What did you do this weekend?

I had a 5-day weekend, so my wife and I decided to get away with our 15-mo twins. We were limited due to COVID, of course, but we found a small cabin for rent in the mountains. We brought everything for our Thanksgiving meal with us so we didn't have to venture out anywhere once we got there. I was really looking forward to it because the region has very little light pollution, so star-gazing was going to be wonderful.

But then of course everything went wrong! It rained almost the entire time we were there, so star-gazing was out due to clouds. The rain also limited us to a few hours where we could go outside and explore nature. Which is such a shame because it was a beautiful little area. There was a stream a short walk from the cabin and a steep cliff on the other side of it. Then of course the cabin itself was much smaller than we'd imagined. The pictures had us thinking the bedroom was its own distinct room, where we could put the twins down for naps and bedtime early so we could have a few hours alone to actually relax at night. But nope, it was a one-room cabin with a TV, couch, bed, kitchen, and bathroom shoved into a single area. So we couldn't actually put the twins down for bed until we went to bed, which meant we had a couple hours of exhausted, pissed-off toddlers at night. And then I fell going down the steps coming out of the cabin. Landed right on some rocks and was sore most of the time.

We enjoyed watching the Thanksgiving parade on TV with the kids and eating our meal, of course, but everything else just kinda sucked. My wife and I were in crabby moods and the kids were bored, so we decided to go home early. It's funny how quickly our moods improved once we started packing. The ride home was even kind of nice because the kids slept and my wife and I had some quiet time to ourselves.

So yeah lesson learned...if we're going to go on vacation with little ones we need to plan it better.

I wrote a script to help me find new radio stations. It parses the wikipedia page for public radio stations and then searches the summary of each individual radio station's wiki page for search terms that I specify, excluding pages that contain blacklisted search terms. Next step is to give the wiki page for independent radio stations the same treatment. I'm mainly just looking for music stations that have decent variety and/or are interesting in some way, and don't have huge blocks of commercials or annoying DJs.

If anyone is interested in something like that, let me know. I could easily share the script but I've also thought about either putting up a curated list of stations and/or making a simple web app for people to do their own searches on.

Also, if there are tools/websites that help with discovering radio stations, I'd love to hear of them. I couldn't find much with a quick google search.

I finally broke down and ordered some dog agility equipment: four jumps, a tunnel, and a set of six weave poles. We haven't been training for a good 3-4 years and I've really, really missed it. I'm hoping it will give me something to focus on this winter, even though I don't think we'll ever compete.

I bought my first car. It's a used plug-in hybrid, so it's been fun cruising around with the near silent motor. I also realized yesterday that it has semi-automated parallel parking. I've already found many excuses to use that.

I spent the holiday weekend at Ocean Beach in San Diego. My significant other just wrapped up their MBA program and we don't have family on this side of the country so we decided to get away from our apartment for a socially-distanced vacation. Ocean Beach dog beach is probably one of the better dog beaches I have been to and we managed to get an Airbnb a short walk away from it. I spent a few days before traveling doing a ton of meal prep, putting my food saver to use so we would have meals ready to go.

Overall, it was probably one of the better vacations we have had, even with COVID restrictions. Our day was essentially: sleep in, go to the beach, walk back and eat, watch movies the rest of the night. No driving around, trying to find parking or going downtown, or going out to eat. Simple but very relaxing.

We did try picking up from a restaurant chain called "Urban Plates" for our traditional Thanksgiving meal. What we thought would be a quick online order ended up being a 2.5+ hour wait. The demand was unprecedented for them and they were wholly overwhelmed by the sheer number of pick-up orders and drop-in ordering. But it all turned in our favor when we were offered a refund on our meal, a $75 gift card, and free delivery for a meal that feeds up to 8 people at a later date. Extremely generous for a simple $50 order.

Last weekend I installed an outlet over my fireplace for my TV. This past weekend I patched and mudded the drywall, primed and painted, and now it looks good as new.

