores vary from day to day, and there’s always this inherent comparing that they do when I give one of them certain jobs to do. It even gets to the point where they’ll fight over easy chores to try and get out of doing what I really need done. Mostly this is Elder because I have her do the more advanced stuff and she’ll try to cut in on whatever Younger is doing.

So yesterday I just gave them jobs. Elder is to feed the cats dry food in the morning. Younger gives them wet food at dinner. Younger’s job is to clear and set the table before dinner, clear and wipe it down after. Elders job is to dry dishes and put them away. Basically I’m tired of them sitting at the table, eating a third plate of food, or running off to the bathroom for twenty minutes to get out of helping. They think they can do one task and be done while Missus and I wash dishes, put away food, and scoop the cat box. So I grounded Elder, let Younger go off to play after she did her job, and made Elder assist with me with cooking dinner.

She didn’t like it, but I need to teach her my work ethic. She got citizen of the month at class, and everyone I know comments about how well-behaved she is, but when she comes home she bickers with her sister and argues with me about everything, and I’m fucking tired of it.

Yesterday was pretty good though. We did have a bit of a challenge when I sent Younger off. Elder wanted me to make her sister wait, but I reminded her that she was grounded and wasn’t going anywhere until I excused her, and I had no intention of doing that until she fixed her attitude and did what I ask.

It’s basically at the point where that if I ask them to do something and they respond negatively, I’ll think of something else to make them do.

I wasn’t a complete asshole though. Elder and I did have some fun. She’d been singing some song, something with silly lyrics to the tune of Smashmouth’s All Star, and it got me thinking about how I used to make up lyrics when I was little. So I decided to introduce her to Weird Al. She loved it. I actually showed her Michael Jackson’s Bad video before Al’s Fat, and her reaction to the Bad video was something else. She was like what in the world is this? and I had to explain to her the context of the video. I guess she thought it was cringe or something. Maybe I’m just old. But she did laugh out loud at Fat, and we went on to watch a few more vids before dinner. The rest of the evening went well.

She’s still grounded though.

She woke up early because she had an accident, and started her laundry, then got on her computer and started studying for school. I wound up getting earlier than I wanted to, but since it is so nice out I went and took Younger to school on her bike. I asked Elder if she wanted to ride, but she went all ugghh on me, complaining that she couldn’t ride with her backpack on. Can’t win them all.

Today is lovely though, and I’m rested, so I’m planning on taking an afternoon trip to the rock gym. I’ll bring the kids — and maybe their cousins — tomorrow. Sunday is a busy day, but tomorrow is wide open. But before that, I’ve got a list of things I want to do today, and daylight is burning.

Yesterday marked the completion of my forty-third trip around the sun. It was also the first day I felt well in a week, following an overzealous Memorial Day celebration followed by influenza courtesy of Younger. I only managed five hours of sleep due to a combination of a late bedtime and taking an hour to fall asleep, so my first task for the day was taking a nap.

The girls greeted me with my first present when I woke up, a black t-shirt with a baby Yoda that said It’s My Birthday. I put it to good use during my meetings during work. I had a few meetings and a work session with a colleague, but I wasn’t productive. I wound up picking up a book on product management that was available on Kindle Unlimited, so I started reading that in the late afternoon between bouts of Tarkov.

I felt well enough to go for a run after the girls got home. It was in the mid eighties and I wasn’t fully recuperated according to my Whoop and wound up running 2.5 miles @ 11 min + pace. That was down quite a bit from my last jog, pre flu, when it was significantly cooler and I broke a 10-min mile for the first time in ages.

Dinner was a smorgasborg of leftovers. Our neighbors came over for cake. Missus had bought a bunch of inch-high Star Wars figurines and set them out among the plates, and we had an Oreo cookie ice cream cake. The kids played afterward and D. and I played the Dune board game, which we hadn’t played in like a year, so most of the time was spent going over the rules. I beat him in three turns, about what happened last time.

Missus was tired after all that, so she went to bed right after the kids went down. I decided to get myself a copy of Dune: Spice Wars and played that for way too long. I went to bed after 11, and it took another hour for me to fall asleep, so here I am again with five hours of sleep. No nap was forthcoming this morning though, I laid down and just couldn’t sleep.

I’m going to continue reading the product management book and force myself to actually implement what it teaches. There’s a lot that needs to be done to prepare for the dao launch; we’ve got about two months to prepare everything and I own this project so it’s success is on my shoulders.

