late june 2015
in journal
today marks the beginning of winter vacation for our oldest daughter (now in pre-k, can you believe it!) and woah, i am happy about that. since she started in school in february, our life has been kicked up a few notches, with lots of going back and forth here and there, lots of planning and scheduling, and very little downtime. being a parent means there’s no true downtime ever, really, but still, this feels like it could be just the big deep breath that i’ve been needing for weeks.
i’ve been working on a few different projects for a while now, covering tech stuff, book stuff, and craftsy stuff. all the usual. ;) all of these i hope to progress on a bunch during the next two weeks.
let’s see, tech-wise it’s lately amara.og to learn how to create valid HTML5 subtitles for videos, taking MOOCs via edx.org like Harvard’s CS50 and the W3C’s HTML5 class, working my way ever so slowly through Free Code Camp, and more. lots of codeacademy and codeschool, oh and bento too. so many resources out there, it’s bewildering but exciting. also i’m always playing around with this here (and others) github pages, making sure i got markdown figured out and all that.
as for the books side of things, i’ve been reading up a storm - well for adult me, at least. thirty+ books so far, and i’ve enjoyed all but one or two of them, and the vast majority i really liked, especially alan weisman’s the world without us, ali smith’s how to be both, frances hardinge’s a face like glass, and ray bradbury’s the martian chronicles. hmm, see here for more. anyhow, i’m getting better at learning to say no to books that are boring, repetitive, bad, or pretentious - or even just books that aren’t for me at that moment. it’s a relief. i think i have enough ocd tendencies that i used to feel super uncomfortable with the idea of not finishing a book. ridiculous! life is too short, you know, to read bad books. i have some other book plans, big and small, but those are best not talking about until i have something to show for it. we shall see. hopefully.
and lastly, crafts. i’ve knitted one item this year. one. it took months - and i’ve decided to put it on our youngest backwards because the collar looks better that way. in other words, it wasn’t a complete success. nonetheless, the knits from the past few years are still being used constantly, so that is a source of pride. cooking-wise, which is a craft, i’ve learned how to cook one particular bolivian dish, sajta it is called, very well and i’m so pleased. it involves cooking tunta too, which is a form of dehydrated potato, a specialty in bolivia. it tastes must better than the description sounds, but anyhow, i’ve always wondered how to cook it and now i know. it’s easy, really. i keep meaning to document how to cook it so maybe that’ll appear here some day.
and that is that. happy friday ~ happy end of june ~ goodbye!
