I found that sometimes listing what is bothering me lets me concentrate on easing those roadblocks. As such, my obligations post helped a lot with getting things done or at least letting me get a better handle on it.

• Work has eased up a little, but mostly I'm accepting what is changed (baring getting frustrated in an end-of-day Friday meeting). I also have a longer term plan to handle that, so I have plans which helps with my anxiety.
• I went through two rounds of formatting Randy's book. Once I get the updated cover and make changes, I'll have the proof out by end of May.
• I caught on my monthly writing obligations. Since May just started, that means another 10k words is thrown on the stack, but at least I'm not in arrears.
• Rewrote a couple chapters of the commission to get over my roadblock. This was a case that my gut feeling said what I had was wrong, it just took me a while to figure out “what” was wrong so I could fix it.

Related to that, I also set up a now page on my site. It is hooked up to a different repository (no surprise there) which is easily editable on my phone using Git Journal. That way, I can add and remove things as I need and it gives me a little bit of self-accountability.

Household

On the household side, there were also a lot of ups and down.

I was missing a piece to put the trampoline up for Child.1. Sadly, Sports Power has terrible customer service and I couldn't find a replacement except on eBay. After a week of waiting for it to show up, I found that they sent me the wrong kit. So now I'm waiting for them to find out what happened and hopefully give me the correct pieces to fix the trampoline. Otherwise, I'm not sure how to fix it.

On Saturday, I finally got a set of grinding wheels to repair the damage from the tiling. But when I got it down on my in-laws, I couldn't find the Dremel to use said wheels. So now I'm looking for that with no idea where it is.

Going home, I decided to fix the kitchen light because the ballast went out. I got LED replacement bulbs, but then I needed just a little length of wire. But my tools were down at my in-laws so I got stymied. Fortunately, when the kids came home, they brought it back and I spent a half hour getting the lights working again. So at least one out of three isn't bad?

Allegro

Outside of that, sending Allegro through the writing group has been encouraging. It is nice when everyone says its fantastic, they read through it, or forgot to edit. At least for the ego. They also give feedback and requests. Some I can't really do but there are others that I follow my basic rule:

One person is an opinion. Two is a suggestion. Twelve means it's wrong.

Related to that, someone I didn't know (always important) started to read the novel after reading about it on Gemini and gave feedback. Much of it has been very useful plus I found a bug with Fedran's generation. More specifically, the Git repositories linked to the individual stories are not automatically made public. Once I get back to the maintenance CLI for Fedran, that will be the first thing I change.

I'm really hoping to work on my other obligations because I've been feeling the urge to write in Fedran again and that's a nice feeling.

Git and Spam

That does lead into what to do about my Git repositories. I have lot of them (couple hundred) because I do one Git repository per story. But my personal Gitea instance hasn't had a lot of traction or feedback. 99% of the registrations are spam (innocent until proven guilty) and, so far, 100% of the comments and issues are spam. The temptation to just turn off public registration is fairly high, but I want to give the opportunity to post issues there instead of email if someone wants.

(That said, if you want to make any suggestion about anything I do, please don't hesitate. Feedback is feedback and it doesn't matter if you think you are “good enough”. You having trouble is enough for me to look at it and see if there is something that can changed. I also make a ton of trivial typos and can't see them until they are pointed out to me.)

Automated spam is also why I don't have comments on my site. For a long time, I was getting about one good comment every five years and a few a day that were spam. It was worse when this site was on WordPress, less so with Discuss. Even when I put in a bot filter, it wouldn't relent and I spent most of my time shoveling crap off my site than doing anything useful.

The other problem with the Gitea is the “Yet Another Account” that I understand. I don't have a good answer to that one either, but I hate the idea of needing to create an account just to report a typo. I would, but I can't expect others to do that for me.

There is something about the allure of SourceHut's focus on email patches that I really like. The email infrastructure is not a bad one. At least that wouldn't require “just another account” because it would be just sending emails to a mailing list. There are other things that could benefit, like “email to comment” that I've seen. SourceHut would have also been my first choice if it wasn't for some initial feedback that soured me on it (telling me that “http access to a Git repository is stupid” is not a good way to respond to feedback to anyone. I don't like being told I was stupid when, even after trying rather hard to be SSH-only, I still find I need the occasional HTTPS access).

I'm not sure of the answer, to be honest. Switching to SourceHut would be a major undertaking to say the least, mainly because I'm still in the middle of the GitLab/GitHub to Gitea migration. But it is food for thought as is considering an email-based way of allowing comments again, if that ends up being something of interest.

Family

This last week has been a relatively fun time with the family.

Child.0 and I finished working on a LEGO Technic kit, the Pangigale V4 R1 (#42107). That bugger has over two hundred steps. And, despite being a LEGO fan for decades, was my first real Technic kit ever. It took us about a month to build since we do a few steps, we talk about videos like Murder Drones or anime, and just be together.

In the other hours, Child.1 had their birthday and we went to see The Super Mario Bros. Movie. That was a very well paced and entertaining movie. While I'm biased toward any Mario movie, it was nice to see the continuation of the threesome relationship between Peach, Bowser, and Mario. For some reason, that has been my allure and the trailers for Paper Mario (Bowser wanted to make sure Peach had enough to read and was comfortable) and the end of one of the more recent games (after the interrupted wedding, Peach playfully left both Bowser and Mario behind to chase after her) really shifted my perceptions as them being in a fairly stable, though competitive, relationship. I don't care if that is true or not, it's just nice to enjoy the fantasy.

Speaking of romance, Partner and I ended up having another parent's night when the kids went to their grandparents. This time, instead of saying in and watching movies and having steak, we decided to see the Dungeons and Dragons movie and go to a sit down restaurant. It was a real date night and it was… very nice. It's been a long time since we tossed the phones aside and just held hands.

May is our anniversary month. On the 13th, we will have been married twenty-three years. We've been together about twenty-six or seven years, not entirely sure on that one.