Trying my damndest to make today a good day. I got plenty or rest last night — my Whoop is showing my vitals at 60%. I’m still sick, but I don’t know how much of it is Nyquil hangover or what. My body is mostly back to normal, I can breathe but my throat and sinuses are a bit off.

I got Elder to school. Younger is home today, Missus is taking care of her. I’ve done my morning meditation, and I’m going to actually get to work after I write this and do my schedule. I’ve got no meetings today, but need to coordinate some things with the team and do some writing, updating proposals, writing requirements and user stories. I’ve got a lot to make up for.

So it seems that the pox on our house might be lifting. Younger is still sick, and is passed out in my bed. Her fever continues, although not as badly as earlier in the week. I managed to get her out of the house for a bit today for a bike ride. She wanted a paddleboat ride, but that was a bit hairy. Apparently if you put all the weight on one side of a paddleboat they will only go in circles. I found this out in the middle of the lake, and had to jump from side to side of the boat to try to move in a straight line, before finally trying to straddle the middle of the boat, one leg on the right set of pedals, my left on the other.

Elder needed some attention from me as well since I’ve been pretty well out of sorts for the last week as well. I have no idea how she’s avoided catching either COVID or the flu, but yesterday she started complaining of stomach pains, and it got so bad the Missus had to go to the infirmary to determine that it was some sort of stomach infection. She went to bed early and was off to church this morning, dressed up like a cowgirl for some event they were doing. She won a prize, a huge bag of bubble gum, and then spent the rest of the afternoon swimming at the neighbors. I took her out for a bike ride late this afternoon, we wound up mostly hiking, as the place we went to was a bit too advanced for her. She was a trooper though.

I’ve spent most of the last couple days reading sci-fi novels and doing Melodics lessons on the pads and keys. I’d been too out of sorts to even play Tarkov until yesterday and quickly wiped out my stash getting murdered.

I’ve been sober almost a week. I can’t remember the last time I’ve done that. No alcohol or cannabis since Memorial Day. I’m pretty sure it caused me to have a real foul attitude earlier this week, but it could be the sickness. I’ve been getting a lot of sleep, but it hasn’t been doing me very good. My Whoop has been reading 50-70% recovery the last couple days. I’ve misplaced the battery, so I’ll be without it for a couple nights. Missus thinks she’s seen it, but I’ll probably order a new one anyways.

Crypto markets are complete trash. Sentiment is very low, which is great as I just keep dollar cost averaging .

Missus has booked our Disneyland tickets for later this month. God help us if anyone else gets sick and forces us to cancel now. I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ve finally beat back the dark cloud that was bothering me since we missed our Hawaii trip. I am ready to get back to work Monday and get some stuff done. I’ve been a complete waste lately and it’s really messed with my mojo. I need to get pumped up, which is one reason why I got the girls out of the house today. I’m not 100%, but I needed to get them out moving because we’ve just been sitting around the house watching TV for so long that I feel like a useless human being.

There’s always tomorrow.

It seems like we’ve been plagued with sickness lately. Missus and I got COVID a week before our vacation and were forced to cancel our Hawaii trip. Younger was home from school for two weeks because I didn’t feel like pushing her school nurse to let her go back – neither of the girls had any symptoms, but their respective school nurses seemed to have varied interpretations of the school’s policies.

So we had a great Memorial Day, although I overdid it, the girls were back on schedule and ready to go to school Tuesday morning. Then I got a call from Younger’s nurse before lunch. She was complaining about a sore throat and had a “low grade fever”. I’d heard that so many times this school year already I’d begun to think that the nurse was using a broken thermometer just to get kids out of the school. Younger loves playing hooky and seems to have mastered getting out of school. But no, this time she was really sick.

Missus was at work with the car so I rode my bike to the school, holding the handlebar of Younger’s bike awkwardly as I rode. I picked her up, she was miserable, and we managed to make it home in the ninety degree heat. I checked her temperature and it was 104. I had already skipped out of my meetings for the day, so I spent the rest of the day administering to her, giving her ibuprofen and chicken soup, trying to get her to stay hydrated. She finally fell asleep on me around 2PM.

She woke up for a bit around dinner then went back to bed at her normal time. I turned in early after finishing The Dawn of Everything, and she woke up early in the morning, so I went to lay back down with her in bed. I came back to my bed, and she woke up again, Missus went with her.

