Friday, September 27 2019

Dear Journal,

Good morning everyone! Happy Friday. This morning it's dark outside. Kind of eerie, kind of cozy. The ominous clouds and cool air are pretty cool to wake up to.

Yesterday was a busy day. If you do them right, Thursdays should be busy. It's really the gauntlet you have to run before the weekend. In the morning I wrapped up some code I was working on and shoved it out to our staging environment. I grabbed a chicken wrap from a food cart, then hung out on the seventh floor while I made a lesson plan for kids code. I riffed on some educational stuff about phishing attacks, then put together a little tutorial for building your own nefarious login page. I went for a short walk around the square, then I did some more research stuff for a project we're starting next week. By four o'clock, I had finished a pretty dense & productive work day, but it wasn't over yet. I jumped on a bus and got home around five, having about a half hour to hang around the house before I had to leave to set up for Kids Code. Marissa was working on a painting outside, so we sat together on the deck. I grabbed a bag of kettle corn to tide me over until dinner. We caught up, I got Rod up from his nap, then I trotted over to the library to set up.

Our Kids Code session went really well. We had a great turnout, and even though nobody worked on the DIY phishing scam I planned, we still had a great time working on scratch games. In hindsight, young kids probably don't come across phishing scams as often. It occurred to me that kids don't have any credit cards, and if you don't have any credit, there's no reason for a scammer to be interested. On top of that, spam filters are generally pretty advanced now. Back when I first got an email, all that stuff used to actually make it to my inbox, and I had to read the message and determine for myself if it was from a scammer. All in all, the kids probably had no idea what I was talking about.

As we were packing up, I got a notification from my phone that an event called "Take a Nap" was starting in ten minutes. I chuckled, remembering how tired I was when I made the event that morning. Funny story, I didn't actually take a nap. I was pretty wired from the busy day, so instead I walked to taco bell to pick up a late dinner, then ate it on the couch with the dogs and watched YouTube videos. Sometimes "me time" is just as relaxing as a nap, if not even more relaxing. For me, taco bell especially is the ultimate indulgence. Eating taco bell is completely unconscious. Chewing the hot cheese and buttery tortilla just empties my brain, and it turns into this weird, gluttonous form of meditation.

Side note: if you're wondering, the correct way to eat taco bell is to let it get cold in the fridge, then microwave it in the wrapper until it's pretty much melted into itself. It's like a completely different meal.

After eating, I grabbed my laptop and hacked a bit on my website code. I finished breaking out some of the statistics. Word count now accounts for both public & private posts, as do "streaks" and "dry spells". But now that all the data is there, I think it looks too busy, and sometime this weekend I'm probably going to move things around again.

So back to here. Friday morning, sitting in the dark drinking a now cold cup of coffee. Right now, I'm feeling pretty content. This weekend is just a lot of hanging out, relaxing, coding, cooking, and I'm going to go out on a limb and assume I'm getting one or two neat birthday presents this weekend. I think it's going to be a good weekend. Ah, and next week is wedding week! My little sister is getting married. All that rigamarole begins for us on Thursday, so I even get a shorter work week out of it too.

Hope you all have a wonderful Friday, and a wonderful weekend. Hope you spend time relaxing, whether that's taking naps or eating taco bell in front of the TV. You do you. Thanks for reading.