Yesterday
A pretty chaotic day. Smallbun's eye doctor appointment took two hours and then I was exhausted from it. While I tried to lay down, she kept making noise, which tapped me out emotionally. After that, Ren thought maybe we would hang out during Smallbun's nap, while I was trying to catch up on reviews (the only thing I expected myself to do yesterday) and that turned into yet another stupid disagreement over boundaries.
Bass and Vocals
Pitch Slide Vocal Range: D1/F#5
98% Rotation:
- Spirit of Radio, Rush
- Black Magic Woman, Santana
Recommended: - Self Trap, Playground Kings
Sauerkraut
Finally jarred the sauerkraut. It tastes amazing.
Smallbun Heated Gamer Moment
No laptops were harmed in the making of these photos.
Today
As I noted in my previous post about goals, I want a day where I'm not grinding on projects prior to me starting work tomorrow. I do not get any gold stars if I work today.
My non-project day boils down to:
- Morning Routine (including retrospective and goalsetting)
- Bass and Vocals
- Workout, Recovery, Shower, Skincare
- Leetcode Reviews
- Tidying, Mail, Email, Weed, Cat Mats
- Rockyard
- Counselor
It's still a busy day, just LESS busy.
Feelings
I'm going to talk briefly about feelings from yesterday because once again Ren had an unpacked expectation (she wanted to hang out), and I cannot relax while there's still work to be done in the day (my reviews). When we talked, she thought that it would take like ten minutes to finish my reviews for the day, and came up mad about it after a half hour of me studying. Of course it ended with her crying and me feeling like an asshole.
I'm not saying that I don't have my own issues, but I want to start with Ren's expectations. Ren has always been a stickler for predictability. If I say something will take an hour and it takes longer, she will get PISSED. The thing is, she runs on clock time and I run on project time. She'll say something like "When can I expect you back in?" and I'll say "I don't know, an hour?" and she'll hold me to that like I swore under oath that I would be back in on the dot. I've addressed this by noting when it's an estimate, but I didn't expect yesterday.
Yesterday, she just... had an expectation of the amount of time it would take, didn't unpack that, and then got angry at me about not meeting that implicit expectation. Her need for predictability has definitely amped up since Smallbun came into the world. It's probably some way of enforcing control when Ren doesn't have a lot. After all, toddlers CANNOT be controlled.
As for my own issues: I fucking hate being interrupted mid-task. Ren and Smallbun both do this constantly. I do my best to be nice about it but after the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth interruption when I just want to be done so I can actually relax, I DO get bitchy. Ren will interrupt me to tell me some little cute thing Smallbun did, because she wants to involve me, but what I want is not to receive blips about things while I'm doing project work, I want to be DONE with the projects so that I can fucking hang out with my wife and kid. Each interruption carries a cost, both mood-wise (it's frustrating to be interrupted) and time-wise (lost context-switching time).
There's also the fact that Ren just feels lonely. She correctly identified (on the 27th) that I was going too hard on a now-impossible goal rather than re-evaluating, but she hasn't gotten any good bonding time with me like she might have expected. This was my fault. Absolutely my fault.
So the big thing that I'm trying to deal with is to make the unpredictable predictable for Ren. Making it so my algorithms reviews aren't something she needs to understand or to evaluate, keeping it as invisible as possible to her, and constraining it hard to a less than an hour a day, preferably less than thirty minutes.
Goals
This is a goals-free day. If I do some stuff to get ahead of them, kudos, I guess, but I'm not setting any of them to In Progress because I deserve like, one normal day before I start working tomorrow.
Backlog
- Survive the First-Week On-Site
- Make progress on Easy Leetcode problems.
- Read A Book
- Wrangle LAN cable going into my study
- Label Pantry, Freezer, and Refrigerator Sections
- Level and Till First Terrace
- Plant Cold Season Crops
- Make Progress Returning Gravel Area To Soil
- Pay For Critical Pest-Proofing on Farmhouse
- [Optional] Mentor on-site to discuss concrete footing of gym front wall
- [Optional] Make Progress Hemming Parking Area With Granite
- [Optional] Side Yard Tree Removal
- [Optional] Asphalt Quote
- [Optional] Fix Upstairs Bathtub Fastflow & First-Floor Bathtub Leak