Kevin's Weblog

I’m at around 150 days in on my 101 in 1001 list. I’m still a bit behind the target pace, but picking up momentum. Here’s a bunch of updates that didn’t warrant their own posts.

I’ve been doing more research on polyphasic sleep; I joined the Google group, and I subscribed to a couple blogs. Since learning about the “Everyman” schedule, this seems a lot less daunting. In that version, you have a 3 hour or so core sleep each night and maybe three 20-minute naps throughout the rest of the day. It seems a lot more flexible, and I’d still be gaining 4 hours a day if it works for me. I’m thinking I’m going to give it a try this summer, when I’m hoping the long days will give me an extra boost. I also want to give myself time to go off caffeine for a month or so first, and to practice napping while keeping an otherwise normal sleep schedule.

A lot of the home stuff is slowly getting under way. We’re baking more (yet another load of no-knead bread is in the works as I write), we’ve reviewed last year’s spending and are working on drafting a budget for this year. We got one of those countertop compost crocks, but I’m a little uncertain about it in the long term. It fills up really fast and I’m getting a little tired of constantly taking it out to the larger composter in the backyard (which isn’t really composting because of the low temperatures). We’re trying to pick meals for the week on Sunday, but it’s been kinda rocky so far. We brainstormed chores and frequencies, but haven’t done assignments or started tracking. In theory we have found a babysitter except that we keep having to cancel our planned date nights, mostly due to illness.

I had to admit that 2 of my 3 orchids didn’t make it through the move. One seemed like it was okay initially, but all our traveling since seems to have done it in. (Our plant-sitter was massively overwatering it from what I can tell.) I bought two replacements last weekend.

We continue to look at furniture, but haven’t gotten as much time for it as we’d like. We found pictures of a bed that looks really cool, and we need to go to the store to look at it. Dining room chairs remain elusive. We got a rocking chair for the living room, but I still want a good armchair for my office.

I got the last bills into my bank’s bill payment system, so I’m not writing any regular checks at this point. I got renters insurance, but life insurance is being tougher. For some reason, I can’t get an agent to call me back (and it appears you can’t get a life insurance policy directly online). I have the Nolo will book checked out from the library and am working through it. I think we have 2 camping trips semi-planned for this summer. We appear to have acquired a critical mass of friends in the area, and have been managing to get together with people for dinner for the last 3 weeks.

Ironically, my attempts to simplify have lots of loose ends at this point. I’m waiting until a trip east later this month to meet with my broker to consolidate one more set of accounts. I’m done ripping all my music, and everything I don’t want to keep is on LaLa, but most of it isn’t moving. I need to make another trip to a used CD shop to see if I can sell any more. I listed all my laserdiscs on Craigslist and sold 10 of them, but that leaves about 45. There’s someone who might want to buy the whole lot, though. I still need to stick the list of LPs up as well.

Travel plans are pretty uncertain. I may have overstretched in this area. But, I wasn’t expecting us to do so much travel in the last 6 months, and especially not under such stressful circumstances. One of the camping trips this summer is supposed to be to Crater Lake. Beyond that, I’m not sure at this point.

I’m waiting for an order of MOO mini cards to arrive, then I can strike that out. I’ve done nearly all the changes I want on the blog that don’t involve begging more design-capable friends to help me. Once I write the Haskell site validator I’m planning, the rest of the site cleanup should proceed quickly.

Well, that was much more of a brain dump than I expected, but I guess I felt like I needed to prove I was actually making progress on stuff. Perhaps one or two of you actually read it all and were at least mildly amused to keep up with my seriously over complicated life.

About a week ago, I was cleaning up after breakfast and the little one was watching Sesame Street. When I walked into the living room, she had a piece of paper in front of her and she had written “ELMO” on it. I excitedly asked her how she learned to do it, and she said the show taught her. This was the first time she had written any word other than her name. That afternoon when I picked her up from preschool, she had written “ELOM”, which is pretty good from memory. Since then she’s really taken to copying out new words. There’s an alphabet chart that her grandmother made in her room, and she’s particularly fond of doing words from there (“nest” and “sun” are the current favorites). It’s pretty amazing how quickly she’s picked this up. Just a couple weeks ago we were visiting kindergartens and wondering at how much writing they do in the curriculum here, but at this rate she’s liable to be ahead of the curve by September.