Category: Weeknotes

Rough week. I feel vast sorrow that so many Americans want an America where the government may, with impunity, openly murder anyone who disagrees with their ideology. Abolish ICE, defund the police, and impeach the illegitimate insurrectionist* before he illegally invades another country 🙃

Win of the week: published the next piece in my digital aura series!

Looking forward to: going to walk with my friend for the first time in a month — I’ve been giving my testy hamstring a break

Stuff I did:

• 0.5 hours consulting
• 3.25 hours business development — had a call with a prospect, hopefully will be invited to bid
• left a voicemail for my Congressional Representative over the weekend asking her to vote in favor of impeachment of the President for kidnapping the leader of a sovereign nation and announcing that “we’re running” Venezuela so we can steal their oil (she voted to table impeachment after the Iran attack last summer)
• researched HSA rollovers and decided against combining an old account because the customer service was so bad at the new account 😒
• sold off the rest of the green energy mutual fund I had
• cleaned up my Goodreads shelves — I had a bunch I made when I joined the site in like 2012 in hopes of better recommendations, and they’ve been cluttering up my lists ever since! I’ve also had interests change so dumped some less relevant shelves and added a couple new ones that are more pertinent
• it was so nice today I went out and pruned for an hour ✂️ my favorite kind of gardening, satisfying and visually impactful — cleared around some witch hazels that are getting decent sized to give them more room and cleaned up the border with my neighbor, who unfortunately for him likes his yard immaculate and I basically have a hedgerow because I’d rather have (humming)birds
• attic inspection — no mice or mold!
• living room shuffle
• hung out online with my friend after taking a couple weeks off from our usual hang for the holidays
• baked coffee cake after waking up early unintentionally on the weekend — my husband kindly waited to tell me about Maduro until after we finished brunch so I could enjoy it
• attempted to make soft-boiled eggs for a second time, and failed again — gotta try a different technique (I tried Kenji López-Alt’s method from The Food Lab)
• watched The Founder — I’ve been boycotting McDonald’s since circa 1999 and I will continue to do so

Win of the week: I pre-prepped veggies the night before for a big New Year’s Day breakfast

Looking forward to: continuing vacation mindset for two more days

Stuff I did:

• online window shopping
• catch-up chores
• finished my year-end reading review and 20 favorite books list
• worked on other blog posts but they’re not done yet
• looked into options for getting my mini PC off the ground and discovered that my monitor has a VESA mount slot so I may mount it back there… I’ve had it on the ground instead of the desk because the sound annoys me (did not consider the sound when I impulsively decided to get one) but crawling under my desk to wake it up every day is annoying… I’m wondering if having it behind the monitor might block some of the noise when the second fan turns on

Highlight of the week: husband surprised me with weekend morning donuts! 🍩 the benefits of a partner who wakes up two hours earlier 😂

Looking forward to: reading a ton of fun books over the next week of vacation 📚

Stuff I did:

Between wrapping up client work at the start of the month, putting my fiction project on hold, and taking it easy on my hamstring, this week has pretty much just been reading, working on some long blog posts, and putzing about on errands and tidying. Very chill but I may go stir crazy after a second week like this 😅

• a pair of pants I got for my husband came with a security tag on them, so I had to call and do an exchange
• we had an attic follow-up check scheduled but the technician got tied up on the job before us, so we rescheduled a couple weeks out — welp, got a tidy house out of it I guess 🤷‍♀️
• pancake breakfast (plus fried eggs and fake sausage for some protein) for Christmas (we don’t celebrate but it’s a bonus day off)
• cleaned out my nightstand drawer and found my missing Pixel 3a 🙌 charging it up so I can try rooting it, and maybe make it my daily reader / media access point (potential vacation project? but might piss me off 🤔)
• made these poached pears again, yup still tasty

Win of the week: updated my physical backup (mostly! a couple folders left — the backup is kind of a disaster I don’t really know how to deal with… I’ve reorganized files on the computer, so should I delete the whole backup and start from scratch? I’ve thrown up my hands on the reorg and am accepting duplicate files for now) — I read some guy’s horror story of losing access to his entire cloud server so seemed like a good time to make sure my external harddrive is up to date (it appears the last time I did a full backup was last October 🙀)

Looking forward to: winter solstice and longer days

Stuff I did:

