I said I’d read and write and move and some of that actually happened!

I was sufficiently annoyed at reading Antifragile that I knew there was zero chance I would finish it (or even continue for the week) so I grabbed John Scalzi’s “The Dispatcher” that was on sale last Monday and read it that day. Very readable 🙂 A bit depressing. But that means I finished a book this week! I also got a copy of “Principles” and haven’t opened it at all! 😀 But based on the point of that one, I suspect it’ll be a much friendlier read once I start.

I’m also re-reading “The Fifth Season” (So! Good!) – do re-reads count? (I guess that’s up to me.) I also realized that I checked the wrong account for Audible and although I thought I’d cancelled it, I do still have a subscription with a. couple of credits. I might cancel it yet, I’m not sure. Really, the only thing I’ve ever enjoyed as audiobooks is Buddhist books, and even those are hit or miss based on narrator. I like my fiction to be in my own head voice, y’know?

This is writing and I’ll post it today (hideously unedited and unreviewed) and reading is covered above. Moving was… mixed this week. I am happy to report that I seem to have found a groove that sees me go swimming twice a week midday and I don’t even whine and complain when it’s time to go. I even found myself wanting to go early one day when I was feeling anxious and restless! And even on the days I feel like just giving up, I still start and then I keep going! This is exciting! My normal distance is 1km and I all too often forget where I’m at while counting. But this past Thursday it was 1.1km. I want to keep the time consistent so if I want to swim further, I’d better speed up.

I haven’t done much else, activity-wise but then it’s only the first week of the year and it was a short one. I still have to finish “American Vandal”, which I’m restricting myself to watching on the Exercycle. That was really hard because I have to find out who drew the dicks* but I am proud that I haven’t broken that rule. I’d have thought it would get me on the bike but so far, no.

On the learning front, I was asked to try to figure out how much of my company’s code shipped last year was open source (compared with closed). This is exciting! I haven’t done much programming in a very long time but I did spend a focused bit of time a couple of years ago and some of the JS/Node neutrons are waking up. It’s a dog’s breakfast at the moment, glued together with text files & bash, but I do have a decent base for something I might use as a jumping off point for learning proper JS dev again – ideally practicing TDD as well. I spent more of my own time than I think my boss would be happy with on this (work-life balance is a Real Thing at Buffer, y’all) but I was enjoying that dopamine hit of solving things. And isn’t the dopamine of learning and accomplishment preferable to constantly refreshing social media or checking mail to see if there’s something new?

Yes. Yes it is.

* this is only for people who’ve seen “American Vandal” or don’t mind partial spoilers (as I say, I haven’t finished it so this doesn’t actually give away any ending) the #1 proof of Dylan’s innocence, in MY mind, is the complete stylistic difference between his everyday (and it does seem to be every day) dick-drawings and the ones on the cars. No. Damn. Way. As mentioned, I don’t know the actual answer, but he really doesn’t seem smart enough to think of disguising his signature style.