This is undoubtably the most productive quarter I’ve completed in the 101 Things in 1001 Days thus far. It’s been a productive summer, but as of this posting, I will have a year left in which to accomplish all my tasks. Right now, it ain’t looking good. At all. That said, let’s jam through what I’ve got done in the past quarter, and the items on which I made a bunch of progress.
Quarterly Metrics
Completed tasks this quarter: 8 (7.9%)
In-progress tasks: 25 (24.7%)
Overall Metrics
Days completed: 659
Days remaining: 361
Completed tasks (total): 38 (37.6%)
In-progress tasks (total): 25 (24.7%)
Tasks completed per day: 0.05
Completed Tasks
27. Develop a series of Todoist/Wordpress Gutenberg blocks. I finally got around to bashing this out, and if you look to the left, you’ll see the two primary blocks featured on the sidebar. I’ve got this up on GitHub as a repo you can download, and I’ll be adding it to the WordPress Plugin library at some point so that others can use it.
30. Buy/build the Lego Avengers Tower Set. I’d been setting cash aside for this for awhile now and finally pulled the trigger. Feeling pretty dang saucy about it and will be building it once I’m back from Philadelphia in early October.
51. Florida trip with Eddy to see KSC and a launch. We decided on the last few days of July and first few of August. There were a couple of launches tentatively scheduled during that time, so I booked us some tickets, got a hotel and rental car set up, and made the plans to fly in and out of Orlando, god help me. Decided to surprise Eddy with a day at Universal, too, as he had been hinting at it. There’s a full recap here.
67. Get a new financial advisor. Hey! It’s me! After reading Ramit Sethi’s book (see #72, just below), I opted to take charge on this. Based on the fees associated with hiring an FA, I decided we’d be better off with me taking control of the ongoing operation of our investments, which basically entails rebalancing the portfolio every 12-18 months. We set up an account at Vanguard, we moved some stuff around so it wasn’t sitting in 401Ks at our old employer, and we started building up our nest egg.
68. Budget for ongoing monthly stock investment. As part of our budgeting process, we worked in a chunk of money every month to put into index funds.
71. File my VA disability claim. Finally tackled this — it’s been a daunting task, and I’d avoided it for far too long. But my back, neck, and other issues, all need to be addressed. So that’s submitted. This is a long process and I suspect it’s going to take awhile to get to the end of it. I had the hearing test this month.
72. Read two books on investing. (2/2) I bashed this out during the quarter. I read Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You to Be Rich on audiobook, mostly during my weekly commute. And right after that, I read John Bogle’s The Little Book of Common Sense Investing. Both amounted to the same thing, though Bogle’s was a little deeper into the weeds than Sethi’s. Both are books I highly recommend to the new investor, and my kids will be getting copies of both books when they graduate high school.
97. Get a 3D printer up and running. I found a good deal on an Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra 12K on Amazon (25% off), and I had the money in savings, so I sprang for it. I’m in the middle of an insanely cool nerd project that could satisfy #85 on this list (build another bicycle frame). So yeah, in my excitement to get the first test print up and running, I forgot to remove the protective plastic on the resin tray, picked a complex model to print, and wound up spending 10 hours on a non-print. Yikes. As I wrote the draft for this entry, there’s a Benchy about 55 minutes away from done. (And then it’ll go on to the wash and curing next.) I’m calling this one done, but I do still have my eyes on an FDM printer — the Bambu Lab H2D, which also has laser-cutting functionality, and multi-material printing as options.
Tasks Where I Made Progress
I have 25 that are in-progress, but these are the ones that I was very actively involved in over the past quarter.
4. Finish the Filthy 50 with a 4:30 (or less) time. Training hard. Gonna fly now, etc., etc. We’re getting close on this. It’s about four weeks away, and I’m not where I should be in training, but I’m going to give it a go anyway.
15. Get (or build) nice touring frames for Didi and me. (1/2) I’ve decided (I think) that I am going to repurpose my 1994 Stumpjumper FS into a touring bike. That’s going to involve brazing a few things onto it — additional bottle mounts, rack mounts, fender eyelets, and I’ll have to build up a rigid fork. This will, of course, necessitate a repaint (and I intend to get duplicate decals for it so I can return it to its original look). As for Didi’s frame — that’s entirely TBD at this point. But we’re making progress here.
