December 25, 2024
We had a low key Christmas because my nephew is in Peru with his mom and all of our life activities surround him.
Listening to: Christmas Evil (1980), which is appropriately very Christmasy, pretty evil, and extremely 1980.
What I've been doing with websites:
- I started putting my holiday horror and romance in the crypt kickers movie spreadsheet but obviously didn't finish it before Christmas. There are some New Year's ones so it'll get some use this year.
- Primarily focusing on the blog I guess, my mini project to do a weekly post is fairly successful although I'm already annoyed by it. However, I definitely do see myself keeping up with it monthly!
What's going on creatively:
- Outside of websites and Obsidian, not much. I have been reading a lot and therefore reflecting and writing a lot, but not doing much creatively.
Since it's Christmas I'm not going to talk about working in this one. Instead I'll talk about how the family went down to the National Harbor for my dad's birthday lunch and we ate at a Brazilian place (Fogo de Chão) that had the best coffee and the best buffet food I've ever eaten.
December 14, 2024
I just started using Obsidian for personal knowledge management so at the moment I'm transferring everything in my messy, awful system to here (or at least whatever I can copy/paste).
Listening to: Catching up with this week's news
What I've been doing with websites:
- I've been fairly consistently keeping a blog! Granted it's only been a few weeks, but I'm still proud of myself. I keep a document on my phone called "this week" where I note my reflections and thoughts throughout the week, and often those turn into blog posts full of interesting thoughts and ideas (or I think so, anyway). It feels nice to build a web space for myself and let all my thoughts spill out. It's something I've been missing for a while.
- I'm going to move maxwrites.com so it points here after I pay for the Obsidian publish account (later). I've been in progress copy/pasting things and reorganizing my writing.
What's going on creatively:
- In fall I fell into a journal trend to create a seasonal bingo card, then journal about each of the boxes as you complete them. I LOVED IT. I created another one for winter after successfully completing several BINGOs on my fall card. I love the aspect of laying out my favorite seasonal things with no pressure to do all of them. I love that I have a journal full of activities and memories.
- Most of my creative energy right now is going into websites! I've been slowly adding stuff to my Neocities site and expanding how I want to use it. Also, I finished Zine Therapy finally!
What's going on at work:
- We are in crunch time (you might refer to it as MAX CRUNCH time, if you wanted to). It's been extraordinarily busy and stressful! In November every year, right on Thanksgiving week, we have a classroom approval process for two different semesters to prepare for upcoming semesters. On top of that, the university I work with is piloting a condensed winter intersession (4 weeks instead of 8), so basically we are handling the course readiness work for 4 different types of class/term, and it all has to be done by the deadlines or else there's huge impact to faculty or students. On top of all that? Our learning management system is doing an automatic update that will impact students/faculty that we have to prepare communications for on a short timeline. How fun!
- I am working on wrapping up as much as I can before the year ends. I've been documenting several major processes (including managing the pilot semester I mentioned). It's interesting and fun to puzzle together these processes that the university has been doing for years, but never had documentation for. In my interviews I've found out that everyone has a different idea of what these processes are for, who does what (as long as it's not them), and almost no one is in alignment on terminology. Excited to be leading the documentation efforts for these so people will stop pointing fingers/blaming others when things go wrong. Everything will be properly scoped, all steps and considerations laid out, and moving forward theoretically these processes should have more positive impact!