• 6.5 hours writing
• analyzed annual spending by category
• started working on my end of year reading posts (stats and favorites) — year’s not over yet though!
• finally baked that apple crisp 😋
• lol a door-to-door window salesperson sassed me when I said I wasn’t interested, “you ever gonna get those redone?” — lady I would if I had the money but I wouldn’t choose your company
• hamstring is still acting up, this is annoying

Win of the week: didn’t eat out at all! meal planning and prepping is paying off

Looking forward to: doing nothing this weekend

Stuff I did:

• 3 hours writing
• one virtual appointment
• optometrist eye exam — my prescription barely changed so I don’t need to get new lenses 🙌 they tried to talk me into getting special night driving glasses with a warm tint, but even with insurance and the cheapest frames, it was going to be $250… I don’t drive at night that often 🤷‍♀️ (I have a pretty strong prescription so I need high-index lenses which of course insurance doesn’t cover 🙄)
• despite my efforts to combine, wound up doing errands three different days 😑
• finally got out for a weekend walk with my friend (since our usual afternoon walk doesn’t fly when the sun sets at 4:18 😒) — state park was slammed on a(n alarmingly windy) Saturday morning!
• another friend had early Monday morning fire alarm testing 🚨 so we did an impromptu walk despite the rain
• attempted to cook an extra midday meal over the weekend but I burned the main ingredient 😿
• baked dreamy tea scones and sourdough banana nut bread
• between the two walks and all the cooking / baking, I overdid it and now my hamstring is Mad — ugh my cardiologist totally called me out for not doing leg day last month, hate it when the doctor’s right 😂
• posted some (re-giftable) books and gift wrap on the Buy Nothing app to give away, but the app is just dead (and they’ve enshittified it to encourage paying)… do I cave and make a Facebook account for access to the super active local Group? 😫
• finally got annoyed enough by a cruddy Wikipedia reference to make an account and leave a note on the talk page
• the cats escaped outside one morning while I was still in bed 😱 (they’re indoor cats) The female can scrabble the front door open if it isn’t 100% latched (given enough time), and it’s easy to not push it quite hard enough — our chill male cat came back inside on his own because it was raining — the female came running to me, soaking wet and meowling, when I called her name 😰🙀 she may have been out there as long as an hour — glad to live on a quiet street!

Win of the week: yay my mammogram came back clean

Looking forward to: baking apple crisp this weekend (ok I’m looking forward to the eating part but you know)

Stuff I did:

• 3.5 hours consulting
• 2 hours market research
• Dentist appointment
• Took the cat to the vet… he’s lost a lot of weight and the vet is worried he’s got something alarming going on but I suspect they had us cut his calories back too drastically in June… have to decide if we want to get him an abdominal ultrasound, that sounds $$
• Did some amortization estimation on when we’ll own our house (7-9 years… still sounds like a long time but our original loan period was for 17 more 😶)
• Cooked chickpeas from scratch over the weekend to use as a base in recipes during the week 🦾
• Made graphics for a couple draft blog posts 😃 Psyched about these posts, had a couple breakthroughs on them this week
• Re-watched The Matrix

Win of the week:

Had our gross 1988 insulation removed, and new R-49 put in! Probably too much work for one day, four guys were here from 9am to 6:45pm. Cats were terrified of the blower generator noise, and aggravated at being locked in my office with me for nearly 10 hours 😂 Diesel fumes were getting in the house for a while but my husband figured out where they were coming from.

(They were supposed to install an exterior vent for our bathroom fan, but didn’t include a photo of it in their “after” shots so I’m skeptical that happened. They were also meant to clean out, seal and sanitize our garage attic, but again, no photos so I suspect they just cleaned it out… I’ll find out when the office reopens.)

Looking forward to: rest of the long weekend!

