Weeknote 2024-W42

2024-10-21 20:45

Some random front-of-mind pieces from my week.

Family & Friends visiting. Sister and 1yo niece arrived Sunday, left today. Dad staying for another few weeks - currently at his rental property around the corner. Friends staying at mine for the next three nights. Married couple with a 4 and 2 year old. Aunty Jo dropped in too on an unexpected visit. It has been super fun. Busy, but fun. I've enjoyed yarns with all, runs with Soph and playing with my niece Mackenzie (Macksie). I let everyone go nuts at home. Toys everywhere, spaghetti on the floor. It's fun. Hopefully Uncle Zak isn't teaching too many bad habits.

🏢 Work - As mentioned in a previous post, things progressed rather quickly this week on the employment front. I landed on the decision to move on. Something popped up - Installation Technician - I applied on Tuesday and after a couple of interviews, by Friday I had an offer. It's Monday now (I'm a day late on my Weeknote). I handed in my resignation today. My start day is 18 November so have 4 weeks to wrap things up in my current job. This is a huge shift and I am very excited.

🏃 Ran 54.1km / 2,148m profile

Had a good few runs with Soph, between baby duties. Took her on some hilly jaunts, and a couple runs around Lake Hayes, which I'll be doing more frequently now my regulars along the Kawarau River are closed because of slips. Lake Hayes is a bit more popular than my usual, but it's nice to see all the friendly faces (a sign my anxiety is improving), and is a beautiful loop with boardwalks through wetlands, undulating trails and mountain views in the backdrop.

🚶 Walked around Arrow River, visited the Queenstown Gardens and back and forth to my local cafe a few times. Stuff I don't usually do unless I've got family visiting. It's been really nice eating and walking at new places. There are lots of ducklings around at the moment. Saw an older cranky duck trying to murder? a small flock, and mumma duck fighting back. It was pretty brutal.

🍜 Had dinner at Tanoshi Japanese restaurant with the fam. The service, atmosphere and food was amazing. We had pork ramen and a bunch of tapas dishes. Highly recommend if you're ever in Queenstown. We had a booth and high-chair for Macksie at the Five Mile branch. There's one in Queenstown itself, which is a bit of a smaller venue. I liked the ramen so much I've decided I'm going to try my hand at making it at home. This recipe looks like a good place to start.

🥃 Drinking my homebrewed kombucha now. Just using the standard English Breakfast tea. It's delicious. Really nice to have a bottle in the fridge at the ready with this warmer weather.

🌱 Started harvesting Spring crops. Check out the Crop Log.

💻 The Odin Project - No progress for second week running. Got the javascript module to go. Probably start up again next week in the evenings.

💻 Tools - While dad and sister are here I grabbed their phones, installed RSS readers, gave them quick rundowns how to find and add feeds and subscribed to a couple. I didn't want them to faff with login credentials or subscriptions so these ones worked well:

NetNewsWire - for iOS (dad). Simple, no login required.
Feedly - for Android (Soph). Simple, no login required.

I like to plant little seeds for a better tech life. Some things stick. Some don't. That's ok.

I use FreshRSS. I like the configurability.

🎧 Listening to...

SomaFM - Awesome listener-supported web music radio. Predominantly playing the Indie Pop Rocks! station which is a nice middle ground for everyone, and it gets the little one dancing and throwing her hands up in the air. So cute.
Quite enjoyed the 2-part The Toughest Concepts in Web Development series on the HTML All The Things podcast. Although I don't need or understand a lot of the concepts (yet?) I found it a good overview of what's out there, which is always good to know as some future bottleneck or use-case will trigger that thought "oh yeah, that's that thingymabob they were talking about" and then you can jump straight to learning it.

📺 Watching Altered Carbon Season 1 - Got one more episode to go. A lot happening in these later episodes. I'm contemplating digging out the book.

📚 Reading The Highly Sensitive Person - Still waiting for my purchased copy to arrive after I had to return the borrowed one to the library.

📸