Update for 3/20/2016

This is a more typical update where I tell you how little I got done on my projects and how many extraneous things I did. (The post date says 3/21 because I published this just after midnight.)

Site updates

• Blog – I blogged several times last week to kick off this series of updates. That took up a decent amount of the week. If you missed them, here’s part 1, part 2, and part 3. I got another post pretty much written, but it will come with an associated wiki article that’s not ready yet, so I’m going to finish that and post it all this week.
• Wiki comments – I’m adding the ability to comment on some of the wiki articles. In principle this was my main project for the week. In practice I only made a decent start. But I think I can get it done by the end of next week. This week there will be interruptions.

Project updates

• Math – I got a few more sections read of the intro to the P-5 part of the EngageNY curriculum. I’m about halfway through it now. Then I’ll start on preschool! Maybe I should sit in on a preschool class to throw myself more fully into the experience. (Just kidding.)
• Video games – I installed Dxtory, a video game recording program, on my Surface, where I play most of my virtual board games, so I can record them and study my losses. Then I recorded two games of Splendor and proceeded to win them both. Last week I also got back into Minecraft, picking up on my Skyblock world where I left off all those months ago. I still knew exactly what I was working on and how to do everything I needed. Minecraft is like riding a bike, it seems. I completed my main task, which was building an enclosed village. Next I’ll need villagers for it, so I’ll need to cure some zombie villagers.
• TV – I’m taking a break from Sarah Jane to watch season 2 of Daredevil, which came out on Netflix on Friday. I’ve watched one episode so far, and it was good, as I’d expect.
• Books – There was a sale at Half Price Books last week through today, and I dropped in on Saturday because I was in the area. I’m in a phase where I basically have all the books I’m looking for, so I wasn’t expecting to find anything interesting, but I ended up buying three. First, I’m on the lookout for books on games that don’t need much equipment, so one book I picked up was Gladstone’s Games to Go. Somehow I managed to cram it into my board game box. Another was Kahney’s biography on Jony Ive. Ive is inspiring to me as a designer and innovator. I read this profile of him about a year ago and have wanted to read this book since then. I don’t know if I’ll try to read it all at once, but I thought it’d be nice to have around to browse through whenever I wanted some motivation. Then there was How Buildings Work by Edward Allen, a book I hadn’t heard of but which fills a gap in my architecture collection. It talks about the basic functions a building has to perform and how our mechanisms for fulfilling them work, such as heating, lighting, and plumbing. I went back tonight to buy a book on EMDR techniques, but it seems someone else got to it first. So I looked around some more and found The Writer’s Adventure, a book of creative writing prompts. I’m looking for writing prompts, but I decided against buying it because I didn’t want to fill my shelves with somewhat obscure titles when there were probably more popular options I could borrow from a library or read online. The Writer’s Digest site has a lot of prompts, for example.
• Productivity – I’m thinking of trying to create more of a routine for my evenings. I usually fail at this, but maybe I haven’t tried hard enough. I’ll see what I can come up with this week. I especially want to block out a large chunk of time each day for project work.

Life updates

• Clothes – Over the past few months I’ve been gradually replacing half my wardrobe. Buying clothes is stressful for me, but it’s also been kind of fun. Except for the pants. I have the hardest time finding dress pants I want to wear. I want a couple of black pairs (the easy part), a couple of blue that don’t look like black, a medium gray that also doesn’t look like black, and a brown that looks more like chocolate than sand. That last one is apparently too much to ask. The one I ordered looked black–dark chocolate, you could say. I returned it yesterday. Then today I tried on my new black pants and spent an infuriating few minutes wrestling with the button at the waist. It actually hurt my finger. A few minutes unfastening one’s pants doesn’t work for someone who sometimes has bathroom emergencies. Hence the rage. How dare Croft & Barrow trap me in my own pants! And I’m not going to wait for the buttons to get broken in or whatever. These pants are all going back to the store. I need to find pants with a hook closure like the ones I’ve been wearing. I would reorder my usual brand, John Blair, but it seems like they make every size but mine now.
• Easter – My brother is visiting for Easter again. It’s an annual tradition I look forward to. We’ll go to our usual Taizé service, an art exhibit we’ve been looking forward to, and our usual Easter morning service. He’ll probably go to half a dozen other services that I’ll skip. So this week I’ll spend some time cleaning up the apartment before he gets here. I’ll try not to let it eat up all my time.
• Worship performing – On Saturday I got a surprise request to substitute for a sick pianist at our church’s other site. I said yes, since I had no conflicting obligations. So that was my morning today. I’d forgotten that they have the pianist do complicated things on the electric keyboard now, and there were some intros I wasn’t used to. So it wasn’t as easy as I was expecting, but I managed. And I got most of this post written in the hour or so between the rehearsal and the service.
• Diet – The first two or three weeks of my low-carb diet were really just a lower-carb diet because I wasn’t that interested in following Atkins exactly. But I’ve decided I want to try a more authentic Atkins experience, so I’m being stricter about it now and cheating much less. I’m in the very restricted phase 1 for another week or two, 20g of net carbs per day. My boss likes Atkins, so we have a lot of conversations about it. It’s amazing how much there is to say about a diet. I might ramble in a separate post sometime. If I have time this week, I want to use the phase 1 ingredient lists to come up with a standard salad or casserole I can make easily. I also need to start taking walks again. I’m sure that’ll go into my plan for my evening routine.