Journal – Week Off Bucket List
Second Dinner has a “summer shutdown” for the week of July 4th. I believe the purpose is as a perk, as well as to coordinate summer time off rather than having folks stagger their breaks. It’s probably more productive to have 1 week with everyone off than to have 2 weeks at half staff.
I totally forgot this was coming. Last weekend we took a trip to Mt. Rainier after Juneteenth, but didn’t make any plans for this week. (Aside: If you didn’t get Juneteenth off, then your employer is racist). But as a father of two young kids, I’m duty-bound to home. I can’t take a spontaneous vacation. So, instead, I thought about what I wanted to do with all this newfound free time.
Some ideas for the bucket list:
Write an article every day
Clean my room
Plan a birthday outing for Kegan
Tutor Aero (6yo) a bit every day, since she has no activities this week
Play some ping pong every day.
Go to Microcenter and get my PC fixed (it’s been crashing a lot lately)
Practice SF3 Third Strike and go to the local arcade on Thursday to test my progress
Fix my old glasses (my new ones are wonky and give me headaches so I want to go back)
Go see a doctor (I haven’t had a primary care physician for 2 years)
Test out some experimental auto-deckbuilder stuff for work
Start reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Play some games on my backlog. Elden Ring: Nightreign or Expedition 33
Read a novel (I haven’t read fiction in a long time)
Take some shrooms and go for a hike
Take another stab at my old smash data analysis project using Claude Code
Immediately a few patterns jump out. Broadly speaking, there are four main categories:
Be more regular about something I want to do more
Catch up on self-care stuff that I’ve been putting off
Seek out an experience that I rarely find time for, especially as a working parent
Do work-related side projects
20% of my break is over already, and all I’ve done is clean my room and play ping pong. Clearly this list was too ambitious. I did get a late start since I was sick for most of the morning, but I definitely need to hone in on what I really want to do.
Reprioritizing the categories:
Self-care
Be regular
Seek out experiences
Work
With that in mind, I think this is my new list:
Must:
Clean my room
Play ping pong every day
Fix my glasses
Go see a doctor
Plan a birthday outing for Kegan
Should:
Tutor Aero
Take some shrooms and go for a hike
Practice Third Strike
Write every day
Could:
Read a novel
Play some games on the backlog
Fix my PC
Let’s see how that goes. As for this blog, I had a few article ideas:
UGC Platform Payouts: Roblox and Fortnite Creative’s command economies continue to flip-flop on their incentive design.
Elitist and Populist Hobbies. Inaccessibility drives social clout, but I think it’s a trap.
AoPS / Beast Academy review: why it’s better than most supplemental math education
“This Test is Gonna Be SO EASY” – a personal story about hubris and cheat sheets in my college stats class.
Is Sherlock Holmes Autistic?