A Now page is a dated update about what I’m currently focused on.
Thinking about
I am one of the lucky ones. My employer mandated everyone who can work remotely should do so, as of March 16th. I’ve done ten weeks working from the table in my craft room and business has largely carried on as usual for my division. We have excellent healthcare and our employer pays the lion’s share of the costs. We don’t know when we will go back to our offices, but we have a corporate update every other week telling us we won’t go back until we can do so safely, and that it will probably be months from now.
Inputs
Biggest influences recently are Janelle Shane’s book “You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place,” and Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson’s book “Remote: Office Not Required.”
The first book made me look into data science and machine learning as a possible study avenue, so I’m watching PluralSight classes on data science. The second book I read because I wanted to check I was doing remote work right. Turned out there was a lot I could improve on.
Craft and Creating
My 1914 Singer sewing machine was made in Clydesdale, Scotland, between January and June of 1914. I oiled it thoroughly and used it to make face masks and drawstring bags. After hearing we will be home for months, I got a Babylock Presto 2 electric machine, and I’m amazed to see the innovations in a hundred years of sewing machine technology. The new machine will thread the needle itself! There’s a lever for that now.
I’m carving a cooking spoon for a friend in New York from maple wood. It is a right-handed spoon with a shallow bowl and a right-angle corner on one side to reach into the edges of pans and jars. Sawing it out took a while because I couldn’t go to Perennial and use their band saw.
Finished three dishcloths on my loom from kitchen cotton using a pattern with a pick-up stick, which is a new technique for me. After that I warped to make a pair of kitchen towels. Found a new way of messing up the warp by leaving it loose and floppy, fixed it and the loom is back in business again.
Started knitting a 1950’s inspired bolero from Mongolian wool I got from a Kickstarter last year by ULA + LIA. The wool winds well with no knots or tangles, which is a treat.
Husband has been watching Asian bread videos with subtitles, we have made carrot buns, caramelised apple buns, and tomato cheese buns so far, all were delicious. There’s still regular sourdough bread baking going on.
Posting some favourite artists and artwork for a serenity break in your day.
Hasui Kawase
- Tsuchizaki, Akita
- Morning at Nijubashi Bridge
- Frosty Morning in Nagaoka
- Evening at Tagonoura
- Morning at Mito Beach
Caz Novak’s Pacifica and European series
Harmston Arts serigraphs
galleryReina colour pencil work
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Katsushika Hokusai
- The Great Wave
- The Fuji reflects in Lake Kawaguchi
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Karen Spratt especially the Hokusai and Venus pieces
Ben Kwok’s Bioworkz animals
Heather Brown’s Surf Art
I’ve been reading poetry lately and my newest favourite is Warning by Maw Shein Win. Below are older friends, from school and old books and dusty libraries and long summer holidays, in approximate date order of writing.
The Flea by John Donne
I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud by William Wordworth
She Walks in Beauty by George Gordon, Lord Byron
Hope Is The Thing With Feathers by Emily Dickinson
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Adelstrop by Edward Thomas
Night Mail by WH Auden
Walking Around by Pablo Neruda
Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen
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Warning by Jenny Joseph
First Day At School by Roger McGough
You don’t have to smile all the time on a video conference. Maintaining ‘interested-engaged-face’ is exhausting. Tell people it is OK not to smile, and OK to turn their video off for a few minutes. Spending a whole day bouncing from one video meeting to the next is exhausting.
A little yoga helps with tight hips and legs, especially pigeon pose and downward dog. Mid-morning workout breaks are a mood-booster, if nothing else for the smug feeling of not having to workout after work. I have to make myself get up, stretch, pace, and walk during the day, where in the office I spent a lot of time walking between meetings and to talk to people.
It is a rare meeting that is without a visiting cat, dog, child, or spouse. That’s absolutely fine too!
Commute time has turned into ‘purring cat wanting to show how cute she is so she gets fed’ time. It’s an improvement but I really miss my highway driving time and singing in the car. Singing in the car in the garage isn’t the same, and the neighbours can hear me.
Karate lessons and group class is happening over Zoom, and it’s working, I’m learning Long 4 kata, which is new to me. Sworkit is making me get regular workouts in also.
My sewing machine, a 1914 Singer model 28k (‘k’ means it was made in Clydesdale, Scotland, obviously) with a turn handle, still works. So far I’ve made a face mask for a friend and a lined drawstring bag for me, which is more sewing than I did in the previous decade and a half, or possibly ever.
This has been a weird week for everyone. My company went global ‘work from home if you can’ starting 16th March, 2024, and I’ve never done more than one day of remote work before. Getting a home office organised, negotiating for desk space with sun-loving cats, and dealing with both Cisco 国内网络加速器 and Sococo struggling under the load was tough. The quiet was deeply strange after being used to an open-door office outside the kitchen in an open-plan company.
On Wednesday, my karate studio closed. On Saturday we heard that St Louis county will be mandating people stay at home for 30 days as of Monday 23rd March 2024. We baked bread this week, and made curry and chilli and lentil soup. Hubby and I watched some of the movie 加速器去哪里下载, but it struck too close to home and we turned it off. My church is doing the second week of streaming services at 10am today.
I ripped out a hat I was knitting because it was too tight, and washed and blocked a shawl from handspun yarn. I got the fibre from Punkin’s Patch at the Kentucky Sheep and Fiber festival in Lexington in May 2024 with my friend Laura H, two days of sun and chatting and wandering and animals, with a bourbon distillery visit.
