Accomplishments: June 2023

After May, which was grueling, I was feeling a little more optimistic about June. here’s what I had planned:

• Build up my new gravel bike, double-check fit, and then ride the ever-living shit out of it.
• Get to at least 50% complete on my AZ-104 certification prep course.
• Get data schema figured out and user signup/login functionality built for Project Insight.
• Do the grunt.js course on Udemy.
• Finish planning the Europe trip! I needed to get the last three cities on our agenda planned — Paris, Milan, and Rome.1

Gravel Bike

This, unfortunately, didn’t happen. I’m still waiting on the frame to be finished, and that’s not on me. I did get to hang out with the builder for a chunk of a Sunday and watch him work, which was really relaxing/fun. Still, not feeling great about this, and probably shouldn’t put goals down for the month that have dependencies beyond my control. On the upside, this freed up some time that I probably would’ve spent building it, finalizing the fitting, and riding the hell out of it. Fail.

Azure AZ-104 Certification Prep

The goal was to hit the 50% mark on this. I made it to 50%, and am feeling confident about wrapping up in July. Win.

Project Insight

Data schema figured out, but the login/signup functionality isn’t there yet. Given everything that happened this month, I’m giving myself a little bit of grace on this. Draw.

Grunt.js Course

When I put this on my to-do list for the month, I didn’t realize that it was only a 90-minute course.2 Anyway, this went pretty smoothly. Started on the 1st and finished on the 7th. Win.

Europe Planning

So I took advantage of not having the Macbook Pro (see the blockers section below) to allow me to tackle a bunch of that’s more analog. And thus, I was able to spend a day with the travel guides just planning a bunch of awesome stuff. Paris and Milan are done, and Rome is partway there. Next we just have to book some hotels. Finished on the 29th. Partial Win.

Minor Accomplishments

• Got some mechanical work done on my trail bike that had been lingering for the better part of 18 months. (To be fair, like 9 of those months the weather was too foul for riding it, though.). So I’m feeling pretty good about that.
• Based on reading an article in HBR about breaking bad habits, I added a list to Todoist called “Don’t Fucking Do This”… It’s kinda working.
• Snagged some Garmin Rally RS100 power-sensing pedals for the Salsa road bike, and signed up for TrainerRoad and built out a training program for the Tour de Tucson this November. Started training. Also signed up for the Filthy 50 this year, which takes place just two weeks after I return from Europe.

Blockers

• Similar to May, mom’s care was a giant blocker for my time. Getting her into a nursing home reduced my day-to-day involvement. But getting her house and her stuff ready to sell made things far more troublesome. Some hoarder-like tendencies and the inability to take anything to a nursing home made it almost impossible to actually get anything else of note done.
• Macbook Pro was in the shop. I was without it for a bunch of days and it put a crimp in my learning. That sucked.
• I want to list my colonoscopy on here, because obviously a six-foot camera shoved up your ass is gonna slow you down for a bit.
• Exhaustion. The first weekend of the month I was wiped out by the side effects of having the second-round of the shingles vaccine. I count this as a win-in-disguise, because really, getting shingles would knock me on my ass a lot harder and a lot longer than the vaccine did.
• End of the school year — for the kids, not me. Things like attending Eddy’s elementary school graduation are important. And then there was the gap between the end of their school year and the start of summer care, which was a bit insane as they were with me for 10 hours a day.
• Got sidetracked into building a replacement for my Todoist/Twitter integration that got nuked when the API became write-only (unless I want to shell out a ridiculous amount of money).
• Got sidetracked into building a script to suck down all my saved items/comments/posts from Reddit into a local storage, after Reddit decided to be a dick about their API.

Conclusions

Not a great month, but at least I got some stuff done. I’ve been rethinking about how I structure daily tasks — my dailies take up a bunch of time every day, and honestly, some of them could be every-other-day tasks. I’m also getting a lot better about not biting off more than I can chew in a given month, which helps the motivation significantly.