• Pandemic, riots, layoffs, immigration crises, cancel culture - what a chill start to the decade.

  • Kid is back in daycare now. I’m nervous, but at the same time relieved to have a few hours of personal and dedicated work time.

  • Entertaining an infant turned out to be awfully hard during lockdown. Baby attention spans range between 1 and 5 minutes. On the other hand, babies find absolutely everything mesmerizing - even a spice cabinet. It also helps that they have very short term memories, so you can repeat fun activities every day without having them get bored. To help occupy the day:
    • Take at least one outing between naps.
    • Toy rotations are amazing - reduces clutter, allows us to buy more toys, leads kid to think that there are new toys every few days.
    • Board books are THE best.
  • In our dual hvac home, our builtin thermometers continually gave incorrect temperature readings, so we installed the 3rd gen Nest with a remote sensor in the baby’s room to avoid having her get too cold/hot during the night. The Nest mostly works fine, except that
    • it starts to cool after reaching 1 degree higher and turns off 1 degree lower than the desired temperature.
    • it’s hard to hack so that only stage 2 cooling turns on ( we have a very aggressive stage 1 cooling)
  • Interesting content watched/read:
    • Micro-living/micro-apartments - we watch these YT videos every so often. It’s a treat and inspiration to see people living the minimalist life.
    • Hamilton on Disney plus:
      • Best show on broadway ever.
      • I must be getting old or getting weird. If I saw this in the theater, I wouldn’t have been able to catch enough dialogue without reading subtitles.
    • Podcasts: I started listening to ‘Beautiful Anonymous’ during my commute in February. I get to hear someone else’s amazing/happy/sad/tragic life events which keep me connected to other worlds.
    • Identity crisis in CS: Imposter syndrome for all of CS ?
    • Currently reading : Harvey Karp’s Happiest Toddler On the Block. Good intro into dealing with the toddler pschye.