Friday, July 5 2019

Dear Journal,

Yesterday's holiday was pretty relaxing. I managed to wake up about an hour before everyone else, so I quickly took the car to the Jenny Street market and picked up some bacon, eggs, and a jug of their famous freshly squeezed orange juice. Waking people up with the smell of bacon is fun. Also, I tried that little paper towel trick that Chef John uses to dab up grease, and it worked beautifully with bacon, so adding that to the playbook. After breakfast, we picked up some flowers and paint stuff for the dining room, and on the way home we grabbed some Portillo's since we had been out and about for a while. When we got home, we were pretty exhausted and Rod was getting in a bad mood, so we decided to just take it easy for the rest of the day and stay close to home. To add to our case, this was also going to be the last low-key day of the week for us, since we have the birthday party and some friends staying the weekend. I grilled a chicken and made some cornbread, we put Rod to bed, I got a little time to write code, and then Marissa and I stayed up just a little too late watching the first Stranger Things episode.

Which was pretty amazing by the way. I don't know why, but I'm always reluctant to watch the new ones. I never seem to remember how amazing of a show it is, or have any desire to go back and re watch it. I need to re-calibrate, because that show is on another level. Maybe it layers on the 80s nostalgia a little thick, and it can be just a tad pandering at times, but undeniably entertaining. And a solid opener to the season at that.

Today, I'm back to work in the morning, then working from home starting around lunch time. We have a ton of shopping to do this evening for the party, and Marissa knows that I need serious emotional support whenever I have to spend more that \$70 at Hy-Vee. After our big shopping trip, we're going to make a special pre-party chores list, then likely cook and clean into the wee hours of the night.

So that's what we're up to. Besides the party, I mentioned I got a little time in to code. I'm working on a slackbot to help automate things for us. First task will be a mailing address manager. We have everyone's address between our google accounts, but there's just too much information in google, and it's difficult to share contacts. So the idea is to write a little slackbot that can fetch anyone's contact info on command, dump lists of people, sort them by tags (e.g. #rodney #birthday), and maybe even automatically send out emails that request updated info.

I'm also kicking around the idea of moving our chores to a slackbot system. I started out keeping all my chores in org mode using reoccurring tasks, but Marissa wanted to get in on the fun, so I added some for her, and now I'm kind of acting as a chore dispatcher. So there's potential for improvement there: I love being relied on to keep routines, but I love automating them even more.

Out of what can be best described as delusional vanity, I'm attempting to make the whole thing with no 3rd party dependencies - just 100% python. Currently, my strategy is just to recreate some bare bones renditions of packages I'd normally install. Yesterday I managed to get a `rest` module finished for web requests and a `shell` module for running shell commands. The standard library for python is serious stuff, I'm not writing nearly as much code as I thought I'd be doing. We'll see how that holds up when it comes time to write a web server.

So that's what I got. OK, time to get psyched up for party weekend.