April, 2022
2022-04-01
April Fools!
No fools sighted today, part of me is glad but another part kind of disappointed that there was no mischevious fun.
Didn't walk this morning, body said a big nope when I got up to turn off the alarm. I won't allow it to say no tomorrow.
Weigh-in this morning at 9:10am was 139.7kg. I can sense the weight loss has reached a plateau. I got some compliments regarding my weight loss at work which felt really good.
Bub has been quite challenging lately. He has a lot of wind and has been crying and crying.
Went to the park with the kids and luckily we had the whole park to ourselves. We really need to get toddler out and about more. The only life he's known is one of lockdowns and isolation and we really need to try harder at showing him new experiences.
Tonight I made some low carb spaghetti and meatballs. Feeling quite inspired lately to make good food; I may need to create a section on this website for recipes.
2022-04-02
Again no walk, argh. My bed is just so cozy with this new blanket and the cooler weather.
Weigh in was 139.4kg at 8:59am.
Today was a good family day. This morning I walked down to Foodworks with toddler to buy some milk and bread for his breakfast. We went ten-pin bowling at Shellhabour Tenpin Bowl and toddler absolutely loved it. Only 1 game however as he started to meltdown because he couldn't have every single go.
After that we went to the new Shellharbour marina and had lunch at The Salty Squid Shell Cove. I had grilled fish and extra salad. It was absolutely delicious and recommend you go and try it if you're in the area. It was windy and overcast so we went for a walk along the marina. Sure I didn't go for my early morning walk but I think I more than made up for it today.
Went to the inlaws for the rest of the evening as toddler was sleeping over. It's so peaceful here without him.
2022-04-03
Did the walk, yes! Daylight savings ended here in NSW so the extra hour of sleep was really good. I had to practically run out of my bedroom after the alarm went off to stop my semi-conscious mind from drifting me back into the cozy embrace of the blankets.
Weigh in at 9:01am was 138.8kg. Feels so good. I tried on a few shirts that I hadn't worn in many months and to my pleasure they were fitting pretty well.
I completed a 24 hour fast since yesterday's lunch and had the leftover Tuscan chicken from the other night. We were going to go out to the club with my parents but unfortunately my mother starting coughing and we didn't want to take the risk so close to her previously having COVID-19.
Sunday night means roast with the in-laws. I helped my father-in-law run down to Bunnings to get a hedge trimmer and helped my mother-in-law reset the password to her Macbook. The pork belly was delicious as usual.
Everyone extra tired tonight so bedtimes were easy all-round. We have some pest exterminators coming over to do a house spray tomorrow so we went the time before bed with picking up all the clutter. Continuing in the morning.
2022-04-04
Walked this morning and it felt great.
Weighed-in at 9:28am this morning at 139.1kg.
Work was stressful this morning, it was a combination of getting the casenotes in on time and mysterious laptop issues. On the bright side, our house was being sprayed for pests so my wife and bub came into office and received many gushings and cuddles. We had some lunch at the kiosk which was really nice.
After work we set about chores around the house. We had dinner and watched Moonfall. I'm not usually one for disaster movies but this one was quite entertaining.
Feeling very tired tonight.
2022-04-05
Didn't walk this morning, unsure as to the reason. It's a warmer day today.
Weigh in at 10:01am was 138.8kg. Woo, I'm in the 138s. Despite the good number I found myself "feeling fat" today, unsure how else to describe it.
Spent some quality hours on getting Sharepoint up and running today. Had a few phone calls and such and such.
We went to the park with the kids in the mid afternoon. The sun is setting quite early since daylight savings ended so we have to make the most of the time we have.
Made a tasty dinner tonight; Stuffed chicken breast with steamed veggies.
Some solid programming after the kids went to bed. It's been a few weeks since I've done some programming and it feels nice.
2022-04-06
It's raining again, eurgh.
Weigh in at 10:48am was 138.3kg. I'm noticing that the shorts that I've been basically living in for the past few years are now starting to droop down my leg if untied and with something in my pocket. Wahoo!
I continued the solid programming from last night for most of the day. I've created a program that ingests data from various systems and cross-references it. This will allow ongoing auditing of our systems to ensure we aren't wasting money paying for accounts that are going unused.
