humming along

it's been a weird couple of days. actually, a weird couple of weeks. there're a million things on my to-do list that generate anxiety when i think about them, but for the most part (mr smear's drama notwithstanding) i've been feeling quite relaxed and have been very good at just putting one foot in front of the other.

it's okay.

mr smear had a better day today, long may it last.

we started the day recording a birthday video for my mother, and using clipchamp was a surprisingly pleasant experience!

i did the dishes while listening to an article being read to me by read aloud: a text to speech voice reader, which was a far superior experience to the narrator app (massive UX fail) in spite of the fact that my computer kept sleeping mid-sentence because it doesn't signal that it's playing audio. i figured out that i could work around that by playing a youtube video on low volume/mute in the background and i'm feeling pretty pleased with myself for coming up with such a dumb hack :P

yesterday, i managed to rework my current solution and refactor all the tests by dinner time. it was a lot of work. this morning, i learned that i needed to interface with a third-party that almost nobody in our company has any experience with, so i spent my day figuring that out and managed to get the job done and dusted before leaving the office.

so that felt good.

i also had a one-on-one with my boss for the first time in a couple of weeks, and it was reassuring to feel aligned again.

i ran into the firefighter on the bus home this afternoon, maybe we'll actually manage to arrange a meeting soon. which reminds me that i bumped into daddy-o quite a while back and still haven't made a coffee date with him...

on sunday i started reading the story of hercules to mr smear from edith hamilton's mythology. i've been using the book occasionally as a reference over the years, but the past week or so i've been reading selections from it. it's lighting my boy up! he loved the story of medusa, and he was enthralled by the story of the cyclops. the story of hercules begins very intensely, reminding me of lews therin telemon, and it gave me a good framing for discussing some of mr smear's recent behavior with him. this evening we read and discussed the first two labors, and even though they're only two short paragraphs in the book we had a really good time picking apart the details and implications :)

gd and i are halfway through the season finale of firefly (she needed to go to sleep), and it's kind of sad feeling like the re-watch is almost over...