Mandaris Moore

It’s been a pretty long weekend. My wife was telling me that we hadn’t had this many activities in a weekend since the pandemic had started. We were out of the house almost all of Saturday because of my daughter’s volleyball tournament followed by a birthday party at the skating ring.

Sunday was filled with a trip to the farmer’s market, seeing my parents, going to another birthday party and then a volleyball clinic.

On top of that, I’ve got this hesitation about how I’m going to handle the coming week.

I wrote that last sentence and then spent 10 minutes saving a gist to github to respond to a closed issue, then surfing twitter, then making a task in OmniFocus before coming back here and writing this.

Well, I’m up in Chico, Ca this morning to take my daughter to a volleyball tournament. She’s really passionate about it or maybe it’s because her friends are also doing it. Either way, it makes her smile.

For me, coming to Chico causes other emotions because I went here for college. Do I walk around campus! Or do I go to a couple of my old favorite restaurants to see if the food is still as good as I remember?

In fact, I don’t know if I’ll be able to see her play because it’s in a gym in a country that wants to pretend that it’s not in an on going pandemic.

Oh, it looks like it’s time to go in.

Smart Glasses by Facebook and Ray-Ban Mix Cool With Creepy

Ray-Ban’s Stories look like classic sunglasses. Except they’re made in partnership with Facebook and have built-in cameras that are hard to spot.

I really liked the video that is included in the article. Joanna Stern is a master of the craft and really like a well crafted article.

As for the glasses, I remember that there were a couple articles about people getting into fights after people found out that they were being recorded. Sometimes, it’s for the better but it’s definitely creepy.

I woke up before my alarm this morning and actually sat up and did some meditation. The day before I had thought about what I was going to do for a morning routine but haven’t committed to writing anything down on paper.

I know that my life is better if I have some kind of start up where I give myself time to do all of these things.

But what are all the things I should do?

What if I don’t wake up on time?

What if my schedule needs to change?

Ultimately, I have to understand that if I want my life to be better I need to do the things that lead to that outcome.

In my Toastmaster’s club we recently talked about what things you should have ready incase of an emergency where you need to leave your home. Something that seems to be more and more common. For example, I live in California and we’ve had a major fire for the last 3+ years and I don’t think we’re going to be seeing many koalas in the wild. Not to meantion all the places effected by climate change.

Anyway, I’ve been telling my family to pack a bug out bag for weeks and the advice has fallen on deaf ears, so I took the time to “Lead by Example” and started to make a bag for myself.

If you are interested, you can look at the emergency kit on ready.gov.

Meeting invites using the default tools from apple is kind of messy.

For close to 48 hours, my home has been without air conditioning. I’m very, very thankful as today will hit 106° F (41° C) with a 67 AQI and that is not air that anyone should be breathing.

Luckily, it was a very easy fix for the repairman and they were in and out of my home fairly quickly.

I’m not too happy with the fact that they person didn’t put a mask on. I put my mask on, but it’s not for me, it’s so that I don’t give you what I got as you move from home to another.

Last night, the air conditioner stopped working. This made for a very long and very hot night. Unfortunately, this causes me an enormous amount of stress due to the fact that I’m renting and the lease is set to renew in October.

With the housing and rental costs going up to unheard of levels, I don’t really want to make waves.

What if this is going to be a huge repair? I’ve been at this location for more than a decade and although I’ve been a good tenant, I don’t know my landlord. With the amount of properties that he owns, he uses another company to manage everything.

To him, I’m a number occupying a space and the cost to keep me here and to fix the A/C might not be enough compared to the amount of money he can get from renting to someone else.

I feel stuck as I don’t think I can go anywhere else even as rents go higher and higher.

I joke woke up from a nightmare this morning. I dreamed that might wife had left her job which I am 100% ready for but that we went to Disneyland to celebrate it. As we were at the park it got dark and we were in line at a counter that looked more like a Chucky Cheese counter, we got some gum that was shaped like the Millinium Falcon.

As I ate the gum, I got dizzy and then I lost my family in the crowd.

I tried to look for them and I couldn’t find them.

I tried to call and my phone wouldn’t find their numbers.

I stopped in on place to get oriented and people started making fun of me.

I tried running but I found myself in the same spot.

I woke up with this feeling of desperation and loneliness.

Not a way to start my day off.

I went to go walk our dog, Lillie for the second time in just as many hours. On the way to little dog park, I saw the basket ball hoop come down. When I got there, I saw that one of the kids that lives in the area had taken it down to try and fix the net.

At first, i didn’t want to get involved.

