{"id":509,"date":"2016-04-05T22:17:05","date_gmt":"2016-04-06T03:17:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/?p=509"},"modified":"2016-04-05T22:23:57","modified_gmt":"2016-04-06T03:23:57","slug":"update-for-442016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2016\/04\/05\/update-for-442016\/","title":{"rendered":"Update for 4\/4\/2016"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of days late again because on Sunday I couldn&#8217;t be bothered to do anything responsible after church, and yesterday I went to sleep practically right after dinner. I&#8217;m also trying to make these updates shorter because my long update last week scared me off of doing them a little, so I want to write less so it gets done and without taking all week. I&#8217;m not sure I wrote less this week.<\/p>\n<h2>Project updates<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Math relearning<\/strong> &#8211; I finished the introductory material for the EngageNY curriculum, and I am finally ready to enter preschool. So hide your collections of 5 or fewer items unless you want them ruthlessly counted!<\/li>\n<li><strong>Daily routine<\/strong> &#8211; I stuck to my evening schedule decently last week, though I had lots of interruptions, and I want to be extra careful to follow it this week so I don&#8217;t give up on the whole idea. I&#8217;ll wait to write about it on the wiki till I&#8217;ve had a few more weeks of experience. I&#8217;ve added a routine for Saturdays, and Sundays I think I&#8217;ll leave for doing whatever, other than these updates. I&#8217;ve also added a schedule for my workdays, which nicely breaks up the monotony and highlights the need for focus. If I only have an hour to work on something, it becomes very obvious to me when I&#8217;ve gotten too sidetracked.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Books<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;ve been listening to the audiobook of <i>Guns, Germs, and Steel<\/i> by Jared Diamond, mostly during walks and household tasks. It&#8217;s a wide-ranging treatment of a question I&#8217;ve had for most of my life: Why has the West dominated the world? It&#8217;s dense with historical details, which are hard for me to follow, so I&#8217;ve been listening for main ideas.<\/li>\n<li>During my devotions I&#8217;ve begun reading <i>Colors of Goodbye<\/i> by September Vaudrey, about her journey through grief after losing her remarkable daughter to a car crash. It appeals to me because I want to learn how people cope with different kinds of pain and because her daughter is someone I&#8217;d like to learn from.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Podcasts<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li><i>Serial<\/i> season 2 just ended. You can binge listen to both seasons from <a href=\"http:\/\/serialpodcast.org\/\">their website<\/a>. <i>Serial<\/i> is a journalism podcast that reports one story per season, stretched out over a dozen or so episodes. It&#8217;s fascinating and has brought the idea of podcasting to a broader audience.<\/li>\n<li>Occasionally I try to catch up on some short story podcasts I listen to, <i>Escape Pod<\/i> and <i>Podcastle<\/i>. Last week a story that stood out to me was &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/podcastle.org\/2013\/06\/20\/podcastle-265-the-copperroof-war\/\">The Copperroof War<\/a>.&#8221; It&#8217;s the kind of story that makes me feel like a lot more stories could be told about its world, epic stories.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Life updates<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Socializing<\/strong> &#8211; Last week I had meals with three different friends and a surprise conversation at the grocery store with another friend I hadn&#8217;t seen in a while. Then Sunday I got together with my friend Tim, as I usually do, and we watched <i>Batman v Superman<\/i>. I liked the movie, but I&#8217;m open to people&#8217;s criticisms of it. My favorite part was the philosophizing in the middle. If only they could&#8217;ve kept that up during the fight scenes. Anyway, this is too much socializing, and I&#8217;ve decided for the good of my projects to remove all friendship from my life. Loneliness is a small price to pay for productivity! Okay, no, loneliness is one of the worst feelings, and I would fail miserably if I tried to do that.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Clothes<\/strong> &#8211; I returned the rest of the pants I ordered and did some more in-store research at Macy&#8217;s, and now I&#8217;m ready for my next attempt at ordering. (Okay, I did it just now, but let&#8217;s pretend I wrote this two days ago.)<\/li>\n<li><strong>Finances<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li>I finally started my taxes. I&#8217;ve gotten through the income part. H&amp;R Block&#8217;s online software makes it easy when you use them year after year. I had so much less data to enter because they already had it.<\/li>\n<li>My replacement credit card arrived. Being a victim of credit card fraud is a strangely mild experience. It&#8217;s almost like any other business transaction. I&#8217;m sure it&#8217;s worse for the banks and retailers, or whoever ends up losing the money.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Work<\/strong> &#8211; I&#8217;m making an ebook of a commentary series published by my current employer (of course) but written long ago by my previous employer. It was one of their major products. Kind of interesting.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Worship team<\/strong> &#8211; Our teams are on a three-week rotation, and mine played this weekend. I felt like I played with more energy than usual.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Death<\/strong> &#8211; At church they announced that the wife of one of my friends had died while they were on vacation. I&#8217;d probably met her once, but I didn&#8217;t know who they meant until they said her husband&#8217;s name. Death is always more shocking when you have some connection to the person. I don&#8217;t know the story yet, but she was pretty young. I&#8217;ll most likely go to the memorial service on Friday.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of days late again because on Sunday I couldn&#8217;t be bothered to do anything responsible after church, and yesterday I went to sleep practically right after dinner. I&#8217;m also trying to make these updates shorter because my long &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2016\/04\/05\/update-for-442016\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89,113,94,121,117,92,120,58,100,122,36,118,105,119,114],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-clothes","category-coping","category-credit-card-fraud","category-daily-routine","category-death","category-ebooks","category-life_updates","category-math-relearning","category-movies","category-people","category-podcasts","category-project-updates","category-taxes","category-worship-performing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":510,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509\/revisions\/510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}