technonaturalist

As is normal for us, November kind of slowly ground to a halt as there was a rather large thing to take care of and then we focused hard on/got roped into helping with end of year stuff, and December was pretty much a write-off.

15yo worked through a Netflix documentary series about F1 racing as her boyfriend is really into it so she was trying to learn a little more about it. I watched a couple of episodes with her and she told me a bit about the boyfriend’s favourite team and favourite driver and a few of the other drivers, saying that now she at least knew who he was talking about when he was excitedly babbling about them like they were friends she should know. We also marvelled at the pit crews basically disassembling and reassembling a car in seconds.

And I very nearly missed it (okay technically I did miss it coz it’s now after midnight but shhh x_x) because I’m trying to get used to a modified schedule and there was a bit of stuff on today and also the usual not being sure if I should bother postinng because I don’t feel like I’ve made enough progress.

But first one of the year and I am trying to get back into the habit of weekly progblogs.

13yo continued on his dessert presentation experiments, jumping on the Halloween bandwagon with this “vampire” themed one (the bananas were meant to be fangs), and the goblet was a prop we’d bought some other Halloween).

Towards the end of the week where we’re running out of stuff and need to do more grocery shopping, there was this much simpler but still very delicious fare (can’t go wrong with peanut butter as long as you’re not allergic to peanuts).

I don’t think I’ve ever had a last month of the year run according to any semblance of a plan and that may or may not have something to do with my persistent delusion that I can somehow continue doing the same thing plus all the extra time consuming things in the same amount of time.

Pro-tip: it never works.

The end of year display was great, and I had the “brilliant” idea to film the whole thing (I did get permission from the head coach to do it first) and edit them all together.

I got a little busy. Some of it was getting overexcited about my notes (which is so far working wonderfully), a lot of it was comp season, some of it was basically being told to upskill because apparently they need me to upskill which I went ahead and did as I had been intending on doing it anyway (just fast forwarded as the plan had been for next year, and hopefully it won’t turn out to have been a waste of money as I may have been shadowbanned), some of it was getting swept up in roleplaying notes (I get really excited about worldbuilding and trying to craft stories around my players’ characters) including the CoD PvP PbP Discord server (very slow because I still need to read books so can’t get 17yo’s Hunter started, and C who got started is taking his sweet time responding, and T and S who are idling on that server haven’t even made characters yet, I don’t think these kids are the best at pbp XD) and a newly created Pokemon server (playfully referred to as Pkmn PvP PbP but is actually called Frontiertown and I have beeen having way too much fun coming up with character names) where I’m attempting to test out a system I wrote (also very slow as none of the three players I have in there have made a character yet).

This month was just as action packed as the previous one. There was one more excursion with the parents, extended family and Up Close and Local Tours but minus 17yo (who was feeling a bit run down and decided to play it paranoid) to Bunbury, where we stopped by a little cafe with its own little adorably put together food garden.

After that it was off to the Dolphin Discovery Centre.

Title I should be using if I cared about SEO: one way to use Obsidian to manage creative writing projects.

Apologies in advance, I accidentally upsized some of the images in this because I forgot an important character in the mogrify command, and I am too lazy to redo those screenies.

A “short” history

Once upon a time, I used to be a total pantser.

And then I started this project.

August started off really slow and cruisy and them ramped right up into September.

It started with the death of one of 13yo’s fish. He was devastated as it had gotten sick but had looked like it was starting to recover before succumbing. We had a little funeral in the side yard, burying it under the rosemary bush.

17yo had another quarter life crisis (he has had at least one in the last two years) where he decided he needed to “get his life together” and once again asked for organisational tips (he has asked me previously for things that I have already told him about in trying to get them to learn my organisational hacks and how to research and experiment with their own). He asked me for a corkboard (full corkboard as I’d bought them corkboard/whiteboard combos previously, apparently it wasn’t big enough for what he wanted to do) so he could pin things he wanted to organise on it. 15yo overheard and said the same.

Not sure what has been going on with Manjaro or whether it’s just my sense of time that’s been warped, but there seems to have been a longer than usual period between updates. I’ve been waiting for Blender 3.3 for a while as that has the new hair system in it, but Manjaro refused to update.

I finally got it to do a system update by force-refreshing the mirrors, but still don’t know if that did it or if an update was coming out then anyway.

The completionist in me is somewhat annoyed that I didn’t get the September Powerbee. I must have done it too early in the morning or something stupid like that (I did it around the same time as I usually do but my “around” tends to be an hour or so).

Oh well.

My parents have been over and seem to have decided to do a lot of tours this time round (probably because an uncle and his family are also over), and invited us out on a number of them. It’s been great because it’s stuff we either haven’t done for a few years or may not have had an opportunity to do so, and hopefully we’ve crammed enough stuff in to make up for the last couple of months.