Category: Weeknotes

Highlight of the week: two fellow consultants / former colleagues sent me referrals for potential projects 🥰

Looking forward to: baking lime pie this weekend

Stuff I did:

• 0.5 hours consulting
• 3 hours business development — updated market research, met with prospective client
• went to a Banff Film Festival World Tour screening — alas, not a great collection of films in the set that we saw… seemed to be the “uplifting” program, so an hour and a half of the show was a bit treacly — best one this year was The Hive Architect — a few standout films I recall from past festivals are Solo (2009), Crossing the Ice (2012), and Sufferfest (2013)
• researched and vetted roofing contractors — DYK you can look up worker safety violations on L&I? 👀😬
• got a quote for tree work
• third PT appointment — had a frank talk about paying out of pocket and making sure I really need all six appointments — decided to space out remaining appointments longer
• one virtual appointment
• walked with my friend at the state park — been avoiding hillier terrain for a few months to give my hamstring a break

Win of the week: actually did my PT exercises every day 🦾 (and have the sore neck to show for it 😣)

Looking forward to: Banff Film Festival!

Stuff I did:

• brainstormed where I want to invest my creative energy in the coming year… blogging? fiction writing? design? illustration? playing with pastels? home improvement? expanding my business offerings? did not come to any conclusions
• reevaluated a business idea I’ve had for years and rejected several times for various reasons… may be worth refreshing my market research
• started planning logistics and researching activities for a family wedding in SoCal later this spring — also tried on a bunch of outfit options for the “glam” theme… I have a cool vintage sequin dress (with shoulder pads 😎) I’m tempted by, but it’s an outdoor wedding so I might go with fancy trousers (I so rarely dress up that I’d prefer not to buy a new outfit)
• went into the back 40 and cut blackberry (I was originally planning to try digging them up but the foliage is so dense my husband had to crawl to reach some)
• researched arborists (discovered that our wildlife snag has been mostly hollowed out from the back 😬) and home inspectors (hoping to get maintenance advice that lets us plan for sequencing / budgeting)
• second PT appointment + tacked on a blood draw I needed to do

Win of the week: hit 3000 public posts on this blog! hesitated for a moment before publishing the 3000th to consider whether I cared it was a “good” post, but this site is a tool so I said eff it… hence my latest aura post I’ve been chipping away at since Thanksgiving is post #3001, not #3000 😉

Looking forward to: reading at least two maybe three books this weekend

Stuff I did:

• 1 hour business development (website edits)
• 3 hours writing — reviewed paper notes, rewrote blurb
• went to Homebrew Website Club: Writing Edition
• first physical therapy appointment for neck pain related to my migraines… I am skeptical the neck pain is causing the headaches versus a symptom of the headaches, but can’t hurt to improve my posture / neck strength I guess (though at an estimated $341 a session I don’t love potentially unneeded PT)
• researched options for cat boarding and cat sitting for an upcoming trip (now that one cat needs medication twice a day 12 hours apart)
• started cleaning the inside of my windows (since the outsides are clean now) ✨ took down some door blinds that wouldn’t raise anymore, but am looking at options to make sure birds won’t fly into the glass
• used the pole saw cutters to take out a few branches I didn’t like high up on the shore pine… husband has sanctioned one more big cut and then I think I’m done🪚
• tried pruning the Japanese maple but still had some sap… reading about it, seems like my original mid-January timing should have been good, so I wonder if the warm winter meant it started coming out of dormancy earlier 🤔 guess I wait till after it leafs out 🤷‍♀️ (narrator: she did not wait)
• the roof cleaner was kind enough to cut back the vines growing on the roof for me, so I started moving the heaping pile of clippings into the yard waste (still more to go though)
• walked with my friend

Win of the week: did my taxes 🦾

Looking forward to: Homebrew Website Club Writing Edition, tomorrow the 21st!