Stuff I did:

• 2.5 hours consulting
• took Thursday and Friday off for Thanksgiving (got basically nothing done on Tuesday or Wednesday either tbh)
• went to Homebrew Website Club: Writer’s Edition
• made soup for lunch on the weekend, I should probably cook midmorning more often
• made sourdough pancakes for Sunday brunch
• first mammogram, not as painful as I feared — if you’ve ever done a foot water/ice bath that hurts worse
• went through draft posts on my old blog and pulled over a handful that might be worth finishing, then privately published or deleted most of the rest (in preparation for archiving it as a static site so I don’t have to worry about WordPress updates forever)
• woke up hot in the middle of the night to be reminded that when the batteries in the thermostat die, the furnace defaults to running… house should have been 65F but it was 75F — blearily scrambled through my office testing rechargeable batteries, thankfully finally found a pair of AA with some charge so I didn’t have to figure out how to manually turn off the heat pump at 3:30am 😂

Win of the week: I was brave and went in person to speak at a public hearing in favor of a local housing project! 😱 Maybe winging it was not my most eloquent moment, but I did it 🦾 (Not going to look it up and rewatch tho 😅)

Looking forward to: new attic insulation next week! We had planned to get it done in 2020 but then we didn’t want a ton of people in our bedroom (attic access is in our primary bathroom 😑) for several years

Still getting used to the new skylight — we both keep turning on the light while attempting to turn it off because we’re so used to the landing being a dark cave 😂 So far, big fan of the skylight, hate the solar nightlight but that’s the part that makes it eligible for the tax credit 🤷‍♀️

Stuff I did:

• 13.25 hours consulting
• yay booked more appointments 🙃
• looked back at spending for the year to update retirement planning
• did some more moving money around and rebalancing, think I’m done for a while finally — ooh good job me I sold half our MSFT stock before it tanked, I would say totally accidental timing except that I was dumping it because I think Microsoft’s making some dumb choices lately, so just mostly accidental
• voted on neighborhood safety projects (got on a neighborhood email list recently)

Win of the week: got a tubular skylight installed over the dark stairway in the center of the house ☀️

Looking forward to: reading Sunward by William Alexander 🤖🚀

Stuff I did:

• 8.5 hours consulting
• took Tuesday off for Veteran’s Day (I aim to give myself Federal holidays off — my clients all have them off anyway!) (I will never call it Victory Day)
• finally bit the bullet and sold half of the random green energy mutual fund I bought when I started investing in 2009 because it seemed like a nice thing to do but that doesn’t really jive with my asset allocation… spreading it out over this year and next to lessen the tax blow hopefully
• wrote up three proposals for neighborhood safety projects: a crosswalk, a painted intersection, and a bike lane (my city sets aside funds each year that neighborhoods can use for small safety projects) — turns out the crosswalk project is already in the works and the other two aren’t suitable for the grant 🤷‍♀️
• actually planned out meals for the week 🦾 going to try wasting less food, which means planning ahead so I don’t buy too much
• spent two hours applying acoustic caulk to two windows… all the YouTube videos made it look easy 😿 not sure whether or not it made any difference but there was at least one seam that didn’t have any caulk to begin with
• drove my friend to their first colonoscopy and back, which somehow took 4+ hours, and then I was exhausted despite doing basically nothing all day 😂
• walked with another friend after work and it was a good thing I brought headlamps for both of us! 🔦🔦 We started at 3:50 and it was basically black out when we got back to the parking lot at 5:10pm, stupid time change
• went to Homebrew Website Club

I thought “fall back” was the less disruptive time change, but this one was rough for me! 🥱

Win of the week: Mamdani and Dems won big 🙌 most people hate fascism, actually (still biting my nails over my city’s council races, two of which are within 500 votes but currently the NIMBY candidate is winning both… 🥺)

Looking forward to: scheduled some house upgrades for the next couple weeks 🏠

Stuff I did:

• 1.75 hours consulting
• 2 hours (writing) market research + 4.25 hours outlining
• coordinated with the insulation company to add on mold treatment and rodent sealing our garage attic at the same time — install Thanksgiving week!
• got a quote for a tubular skylight over our dark staircase (going after the energy efficiency tax credit that expires at the end of the year) — booked for next week!
• open enrollment — scoped out the state healthcare marketplace and the cheapest option was more than twice what I could get through my husband’s work, so I’m sticking with that
• evaluated adjustments to retirement savings and upped husband’s 401(k) contributions to make up for a few paychecks that didn’t have contributions during the job transition
• went in to do my labs for my annual wellness visit and the nurse somehow failed to order them 🤦‍♀️ stopped at the good donut place on the way home to assuage my annoyance at waking up two hours early for no reason 🍩 went back and actually did the blood draw the next day
• annual wellness visit — and now I have a bunch of follow-up appointments to schedule… got my first mammogram booked yay
• hung out with a friend for the first time in a while!
• walked with my friend on a beautiful sunny day ☀️