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Thinking about:
Pondering my career and what I want to do with it. I’m thinking about a master’s degree but a traditional MBA doesn’t interest me enough to spend years of work on it. So what other subjects would hook my interest enough to complete a degree?
Inputs:
Reading more mysteries and thrillers to balance the business nonfiction books. I’ve always been a voracious reader, my parents used to drop me and my sister off in Ipswich County Library on Saturday mornings while they did the grocery shopping and we could take six books home a week.
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Carving wooden spoons is a new craft to me, and I love it! I’m a responsible adult who can be trusted with knives, gouges, and rasps. An hour of sandpapering can transform a piece of wood from a rough-cut chunk into a smooth spoon ready for finishing. I’ve always loved wood and the curves and shapes of spoons.
Knitting is a safer travel project, and I plan to avoid buying yarn in the first six months of the year to use up some of my stash. Still weaving on a rigid-heddle loom and experimenting with using a pick-up stick to add texture.
Did a lot of reading in 2024, 61 books in total, 48 were new to me, 13 re-reads, 5 on Audible, and 11 books left unfinished. 23 were nonfiction, 39 were fiction. I’ve noticed an uptick in the number of books I read per year, going to keep tracking that to see if it correlates to my level of burnout and stress. 2017-19 were big reading years, and stressful burnout years.
I bought my first sheep fleece in 2024, at the Kentucky Sheep and Fiber festival in May. Round Barn in IL processed it into 8oz of roving and 4730yds of yarn that looks like fingering weight. For the non-knitters, that’s about enough to make a sweater for a minivan. Planning a loose cardigan and a weaving project from that. The fleece was from a sheep called Blue 620, a cross of the Bluefaced Leicester, California Variegated Mutant, and Texel breeds, which I had never encountered.
Took a class at Perennial on 14th December, carving wooden spoons. I made my first spoon there and caught the bug, I have now made five and I’m still a long way from being good at it. I like the smell of the wood, the smoothness of the knife cuts, and the sharp, sharp tools. My Kevlar safety glove has saved me many times.
Lots of work travel in 2024, to Springfield MO four times, and Denver CO four times. I spoke at three conferences, Connectaha in March, KCDC in July, and CodepaLOUsa in August. I’m accepted to speak at Connectaha again, and I’ve submitted to KCDC.
I am wondering about the future of this blog. I’ve had one since January 2002. We’ll see what 2024 brings.
Thinking about:
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Stimuli and input:
Several books have been a big influence lately:
Radical Candor by Kim Scott
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett
I go through periods where all I read is nonfiction, business-related books, and a friend loaned me Thief of Time, which brought back years of happy memories reading Discworld books as a teen. Sometimes I just need to pause reading to learn and read for pleasure.
Craft and creating:
Still weaving, I have several scarves made, a kitchen towel, and my next project will be dishcloths. There’s something satisfying about using an everyday object that you made, seeing it be useful, even just putting it through the laundry.
Knitted a toy duck, planning to make a second one to fix some things I didn’t like about the first, and to make it less bulletproof and more squishy.
Exercise and health:
Switched to a standing desk and a squishy mat in work to deal with neck pain. It was not an easy transition, but now I stand most of the day.
I want to start re-learning my karate kata, they’re a good exercise I can do while travelling (except for the staff and cane ones). Going to start with my favourite, Long Two, which I did for a tournament in 2010 when I was a purple belt (the second belt of eight in my system). I won my division took home a three-foot-tall trophy.
Our eight month old kitten seems to be desperate to get outside, either into the garage or out the front door. We started harness training him so he could go outside on a leash.
Day 1: Harness sized for an adult cat barely fits 8 month old kitten. Velcro is no match for kitten ingenuity. Thank goodness they don’t have opposable thumbs.
Day 2: Dog harness fits, and kitten cannot escape the clips. Will play fetch while harnessed. Progress!
Day 3: Outside, on the leash, digging at a shrub. Success!
国内网络加速器 In the garage, on the leash, rolling around on the concrete. What is going on in that tangerine-sized brain? Need to replace garage door handle with a door knob. Just in case…
Day 5: Kitten lunged for the front door and got it shut on his head. No apparent damage, got to be more careful.
Day 6: Photographic proof of kitten in a dog harness, on a leash.
When I start learning a new coding language, I work through the same set of exercises each time. They are my coding kata, problems I know the answers to in several languages now, where the goal is to get the same results each time.
Exercises in ascending order of difficulty:
In a console/terminal window, display the number of days until Christmas this year, or a date that is meaningful to you.
Getting input from the user, display the number of days between two dates.
Write that output to a file, including whether the year you chose is a leap year or not.
Concatenate two user-entered words together, output to a console (string manipulation).
Count the number of a specific letter in a phrase (e.g. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” has 3 of the letter e).
Count the number of a specific letter in a phrase entered by the user
Starting from a user-entered number, display “99 bottles of beer on the wall,” counting down to “No bottles of beer on the wall, go to the store and pick up some more.” (loops and control structures)
Display the factorial of a user-entered number (recursion)
Display the cube of a user-entered number
Display the cube root of a user-entered number
Return a true/false for if a given month/year combination has a Friday the 13th.
Count the number of Friday 13ths in a given year (always 1-3, never 0 or 4).
Display which months this year have a Friday 13th, using the system locale for month names (system information, loops).
Get the latest weather data on Mars from http://ingenology.github.io/mars_weather_api/ (JSON file access and parsing).
Display the latest Martian min and max temperatures in Celsius and Fahrenheit.
Display the current Martian Sol (a Sol is the Martian equivalent of a day).
