We took a trip out to Liberty Island and engaged with a hollow symbol of things we think we value!
Mother’s day I took Max and Z out for hours to let Sam not be a mom for a bit. It was good but EXHAUSTING. I love them so much and wish that it didn’t require so much fighting. Or maybe that I didn’t fight so much.
Bonus song for the week:
Tap Tap…
So, I’ve been a busy boy. Biking has started up again and I got a few days in this week.
Max has been learning to read pretty well and is sounding out words he sees all over the place. I like that he’s teaching himself to some extent. At school he’s only in the B reading group, but at home he can get through E and F books. It’s really exciting because reading is such a big part of my life that I really want to be able to share this with him.
As a result of showing Max some bees and bombs gifs he was into asking for that every night for months. I almost ran out of internet art! Slowly I got him into just listening to me as I read The Watch aloud.
Wednesdays Sam and I go to special therapy with Beryl Nightingale to learn how to deal with Swale’s twice exceptional behavior. I think we’re making progress because this is the first week back from his spring break and when I picked him up from school his teacher said he participated in everything and has really improved from the beginning of the year.
Zelda has turned into a little chatterbox. She just started naming circles and triangles, she’s got opinions about everything and she’s super funny and super cute. She’s doing a lot of pretending to be dogs or lions and is always ready to go on a walk.
At work I’ve managed to spend some time doing interesting code work. I probably shouldn’t but it was too juicy to not grab. We’re changing the namespace of our client libraries to better brand them. That’s good! But it means that anyone who’s currently using our client libraries would have the code completely break for them. That’s bad!
So I’ve written a little utility that wraps the client library python wheel and outputs a set of legacy wrapper scripts that bridges everything and does it dynamically!
I call it snowchains (a wheel wrapper, getit?) and it was also a good chance to get to know sphinx, tox, RestructuredText, Abstract Syntax Trees and python reflection internals – a real geekfest of learning. Hope to get it open sourced if possible.
Speaking of a real geekfest of learning, I snapped up the python humblebundle super quick.
Kyle at work helped me figure out an issue with jumpstart having problems installing z. It seems that if you run a script in non-interactive mode it isn’t sourcing all the resource files so it doesn’t see certain paths so it can’t tell that my tool is already installed.
On Thursday I registered for the City Challenge New York Obstacle Race. Some folks from work are joining me and I’m hoping you might as well. The last one was fun other than it raining. I put in some work and Vimal, the proprietor of Cafe Hudson came out to be my personal photographer. He got some verrrry sweet photos.
Not bad for an old guy
If you can make it to Szechuan Mountain House 6pm on Sunday we’re going to go eat some crazy fizzy spicy Szechuan food. This place specializes in delicious numbing Mala food – I stumbled on it while exploring on my free night out a week or 2 ago and was really impressed. I’ve never eaten anything quite like it. Also I will turn as old as an actual mountain.
This is the 6th week at my new job.
I’m really enjoying the new toys to work with there – there are so many smart folks and they’ve been doing the right thing for years. I’ll suggest a clever solution and they will point out they’ve got that in their plan or that they considered it and it doesn’t work for good reasons. The tools, the documentation, the culture, it’s all really impressive.
I’m working in tighter boundaries – instead of nobody caring about performance I find myself in meetings with high level people where we are talking about differences of 200ms. We’re hiring! Get in touch if you’re interested and I can refer you in.
There’s no dress code and that’s been really nice. It makes it much easier to bike in – so I’ve been doing that way more than usual. I skipped a few days due to rain and I’ve still done 36 miles this week. Since I joined Strava I’ve ridden 100 miles.
I’m sweating less for a 6 mile ride and I’m noticing differences in how fast I can go up bridges and such. I also don’t have as much energy just waiting around in my legs – they get more tired and I’m not giving them much rest at all.
I’m doing weight watchers with Sam and it’s definitely affecting my choices. Now that there’s points I’m eating way healthier. And the sous vide machine has been helping – it’s easy to pop something in when I get home and then finish the cooking after putting kids to sleep.
The boy got sick this week and we had to take him to the urgent care center because his heart rate seemed very high. He refused to take anything to bring down his fever, I think that’s what caused it. So we go to the urgent care and they say take this medicine to reduce your fever and he refuses to drink it. Ultimately they say, then we have to give a suppository.
That’s no fun. But when they came back in a few hours and said it’s time for more medicine he looks up and says “I’ll do it the easy way. Bring me the cup!”
I’ve had a chance to volunteer on the texting team for the Beto O’Rourke campaign and it was fun and easy. I HIGHLY encourage you to give it a shot because Ted Cruz can be beaten. If you can’t donate money, these days it is super easy to donate time.
Closer to home I found that since I am partially domiciled in NY-19 I can register to vote there and there’s a good candidate in a toss-up race in House. I’m going up this weekend to learn how we can volunteer to get Antonio Delgado in and John Faso out.
Baby Z is taking her first walks and she points at her belly if you ask her where it is! She also is playing with Max. This morning they both had fruitsicles (to keep Max hydrated) and she kept leaning over to wack him with it! It’s so wonderful to see them loving each other.
A young woman conducted an unauthorized science experiment with an unfortunate result. At school early, before morning bell, she was in the lab and mixed some common household chemicals in a bottle. There was a small explosion that injured no one.
She has been expelled and is being charged with a felony.
I am Kiera Wilmot. I was enthusiastic and bored in high school. I did unauthorized experiments, some of them very very stupid. I was well known as a smart person who did very very stupid things in high school.
I was not expelled or arrested, I was given guidance and understanding and was often yelled at for doing stupid dangerous things. The authorities at my school did not screw up my life by putting a felony on my record or kicking me out of school. I stand with Kiera and other troublemakers.
As a former troublemaker and soon to be parent of a future troublemaker I am very worried about the zero tolerance policies at our schools. They are crazy and would leave me a drain on society instead of a productive taxpayer.
Manchester Orchestra is really putting it all out there for this version of Virgin, but I think the kids really make it:
I know there are other good songs with kids singing.
Any other suggestions?