She woke up this morning still sick, I gave her a hot bath and got a reading of 106 on the infrared thermometer, so I called the pediatrician. He wanted a rectal reading, but her temp had already come back down to 103 so I told him we’d keep pushing fluids. Now her and Missus are laid out on the couch watching TV.

I have got to get some work done today, so she’s taking a turn today.

It’s Sunday night, tomorrow is Memorial Day, and the kids are going to bed. They have been on my nerves, fighting, arguing, bickering, generally acting like spoiled, persnickety brats. I guess I haven’t been the best dad, either, but I’ve been doing my best to do things with them, but I may just be too much of a crass asshole to raise children well. In the last few days I’ve taken the four of us to the rock gym, a bike ride at the park, and they’ve basically been getting away with murder the rest of the time.

I also bought a Novation Launchpad X and a one year subscription to Melodica, hoping that it will let me spend some time with the kids that doesn’t involve passively consuming content. I’ll admit that it’s mostly for me, but I’m hoping it’ll spur some creativity with the girls.

As I was writing, Elder came down to tell me that she was finished reading her book. I told her she could do Melodica for a few minutes, and she went right to it.

I understand the old saying about idle hands. With our vacation cancelled, Younger and Missus on quarantine from school and work, and the rest of the company on leave, I’ve been less than productive. I have no drive to do anything, really.

As much as I’d like to throw a pity party for myself for missing out on the vacation of a lifetime, I can’t stomach it. I’m not some pining teenager feeling sorry for myself, but at the same time I find my lack of ambition disturbing. I haven’t been able to bring myself to do anything really, other than binge on video games and Netflix, beer and cannabis. I’m not happy.

I had an insight while I was falling asleep last night. My birthday is in two weeks, and I usually get a bit moody around that time. When I had explained it to Missus, or tried to justify it, rather, I had told her it was something to do with my contemplation of my own mortality. I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s the fact that I don’t have any friends. I have had a couple friends whose birthdays were a couple days on either side of mine. One of them, Trevor, was a huge help to me when I was a young man, he was a Jamaican man who let me move in with him and mentored me when I was in my late teens. He was a big influence on me, and helped me out growing up. Unfortunately, he got involved in a nightclub shooting and was deported from the country a decade or two ago, and I’ve fallen out of touch with him and his family.

My other friend I won’t say much about, other than he’s found sobriety and most of our relationship was about doing the opposite. We don’t have much in common anymore and I don’t think we find each other’s company appealing given my proclivities. We’ve tried to rebase our relationship around fitness, but it’s not worked very well.

I was hoping that I’d be able to make the best out of our extended staycation, but the weather hasn’t cooperated. It rained all day yesterday, today is drizzly as well, but tomorrow might clear up and present an opportunity to go on a biking trip with the fam. Or maybe we can go to an amusement park. I’ve got climbing shoes coming tonight, so I’d like to go do that as well, preferably by myself one time before I take the girls.

i just can’t imagine what life is going to be like next week when work starts back up. I’m not excited about it at all, and that is very disheartening for me. I don’t even know what I want though, nothing seems to be bringing me joy, and I just don’t know how much of that is in my head.

Today I did everything to start the week out on top. I went to bed on time after finishing the last book of the Mistborn trilogy, and slept in a bit before taking Elder to school. My Whoop showed I was fully recovered, and I wanted to check my performance against a run so I went on a 2.5m run. It was my best time yet, an average of 9m45s. Then, as promised, I took Younger for a bike ride on the easy trail over by the reservoir.

We got there around eleven or so, and she was a trooper. The easy trail is about 1.5m, and she handled it without much issue. We stopped a few times as she had a bit of uncomfortableness, but it wasn’t anything like the whining and complaining that her older sister gave me when we went. After the short trail, I wanted to take her along the outer paths like I had done with her sister, but we didn’t make it very far.

The Mill, as it is known, contains a man-made reservoir system that serves drinking water for the county, in addition to the bike and multi-purpose trails that run through the woods, there is also a series of high-voltage transmission lines that cut through a part of it. There are also horse and what appears to be tree farms as well. And there are numerous paths that crisscross through the woods, carves by large machinery with large wheels that leave ruts in the mud two feet wide and six inches deep. I had wondered what sort of activities went on back there, and assumed it was some sort of logging. I was wrong.

