Summer of Writing

In keeping with my themes for 2024 this summer was to be 'The Summer of Writing'.

This theme didn't have a specific post or word count, but I knew I wanted to write more1.

I had a few things I needed to do to get this started. One of them included starting a writing cohort. I wasn't sure how I would do that but it turns out in early June Lacey was having similar thoughts. Mario and Trey had some interest as well and so we formed a writing group!

We meet every Wednesday (more or less) for about an hour.

I had really hoped that the forming the cohort would give me the encouragement and accountability I needed ... and it HAS!

But I also quickly realized that all I had calendared (really) was the Wednesday writing session, and so I set out to have a 30 minute daily writing session on my own.

Life has a way of kicking you in the ass though when you least expect it.

Roughly 10 days into my 'Summer of Writing' a work thing came up and kind of consumed all of my thought and energy. I realized quickly that something had to give, and so I looked ahead at my Autumn theme and borrowed from it a bit, while still keeping the spirit of trying to write.

The next theme was going to be 'The Autumn of Mindfulness' which included starting a meditation practice so I dove into that. I also decided that I needed to try to find something to do from a physical activity perspective. I live in the desert of southern california so the summers are brutal ( daily highs that can average 110F+) and being outside isn't something I really like, even in the early morning, before the sunrise, the temps can be mid to high 80s ... sometimes even the low 90s.

I decided that I would pick up swimming and going to the gym to help alleviate some of the stress from work.

That, in addition to the writing, seemed to be a good thing to work on.

During my Summer of Writing I only wrote 5 posts (including this one)

The articles had a total of 5237 words and so, from the perspective of writing, I managed to do some writing, but it wasn't really anymore than what I had done during the Spring of Transition where I wrote 4 articles with 3890

However, the ability to transition from one idea to another is something that CGP Grey talks about in his themes and so I don't feel too badly about it ... especially because the meditation and swimming have really been something I'm very proud of.

My meditation practice includes a 20 minute daily session first thing in the morning to help clear my mind for the day.

My swimming routine consists of swimming 3 days a week. When I started I could barely do a 20 minute swim. Just before DjangoCon US I swam 1800 yards in 54 minutes and for the most part didn't stop for a break. If you would have told me that in early July when I started I would not have believed you.

In a weird way the meditation and swimming kind of helped with the writing because it allowed me to stop thinking, which then allowed room for deeper thinking about my writing.

The stress of work has alleviated a bit and so I'm hoping that after DjangoCon US I'll be able to dedicate about 15 minutes a day to writing to start, and then ramp up to 30 minutes (similar to what I did with the swimming) and continue to swim and meditate.

One thing that I've found very helpful is to just add a little bit of a good habit and remove a bit of a bad habit. Sooner or later the bad habit is gone and replaced with the new good habit.

In the Autumn of mindfulness, which I will still try to do, I'll focus on eating right (I kind of eat like a 7 year old whose parents left the pantry stocked with a ton of junk food and then left for the weekend) so I'm going to work to get that under control.

All in all, it's been a successful summer of writing, even if it wasn't what I initially envisioned. But that's OK, and part of life.

As Mark Twain said, "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans."2

  1. How much more? I don't really know ... just more ↩︎
  2. No he didn't. It was actually Allen Saunders in Reader's Digest in 1957, I just like to attribute everything to either Mark Twain or Abraham Lincoln ↩︎

Posted by ryan on Thu 03 October 2024

Spring of Transition

I've written before about the Theme's that CGP Grey has discussed and I think they're great! I've just recently completed my 'Spring of Transition'.

So what is the Spring of Transition? For me it meant focusing on that last bit of time that my daughter will be living with me and my wife full time.

She just graduated from High School and is getting ready to go off to college in the Fall. I've taken the last quarter to really try and focus on spending quality time with her, and enjoy the last bits of her living here with me and my wife.

One of the things I am eternally grateful for is that when my daughter was a baby/toddler I started a WordPress blog to keep track of all of the adventures we got into. This was 2008 - 2010 and while Facebook was kind of a thing, Instragram was NOT a thing. I used this blog to post pictures with a fun caption of the context of the picture. I would also write a monthly letter to her and recap what fun adventures we had, or what changes I had noticed.

I did this for a couple of years, but then life got in the way and the changes that she was going through were harder and harder to see, and capture, with a camera. This made it very hard to write about as well.

I ended up taking down my site, but I kept a backup of the WordPress XML just in case1 I would want to use it again.

At one point I stumbled upon a journalling app called Day One that I used to journal. I used it for a couple of years and then found a feature that allowed me to import my WordPress blog data.

I played around with this a bit and finally made the plunge to import the data. It may be the best decision I've ever made with respect to tech.

Over the last several years I focused on trying to journal every day. One of the grear features of Day One is 'On This Day'. After I journal I'll click on that tab and look back at what I've written "On This Day".