I've installed OpenRCT2 today, imported RCT1 and RCT2 from my purchases from Good Old Games and completed the first scenario of RCT1. I will create a dedicated article to my ongoing progress through this game, including save files. I'm so glad the OpenRCT2 project exists as Roller Coaster Tycoon was one my favourite games when I was younger.
Went over to my grandparents for an early dinner as it was my mum's birthday. My grandparents are vegan so I ate the curry and didn't touch the hot chips, even though they looked absolutely delicious. My pop had this bread which was only 2.5g for two slices, so I had a slice of toast with some tomato. It was nice to eat a slice of toast.
My friend crashed tonight as she went out for drinks with a new friend.
The rain has been torrential this evening, absolutely bucketing down.
2022-04-07
It looks like the rain did not stop at all tonight. The ground looks totally waterlogged. I imagine a lot of people will be chucking a sickie today or the very least working from home. Suffice to say, I did not walk this morning.
The rain continues, and it looks like a lot of roads have been closed around the Illawarra.
While I did not walk this morning I said fuck it and went for a walk after lunch, my usual route. It was absolutely pissing down and I got drenched, but I feel much better about myself for overcoming the obstacle. Not to mention that the warm shower afterwards felt amazing.
Made some garlic & rosemary basted steak with lemon fried veggies tonight. Unfortunately I overcooked the meat too much :(
2022-04-08
More rain. Oh dear, rain so much rain. No walk. :(
Weigh in at 9:33am was 137.7kg. Feeler slimmer today!
Today at work was jam-packed with Microsoft Power Automate. I'm really buying into the "No Code" stuff. I created a Microsoft Sway page with an embedded Microsoft Form at the end. Staff provide their email address and it cross-references with the staff list on Sharepoint. It then generates a training completion certificate and saves it as a PDF in their folder, updates the completion date on the staff list and also emails it back to the staff member as an attachment. It also notifies them if they got any answers wrong. I completed all that in a single day, amazing! I'm sure some users will find some bugs that I did not anticipate but a handful have completed it so far and it seems to be working as expected.
Made a delectably tasty meal tonight; A cheesy chicken casserole with bacon, chorizo, mushroom and spinach. Fat, fat, more fat and salt, yes please! I won't be eating until tomorrow's dinner with this meal.
I've just realised that since uploading more pictures of food that I need to automate the scaling and thumbnailing process. I load them in GIMP, scale the photo from my phone to 30%, save, then scale again to 40%, then save the thumb. It's getting tedious.
2022-04-09
A rainy saturday morning. No walk but also no food until lunch.
I felt inspired to keep doing Microsoft Power Automate work today so I will likely take a half day during the week to compensate. I attempted to play some OpenRCT2 but could only go for 20 minutes before the desire to work came back.
We went out to the Ocean Beach Hotel for dinner where I had a delicious rump steak with green veggies and coleslaw.
2022-04-10
The weather has improved but I still woke up and went straight back to bed. I even put all my clothes out the night before. Feeling disappointed in myself this morning.
Weigh in at 9:33am was 136.7kg, so that lifted the spirits somewhat.
We went out to the park this morning but it was a bad idea - The ground was absolutely drenched and toddler was very emotional, nobody really enjoyed the outing. We also learned a new lesson; Don't try and go to the park a few days after torrential rain. It seems comedically common sense now that I think back on it.
I answered some Stack Overflow questions today and thought I would share the little bash script I created to help me answer questions. I run this in the terminal of VSCodium. It creates a folder called the ID of the question, and creates an index.php file inside (considering I mainly answer PHP questions). It then moves me into that folder in the terminal. My dream for this script is for it to pull in the actual question itself and perhaps even create files out of the code blocks, but honestly that's a wild fantasy at this point.
#!/bin/bash
URL="$1"
IFS="/"
read -a fragments <<< "$1"
ID=${fragments[4]}
IFS=""
mkdir $ID
cd $ID
touch index.php
echo $URL > url.txt
exec bash
In-laws this evening for Sunday roast and watched the casenotes roll in.
2022-04-11
I bloody well did it, I went for the morning walk. It's been a week since I did it last. It's amazing how much smoother the family morning routine goes when I get up and do the walk. I'm grouchy when I don't go for the walk because I'm usually woken up by toddler. It's not fair on him for me to be grouchy for that.
Weighed in early at 8:44am which was 136.6kg. I'm feeling slimmer today. 4XL shirts are now in the realm of possibility once again.
Casenotes went quite well this morning. Nothing too out of the oridinary.
