Since we did the family Thanksgiving last weekend, the last four days have been nothing but relaxation for us. The six-year old watched TV until her brain melted, my wife read books or did research until her brain melted, and I just kind of chilled until my already melted brain reshaped. Or something. Maybe it’s still a little gooey.

The end of spooky season…

I picked up the RESIDENT EVIL 2 remake around Halloween. I finally beat it this weekend. I’m not usually a fan of games that you have to play through twice to completely enjoy but I went through both the Claire and Leon runs and I’m glad I did. I played the original game on the N64 and never beat it, so this might set a record for the longest time to finish a game.

I also said last week that I would start reading again, and I did. I finished Mexican Gothic, which was a well done little bit of horror. I think pretty early on it became obvious where the plot was going so I sped through the later half of the book but I’d still recommend it ¹.

…start of snowy season

Put up the tree. Immediately the cats starting losing their minds.

We also watched The Shop Around the Corner which is the lesser known of the Jimmy Stewart Christmas movies. Arguably the better of the two.

Remapping my life

Every year around Christmas / New Years I look at the systems I used for my personal life the year before and reevaluate things. This year I wanted to get a head start on it, mainly because in past years if I start something at the beginning of the New Year and then find out three months in it’s not working I think “well I’ve already got three months” in or “well there’s only nine months left?” or some such silly ideas.

Today I sat down and organized Things, Bear, and iCloud to all be in line. Essentially I borrowed the structure from Things (Areas with Projects in them) and used that in Bear and iCloud. So now at the top level of iCloud there’s the areas, and inside of that there are folders that correspond to a project or context for that area. Same with Bear, there’s top level tags for the areas, and second level tags for the projects / context.

Some notes on the process:

• MacOS allows you to add comments to files and folders and show them in Finder. Between that and tags I can’t think of a reason to add an external app on top of this to organize files.
• There’s a folder in Finder labeled something along the lines of “IDFK what any of this is”. I’ll get to it… eventually. The point is there is only one folder named that now, not multiple.
• The remnants of the early days of doing iCloud storage means that the / folder of iCloud is a disaster to organize, so I created this structure inside of /documents instead, and the top level can be whatever apps want to make of it.
• Bear has been the hardest to get through, because for a bit I thought I could just map connected ideas by hashtags, so there were way too many top level hashtags. So now it’s either remove the hashtag, or delete the note, or find a better one.

I did find this in one of my Bear notes, from Think Again:

As Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio told me, “If you don’t look back at yourself and think, ‘Wow, how stupid was I a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the last year.”

So I guess I learned something in the last year?

COVID time

I might have more thoughts on this later², but for now I’m just here to point out that with us entering COVID round three…

…we’re looking at two years of whatever we’ve been calling the last two years, and should probably stop talking about “the new normal” or “the way things were” and start living like things are as they are. I suppose it’s a human way of thinking to say “now is bad but the future will be different and better!” but… I dunno, it’s probably not!

Footnotes

1. In case you’re thinking “Joe that doesn’t seem nearly lazy enough for a lazy long weekend” I also made it to the final boss of Metroid Dread, figured out how the loop works in Deathloop and started a second book. This isn’t quite pre-kid levels of lazy but now that she’s old enough to be lazy herself it’s getting closer. ↩

2. Is having thoughts on days that aren’t Sunday part of why I reorganized all my projects/notes/files? Stay tuned! ↩