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Rereading Moon of the Crusted Snow. What a friggin' book! I need more "slice of life" and First Nations fiction in my life. Miigwech!

With the latest version of my blog I can post from any device, any place, any time... This is awesome!

Been reading a bunch lately. Started reading "Good Inside". A parenting book that has such a simple concept to it, but has been incredibly effective already. Both myself and the kids respond really well to the techniques outlined in the book, and there have been fewer meltdowns. The meltdowns that do happen are resolved in a much more loving way that really feels good!

I read "The Violin Makers Secret". Advertised to me through BookBub as a cozy mystery. I thought it would be a quick, fun, casual read, which it was! But, I enjoyed it way more than I was expecting. It was so heartwarming, funny, and just fun! The characters are a little inconsistent with their backstory, the pacing of the book is faaaaast and sometimes super fast, and some of the events in the book are a little too coincidental. But it is meant to be a fast, fun read and I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish.

I re-read Brave New World. I read it when I was a teenager and definitely did not take it all in back then... The book is awesome! If you haven't read it, just do it! Some of the references are weird because it's 1930's sci-fi, but otherwise it is incredible!

One of the characters in Brave New World, John the Savage, is into Shakespeare. Reading the quotes in this book triggered something in my brain. I think I get the appeal with Shakespeare now... I am reading The Tempest to see what's up. So far I can parse it a lot better than I ever could at school and the imagery is just gorgeous!

Now I am reading "Interview With The Vampire" by Anne Rice. So far it is very good! The description of the transformation is great! Looking forward to seeing where this is going!

I have had weird connections pop up in the books I have been reading lately. For example, Brave New World, The Violin Makers Secret, both quote Shakespeare. A bunch of books have all used the word "usurped"... Just some strange observations that have popped up. Not dissimilar to that Deja Vu feeling...

Started a French course this week. It's a 10 week course in the basics to try and get me talking a bit of French. I think the strategy for success is to fully immerse myself in the language by doing everything in French. Reading, watching TV, movies, Audiobooks, etc... As well ask talking French with the family. Wish me luck!

Added the "GAMES" link to the site this evening! Part of my plan to make this site the center of my creative projects. Continuing on the simplicity train I went through iterations of this addition. First, I thought about having a Games page on the site and then having a separate page linked from there for each game, so each one gets it's own little space and styling if I want. Cool idea, but too complex. Next, I thought I would just create the Games page, then grab embed links from itch.io (where the games are hosted) and host them all on the Games page on this site. Much simpler, but could still be refined! Finally, I realized that the games live on itch.io already. They have their own themed pages there and all that jazz, that I already created... So in the end the simplest approach is to just add the link to the itch.io page of all my games. Done!

In other news, tonight was pretty shitty. I lost my temper with the kids and I am ashamed of that. I am meant to be the one showing them how to act. Lead by example... Well, great example that was... NOT! Better luck tomorrow. I think the main thing I need to work on is just being more flexible and responding to their needs. Giving in to the kids tantrums every now and then is not "weakness". It is not a battle of the most stubborn. I need to learn to admit when I am wrong, or just learn which hills are worth dying on.

Another, final dissapointing note... I got a bonus at work and was forced by my wife to spend a couple hundred dollars on myself... Which is very nice! But, I made a bit of an impulse purchase because I knew if I didn't spend it soon then it would just get spent on bills and stuff. I purchased a pocket sized e-reader. The XTEink 4 Pro. It is highly reviewed and everything about it seems great, but I had instant buyers remorse after purchasing it. Then I couldn't cancel the order in time and after a couple of weeks it finally arrived. So far the experience has not been great. Reading on it is fine, but getting the books on there and working with the system itself is very difficult... I will put some books on there that I like and take it around in my pocket to see if I like it over time. I am probably feeling extra anxiety and frustration with it because of my mood I am in re the kiddos. So maybe I just need to give it a fair chance. Once the books are on there then it should work great, and I can put a large SD card in it so I only have to do file transfers every now and then.

We will see how it all goes...

I am dusting off this site again! Like many bloggers and indie web folks, the website updates come in waves. It has been a while since I last posted but that is not a bad thing. Consistency is tricky when life is always throwing new challenges at you and it is not a failure if you cannot keep up with all your interests on top of personal responsibilities and general day-to-day life that needs living.

Currently, I am focussing on making things simpler and more effective. I often find myself getting bogged down in the details. While I enjoy getting into the weeds and learning things deeply, it is time to take that knowledge and leverage it to my advantage by stripping things back to their simplest, most effective versions. Not everything needs to be perfect, and there is often an easier way to get things 90% there, and then you can decide on wether you want to keep going for the remaining 10%.

Take this website for example. Originally, I had it set up using Jekyll, which allowed me to create blog posts using Markdown, which is great because I write markdown in Obsidian for my personal notes and journal anyway. Using Jekyll I was able to create the blog posts quickly and easily, then I created a development version of the site to test changes with. Next, I updated the CSS and the style of the site to match my mental vision, which was bright purple with diagonal stripes and bright yellow text! While this looked cool, it was a bit hard on the eyes, and I would run into CSS class clashes when using different HTML elements, and it was starting to get tangled up... Then I created a cronjob on my home server that would loop through one of the directories in my Obsidian vault and upload any blog posts I had written in Obsidian that day using the Neocities CLI.

All of this was an excellent way to learn about setting up a more robust and complex system! But, when I get real with myself and how I use this site then it is a lot of overhead for very little return on my time... Plus it is overwhelming when things go wrong or I migrate my server and need to re-setup the dev site and cron jobs, etc... BRUTAL! So, it is time to bring it back to basics. No more Jekyll, no more automatic jobs, simple CSS (literally). My blog will now be a timestamp and a bunch of "p" tags in HTML, instead of separate pages rendered by Jekyll. Any other projects I want to host on this site will be static pages that I create by hand instead of having Jekyll create their content dynamically based on the blog posts or other content I create and tell it about.

Simple is the key to getting more done, enjoying the creative process, and writing a ton LESS documentation! I am trying this approach to all aspects of my professional and personal life to see how it goes. So far it is a very enjoyable process, and very satisfying when I manage to make things easier on myself!

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