Weeknotes, 2025-08-31
Going to try weeknotes for a while, mostly inspired by the great ones from anh and jenn schiffer (but I’ve been seeing more and more great examples recently).
It was a good week. It has been dominated by one big milestone and one large project.
Major
Back to School
5yo started Kindergarten! On Monday we had a classroom visit and her school had a “fun fair” (the highlight of which was definitely shaved ice), and on Tuesday school started for real. She gets to do “car line” this year, which involves her walking to and from class on her own (with lots of responsible adults around). Her cousin got to do it in the mornings last year and she’s very excited for it. This amazing kid continues to blow me away.
The Garage
My partner and I have spent much of this and last week cleaning out the garage. This is quite the undertaking. We’ve got a bunch of stuff from her aunt and my mom, both of whom have passed away; lots of big, mixed emotions around those. And I’ve got the additional “fun” of finally going through boxes that have accumulated from one move to the next, never having been opened. A handful of these have been packed since I first moved out of my parents' house (I have found my class schedule from my senior year of high school, my SAT scores, and a school phone directory), and a handful more show up each time I move.
Some of this has felt like triage; there’s definitely another round of this in the future (and going through the many boxes of photos that came out of my mother’s house after she died is a whole separate project). But I’ve now done a first pass over almost every box, a lot more stuff has gone away than stayed, and I can now actually see what’s left to evaluate it properly.
I think we’ve taken six carloads of stuff to Goodwill and we’ve almost filled up our second trailer load for the dump (plus a lot of recycling). It is slow going and emotionally taxing, but feels good. Lightening.
Minor
Aside from that:
• We were dog sitting this week for an astoundingly cute puppy, Bear. He’s very young and was born with a cleft lip so still needs to be hand fed from a syringe. I didn’t love having to do that every 3-5 hours, including overnight, but he’s awfully sweet.
• 5yo finished up this round of swim lessons. She didn’t quite “graduate” from this level, but she’s making really good progress. It’s fun to watch.
• We went on a family bike ride near the waterfront after school on Friday. It was lovely; 5yo has gotten so good on her bike. She’s very distractible, though; many, many unannounced stops. She also got to splash around in one of the fountains, which she loved and was adorable to watch.
• I finally saw Superman. I thought the first half was a little rough but the second half was great, and overall this is the first time it felt like a movie really understood Superman since Christopher Reeve.
• There has been remarkably little computer touching this week. The last several, actually, with a little travel and end-of-summer stuff going on. The first week or so of that felt nicely restorative, but now it feels like I’m neglecting part of myself. Next week should get more balanced.
• Despite that, I picked up a trashcan Mac Pro from FreeGeek. I’ve wanted one almost as an art object (to go with the G4 cube) for a long time; coincidentally, I also now have a project where I need a system with several cores but don’t care too much about overall speed, so this might be a reasonable choice. And the prices have finally come down enough (sometimes, like this one) that it made sense. More or less.
• Board meeting for the Plan 9 Foundation. Productive but nothing remarkable, I think. Minutes to come on 9fans.
Media
• Superman. Fun and good.
• I’ve managed to dilute it some, but KPop Demon Hunters remains in heavy rotation.
• Part of that dilution has been that 5yo has come back around to Taylor Swift, especially 1989.
• I found True Believer by Hayley Williams via TikTok. It’s got a nice bite to it, and that second verse cuts deep into what needs cutting.