The multipurpose trails that run through the area are use by horses, droppings are everywhere. The bike trails can also be used for hiking, but I’ve yet to see anyone walking back there. There are three trails, the first novice trail is a mile and a half, and dumps out at near a 3.5m intermediate path. There was no way I was taking Younger, but I had taken her sister around the outer perimeter of the multipurpose trails, and there was some good riding back there, including a short run near the back that was gently sloping downhill that one can build up some good speed on, so I had planned to go there. Instead of following the gravel road from the exit of trail A the mile or so past the entrance to trail C, where the aforementioned run was at, I usually followed some cut throughs made for these large machines. That’s where we ran into some trouble.

After we left the gravel, I started noticing that there seemed to be a lot of horse droppings around. A lot. After a few dozen yards into the woods I noticed that it was everywhere. I couldn’t avoid it. It didn’t seem like droppings, it was too … runny, like big blobs of mud. It started sticking to my tires, caking to the tubes and picking up pine needles and everything else, like some sort of dirt frosting around the rims. Then Younger got stuck.

And did I mention the smell? It wasn’t great. I laid my bike down, carefully, and went back to help her, hoping to push our bike through to the main path, but it got worse. It was sticking to my shoes, despite my best attempt to avoid it, and Younger was not having a good time. I finally reneged, pulled my bike out of the woods to one of the access roads, which was also covered in the muck, which I now assumed to be treated waste. I went back for Younger, letting her piggy-back ride as to avoid stepping in the mess in her tennis shoes. We made it back to the main access road, which was free of the … stuff, and tried to catch out bearings by a field.

We saw one of the trucks appear, a large machine towing a trailer, which I could see was filled with more of the muck. I considered pushing forward, but the road was still half covered with the stuff, and I figured I had tortured Younger enough for the day. I tried slamming the bikes on the ground to remove some of the stuff off of the tires; the last thing I wanted to do was take off at speed and risk the muck flying off the tires onto our backs, so we carefully made our way back to the trail entrance and our parking spot near a fishing area.

We came across a pickup truck leaving a side road, and I approached the driver as he got out to close a chain across the path. “What the heck is going on over there?” I asked him. It wasn’t sewage, thankfully, but just waste product from the water treatment. Sediment from the reservoir, with a bit of fish shit, apparently, but it wasn’t human waste. Apparently it was dumped into the large machines and then sprayed out into the paths in the woods, miles and miles of gunk sprayed out into the woods.

We made it back to the parking lot, and loaded the bikes back up. Once we were home I sprayed the tires down with water to get the mud, or muck, off of them as best as I could. Thankfully our shoes weren’t too bad, and nothing smelled.

I had hoped to bring Younger on an adventure, but it didn’t turn out to be quite the one I had in mind.

So my bout with COVID is over, and Missus is mostly over hers. Some lingering tiredness remains, in her case. I’m well enough, well enough to stay up till 2AM playing video games and watching TV, at least, although my Whoop is showing very low levels of recovery due to my shitty sleep schedule. The girls remain unaffected.

I also seem to be over the blues I’ve been feeling over the loss of our Hawaii trip which was probably even worse than the sickness itself. I’ve been out of sorts, even before I got sick. I’d stopped meditating in the mornings, and most of my other good habits seem to have fallen by the wayside as well. I don’t really think that it was related to the bear markets and financial ruin that has been going on, but maybe I’m in denial.

I’ve got another week to recharge. Due to a quirk in the fact that the girls go to different elementary schools and have different school nurses who are interpreting the city’s COVID policies differently, Elder is going back to school tomorrow, while Younger is out next week. So I plan on loading up our bikes and going on an adventure tomorrow with her, to the same bike trail where I took her sister a few weeks ago. If she does well, then we’ll be able to go on a family trip with the four of us. Missus is ready to pick out a bike as well.

I don’t think that we’ll be able to make up for the Hawaii trip here at home, obviously, but we’re going to try our best to fill the week out with activities. I’ve been researching trails online and have found that we live a few hours from what is considered a world-class biking area.

Tonight, I’m going to finish reading the last book of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy. I’m about a hundred pages from the end. It’s a good series, and it frustrates me that Missus has refused to pick up the first book in the series. We watched S3 of Love, Death, and Robots earlier today, together, and I’ve been binging Nightflyers for the last couple days. It’s decent show, but not great. I also grabbed Prey from the Epic Games freebies on Friday and played that a bit yesterday. It’s a Bethesda game, and has Bioshock written all over it. I’m not sure how much time I’ll put into it, I just needed a break from Tarkov.