The best entries are from the blog. Small reminders of the toddler my (now) adult daughter was.

This has been especially great over the last 3 months as she has wrapped up High School and prepared for College. It's really allowed me to focus on the great times we had, and work to create some awesome new memories.

We didn't do anything exotic, or visit any far off places during this 'Spring of Transition' ... there's already sooooo much to be done at the end of a High School career!

But, I have tried to focus on the things that we do like to do.

We have watched a bunch of Star Wars:

We've also tried to watch the Battle Star Galactica TV show from the early 2000s. This didn't go well.

Another thing that we've been doing is trying to cook meals together. My daughter is a vegetarian, and my wife and I are not, so this makes dinner (and other meals) challenging.

To over come this she found several vegetarian dishes that she thought I would like and we've made them together for dinner. It's been a real treat to see what she thinks of some of these recipes, which are mostly Thai and Vietnamese meals which is not something she would typically eat (she's really big into the various combinations of cheese and starch, i.e. Grilled Cheese Sandwiches, Quesadillas, and Cheese Pizza 😊

We've also been trying really hard to get take out from a Thai place that has many vegetarian options, but haven't been able to make it work just yet. This looks to be something that we'll hopefully be able to do over the summer before she leaves for school.

I think the hardest part about all of this has been knowing that each of the things that she's done will be the last. She had her last dance recital (I've been watching her dance for 15 years). She had her last Girl Scout meeting. She had her last High School class.

Soon she'll have her last night sleeping here before she goes to school.

Obviously I always knew this day would come, but I didn't really think it would get here so quickly. The days are long, but the years are short. I never really understood what that meant until these last few months.

There is now this full grown adult living in my home ... at least for the next few months. But just yesterday she was a silly toddler walking around the house claiming that the elves must have left her milk in the pantry!

I know that her leaving for college isn't the last time I'll ever see her. I mean, she'll still have a room at our house, so she'll want to come back at some point, right? Right?

And it's not like she's going to school on the other side of the country. It's just a short 2 hour drive away. But still ... it won't be the same.

It's just all so different. My wife and I are planning to be empty nesters. Like, what does that even mean? For the last 19 years our daughter has been a part of, and influenced, the lives that we've lead.

I'm also a little nervous about my 'little girl'2 going away into the big bad world. I know I shouldn't be though. She is the most thoughtful, capable, intelligent, caring, hard working person I've ever met in my life.

I know she's going to do great in her next chapter.

I just didn't realize that next chapter would come so soon.

  1. this is one of the ONLY times my digital hoarding has actually paid off ↩︎
  2. Fun fact: she's 5'7 with the strength of someone that's been dancing for 15 years so she's not actually little ↩︎

Posted by ryan on Thu 20 June 2024

Winter of Learning

Winter of Learning Retrospective

Have you heard the good word about themes? If you haven't, take a look at this great video by CGP Grey on Themes and how they can work. For the last couple of years I've been doing yearly themes ... with limited success. This lack of success was entirely due to me not actually reviewing the status of my themes until the end of the year ... and by then it's too late!

This last December I decided that I'd do the themes, but this time I'd do seasonal set of themes instead of one BIG annual theme.

My current theme ended yesterday (March 18th) and this time I'm going to actually take stock of where I am and how 'well' I did.

Since my theme started on December 21, 2023 which is the Northern Hemisphere Winter Solstice, I decided to have a seasonal theme of 'Winter of Learning' with the following things I wanted to learn more about:

To help me keep track of this I dusted off my TIL github repo and started to write down some TILs. Over the course of the 88 days of my Seasonal theme I added 28 TILs. I also had 16 other, more personal, TILs that didn't make it into the repo for a total of 44 TILs. With 88 days that's a 50% hit rate on writing down stuff that I learned.

This is much better than I thought I had done. I'd been pretty down on myself because I had meant to write a TIL every night, but I didn't. I over estimated the number of times I didn't write a TIL and thought I had done much worse on it than I had.

Now, just because I wrote a TIL doesn't mean that it was one of the topics above that I had indicated I would WANT to write about, but that's OK! The point of a TIL is to document some stuff that you learned and the topics above were only ever meant to be guides, not directives.

I think the one thing I learned that I'm more proud of is spending a pretty good amount of time one weekend trying to learn Docker better. During one of Jeff Triplett's office hours I had joked that Docker scared me. And it was me actually saying it out loud that drove me to sit down and figure some shit out. I even had a public notes issue about it!

Overall this Winter of Learning isn't what I thought it would be, but I'm glad I did it. I am going to work to try and keep on writing TILs and hopefully I'll be able to get in at least 2 per week!

That being said, it's now time to prepare for my next seasonal theme ... the Spring of Transition. My daughter is a Senior in High School and is getting ready to head off to college. Now seems like a good time to start getting ready for my wife and I to be empty nesters and so we'll be spending the next 92 days figuring out how we can do that.

Posted by ryan on Tue 19 March 2024