A kid outside after 8 o’clock.

But, I decided to help him.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get the hoop net working because it was a metal net. I’ll help him set it up tomorrow.

I can’t be the only one who likes “Off the wall” more than “Thriller”.

As some of you may know, I live in an apartment complex. One of the perks is that it has a little gym on the premises. It’s something that they put on the brochure to attract new tenants and justification to raise the rent. I do enjoy the convenience of it and it is a pretty good size room, but you do get a feeling that it’s mostly a check box for management and not something they see as an ongoing project.

There are few major issues with the gym here:

1. The air conditioner doesn’t work. Yes, this is good for those who want to work up a sweat, but the last time I checked we’re still going through a pandemic and I think we’d all be better with a well ventilated area.

2. The equipment is all from the early 80s. I’m happy that we have it but a lot of the stuff is barely working if it’s working at all. The display on the tread mill has red light up digits that make me feel that it should be the count down on a doomsday device.

3. Other people take it for granted. For some reason, people get entitled and thing that just because you’re paying for the gym you don’t have to clean up after yourself.

GoDaddy is cutting off Texas Right to Life’s abortion ‘whistleblowing’ website - The Verge

I might have to rethink my opinion of GoDaddy.

We’re very fortunate to be able to get our children cellphones at a reasonable price thanks to hand-me-downs and Mint Mobile. It’s definitely not a necessity, but has made things a lot smoother when it comes to communicating with the kids about their various after school activities.

Although the youngest hasn’t always followed through on making sure that her phone is on the charger every night as part of our agreed bed time routine. And, last night, my wife and I couldn’t find it. She had fallen asleep and we didn’t want to wake her so my wife and eye had to creep around the house like mice trying to find that last little bit of cheese.

The next day, I asked my daughter where it was.

She said that it was in her binder.

We hadn’t looked through it.

We hadn’t even thought to look through it.

Was it because we trusted her that we don’t look through her stuff?

For and instant, I thought about saying “Do you want us to start going through your things?”

I decided not to. I want to keep this feeling of mutual trust. The trust that I have no reason to go through her bags and that I’m only going through her things I need to.

We’re very fortunate to be able to get our children cellphones at a reasonable price thanks to hand-me-downs and Mint Mobile. It’s definitely not a necessity, but has made things a lot smoother when it comes to communicating with the kids about their various after school activities.

Although the youngest hasn’t always followed through on making sure that her phone is on the charger every night as part of our agreed bed time routine. And, last night, my wife and I couldn’t find it. She had fallen asleep and we didn’t want to wake her so my wife and eye had to creep around the house like mice trying to find that last little bit of cheese.

The next day, I asked my daughter where it was.

She said that it was in her binder.

We hadn’t looked through it.

We hadn’t even thought to look through it.

Was it because we trusted her that we don’t look through her stuff?

For and instant, I thought about saying “Do you want us to start going through your things?”

I decided not to. I want to keep this feeling of mutual trust. The trust that I have no reason to go through her bags and that I’m only going through her things I need to.

In my home, I’m the one who wakes up and makes sure that everyone is able to get to where they need to be that day. In a lot of ways, I help set the tone for how the morning is going to go.

I hear the alarm and then stumble out of bed and go down stairs to make lunches and coffee for everyone else and then wonder why it took me 20 minutes to make two sandwiches¹.

I then grab the dog so that she can go for her morning constitutional and I can listen to 10 minutes of whatever podcast that I have queued up.

But today was different, I didn’t grab my earbuds or play the podcast through my iPhone. I just walked in silence.

I saw the sunrise in my apartment complex and thought about how nice it looked today.

I rarely find myself having moments of peace and condtentment, but I think I found a little bit of it here.

This is a small test to see if the micro.blog mac app allows for post using hugo shortcodes.

I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Batman movies and then asked it to write a Batman movie of its own. Here is the first page. pic.twitter.com/xrgvgAyv1L

— Keaton Patti (@KeatonPatti) August 13, 2019

I’m thinking about challenging myself to write 100 words every day on micro.blog for the month of September. But there are already a lot of challenges in my life, so I don’t know if this would be more therapeutic than other choices that I’ve made.

I came across this today.

how-i-experience-web-today.com

If on micro.blog is using this app.

pushup.page.link

I made it all the way to 20 push-ups. The trick is that my phone is right in front of me and I don’t want to fall on it.

I bought a chemex and Audio hijack…

Did I catch the podcasting bug?

Playing fetch with Lillie

She likes to look down on the peasantry.

Big eyes!