Spent the day cleaning up documents on the shared drive, which inspired me to write an article about Merging and Splitting Documents on Linux. Previously I would look at multiple Stack Overflow answers, and scour the internet. Now I have my own place to go to get the information I need.
Tonight I made us a Keto Cottage Pie loosely based from this recipe. It was very tasty. I deviated from the original recipe by adding carrot, mushroom and spinach to the mince. I also overdid it on the red wine vinegar so used some baking soda to neutralise it somewhat. I also added some cheese to the egg mixture.
I made a quick PHP script tonight that shells out to convert and saves me the hassle of manually resizing the images. It has some basic support for multiple files taken on the same day.
<?php
foreach (array_diff(scandir('input'), ['.','..']) as $file) {
// my phone always spits out filenames as yyyymmdd_hhmmss.jpg
$date = $output = date('Y-m-d', strtotime(explode('_', $file)[0]));
$i = 1;
do {
if ($i > 1)
$output = $date .= '-'.$i;
++$i;
} while (file_exists('output/'.$output.'.jpg'));
$cmd = 'convert "input/'.$file.'" -resize 30% "output/'.$output.'.jpg"';
exec($cmd, $exec, $return);
if ($return !== 0)
die('Could not convert "input/'.$file.'"');
$cmd = 'convert "output/'.$output.'.jpg" -resize 40% "output/'.$output.'-thumb.jpg"';
exec($cmd, $exec, $var);
if ($return !== 0)
die('Could not create thumb "output/'.$output.'-thumb.jpg"');
echo '"output/'.$output.'.jpg" and "output/'.$output.'-thumb.jpg"' . PHP_EOL;
}
2022-04-12
This morning was definitely a battle of motivation vs comfort. I woke up then immediately went back to bed and it felt like I was a referee at a wrestling match. On one side was a voice telling me to get up off my ass and get moving and that I'll feel better, the other was complaining about the overcast sky and how comfortable the bed feels. Luckily the chippy, upbeat voice won in the end. I went for the walk and ended up feeling really great afterwards.
Weighed in at 9:01am and was 135.3kg. A whole kilogram difference since yesterday seemed shocking. Then I realised I was stark naked and that previously I had been weighing with clothes on. From now on all weigh-ins will be sans-clothing.
Work was work today, not the most exciting but wasn't exactly boring. I had a super delicious omelette from the RLA Kiosk and big props to the people working in there, great job!
My parents came over for dinner and I made us all a cream of mushroom soup. It was really yum but unfortunately a bit too salty, and there wasn't enough! I'm definitely going to try again next week with bigger portions and less chicken stock.
2022-04-13
3 days in a row, the walk was even easier this morning. Forcing myself to think about things other than work, my mind started thinking about this website this morning, and how I've been doing this daily writing thing for almost 7 months now. I legitimately can't see myself not doing these daily blogs anymore. I don't imagine anybody has stumbled across this website, let alone be interested enough to return. But then again, other people are not the target audience for this site. I browsed it on my phone and saw that dark mode looks shithouse, the links are too blue and the text looks strange. I need to invest a bit of time to giving the design a slight refresh.
Weigh-in at 8:48am was 135.0kg on the dot. I'm now lighter than my previous all-time high when I lost weight in my teen years. My regular shorts are drooping even more. I'm actually a little bit anxious about it because these shorts have served me very well. Oh well, I'm sure I'll find some comfortable clothes at a smaller size.
Toddler was off to school today so made him lunch bright and early and played with blocks and cars. He loves blocks and cars and I love him.
My plan for work was to get some solid hours, alone, working with Power Automate to upgrade all our flows to utilise our new Staff list. No dice, things cropped up and it was hard to get back into a flow state again, heh, getit? Flow. Oh shit that's a bad pun, yep I'm a dad.
Because I wasn't really feeling motivated about work after lunch, I decided to start hacking together a silly idea I've had for a while; I've been thinking about all the different ways browsers can be utilised to display the same data; You have regular HTML, XML, XML+XSLT, plain text, JSON, PDFs, SVGs, the canvas element, images, videos, audio. And wouldn't it be silly to have a program that can dynamically generate the same data in all those different formats. You could even have things like outputting the text using HTML tables, abusing CSS's content: ''. using a CSS shapes font or outputting to the Javascript console. The browser has an incredibly diverse means to display information to the user. I setup a bit of scaffolding and can now feed it a PHP array as input and ouput either plain text, JSON or XML.
