An unremarkable week at work, made memorable only by its brevity. We get an extra day off for Canadian Thanksgiving, which makes for a nice four day weekend. What wasn’t nice is how I spent this extra day off on Friday—prostrated on the couch with flu symptoms and zero energy, courtesy of the Moderna booster I got the day prior. The same thing happened with my previous shot, so with that hindsight I at least knew not to plan anything for the day after.
I slacked off writing this post long enough that I can only muster point form from here:
- 🌳 Rooted
- I seem to have joined and reached out to the right people at just the right time to form a triad for working through My Grandmother’s Hands. The other folks in my group had just found each other and started looking for a third when I sent my message. I feel I’m going to learn a lot from them, and am grateful we found each other quickly.
- I attended a session on Ancestral Belonging today. It’s my first direct exposure to ancestral healing, so much of it went over my head, but I was surprised how much actually resonated. I’m definitely more open to it now than I was two years ago when I first heard of it.
- 🧠 Anki. I’ve spent a little bit of time setting up custom cards/fields for learning words in both English and Russian from the same notes. The lack of preexisting decks, add-ons, or even anecdotal workflows online worries me a bit—is this an anti-pattern of some kind? Another speed bump is the lack of a good Russian dictionary online. I found this one, and it claims to be the only free one out there, but it’s … just ok. The lack of APIs for these dictionary services or prebuilt Anki add-ons combined with the friction of card creation on mobile could make this entire deck building game too difficult. We’ll see.
- 🎮 Speaking of games, I picked up No Man’s Sky on the Switch the day after it came out. While technically it was free due to some trade-ins I’ve been holding onto for too long, this is actually the third time I buy it. I got it on PC via Steam on release day (and was seemingly in the minority that liked it even then), and salvaged a used copy on Kijiji a few years back for the PlayStation. It always felt like the perfect game for a portable console, though. The mix of mining and chill space exploration lends itself well to couch- and bed-times. With the latest update—once it actually gets pushed to the store—the grinding aspect can thankfully be tuned down, and I should finally be able to get sentinels and those annoying bitey plants off my back, so I can pillage their planets’ natural resources with only my conscience’s sting.
Next week I’ll be off on a short maybe-climbing-maybe-just-eating-and-drinking trip.