Stuff I did:

• took Monday off for President’s Day
• read through a revised version of the book 2 draft
• 2.5 hours writing — plugged existing scenes into a beat sheet, spreading them out to cover more of the character arc; did an inventory of actual written scenes and it’s fewer words than I thought (had a lot of prepwork that was getting counted)
• made my sister’s birthday playlist — the twentieth year in a row! — and wrote up my mix-making process
• called my current insurance and updated coverage to bring pricing in line with the other quotes we got — wanted to add roadside assistance but the agent was like “ours is terrible just get AAA”
• had the roof, gutters, and solar panels cleaned, driveway and deck pressure washed, and windows washed 🙌 in preparation, we hacked back the grasses along the front walkway
• got out the tall ladder and pruned the top of the shore pine — felt like I took a fair bit, but looking at the photos seems like I ought to slim it down more ✂️🌲
• walked with my friend, plus glued some magnets onto minis for them which somehow took me an hour 😂
  

Win of the week: finished my next digital aura blog post 🙌

Highlight of the week: got a really nice email about my post “Decoding failure”

Looking forward to: bought tickets to a Banff Film Fest showing next month! This will be my first large indoor event since the pandemic started 😳

Stuff I did:

• 1 hour consulting — got an update but project still on hold
• 2.25 hours business development — updated language on my website and sent off updated proposal — they’re working on the contract!
• got home and auto* quotes from an insurance broker, who recommended Pemco, and USAA
  
  • Pemco wants to know how old our roof is… no permits on file… emailed my neighbor but no luck… then went on Google Earth and lo and behold! There is an aerial photo of our house in 2006 with a blue Tyvek roof (what are the odds?!) — but will they insure us with a 20-year old roof with no written documentation? read some horror stories on Reddit, would feel pretty dumb to switch insurance to save $500 a year and be forced into doing a $20k(?) project before it was needed lol
  • USAA sales guy was sketchy and wouldn’t email me a quote or show me the contract till I committed to buy, I can’t be the only person in the world who wants to see it in writing first… also said they couldn’t hold my quote once I got off the phone, again I can’t be the only person who gets multiple quotes???
• Pemco wants any hazards dealt with so that lit a fire under my ass to deal with some known issues
  • booked a quote for pressure washing and roof cleaning (couldn’t find who we hired last time till I dug out the checkbook 😂 added to my recently-created home maintenance spreadsheet 🦾)
  • researched how to DIY repair a huge tripping hazard in our driveway because I’ve tried hiring handymen to fix it multiple times but no one wants to grind concrete (including me 🙃) — trying to grind down two inches sounds imprudent, so maybe a ramp? (lol found what my city uses — absolutely no way Comms approved this appearance)
  • cut back the red flowering currant and jasmine vine from the house… oh no the vines are WAY worse than I realized — growing into the gutter and siding 😬 oh NO I was yanking vines off from below and was like, maybe let’s see just how bad it is, stood on the ladder holding my phone above my head to take a photo, and there is a DEAD RAT on the roof I almost pulled off onto myself 😫 I will do a lot of my own yardwork but dead rats* are where I am willing to beg my husband to deal with it for me… or maybe the roof cleaner guy will deal with it for us? 😃 what’s the dead rat multiplier? 😂
    
  • found multiple rotten spots on the (non-functional) chimney siding… sigh, it never ends… I was hoping maybe we would finally get to do some fun home improvements this year, but I have a suspicion it will be a roof, siding and driveway kind of year 💸
• made (standard) french toast for brunch after Anthony posted his baked french toast recipe
• I scored a new 12″ skillet at the All-Clad seconds sale and I’m practicing cooking scrambled eggs in stainless steel instead of non-stick (my current ceramic non-stick pan needs to be retired)
• played Satisfactory with my sister — we hadn’t played in ages so it took a while to figure out what we were doing based on our cryptic notes to self (“make more screws probably”)… also whatever we did last time totally overloaded the power grid so we had to turn off a ton of stuff

Highlight of the week: happy to hear from two of my (grown-up) nieces for the first time in a few years 💜

Looking forward to: my consulting project that’s been paused for the past couple months should be starting back up soon

Stuff I did:

• 5 hours business development — meeting with potential client who I sent the proposal last week — adjusting scope and budget
• made progress on the next post in my aura series — it’s so close! Cut it down from 3000 to 1000 words, re-orging the whole thing in the process, then spliced in another draft post that wasn’t working as a standalone
• made white bean shakshuka for Sunday brunch (eggs cooked in 2.5 min) — definitely want the bread with it — tasty but we both like menemen better
• cleaned up my Downloads folder
• started uploading some tax documents
• first round of pruning on the pine — need to get out the pole saw / ladder to attack the top — while I was working on it a hummingbird flew into the pine and landed to rest twice 🙀
• pruned the heck out of a red twig dogwood that always overgrows the path and sawed off a trunk of a red elderberry that we’ve let grow into a tree in the backyard — the top part is still stuck in the canopy 😅
• walked with my friend — my hamstring is *still* bothering me when I stand up or walk too long 🫤 (probably all the yardwork this week didn’t help) — my friend’s theory is that I’m overcompensating for my bum knee (on the opposite leg) so I’m going to try restarting the knee exercises they gave me in PT a decade ago (that I was probably supposed to be doing this whole time oops)

Crowdsourcing! I keep getting these Tribit Bluetooth speakers — they sound great and have great battery life… but the charging port fails after a few years. My current one’s four years old and I suspect I’m at that point. I could just get the new version, but I welcome recs if you have a Bluetooth speaker you love! 📻

Win of the week: put together a price estimate and proposal for the potential client I spoke to earlier this month 🤞

Looking forward to: reading Enchanting the Fae Queen by Stephanie Burgis — loved the previous book!

Stuff I did:

• 11.25 hours business development
• virtual meet n greet with another woman entrepreneur trying to break into the public sector
• unfortunately had cause to test my new migraine medicine (Sumatriptan) — but fortunately despite taking it an hour+ after the pain started (you’re meant to take it ASAP) it pretty much nullified the pain within 2 hours… woke up to mild pain then a few hours of postdrome malaise — considering most of my migraines last 72 hours, this one lasting ~36 (including the 24 hour buildup when I wasn’t sure it was a migraine — I mostly get a really stiff neck) is a huge win in my book 🙌
• walked with my friend
• signed in Pro without testifying on two State bills and wrote a follow-up note to my state senator who’s on the committee in support of divesting State pensions from coal and banning rodenticides
• baked blueberry cobbler from Smitten Kitchen Keepers — took 70 minutes to bake (versus 30 minutes in the instructions and 45-60 minutes from previous baking notes) even though I set the temp 25F higher than called for… wonder if something is failing in the oven 🤔 hopefully not because I’m not ready for a kitchen remodel! (I want a wall oven separate from the stovetop… one day)

Win of the week: in 2022, I wrote 75k of an indirect sequel to the novel I’m quitting — I reread the draft for the first time since and it’s pretty good! Not sure whether I’ll do something with it but I think it’s an option — it doesn’t actually rely on the other story being published

Looking forward to: finding out if my new migraine medicine works 🙃

Stuff I did:

• went to Homebrew Writing Club: Writer’s Edition and had a lovely time chatting!
• took Monday off work for Martin Luther King Jr. Day — I hadn’t considered before how astonishing it is that we actually designated a Federal holiday in his honor
• made my husband’s 2026 Roth IRA contribution
• pruned my japanese maple a bit but noticed it was producing a lot of sap so I’m going to wait another month and try again; flagged some branches I think I want to remove on my pine
• wrote to my state reps in opposition to a KOSA-like age-verification bill for Internet content — initially I was just writing a general “privacy is good yo” comment… then I read the text of the bill and realized it could actually affect me as a business owner if I ever wanted to directly sell my romance writing via my author website since it applies to sole proprietors
• submitted written testimony on state policy for the first time! I signed up for the Take Action Network, which keeps track of legislation and provides prompts for when to take action on what bills (when I worked in local government, we had special software for tracking legislation where I could prep internal analysis for the city’s lobbyist — bills change a lot over the session, and often suddenly for the worse!)

Win of the week: got some medication to try for my next migraine

Looking forward to: Homebrew Website Club Writing Edition tomorrow, Saturday January 17th!