Inspiration struck me in the mid-afternoon and I went for another walk. I think subconsciously I thought it may rain tomorrow morning so I should get an extra one in just in case.
I tried my hand again at cooking rump steak basted in butter and rosemary. A better attempt this time but I really need a skillet instead of this frying pan. The pan I have is too small so I can't really baste very well. The meat was better cooked but still a bit too well for my liking. I think next time I do it I will cook on high heat for that initial sear, then lower the heat for basting. The veggies were tasty.
I did some Power Automate work tonight after the kids went to bed. I find that working from home and having such flexibility and freedom in my job is a blessing but also has it's downsides. The distinction between home, work, uptime and downtime is basically non-existant and I think about work way too often. Since I worked last weekend I've decided to take it easy tomorrow. Only answer necessary calls and emails and try and focus my mind on things that need to be done around the home. More importantly: enjoy the time with my kids. They won't be young forever and I want to soak up as much of the experience as I can. One thing I need to start doing is setting blocks of time that are "no work" hours. While I'm not currently feeling burnt out because there's so much variety to my role, I can sense it happening if I don't actively make changes.
2022-04-14
No walk this morning. My semi-conscious mind won by really emphasising how tired my body felt and that my feet hurt, combined with the fact it was raining as I went to sleep and still overcast outside. I slept an extra two hours and felt disappointed in myself. I know I did the extra walk yesterday but the whole morning routine just feels shitty without me doing that walk.
I took it easy at work today. Bought some stock from JB HiFi and delivered it for somebody else to deal with.
We went to a new park which was really good. Toddler loved going down the slide again and again and again and again.
Had a nap, that was nice. It's been a while since I had one of those.
Tonight we went over the in-laws and I made us creamy garlic chicken with steamed veggies. They are going away from easter so my wife and mother-in-law set up a little easter egg hunt for toddler. Damn that child loves his chocolate, it's going to be a whirlwind of a weekend.
2022-04-15
I woke up a few minutes before my alarm and my semi-conscious mind had no excuse; My body felt pretty good and I could see the stars in the sky. The walk this morning went by in a flash. The hill I walk on in the middle was comparitively easy today.
Scales aren't working this morning because the batteries are dead.
It's Good Friday today so the start of a 4-day long weekend. We went to the park today with toddler. He really doesn't like climbing and wife and I both feel like we've failed him. We are going to look into him seeing someone about his joints because he often says "ow my knee". However, we're not sure if he's describing any and all leg pain as knee pain.
We had leftover chicken from last night for dinner. Felt really flat so crashed out before 9pm.
2022-04-16
Slept like a log and forgot to put an alarm on. I was the last one awake and rose at 8am. Not sure what that 11 hour sleep was but it seems my body needed it!
We went to Bunnings this morning to get some shelving for the garage. For too long it has sat there like a bombsite and I was motivated to do something about it. I built one of the shelves after a lot of clutter shuffling and the plan is to put our important storage needs on those shelves.
We went to the pool in the afternoon and the boys loved it.
For dinner I went to a local kebab shop and got myself a "just meat box" and cut up some salad to go with it. I was naughty and had a few chips which unfortunately inspired a few cravings for chocolate. I'm disappointed in myself for eating those few chips but realised after those cravings had appeared that I need to strengthen my resolve to just say no.
Drew a fret to wind down the day. These drawings really are great to meditate to while creating. I'm thinking about the walk tomorrow morning before the Easter madness begins.
2022-04-17
🐰 Happy Easter!
Went for the walk this morning and it felt really good. It was nice to go for the walk and only have a couple of fleeting thoughts of work. It's nice to think about other things as well.
Weigh in at 8:54am was 135.7kg. I think the meal I had last night was a mistake, my weight loss has hit a plateau so I should increase my intermittent fasting and increase exercise as well.
We went to the park with my parents and grandparents for Easter and had lunch. Toddler loved going on playground and there was another family there with a really cool rocket toy. He absolutely adored it and we will be getting one for him for Christmas.
Came back home and built a few more of the shelves in the garage. The garage is west-facing so after noon the sun pours inside. Very hot. I'm sunburnt too, I forgot to wear sunscreen. Wear sunscreen kids!