18. Get the Surly repainted. I reached out to Brad at Dirt Design Graphic for a price quote. Didn’t get one. Reached out to Dark Matter Finishing instead, and got a quote that I liked. Going to try to get this done in Q1 of next year.
21. Get at least two certifications. (1/2) I went ahead and studied like crazy for my PCAP test, and I’ll be finishing the studying and taking the certification test in October.
22. Contribute to an open source project. I got involved with Wagtail, and I have been trolling through the issues list looking for code I can help improve upon.
23. Get the danbailey.dev website up and running. After doing some research, and after really bashing my head into my desk trying to decide between WordPress and Wagtail, I opted to go with a simple Wagtail setup, running on gunicorn, with Apache acting as a reverse proxy. I’m working on the template layer right now, and I plan to launch this thing in October.
31. Get a display case and finish building the UCS Millenium Falcon set. I started doing some design work for what I need to build. Might have to buy a table router (oh no!) as part of the build process.
32. Get my D&D campaign world finished; start running it. I need to spend a whole day just fucking buried in planning to get this wrapped up. I’m deep in world design, notes, all the complex stuff to enable me to create a crazy world for my characters to exist in. I also need to schedule session zero for everyone to get together and put together characters.
33. Submit a design to Lego Ideas. I had my idea in July, and in August I started doing my sketches to figure it out and started modeling it in Stud.io. In early October, I’ll be ordering the parts necessary to make it from Bricklink, and once I’ve validated that the design is feasible and can be built, I’ll go ahead and submit it. October or November for this one.
37. Finish three Zelda games I haven’t completed. (0/3). This hasn’t been going as quickly as I’d like, but this quarter, I really buckled down and started grinding on Tears of the Kingdom, which has been going really well. I’m pretty close to wrapping everything up, and then I’ll get back to the Switch version of A Link to the Past and bang out the rest of that next.
43. Two new tattoos. (0/2) I came up with a great idea for a tattoo — specifically, a Heptapod-B tattoo (see Arrival for reference). I’ll likely get this one before the end of the year.
45. Be able to do 50 push-ups. Training.
61. Read 150 books. By September 25th, I was at 110 books so far. And with my upcoming road trip to Philly in October, I’m going to have the opportunity to bang out a bunch of audiobooks on the drive.
63. Write a half-dozen short stories; submit. (0/6) I wrote the first draft of “Appendix G,” a science fiction short story during September, and I am fairly pleased with it so far. I need to find a way to workshop this thing and then get it submitted. And I’ve already got ideas for the second one.
75. Do at least six Udemy courses. (3/6) I’ve been blasting through the PCAP one for my certification, and next up, I have a FreeCAD course, which will help me with another of the tasks on this list. I’m also eyeballing courses on Blender, and a few others.
77. Master Python. The hardest part about this one is making the determination of when I’ve “mastered” it. Maybe once I’ve got the PCAP certification done, and I’ve done a couple more courses. I’m likely to spin this off into a “How I Mastered Python” post.
89. Go to at least five concerts. (4/5) We attended Farm Aid 40, which was amazing. Highlights included Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan (a last-minute addition to the line-up), Jesse Welles, Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, and a bunch of others. It was a great day, and I had a great time, even if the 12+ hours in the bleachers were destroying my back, and even if Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson were very much showing their age (85 and 92, respectively).
93. Get myself a decent drone. I’ve been eyeballing a DJI Mini 4 Pro, but given the inability to get those in the U.S. right now (and maybe not ever), I’ve started looking at the kits from Flightory.
98. Upgrade the trigger and sights on the Glock 19. I got the trigger upgraded a few months ago to a Timney Competition model, and it’s been lovely. I’ve purchased a Holosun optic for it, but had to also buy a new slide with the cutout for said device. I need to drop the slide off with the gunsmith once I’m back from Philly so I can get the original hard sights moved over to the new one.
Upcoming
In the immediate short term — which is to say the first week of October, I’ll be bashing out a trip to Philly (#56), seeing the Apollo capsules in Chicago and Dayton, Ohio (#28), and finalizing the Glock upgrades (#98).
