School district has explicitly said it’s not going to make a decision about tomorrow until between 2:30am and 5:00am, so we have to get everything ready tonight knowing full well that it might prove to be vain by the time we get up. Yayyyyy.

A few months ago, I blogged about teaching being something that’s somewhat performative, and that’s on my mind again as the local district announces “Non-Traditional Instruction” for tomorrow.

No, I’m not ready for classes to start next week, but schools are cancelled for snow and I’m under the weather, so kiddo and I are watching the new Wallace and Gromit this morning.

After a few years of demanding more sleep, it looks like my body is following up with becoming a lighter sleeper, too.

When I went through an Esperanto phase years and years ago, my dad once asked why I was so interested in studying a language with no practical applications, but joke’s on him because I can follow dialogue in Saga way easier now.

I know that all kids parrot what they hear their parents say to a certain extent, but kiddo has gotten very pro-public transport lately, and it makes me very happy.

We have some neat family holiday plans this year, so naturally the part of my brain that likes to imagine how things could go wrong is working overtime right now.

Adding “Star Trek: Lower Decks” to my running list of “things I sample on YouTube that I wish I had time to really commit to instead.” (Other entries include the Keyforge unique deck game and solo campaigns of the Starforged TTRPG).

Putting together a reading list for a class on social media research reminds me how much writing on this serves as an unintentional history. I don’t know if any of this chapter on FB and Twitter APIs is still relevant, but that alone may be worth reading it for…

I’m stress-eating banana bread to put off grading, how’s your end of semester going?

This is a busy week, so I really don’t want to be spending time updating a shared course that I’m not even teaching next semester… but I am getting to learn more about SSHing into a VM, and that’s legitimately cool.

Reread some feedback from a journal editor after a couple of days, and while I still disagree with it, it’s at least more reasonable than I remembered it being.

All the guilt I felt about cancelling our local news subscription vanished during the corporate slog I had to go through to actually make it happen. Looking forward to redirecting funds to news orgs with a little more respect for their subscribers.

I will never not be angry about the term STEAM, even when it’s being used in good faith by people I respect.

I know I’ve made this exact post before, but it’s relevant again this morning, so: I agree with the advice to leave one’s headphones at home to practice mindfulness while running, but I’m exhausted this morning and don’t think I’ll even get my shoes on without an actual play podcast to motivate me.

Sun. afternoon, after chatting with other parents at birthday party: “Wow, spending time with fellow adults is great.”

Sun. evening, after Zoom siblings’ game night: “Why don’t I do this more often?”

Mon. morning, barely functional from not enough sleep: “Oh, right.”

Current status: Copying information from one text message into another and reflexively almost adding Markdown blockquote formatting.

For the first time in a few years, I’m sorting feed subscriptions into folders instead of having a “monofeed.” Combined with Reeder’s lack of unread counts, I’m pleasantly surprised how this has encouraged more mindfulness in subscribing and checking feeds.

Next self-imposed challenge for improving my website-first approach to social media: How can I “repost” content from either Mastodon, Bluesky, or Micro.blog in a way that embeds it in the post on my site but then links to (or otherwise shares) it when that post goes out to those platforms?

Scientific inquiry report: Hand warmers work well enough that I feel dumb that I haven’t been using them, but they don’t fix the main problem of numb fingers. My current winter gloves usually do the trick, but it’s time to invest in some “lobster claws” for really cold commutes.

In the spirit of scientific inquiry (and getting my colleagues off my case about the color of my fingers when I get to the office), let’s see how much protection these expired-in-2022 hand warmers provide against this morning’s freezing temperatures.

Duolingo is one of those apps I really loved once but now can’t see as anything but creepy adware. It’s hard to complain when it’s teaching kiddo more French than I ever managed to, but I still worry I’ve sold her soul to that little green owl.

Some of my recent posts that I like the best have naturally been to the one part of my site for which my Micro.blog POSSE relay isn’t working. Guess it’s time to teach myself some JSON in hopes of building a more reliable set of feeds.

Kiddo is expressing her distaste for her “read aloud” homework by putting a lot of obviously false enthusiasm into her performance.

Kiddo’s describing defeated Pokémon as “dying” is really forcing me to confront the premise of the series.