Weeknotes 21

I would typically euphemistically refer to “current events” but let’s be plain: COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has dominated our lives this week.

We’ve been rallying together with our neighbours and are sharing a precious online supermarket order. I intend to repay their kindness in bread made from my fortuitous flour stockpile.

With UK schools now closed, more people need to juggle childcare with remote working and I really want to make this work in my current team. I’m hoping “The Basecamp Guide to Internal Communication” and Hailley Griffis’ “Asynchronous Communication and Why It Matters For Remote Work” will come in handy as we move to work more asynchronously.

For those of you joining remote calls when you can’t really control the level of background noise (e.g. because your six-month old is really enthusiastic about eating his porridge), Alex recommended Krisp App to me. I haven’t tried it yet but might give it a go this week.

Now that I am working from home for the foreseeable future, I was surprised to discover that the daily decision whether to wear socks or not has become much more significant.

NetNewsWire, an RSS reader for iOS is now out. I admit I’m still struggling to get back into the habit of using an RSS reader versus mindlessly checking individual websites in turn.

Adrianna Chang’s “Refactoring Legacy Code with the Strangler Fig Pattern” looks like another great dive into tackling legacy code in a considered, incremental way.

Happy Mother’s Day! Or is that Mothering Sunday?

Cabel Sasser has been putting up Twitter polls for MIDI songs to play on his Roland Music Player. I was proud to contribute to Friday’s vote, resulting in Smash Mouth’s “All Star” and, as I enjoyed the tinny beats, E stunned me by singing along, revealing that she knew all of the lyrics.

Keeping the weekend spirit alive, yesterday I indulged in a little flower arranging, adding a little homemade flower food made from a squirt of bleach and a sprinkling of granulated sugar.

To celebrate the end of winter, I removed the Sellotape from our patio door and stepped out onto our tiny spit of outside space. Our planter resembled something out of “The Last of Us” so I cleared it of dead salad plants and tilled the soil. It wasn’t quite forest bathing but was surprisingly restorative.

I learnt that the strange outcrop of salt on the outside of our water softener is known as “salt creep” and tackled it with a combination of a sturdy brush and one of my three trusty cans of WD-40 (WD-40® Specialist® Water Resistant Silicone Lubricant, for those of you keeping track).

One night, as I put my Kindle down, E asked me what I was reading and I replied “Children of Ruin”. She scoffed, “of course; that’s a very Paul book title.”