A lot of things have happened, some good, some scary. Let’s keep it simple and just talk about the last 2 weeks.

It’s a celebration week! Cousin Atlanta has been staying with us and providing wonderful babysitting every day. She finally left on Thursday to go to Germany and then Oklahoma and it’s sad because she’s been wonderful as a guest and so much help with the kids. They already miss her. It also let us go out a lot – my work party was on Wednesday, Beer Club was Thursday, Lance’s birthday, a maker night for Max at his school, a meetup for some old PWP folks and uh…

Frankly, I don’t think I can do much more celebrating. I need sleep and some water.

Atlanta got us an Xbox One! Incredible gift. Of course, I’m trying to play with Max so he is connected and I’m not just staying up being a dork by myself. So few games revolve around anything other than murdering people.

This game ABZÛ is pretty amazing though – I love talking with Max about the different fish.

I’m excited about all the gifts I’ve bought my family – can’t wait to see them unwrap things next week.

We are disappointed at how kindergarten is turning out for Max. He’s not engaged, he doesn’t want to go, he leaves his class and they can’t really manage him. We met with a Beryl Nightingale, a neuropsychologist in the neighborhood to learn about what’s going on with him. She says he’s a Twice Exceptional (2E) kid, which is a term I wish existed when I was growing up. He’s a smart guy so he’s able to learn a lot without paying much attention, but he’s going to be rigid and have a tough time processing the rules of what people want him to do. We’re trying to work with the school to see if they can give him an adequate education. I’m a hopeful, but not certain it will work out.

We also toured some schools for 2E kids, the West End School, the Lang School and the Quad Prep. Each is really impressive in different ways – but I have no idea how we can find the funds to send him to one. I wish the public system would teach him better.

Code

I was able to get some coding done and finish some updates to a cool python script that moves Jiras around through our prioritization process at work. I held myself to the standard I’d ask of others and put tests in and made sure they run fast and cover all the new work.

Also did some neat tricks in jupyter notebooks for people asking questions about our API.

We got asked to do some work around cost estimates for work as well and I was hoping to get time to automate the answer using Boto, but it was apparent really quickly that I could do it in a fraction of the time using a spreadsheet. One to revisit later!

Going to take some time off next week, but of course there’s a giant project due nearly every week until Sam leaves for Morocco, so I’ll probably end up sneaking a little work in here or there.

Bike

NO BIKING THIS WEEK I SUCK.