Goals

• Relationships: My wife and I have been working on our relationship and I've learned a lot since I last wrote. I also got to catch up with a lot of people this fortnight.
• Career: I've spent a little bit of time picking and learning a new web development stack for personal projects. More on that later.
• Health and Longevity: I've seen a physical therapist regarding my shoulder. Their working theory is that my neck and shoulder are positively flaccid and are crumpling under the mammoth weight of my head. I've been reorganizing my work and living spaces to support my corpse better and we're working on shoulder strength in therapy.
• Financial Independence: Despite some annual expenses for which we forgot to account and increased therapy costs we came in a few hundred under budget!

Habits

Leave Work on Time

This habit is really well established at this point. I've switched my reward from Twix bars (pure sugar, costs $1) to trail mix (only mostly sugar, free at work). I'm gonna call this habit done!

Habit

• Cue: Computer and phone reminders and auto-close computer communication apps at 4:30pm, auto-logout at 5:00pm.
• Response: Stop current task. Log work for the day and set tomorrow's agenda. Pack up and walk out that damn door.
• Reward: If I've left on time, grab a snack from the snack bar on my way out. Bask in all that free time I've clawed back to enjoy life.

Bedtime Routine

I'm still reading Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. The iced tea has been swapped for mandarin orange seltzer water, which is both tasty and extremely convenient. This has been on track for a while now, so I'm going to stop writing about this habit as well.

Habit

• Cue: Dinner's finished.
• Response: Pack for the next day. Brush my teeth. Grab a tasty beverage. Read in bed. Go to sleep.
• Reward: Read a fun book and drink a tasty beverage.

Financial Reviews

This was a lot less stressful with transactions split out. And we've got a pretty good amount socked away for car shopping!

• Cue: Personal Goals Review.
• Response: Log in to Mint. Review budgets and goals.
• Reward: Goal fund goes up and to the right.

Transaction Updating

This is now easy as heck, 10/10. Will stop writing about it.

• Cue: Pick up my phone for the first time in the day.
• Response: Open the Mint app. Rectify any transactions which have arrived since yesterday morning.
• Reward: Idle reading / nap.

Projects

Car Shopping

Our trusty 2002 Toyota Camry is getting less trusty every month. 275k miles have not been kind. I've already dragged my feet on replacing it for too long, so I need to focus on this dang thing.

House Search

Our household has grown a since we moved into our current residence, and we've been feeling the squeeze. A cursory look around our area suggests the 4 of us could get a fair bit more house for about what we're paying now.

Personal Web Development Stack

I've spent an awfully long time playing with shiny new tools and toys rather than building expertise in any one set of technologies. While it's a lot of fun and I still do fine with the stack we use at work (Spring, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Angular, Chef, etc.), I don't have a go-to set of tools for my personal projects any more. So I'm picking a few longer-term technologies and planning training projects. I'll probably hack up this blag, for instance.