On the slow cooker has been a porterhouse roast with some veggies. It was pretty tasty tonight. My parents came over and mum brought a potato and veggie bake. Bloody delicious.
I've been playing on Stack Overflow all day and have some ideas on how to make my stackoverflow.sh script better. In one of the questions I answered, the person had listed a print_r dump, which lead me to find a function to parse the output from print_r. Having the index.php that is automatically generated by my script include a ../functions.php or similar with some useful functions may come in handy in the future.
2022-04-18
Still worked this morning watching the casenotes roll in. Some people need a lot of training :(
Walked in the morning and it felt great. I put some new music on my iPod so that made the walk more interesting. I almost walked for longer and I think tomorrow I will increase the challenge to myself.
Went to Bunnings again today to buy another shelf for the garage; Now one whole side of the garage is floor to ceiling shelving. The garage looks a lot more "lived in" now. I can actually see some usages for the area other than a dumping ground. We have quite a few boxes to go through together and possibly even some items we can put on Facebook marketplace to sell.
Spent some more time on Stack Overflow today, and played half-way through Dynamite Dunes on OpenRCT2. The plan is to release a page when I complete all the scenarios, providing save files a few days before scenario completion.
Went to in-laws tonight because they were away for Easter. Wife's youngest brother and fiance came over and we played Articulate. Articulate is a really fun and simple game. You have to guess whatever word is on the card but not in the same manner as charades. You have to describe the word using associations, similarities, contexts, etc.
I've noticed that I'm in the pattern of only uploading these daily posts once every week or so. I think the blocker for me is that I need to expend mental energy to figure out manually which of the files have changed and therefore need uploaded. Been thinking about some sort of method to diff the directories between development and production.
2022-04-19
I woke up at 4:30 this morning was stomach pains. I think I ate too much crackling last night because I burped a few times and there was a strong scent of pork. Feeling nauseous, I decided to still do my usual work. Stretching, while it make me dry heave a few times, helped immensely. The walk was more difficult this morning than yesterday morning but when I got home my stomach pain was basically gone.
I found it hard to get back into the groove of work this morning. It was a combination of the 4 and a bit days off in a row (well, not really off off, but off enough) and a toddler demanding attention.
Continued work on Power Automate today. As part of the Staff Intake process, there are many emails that need to be sent. What I decided to do was put HTML files on Sharepoint that could be converted into the emails. In order to display dynamic content I make extensive use of the replace() function. Unforturnately, Power Automate does not have a replaceAll() function or similar, so a lot of nesting is required. I made a handy PHP script to automatically create these strings for me based on a JSON object. Holy shit does it make things easier.
Went to Bunnings yet again to buy more shelving for the garage. The walls will basically be nothing but shelving and I woudln't have it any other way. As I was unloading I had a pleasent moment where, for the first time, I could see potential inside the garage. Like it could be used as more than a dumping ground.
Tonight I made us some low-carb chicken nuggets/pieces. The crumbing is a mixture of almond meal, grated parmesan and herbs/spices. It's missing that crunch that makes crumbing so enjoyable but it was still really tasty.
Oh good. The rain is back, and thunder and lightning. Joy. I'm not sure if we've even gone a week this year without some sort of rain.
2022-04-20
🌿 Blaze it.
I was fully expecting the weather to be dreary this morning but it was actually perfect - Not a cloud in the sky and it's not too hot. Went for my usual walk and things felt great. I appear to be crossing paths with someone else who looks to be improving themself, we've passed each other in the same spot 3 days in a row now.
Weigh-in at 8:31am was 136.6kg. I'm not sure what's caused the gain in weight but I don't feel any fatter. It's probably water retention of some sort. I also go new batteries for the scales so maybe that's playing a part as well.
Power Automate, Power Automate and some more Power Automate today. Oh how I wish they would implement a replaceAll() function. Holy shit am I glad I created that script to make them automatically because I would be giving up if I had to do that manually. Especially when things fail if a value has not been inserted into the Sharepoint list and it is returned null. You get a nice "error at line 0 column 0, null seen. And that's it :(
Constructed the two shelves I bought yesterday, slowly making progress. We have our on-call cleanup on Friday so tomorrow is the day all the garbage goes out on the kerbside.
For dinner we had a fully-loaded fritatta with the left-over veggie bake from the other night. The fritatta was very filling.
Feeling fat tonight, unsure why. I think I've been eating too many cashews and my carbs have been too high. No more cashews for me.
