Yesterday

Writing

• Wrote and published an article on Time Management Tip #1: Pomodoro Technique. How I use the technique and how I’ve adjusted it to fit my needs.

Music

• Had my bi-weekly virtual guitar lesson with Jared. This was the first lesson back, after he took a 1.5 month sabbatical, a vacation he deserves and a vacation that he takes once a year. During the lesson, we didn’t actually focus on any mechanics of guitar this time, which was fine by me because instead, we had a lengthy discussion around where we want to take guitar lessons: what’s the point and what do I want to work towards. More on this in a separate blog post.

Graduate School

• Submitted both homework assignments (apparently a day before it was due: so hooray me) and watched the video lectures while sitting in the back seat of the car, while my wife drove us from Seattle to Renton (see house hunting below, under family section).

Organization

• Miss: I had a scheduled call at 06:00 PM PST with a fellow class mate and I missed the chat. For two reasons: my phone died on the way home and two the event was not scheduled in my calendar, no alerts or notifications. Fortunately, he was still online at the time so we were able to meet over Google Hangouts despite me being 30 minutes late or so.

Family

• House hunted in Renton, viewing three homes and one of which we will submit an offer. We’ll go in at listing price and per our realtor, a friend of my sisters, escalate to about 20k above if there are competing offers. I could really see Jess and I living in the home, the square footage practically doubling the size of our current rental. Funny how having kids changes things. Up until a week or two ago, I opposed the idea of moving to the suburbs, opposed to moving away from Maple Leaf/North Seattle: all favorite local cafes are within walking distance, the amazing off leash dog parks like Magnuson, top notch vegan restaurants. But since COVID hit, my view has changed. Based off of the amount of time we spend at home, which is about 23 out of the 24 hours in the day, I’d love for Elliott to have a little more space, more than the 15 square feet of crawling space that we have now.

Today

Organization

• Plan day and week out by reviewing OmniFocus forecast events
• Process e-mail inbox down to zero
• Migrate sticky notes (written down while walking dogs in the morning) into writing tracker and OmniFocus

Graduate School

• Begin on lecture series for the week, the lecture focusing on virtualization (curious what this means)
• Write up notes taken over the weekend on L3 Microkernel, SPIN, and Mach, three different underlying OS structures, each with their own trade offs

Work

• Finish one pager design document (due tomorrow)
• Review dashboard in preparation for organization wide, weekly operations meeting

Family

• Morning routine of walking dogs at local Northacres park, blending a strawberry and banana smoothie (wait: no much coconut milk so that’s out of the question), eating lunch together, bathing Elliott as part of her night time routine
• Put together loan documents so that we can get a pre-approval for house that we are putting an offer in

Bonus Image

Word of the day

decry – adjective (adj) – publicly denounce

“SPIN and Exokernel used Mach as a basis for decrying Microkernel-based design”

What are you grateful for?

I’m glad I’m writing down what I’m grateful for because its so easy for me to get trapped inside my own brain, my own world, when work (on call specifically) feels like a tornado.

• To be in a financial position to even be looking to buy a home in the midst of COVID-19

Feelings

• Nervous about the move. Just like Jess. Leaving behind North Seattle is scary: we’ve grown to love the city. Will we regret it? Maybe. But the way I see it is that this decision (of moving to Renton) is not a one-way door: we can always move back and rent in North Seattle. Sure, we might not get the same awesome rental that we been living in for 4+ years but that’s a fair trade off. We are doing the right thing by listening to our gut and being heedful to our fears.