“What, Brian J., does your to-do list look like at the end of the day?”
Ah, gentle reader, incomplete. Incomplete. As you can see, “Potatoes” is on the list for what might be the 25th consecutive day, but it is getting more likely that I will complete it. Some months (in multiples of twelve, maybe) ago, I found a recipe for oven roasted potatoes on the Internet, and I liked it, so I did it a couple of times. When I fell away from it, my beautiful wife cut the recipe to fit to a 3×5 card and put it into one of her recipe boxes. I tend to fold the recipes I want to use again and tuck them into the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. So for a while, I didn’t have access to the recipe I liked, and Find it again on the Internet was a prerequisite for the task. But! Sometime in the middle of the month, she found it for me and set it atop her recipe boxes in the kitchen. Then! It disappeared; I don’t know if it went back into the recipe boxes or something more sinister. Now! She has rediscovered the recipe and put it on my desk (where it has a greater chance to be lost or something more sinister. But the oblong spheriods are back in my court. And if I don’t cook some today, I will have to write Famous for Potatoes on my list for January 26th.
I have not done a “room” on TryHackMe. In a while. But I’ve added it to the list recently in case I need to pivot to cybersecurity from quality assurance to find a job (spoiler alert: probably). I did, however, figure out that the “AttackBox” option doesn’t actually work these days, and to do a room, I’ll have to spin up a virtual (on the Web) Kali Linux device. Which means I can pick up where I left off now when I left off… What, two years ago? I will need some review. I think I took some notes, but in the interim, I might have discarded them.
FreeCodeCamp.org offers online courses in basic (not BASIC) programming in a variety of languages. I completed the HTML/CSS one and got a little certificate for it…. five years ago? Ah, in the interim before my last full-time position. I also started the JavaScript one as it was the language I was noodling in at the time, but I abandoned it because it was very time consuming. These five (apparently) years later, it remembers where I was in the course, but it cleared all previous work I had done, so I have to start over. Which, okay, I can speedrun it, but: Now it has “workshops” where you do a little program going line-by-line, where you have to write a variable declaration and then a console log using whatever concept/method the lesson covered, and now it’s very time consuming. I am closing in on 10% done after a week, so speedrun is not the word to use. I thought I’d plough through JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python fast because a lot of “job postings” indicate they prefer “experts” in a language, and I have a hard time considering myself an expert in any of these languages, even though I’ve used them a bunch. But time will tell how long my patience holds out on these things.
GTO Spec refers to writing a data model and identifying a set of screens for a new project I’m thinking about so I can prompt an LLM to scaffold it up for me. It should be easy. Why am I procastinating?
A number of the chores are part of the Choose Your Own Grind protocol; I clean the upstairs and the bathrooms weekly and the downstairs every two weeks (generally). Cleaning the bathtubs and the shower was on the two-week schedule but has fallen to a once-in-a-while schedule. As this is week two, today’s list includes dusting and vacuuming downstairs, but….
Not depicted on the list: Since my boys have given up reading now that they have phones and computers (hold out as long as you can, young parents), I decided we would cull their bookshelves and move the two full-sized bookshelves from the youngest’s bedroom, formerly their shared bedroom, to the downstairs. For years, I’ve been stacking oversized art monographs and coffee table books haphazardly on bookshelves in the main living area, and my wife had mentioned it looked cluttered. So I thought sometime in January, after the Christmas decorations were up, we would tackle that. So, yesterday, we did. I gathered five boxes of children’s books for donation (the bookshelves were still stocked with, well, not board books, but with books written for elementary and middle school students); a bedful of adult books which he wanted to keep or I, in sorting them, decided he would keep; a half bin full of old school workbooks, old magazines, and torn up books for recycling; and three boxes of books I wanted to keep, which includes books of mine that ended up on their bookshelves, comic books that they’d bought or I bought for them when we went to the Comic Cave, and books they owned which I wanted to keep, maybe for grandchildren. We moved the bookshelves downstairs, and I got the art books/monographs/binders we have instead of scrapbooks onto one set of bookshelves. Today, I will tackle the audio courses; I will sort the books in the boxes in my office; I will move the donation pile from the living room (where my wife went through them to see what she wants to keep) to the garage and will restack/repack the donation boxes in the garage; and I will use my week’s allotment of semicolons even though it’s not Sunday.
And! I will do these things before I dust and vacuum downstairs as the not-depicted-on-the-to-do-list project, which I did after cleaning the upstairs, left detritus on the floors upstairs so they had to be swept and vacuumed again.
Also, not depicted: Writing long blog posts about the whole effort. Sometimes I do add blog posts to the list when I have an idea but not the immediate drive to write a post (I started this one before breakfast, but that was an hour ago–I should get to the things on the list). Also, the normal chores of daily life including laundry, dishes, some cooking, et cetera. And the shoveling which I might undertake (and which will take four to six hours should I choose to partake in the joy of being outside in the snow–six inches instead of the 20 they predicted, but enough to leave southwest Missouri snowbound for three or four days, except for delivery drivers (my oldest ordered pizza last night, but from the shop in Battlefield, so not a long drive for the poor rascal) and people with, you know, real jobs.
So: Will I update you tomorrow? Eh, probably not.