Stuff I did:

• 0.75 hours consulting
• 1.5 hours business admin and market research — almost got conned into paying Adobe for genAI by auto-renewal 😠 fortunately last-January-Tracy left a cryptic note on my calendar to check my plan before it renewed
• went to the dermatologist for a full body check — they loaded me up with samples of SPF moisturizer because I confessed I’m terrible about wearing sunscreen, ugh now I’ve been assigned a “skin routine” 😑
• went to the neurologist about my headaches (I get a mix of migraine and tension headaches about 5-6 days a month, which I decided is too many days) — we’re going to try meds and PT for my neck stiffness
• putzed around looking for “historic” (2025) data out of curiosity to map against my headache log from last year… Wunderground had historic barometric pressure (for Seattle proper, dunno how variable it is locally) but I couldn’t find tabular AQI or pollen data to download
• emailed my state representatives about climate

• 

  hacked my Euphorbia wulfenii to the ground so they’ll be easier to dig up… I used to really like them but the self-seeding is outrageous

• pruned the rhodie in front of my house, clearing out branches that touched the house and doing a bit of thinning, and cleared the (somewhat alarming amount of) dead wood out of our favorite rhodie in the garden
• re-staked my derpy dwarf Doug fir (it’s basically the Charlie Brown christmas tree but uglier) and my gorgeous contorted filbert… kinda refining the front yard into a “sculptural” plant showcase (in winter at least)
• nesting is my emotional coping method for escalating fascism… I’ve been trolling online vintage furniture because we have a bunch of ten-year-ago Craigslist junk, shouldn’t I get furniture I actually like one day? 🥺 No purchases have been made but I have my eye on a few things…
• walked with my friend twice (half our usual distance in an attempt to not immediately over-do it again)
• played PEAK with my husband… haha my hands were sweating from anxiety, I could only handle an hour and a half
• researched recipes that don’t require cooking or refrigerated ingredients because we often lose power for a day or two in January or February… hmm not a ton of ideas out there, basically it’s pb-honey sammies and snack board time (sans fromage)
• made this soup for lunch but turned out disastrous despite having made it many times before… used Cento crushed tomatoes this time which I think were too thick / not liquid-y enough so the tortellini took like 30 minutes to cook instead of 5 (after adding 2 cups extra water)

Rough week. I feel vast sorrow that so many Americans want an America where the government may, with impunity, openly murder anyone who disagrees with their ideology. Abolish ICE, defund the police, and impeach the illegitimate insurrectionist* before he illegally invades another country 🙃

Win of the week: published the next piece in my digital aura series!

Looking forward to: going to walk with my friend for the first time in a month — I’ve been giving my testy hamstring a break

Stuff I did:

• 0.5 hours consulting
• 3.25 hours business development — had a call with a prospect, hopefully will be invited to bid
• left a voicemail for my Congressional Representative over the weekend asking her to vote in favor of impeachment of the President for kidnapping the leader of a sovereign nation and announcing that “we’re running” Venezuela so we can steal their oil (she voted to table impeachment after the Iran attack last summer)
• researched HSA rollovers and decided against combining an old account because the customer service was so bad at the new account 😒
• sold off the rest of the green energy mutual fund I had
• cleaned up my Goodreads shelves — I had a bunch I made when I joined the site in like 2012 in hopes of better recommendations, and they’ve been cluttering up my lists ever since! I’ve also had interests change so dumped some less relevant shelves and added a couple new ones that are more pertinent
• it was so nice today I went out and pruned for an hour ✂️ my favorite kind of gardening, satisfying and visually impactful — cleared around some witch hazels that are getting decent sized to give them more room and cleaned up the border with my neighbor, who unfortunately for him likes his yard immaculate and I basically have a hedgerow because I’d rather have (humming)birds
• attic inspection — no mice or mold!
• living room shuffle
• hung out online with my friend after taking a couple weeks off from our usual hang for the holidays
• baked coffee cake after waking up early unintentionally on the weekend — my husband kindly waited to tell me about Maduro until after we finished brunch so I could enjoy it
• attempted to make soft-boiled eggs for a second time, and failed again — gotta try a different technique (I tried Kenji López-Alt’s method from The Food Lab)
• watched The Founder — I’ve been boycotting McDonald’s since circa 1999 and I will continue to do so