Achievement Unlocked: April 2018

I’m starting to get that feeling where I’m a little bored of writing these monthly recaps. Half of it comes from the fact that I forget and get lazy because a monthly recap is not something I feel super passionate about. The other half is that I forget what happens in a month, but that’s something I am trying to do better at.

My friend and my new manager at work, Chris, encouraged me to write down the things I learn about JavaScript as I go along, not only because I’m bound to forget them, but because it will be easier to look back and see a collection of my learnings and see my progress. It can be hard visualising progress when you’re in the thick of it. That said, I’ve also tried to do better at writing daily notes not only about learnings, but happenings.

I use a loose form of bullet journalling – loose as in I have daily to-dos and I do the “daily log”, and include events and tasks, and I migrate tasks forward, but I don’t schedule anything or do a future log or any kind of planning. Pretty bullshit way to do it if you ask me. 😆 Over the past two weeks I have attempted to write more “notes” in my daily log. I think it will be more handy when I look back over my notebook.

I keep two notebooks as well, which is a bit redundant. I use one at work and one at home. It distinctly separates what tasks I have at work or that I want to do in my break at work, and the work I do at home. I don’t know if this is beneficial though. I think that for me personally, as someone who strongly believes in leaving work at work unless absolutely necessary, it works – but I feel like there are things I learn at work that should be in my “personal” journal.

All that waffle aside, though, I bought a new dot grid notebook to use for slightly stricter bullet journalling and it’s on it’s way. I got the CIAK Mate soft cover notebook in navy. I’m picky about my notebooks – I prefer soft to hardcover, and I like them to lie flat. I dislike elastic bands and I don’t like notebooks too thick either. This one, at 128 pages, is not as thin as I’d like, but it’s tolerable considering what’s on offer on the Larrypost website I purchased it from. I chose navy because I have been loving it as a new “neutral” colour for clothes and accessories. It surprisingly goes well with a lot of other colours! A bit like dark blue jeans. 😉 I had wanted to buy the same notebook in another colour but I figured I’d see how this one goes first.

OK, onto this month’s review. I hope to actually post my May review on time. 🤣

Just before writing this, I was:

We purchased tickets to visit Alcatraz on our trip to San Francisco in July. Tick!

This past month, I achieved:

• I completed a first aid course.
• I went to the Google Women Techmaker’s Summit.
• I have been trying to catch up on reading blogs and I am at 95 unread posts now – I had started at 600+ a couple of months ago. I think that in April I managed to catch up a lot.
• Nick and I celebrated six months of marriage at The Grounds, our wedding venue.
• We saw comedians Ross Noble and James Veitch, live, and they made us laugh a lot. 😆
• Nick and I went to Melbourne for a few days. We had a lot of good food! 🤤

This past month, I learned:

• I learned a lot in the first aid course about how to correctly administer first aid. A lot of people think they know how to save someone’s life or stop someone from bleeding or even treat a wound, but you’d be surprised that the correct and advised way to do it is probably not what you think.
• I understood how to do a few things in JavaScript, including passing a function inside an onClick attribute, and filtering and mapping through data… quite a few things that went over my head at first but that I came to understand.
• I struggled with a task at work but in the end I was able to complete it. I had been working on it for almost five weeks… I felt really down sometimes because it was very challenging and so out of my comfort zone. But in the end I realised that I could explain the entire scope of the feature without stumbling over my words. Six months ago I would have said something like, “this function I wrote touches this thing here and then asks it to do something based on something in this file somewhere up here…” So knowing I have confidence in explaining the workings of that task makes me happy. 🙂
• I really dislike rayon/spandex blends used in clothing because the material feels cheap, crinkles easily, and doesn’t last long, and that I should double check anything I purchase to make sure it isn’t made of this. I think this was more of a reminder than something I actually learned though.

This past month, I got bored of:

Eating cereal for breakfast at home.

But that’s OK, because I enjoyed:

Having a protein shake and then eating some hot vegetables and eggs at work. (Yeah, we have chefs – I think most of my readers know that. ☺)

Today, something that made me happy was:

Drinking BeforeYouSpeak coffee. I enjoy the taste and it gives me energy without me crashing. I used it as a pre-workout for the gym today.

Today, something I could have done better was:

I didn’t really give myself enough time to visit the Salmon and Bear restaurant after going to the gym, because by the time I left for the gym the restaurant was about to close. I had really wanted a poke bowl. ☹️ I didn’t time that well.

Tomorrow, I’m going to:

Work from home. I have been working from home this whole week because of my injured leg. I’m not quite ready to face rush hour on public transport and I feel like the office space is going to overwhelm me a bit after the accident down the stairs. 😬 Hopefully have a quiet night in. As I usually do every Friday, haha.

In May, I’m looking forward to:

Well, right now, given that I injured my leg last week, I am really looking forward to it healing and hopefully by the end of the month. 😩

In May, I’m going to make the positive change of:

I want to try to give myself a more relaxing morning and not dive into technology so eagerly. I want to take the time to stretch, walk around, wash my face and wake myself up, hydrate (drink water)…

One thing on my to-do list is:

Amusingly enough there is nothing that ready needs doing that I have written in my notebook. “Write a blog post” was the last thing on it for today, but maybe I will have some things that need doing tomorrow. I do have to write a review blog post for a phone case I received, so there’s that. 🙂

One happy photo from this past month is:

We got a photo with James Veitch! I’m very grateful that he stuck around to meet everyone afterwards.

If I had to write a book or record a film about this past month, I would call it:

Live Learn Laugh

After I post this, I’m going to:

Get ready for bed. 😆 This seems to be my regular response for this prompt.

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