I did a load of winterizing in the backyard - picked up what felt like a zillion things and put them in the outdoor play bin, stacked the patio set, raked the sandbox, found the air conditioner tarp, threw out an old decrepit air condition tarp, prepped the lawnmower for storage, prepped the winter storage shed for all the long term storage stuff, especially the bikes, cleaned out the good shed and put the summer stuff in the rafters and the winter stuff at a reachable spot (mostly toboggans, but some snowball makers and a snowman kit), put away all the spring / summer tools, got out the winter tools, filled the de-icer receptacle, added winter windshield washer fluid to the van, got out the Christmas decorations. That mostly was not fun. I also worked on some of the drywall / house fixes that are now almost complete.

I did some work on my Timasomo project, which was my personal website. It's mostly "done"; I finally finished the script to parse the WordPress entries into markdown and import all the photos, and I finished off the blog and photos section. There are some other sections that I'll add, but I got things to the point that there are working taxonomies, and I started categorizing / tagging photos and blog posts. The front page isn't quite done yet, and there are some rough edges, but I'm overall fairly happy.

I played a game of Ticket to Ride - Nordic Countries with my wife and annihilated her. Final score was 160 - 105.

I did the normal weekendy things - grocery shopping, meal prep, cleaning. And I played a bit of World of Warcraft, which just had a new expansion released last week. It's okay thus far.

I went to buy some clothes with my mom. Since she's working however, she decided it was more convenient for us to meet close to where we were gonna buy said clothes, so I had to use the public transportation available to get there. Unfortunately I confused the time she was gonna call me when she was gonna wait for me instead of when she was gonna leave so I had to wait for her for about 30 minutes in the benches with people walking around which was a pretty good reminder that I am introverted rather than just alone.

A(nother) relative of mine had their birthday so I went there too. Being a typical Brazilian party, they had a grill ready with some typical brazilian pop music and some rice, mayo salad, beef and sausages and some soda. After eating, I went to see my cousin play some Battle Royale and a digital piano. (which I realized I definitely wanted to do and installed a similar app as soon as I got home.)

Also watched the second round of the municipal elections here in Brazil and saw our leftist candidate get defeated by 19 points, pretty close to the polling. ""At least it wasn't the bolsonaro-backed candidate"". One of the most notable things is that the Workers' Party here hasn't won a single capital (apparently thats how we measure a party's electoral success here) for the first time in 35 years and has gotten their lowest result in 24 years (aka before they won the presidency) so clearly they're on their way back to the underground or into some soul searching. If they take the lattter route I wonder what would they change into. I'd speculate they would turn into a "religious left" party since their base is more rural and poor (simultaneously) and the only thing that tends to reach into those areas is churches but I'm not nearly knowledgeable enough about Brazilian politics to take myself very seriously. It also seems somewhat likely that PSOL is gonna be the main leftist party in Brazil from now on which (other than angering me given they have been far more popular here than actual socialism) seems neat given how many smears the Workers' party seems to have against it.

I added continuous integration into my public machine learning library for pytorch model profiling (awwong1/torchprof).
I played around with the hexo static site generator, considering moving away from hugo due to limited markdown mathjax support.
I slept a lot this Sunday.

I've been enjoying the past two days enormously. I didn't do anything fancy/special, really, but the backdrop for this weekend has me giddy: I've got paid vacation for the next five weeks.

I'm very aware that I'm super lucky to have a job at all, these days.
But on a more emotional level I'm super excited by the idea of "I've got no work to do, tomorrow".
No sitting on the phone for eight to twelve hours a day, no being so drained in the evening that you can't do anything, but since you haven't done much "productive" today, you also don't want to sleep yet, because that would mean that the day is over, and you'll have to be back on the phone soon...

I programmed a bit, I watched a movie with my partner, I had some family over for dinner last night, I cleaned the apartment.
But it all felt so freeing...