2022-04-21
Felt pretty good when I got out of bed this morning. Did my usual route. As I was turning into the last 1/4 of the walk and older bloke came power walking up behind me. It was so inspiring, he was absolutely smashing it. I tried to keep pace with him but I could tell I would start hurting if I pushed any harder so I slowed to my usual pace. I want to be more like that man.
Toddler woke up earlier than usual this morning and we played with his cars on his new town carpet. Since he's the only one eating bread in the house, a loaf of bread usually doesn't get finished before getting stale. The local Foodworks wasn't open yet so we walked down and walked back. He sat on my shoulders for half of the journey home. So that's 2 walks for me this morning, feeling great!
Mammoth day at work, management meeting and many todos struck off the list. The Staff Intake process and Sharepoint list was a hit and ticks all the required boxes.
Came home and immediately put all the rubbish out on the kerbside with the help of our lovely neighbour.
Wife's parents came over for cottage pie. It was really yummy tonight. I used a hand mixer and totally whizzed the cauliflour to the point you couldn't even tell it was cauliflour, yummmm.
With all these pictures of food I've been posting, it's got me thinking about figuring out lighting to make the photos as aesthetically pleasing as possible!
2022-04-22
Sixth day in a row going for a walk. I'm on a roll! Yeehaw!
Toddler was off to daycare on an unusual day today, earlier than normal too. He didn't like being out of routine and did not want to get out of the care when he got there. We persuaded him with trucks and dinosaurs though. Love you kid.
Work was alright today, didn't get as much accomplished as I had hoped but you gotta have less productive days to know you're having super productive ones.
Surprisingly the kerbside cleanup happened today. This was unexpected as there are other piles in our area that have been out for a couple of weeks.
Went shopping this afternoon for clothes for the boys for our upcoming Mother's Day photoshoot.
Tonight I had another go at making mushroom soup. I doubled all the ingredients EXCEPT for the chicken boullion. It wasn't saturated in salt this time, extremely delicious and very filling. I had it with a peice of Burgen bread, which clocks in at 2.5g of carbs per slice.
Oh joy, the rain has started tonight. I hope it leaves us before the monster trucks tomorrow.
2022-04-23
The rain stuck around last night. I awoke and it was sprinkling on the roof so my semi-conscious mind decided to take the opportunity to sleep.
I spent time this morning organising the garage; I've completed 1 shelf so far. Making progress with it and seeing more and more opportunity to use the space in the future.
It was a big day at the Monster Trucks today! The Bulli Showgrounds were fully loaded with people. The show started at 4pm and we got there just after opening at 1pm. We found a spot and plonked down our camping chairs. Toddler had a great time eating food, playing with his uncles and grandparents. It pissed down rain nearing the end of the event. Luckily my dad brought a ponch otherwise I would have been absolutely drenched. The show had been scaled back somewhat because of the rain. The show was OK. I was hoping and expecting more actual monster trucks but they had non-monster truck performances in-between. The jumps were not huge but I put that down to Australia's strick workplace safety laws and the fact that the fencing around the showgrounds is not adequate to reliably protect the crowd if any shrapnel may fly out.
Trying to get out of the event was a mess, traffic control measures were not put in place to help funnel people out of the showgrounds.
Went back to the in-laws for dinner. Toddler was totally wrecked by the end of the night.
2022-04-24
The rain didn't stick around last night thankfully. I did my walk as usual.
Did some more organising in the garage, put a couple of things up on Facebook marketplace, there has been a little bit of interest.
Realised there's a lot of food in the house, plenty of leftovers options, so good.
Usual casenotes and inlaws for Sunday roast. Toddler is sleeping there tonight because of the pubic holiday tomorrow. It's so quiet... Even though he would be in bed at this time, it just feels more silent. Maybe it's just less thoughts in my mind.
2022-04-25
📯 Lest we forget.
It's cold this morning, and drizzling. I still powered through and did the walk. I'm feeling slimmer and want to keep the progress rolling.
Did some more in the garage. All the interest in those items fizzled out unfortunately.
Put together a monitor stand that I got last week but realised there were a few bits missing. I "fabricated" some parts by super-gluing cardboard together and cutting them out. My desk broke when trying to mount it. Note to self: Don't try and put really heavy, awkward thing on-top of old, flimsy desk.
Parents came over to visit this afternoon.
