Finally, time off. I left work before 1 PM* and won’t go back until Friday. Even that’s just an accounting trick to let me catch up on email before I ditch early for robots. And Shanda is off with me. They even finally see, almost a month too late, the value in dedicating some time to recovery. And so I have high hopes. Learned that alive and sorry are two important things. I like one of those more than the other, but I’m mostly just glad to have the attention. It sounds tough to be someplace where those are both high priorities; not sure I can do anything to help…

I missed robots today. My 2:30 got pushed to 3:30 – which already makes me an hour late – and I got assigned new work in that meeting that I needed done before 10 tomorrow morning, so I didn’t get out of the office until after 5. I did get my errands done before I went home, but I’m annoyed to have done more work and less robots today. Tried to clarify my thinking in discussion with DerbyK. You saw me feeling guilty, which is true though something I’d prefer not to make other people deal with. The bit was trying to peel apart though, past the guilt (earned and…

I can’t decide what I did today. Sort of nothing. But also many things. I pushed a brad through one piece of cloth and unfolded another onto a chair. I moved a bunch of plastic sheets from one table to another and back again. I stored thousands of tiny vinyl letters and emptied and filled the dishwasher. I took Dog for a walk and put out the trash. Talked to Shanda about a book – the C-PTSD one I noted here – and watched 30 minutes of Robin Wright lying to me in the best way*. Played a couple hours of silly Wow D&D and tried to calm our GM…

Robots went well. Didn’t win many matches but everything functioned as expected, and we had far and away the most opposing team points (a proxy for the difficulty of our matches), so it was still mostly high spirits. We had time to make code changes but the risk was too high with our untuned systems to do anything useful. No significant panic from anyone which was welcome. Still too many people but only occasionally intolerable. Shanda drove me there and brought me lunch*, and I got to TV Hulk walk away at the end of the episode (to get to the bus stop). And the robot party eyes were well…

Turns out Apple didn’t update my favorite laptop. I was prepared to buy one it until I noticed the updated machine was the Air. Which is similar but 2mm taller, 25mm wider and has a fan. So it’s not quite notebook-sized and not quite silent. I may still get it – I’m not convinced they’re going to make a new MacBook – but I’m less interested than I was. It’s also hard for me to spend money on myself, even when it’s for a tool I use for hours every week and need for my day job. It’s less money than I’ve given away this quarter but it still feels…

Apple finally announced an update to my favorite laptop that includes 2 physical ports. They are unfortunately both on the same side (fraking 3.5mm analog audio on the other) but it’s still most of the improvement I was looking for. That and more pixels. All the pixels. All in 13.3″. I’ve been a lot happier with my current machine since I replaced the bottom half of it (new bottom case, battery, keyboard, trackpad), but I still think it’s time for a new one. It certainly will be before the next hardware update so I might as well have one now and give this one away before it’s ancient. Talked to Ben…

A hard day for Shanda, at least at times. She wanted my help but I was out until almost 9 PM and by then she was angry enough to make it a moot point – we never really recovered. So another day that ends with avoidance-denial-anger-unload-sleep. And another night when staying up until 5 AM after that feels like a good idea. Robots went okay today. We’re still at 0% functioning auto code and BC is still trying to make the whole thing drop into place fully formed. I pushed past him on some testing and framework changes today so maybe that will help over the rest of the week.…

Here is the public version of the homework I assigned all of you — relief from societal expectations of familial interactions, in forms from commiseration and acknowledgment to scheming and puppy GIFs: https://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/comments/9lneeb/ It’s the sort of thing I think makes RBN so valuable, and I’m glad that you participated in a similar thing. I don’t do most holidays, or at least haven’t ever participated outside of a family context I hated1It’s not Christmas until somebody cries. This is both the tagline to my Christmas action movie and historically true in my experience.. These days that doesn’t feel like such a burden, but it did sometimes in the past. Particularly…

I left hypervigilant off of yesterday’s list because it’s a whole separate category. It’s why I have 40 man days of emergency supplies and why I’m measuring Rev’s water consumption so I can have 40 man + 20 dog days of emergency supplies. It’s why I wear clothes as armor and carry a knife and am ready to flee the country same-day without returning home to pack. It’s why I owned a minivan, and why I am always prepared to use 10 distinct forms of locally accessible transportation. It’s why I maintain a foreign mailing address and bank account and why I am so compelled to obtain additional citizenship. It’s…

Got a second set of robot work done between meetings this week, which is pretty good for me. Usually if I don’t get the work done on the same day as a meeting — maybe later that night if I’m motivated — I have trouble picking it up again until hours before the next meeting. Usually the work is easy enough that it isn’t a problem, but it’s still nice to have things squared away. Helps me feel productive in a week when I don’t always feel like I can achieve lunch. My light day job workload this week has been very useful for catching up on bits of my…