Update for 7/29/2018

Life maintenance

Moving in a hurry is not fun. It’s even less fun when you’re trying to save money by doing it yourself. And when the schedules of the parties involved are clashing. And when your knowledge of the situation is developing as you go. And when you’re possibly facing rain the day of the move. These factors combined to make Monday a day of planning mixed with intense worry and despair. But once I made some decisions, I calmed down and felt better, and the rest of the week went fairly smoothly.

I did have another brief attack on Saturday when I didn’t know if I could get the keys to the new apartment and start moving stuff over. I really didn’t want to move everything in one day. I have a lot of stuff. But it turned out I could get the keys, and Jeremy came over to help, and that made the process much more pleasant.

Unless something goes terribly wrong, the move will be finished Tuesday night.

Conceptual modeling

On Thursday at lunch, for once I didn’t have anything to do besides eating, so I slipped in a sneaky note-taking session on my conceptual modeling project.

After my move is finished, I’m hoping to come back to this project and write the next version of my method. Then I might put it on hold for other projects.

Cognitive science

I finished NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman much sooner than I expected. I was hoping it would cover more of the cognitive aspects of autism, but it was almost strictly a history of the condition and the ways society has handled it, which, aside from some bright spots, have been appalling. But the last chapter or two of the book were much more encouraging. And it’s given me more people, books, organizations, and movies to look into.

Text-to-speech

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a Fire 7, Amazon’s smallest current tablet. My sole reason was to use its text-to-speech function to listen to my Kindle books so I can actually get through them. The Fire arrived on Friday, just in time for me to finish NeuroTribes and start on my next book, one from the spirituality category. I have a few small gripes with the text-to-speech feature, but overall it’s good enough.

Spirituality

The first Kindle book I’ve chosen to listen to is Living Spiritual Praxis by Eric Kyle. It’s a guide to designing spiritual formation programs in a systematic fashion. It really occupies two of my projects at once–spirituality and conceptual modeling. I found the book because it discusses one of my sources on modeling in social science research. It shows up in an appendix that overviews conceptual modeling.

On spirituality, Kyle’s book puts forward the somewhat surprising idea that “[s]piritual discernment is the very core of the craft of theistic spiritual formation.” He spends a lot of time discussing how to carry it out. Though his focus in the book is on developing church programs, his larger goal is to foster discernment throughout the reader’s spiritual life.

Socializing

Friday my dad dropped by to have lunch with me on his way home from my brother’s new place–that is, a few hours into his two-day drive down the middle of the country. He’d called a couple of days before, and we ate avocado chicken salads at Wendy’s and caught up and talked about life. There’s something nice about taking a break from a normal work day to have lunch with someone you don’t see often. It’s like a cool spray of water on a hot day.