Made a really yum Moussaka tonight (eggplant lasagne). Wife loved it.
Got really sick tonight. Stomach bug, evactuating from both ends, etc. Not sure what caused it as nobody else has any symptoms. It kept me up most of the night.
2022-04-26
Write-off of a day, dealing with the stomach bug. Dehydrated, headache, mild fever, muscle weakness, aching joints. All signs point to norovirus.
Water, sleep, electrolytes, sleep, arrowroot biscuit, sleep, water, sleep. You get the idea.
By the evening I was starting to feel a bit better. Keeping an eye out for any symptoms in the family.
2022-04-27
Woke up feeling quite a bit better -- Still not fully recovered but all the symptoms seem to have subsided. I do seem to have some chest pain which I think is caused by the harsh vomiting; I'm a loud and gross vomitter.
Weigh in this morning at 10:12am was 131.7kg. Big drop in weight but I put that down to still being slightly dehydrated.
Stumbled around getting a temporary setup up and running in my office.
Slowly getting back into work mode. My head still feels a bit all over the place. After a bit I started to get into the flow state and accomplished quite a bit of Power Automate work and smashed through a few dangling items on the TODO list.
Since I'm the primary cook in our household, my wife was totally drained from taking full-on mommy duties and we hadn't gone grocery shopping this week, we got some food from "Mississippi Wing Co", which seems to just be a different brand name for "Hello Harry". The tenders were pretty good and the coleslaw was nice. I had to remind myself to eat less than my mind desired due to still recovering.
Still undecided on whether it would be good to go for a walk in the morning. If I wake up with no chest pain I will, but if it's still around I will wait another day.
2022-04-28
Woke up and chest still not feeling great so I decided not to go for a walk. It's better than it was yesterday but still don't want to risk it while exercising.
Got stuck at a particularly annoying issue with Power Automate today. For some reason I could not get files inside a Sharepoint folder and add them as attachments to a single email. I could do it manually, but building an array dynamically did not appear to be working. I found that it appeared to be doing a base64 encode twice? The Internet did not yield an answer so I had to do a quick-n-dirty workaround.
This afternoon we had our mother's day shoot with my mum and mother-in-law. It was quite nice and I'm sure we'll get some good photos from the session.
Whipped together a chicken stir fry this evening and it was alright, I needed something light after the illness earlier in the week.
I had a downward spiral this evening that was rather unexpected. I'm feeling like I don't know who I am. I can easily list the responsibilities, habits and tendencies that exist in my life, but when I think about actually who I am, all there seems to be is a void of nothingness. Like my personality consists entirely of serving others and battling addictions. I remember laughing a lot when I was younger. I hardly laugh anymore, and when I do it's a courtesy laugh or laughing because I know people like to belive they are funny. I've spent so much of my life over the past 3 years fulfilling obligations that I can't help but feel I don't really do things for any other reason anymore. Even this daily blog and this website is an obligation to myself... I need to meditate and go for a walk.
2022-04-29
Didn't end up going for a walk this morning even though everything was laid out. I blame that super comfortable suede blanket. It has been banished.
Toddler went to daycare early this morning so the morning routine was quite hectic. I then went into the office straight after that.
Having a toddler at home has helped me develop an ability to concentrate through noise and distraction. I got quite a bit of work done suprisingly.
My wife and bub came round for a car wash and to have some lunch at the kiosk. In a beautiful twist of fate, my nan and aunt dropped by to check out the place. We all had lunch together and caught up, it was really pleasant.
Made a fritatta tonight and it was pretty average, oh well. Can't make a good meal every time.
Hacked together an update to spigg today based on a stripped down version of the incredible Fadeshadow project. Fullpage CSS slider with no javascript. I'm going to clean up things a bit and release a newer version.
2022-04-30
It's the last day of the month! Sure enough, without that devilishly plush blanket ensnaring me with invitations of early morning snoozing, I jumped out of bed and went for my walk. I made sure to pull back the pace slightly so I didn't over-exert myself. It went really well. Great timing as well, as it started to piss down just as I entered back through the door.
Wife's birthday today so made her some breakfast in bed, well at least that was the plan. She woke up half-way through cooking.
We went to the Early Start Discovery Space at the university this morning. Toddler had a good time.
Chilled in the afternoon then went out to Dapto Leagues Club for dinner.
All-in-all a pretty relaxing day.