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What did you do this week?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
Slowly de-stressed from an absolute shit and extremely stressful last two weeks (spoken as someone that doesn't get stressed easily). Week was generally getting better day by day right up until last night when the expected, but unwelcome, occurred. I have two best friends, "the guys", whom are easily the most important individuals in my life and have been for the many decades we've known each other. As is expected at our age, parents have begun to die and so one of my best friends' mother passed away after an extremely hard 18 month battle with aggressive cancer.
She'd been placed in hospice, so it wasn't unexpected, but it's the first parental unit loss we've collectively had and it occurred after a long period of pain and to the one of us that doesn't deal with stress well. There's the shared pain of witnessing the ones you love the most in agony in addition to the feeling of loss of someone that wasn't your biological parent, but nonetheless raised you in a sense through years of interaction and time spent with your best friends. So begins the stress and grieving that goes with the loss, preparations for funerals, and support of those involved.
I'm sorry for your loss. My grandmother passed away suddenly this week and it's been difficult too. You sound like a really compassionate person and I'm sure your friend also recognises that. I know from experience that just being present and offering your support can be a great comfort. Best of luck to both of you moving forward.
Managed to turn my sleeping schedule stable, and even a little pretty. I now go to bed at around 8 PM and get up at about 5~6 AM. (Yes, I sleep for about 10 hours. Until the situation is resolved, this is probably my normal sleep length.) Not the best time to go to bed in a building with paper-thin walls where people like to party, but at least it's somewhat stable.
Not a lot of actual work has been going on, and it doesn't sit well with me. I'd like to get over my depression and get doing again, but I know it ain't that easy. Ideally, I'd like to sit down and work on Intergrid again – make it a thing worth using – but there's so much anxiety around it, I can't even touch the code. Funny how the things you care about can scare the piss out of you so easily.
What I need is a genuine fuckin' break. Give myself a few days off away from the physical here, enjoy a different situation, walk a lot, see a lot, each good food, but not too much of it. It's also something I can't afford right now. Money is a bitch not to have.
Ideally, I'd move the fuck away from here on a permanent basis. Live a life somewhere else, make it worthwhile. That requires a flow of cash – not much, but it needs to be stable. That means either a salary or doing something that's good enough for patronage and donations, and I'm not a salary person, but I'm not making anything good right now, either.
Here's a cup of water for making something good, and making life worthwhile.
I worked off-and-on on a poorly-thought-out reimplementation of Markdown in awk. I'm now considering a groff-like macro language, but I don't even know where to begin or why that would be useful. This all started because I wanted to move away from Hakyll on my personal site, but again I'm not sure why I want to do that.....
I biked to work this week though! It was great.
I find that questioning your desires is bad habit. It reduces your self, demotes producing the actual thing, and makes life seem less meaningful in general.
If you have reasons to believe something is worth doing, put the effort in. If you're wrong halfway through, at least you acted on what you thought was a good project. Acting on it makes it all the more likely that you'll act on the next thing, which may well be the thing that makes it click for you.
Elaborate for the ill-educated, if you will.
Hey, thank you for the reminder and the kind words. I'll work on another piece of the puzzle today! It's still inchoate in my mind.
Groff is a typesetting program used for UNIX man pages. I can't find a ton of stuff on how it works, but it uses commands to format text. It's super old but it looks like this:
You may be interested in reading up on HTML preprocessors. Pug (mentioned in the article) sounds similar to the example you gave.
I made a kitchen knife (first knife I've ever made!), I started my fairly long-term rebuild/reorg of my workspace (all my tools are moving to individual work carts so I can reconfigure the space as required), I wrote a bunch of code for my kiln controller project and today I crashed my bike and am now covered in road rash and bruises (bike is OK, thankfully).
It has certainly been a week of events.
Got sick. Lots of ice skating. Got my bag stolen.
Nothing incredibly meaningful and yet this week has felt weird, like I'm on autopilot on things I don't usually do. I've been less hungry, eating radically less without actually trying (something I've tried to do for years without much success) and finally no longer stuck at the weight I was at.
Moreso, I've been having a lot of fun ice skating. Bought my own skates which was a weird experience as I had to re-learn from scratch and I can't leave them on more than 20 minutes at a time without my feet feeling like hell. I went almost every day even when I was sick this week. Just lots of good progress; on the 14th the girlfriend and I are doing a "love on ice" event, so I'm still trying to get better. Going back Monday.
I've not felt this way for a long time: Learning something I'm looking forward to know how to do better… and deeply enjoying the lack of skill as the progress sets in. Most learning experiences are frustrating as I constantly feel limited, but this, I can just put on my skates and glide; get out of my comfort zone a bit and I'm not worried about not knowing or failing. And I get to watch others with tons of experience figure skate just a few feet away which is cool as hell.
Last time I felt this way about a learning experience I think was when I learned Swedish.
Got hammered at a work apero yesterday, I didn't saw it coming, we were just chatting and having a good time and suddenly it was midnight and I was drunk af. Coming back home is a bit blurry and I passed out with the lights on... not feeling too good today.
Basically do the 2 things I talked about last week.
I'm back to school, although the first week so far has been mostly just the teachers telling 6 people in my classroom to stop throwing chalk, pencil pieces and paper balls at eachother in 9th grade, making sure a few more people actuallly remember last year's material and are paying attention and just telling everyone to please just be quiet, introducing themselves to the 4 new classmates and introuducing us to 4 new subjects being taught as part of a project of our state government, presumably so our conservative government can say it cares about education while the teachers still get paid between 1-2 minimum wages and lack supplies, although it's only been one week and I (to my own irritation) don't know my nation's politics, much less it's educational policies nearly as well as US politics so I'm still hoping it will actually be good.
I also went to the dentist to remove my 2 milk teeth. Since they were milk teeth the dentist didn't use any actual drills, just anesthetic that made my left cheeks and lips feel strange for 2 hours. Everything went smoothly and it wasn't as long or complicated as I expected.