Month: October 2020

For the first time in years, my mind is craving a hobby. I haven’t had one in a long time, and the options I’ve come up with over the last week are overwhelming. Here’s a sampling:

• Learn to play D&D
• Figure out how to make a rudimentary rogue-like game with procedurally generated maps
• Read the stack of comics that has accumulated on my night stand over the last year
• Learn to play guitar
• Build a gaming PC
• Set up a Twitch stream so people can see how bad I am at video games

I’d add martial arts classes to that list, but sadly, the pandemic prevents that.

Related to all of this: I installed Windows on my Mac via Boot Camp so I could play Spelunky 2, and it’s super fun. (This inspired the second bullet above.)

The roadblock I keep running up against is my own impatience. I want to do these things, but I know that most of them will require a time investment before I’m even halfway good at them (especially playing guitar), so it’s hard to convince myself to just pick one and go with it.

Reminds me of this scene from True Detective:

We put out our fall decorations yesterday. Some Halloween-related stuff, but most of it is generic fall-type stuff that we keep up through Thanksgiving. It felt somewhat normal!

We had planned to try out an apple orchard this weekend, but word is that the place is super crowded on weekends despite the pandemic, so that’s out. It’s a bummer, but with the US reporting nearly 60,000 new cases yesterday, it feels safer to skip this tradition rather than force it to happen. The kids are bummed, but the house we moved into has a tiny fire pit in the back yard and we have the ingredients for s’mores, so that’ll probably help.

Dealing with virtual school continues to be a mess. I spend at least half an hour per day trying to figure out why Google Classroom won’t let one of our kids into their class meeting. We’ve remedied some of the sharper edges, though, and I’d still rather be doing this than sending them back in-person.

Our oldest is using an old 13" MacBook Pro that I had lying around. It needed a new battery, so I sent it in for service, and now it’s her school computer. It’s better for her than the 8" Android tablet the school issued. I feel guilty for giving her such a leg up technology-wise when I know other kids are struggling to even get internet access at home. At the same time, I don’t want her to struggle or her grades to suffer because (and this actually happened) she has trouble finding the punctuation and shift keys on the virtual Android keyboard.

There was an Apple event this week. I want about a dozen HomePod minis. Tiny iPhone 12 looks neat, too.