i have this weird thing where, if there is something i want to post publicly about, and i haven't done it yet, i can't seem to sit down and write in my journal. i can — and have — done lots of other things in the meantime, but it feels strangely like i am sneaking around in secret. it's one of those weird procrastination brain things. who am i hiding from??
anyway, i finally finished my year in review blog post, which means i am free to do other things that result in public artifacts now! i started wanting to write it about a month ago, but the self-pressure really ramped up when new year's came and went and i still hadn't done it. then i went back to work for two weeks, and i also still hadn't done it. i wrote a little bit in the post itself about why it was a bit difficult to write, but i did it anyway, and i think it came out good enough to be proud of.
in the meantime, while procrastinating the blog post, i started making a suite of tools to make it easier to edit my website. in some sense, this was an extremely ironic way to procrastinate writing a blog post. "once i am finished making this tool, editing my website will be so much easier!" *proceeds to put 30 hours of work into the tool instead of 2 hours actually editing my website*
despite the irony, i am actually super excited and happy with how the tools came out. i really do think they will be a game changer, especially for making image galleries, and making custom gradient styles for my page backgrounds, two especially visual things that i had previously been doing laboriously in a code editor. i ended up building the tools as a static folder of html, css, and javascript files, rather than using a static site generator, because i wanted to keep them extremely minimal and free of external dependencies. along the way, i came up with a way to generate a list of all of the colors used on my website, that updates every time the site gets built, and gets served as a public json file. and then the website tool suite can ingest it and display it as a grid of swatches. i spent a while thinking and trying to figure out how to create swatches and save the data somewhere, only to realize that my website itself is the best point of reference for what colors are used on my website. kind of like self-documenting code or something.
prior to the website-tools project, i did another productive procrastination project in which i spent a bunch of time last week installing some elaborate automations on my smartphone to make it become essentially useless and uninteresting for approximately 12 hours a day. i already don't usually spend a lot of time on phone apps, but i have been wanting to get more sleep, and also have a more focused morning routine that doesn't involve "checking" a bunch of things right after i wake up.
now, i have a custom set of automations where if i log a certain amount of time on my meditation app in the morning, i can use an NFC tag attached to a 3D printed statue of the venus de milo to unlock the more compulsive apps on my phone. otherwise, i have to wait until 10am, when things unlock automatically. then, in the evening, the phone becomes "dumb" again at 10pm. i could theoretically disable these things, but i have set up deterrents that would make it very annoying to do so (and guilt trip me in the process). these are the kinds of things that bring me a weird amount of satisfaction to set up.
i also did another round of printing out my are.na idea cards. i had added 12 new things to are.na over the past couple weeks, so now i have a total of 176 cards. i'm still working through the 4 idea cards i pulled around new year's, but i'm almost ready to pull some more.
a week ago, we hosted a small birthday gathering for my 34th birthday that took place over the holidays (my birthday is the day after christmas). we had to push it forward from december because andrei was sick, but i think that more people were able to make it for the new date anyway, since it wasn't so much in the middle of the holidays. later in the week, we visited andrei's sister's family, and yesterday, i went to a gathering that some other friends were hosting. it's been a pretty social time!
going back to work after my two week break for the holidays was a bit tough because, despite my efforts, my sleep schedule got completely shifted around. so i was very tired for a lot of the first week, and a little bit of the second week. also at work, i helped my boss cut down a pretty huge tree, so that was kind of exciting, and a bit scary.
oh, and one more thing that happened since my last journal entry, is that i helped a client, who is also a family friend, triage and migrate a broken wordpress website. she has had her website running for over 25 years, but she's not a technical person at all so when her website disappeared, she was very distraught. thankfully, i was able to get it working again, but it took a good chunk of time last weekend that i did not expect to dedicate to that.
now, it's sunday evening, and i have tomorrow off because it's martin luther king day. i've still got some stuff i want to get done before my extra long weekend is over, but now that the blog post is done, i feel rather relieved.