I need to paint. It's been too long since I have painted.

We bought an empty lot that borders ours. We removed the scrubby trees and left the good ones. We are now planting lots of trees. The goal is a pretty forest with meandering trials. On the street side of the lot I am planting native prairie grass and milkweed. I'm growing seedlings in my basement atm.

I've started passively looking for a new job. I've done this before, and it came to nothing. Last week was the culmination of a big project, months of work. It went beautifully. Customers that are notoriously hard to please expressed how well things went. The result internally? One mass email saying thanks. I know it's just the job I'm paid to do, but it feels like we could have done more. Literally two thirds of the group was directly involved. I see other groups do bigger celebrations for less.

To top that off, someone sent a related timeline of one part of that project and credited someone else rather than me for what was the hardest study I ever did and probably the most complex study we've ever done in-house. If anyone else noticed, they didn't say anything. I didn't have the heart to correct it to take credit for something nobody else apparently cares about enough to remember.

It feels like nobody cares. It makes me want to not be here.

There's a job in Holyoke, MA I'm qualified for. That's 3.5 hours to the Adirondack High Peaks and 4.5 hours to the White Mountains. There's another in Rensselaer, NY I could maybe get hired for. I wouldn't say I'm a slam dunk, but the differences could probably be explained in an interview.

I ran my fastest half marathon in Saturday beating my old time by over five minutes.

My daughter took the 2nd grade standardized test this year and we just found out she knocked it out of the park.

This means she has a chance at going to the special talented kid school. We found out Monday that she qualifies and the only open house we could go to was on Tuesday we also have a bunch if paperwork to produce in a short time frame.

You get in by lottery. The school got moved last year which pissed off a bunch of parents and generated some lawsuits. The bad press means there are more openings and less competition than normal. It's a better than a 50/50 chance.

A few of the parents at the open house were the sort of people that start planning their kids college admissions campaign in kindergarten. They were fucking annoying with their outrage that there isn't a music or sports program. It's still a public school, the classrooms get no more funding than the regular kids classrooms.

What they do get is a classroom of kids all operating around the same level. The lessons look very multidisciplinary with a lot of project work. Everyone has a grade level homeroom. The science is taught above grade level. Kids do half a year of Spanish and half a year of Mandarin. When they get to middle school they pick a language and earn college language credit for the class. The kids leave their homeroom for math instruction, going to a class that operates at their current level of understanding. Three grade levels above grade level is where the current kids who have the most aptitude are at.

It seems like a way better situation than her current classroom of 31 kids with a teacher who shouts a lot and picks the good kids and bad kids during the first few weeks of school.

I really really hope she gets in. I think it would be great for her.

We decided to do a spur-of-the-moment camping trip at Crystal Lake.

It was really nice at first, but little did we know we had picked just about the windiest day they ever had to try to camp.

We ended up having to sleep in the car. In a rush I packed about everything I could into the trunk. The tent stayed out though, which was eventually uprooted and blown across the road. In the morning it was too windy to do just about anything, so we ended up going to the cafe/camp store (which was closed the previous day) to get coffee and breakfast.

I’m in Daytona, Florida for gymnastics nationals. The thrill of seeing the peak human performance, showcases of yearslong effort and training, makes me even more committed to the sport. Will let you know guys know how I do.

It’s so nice to be in the Florida sun, although I really don’t crave moving here. Every Carl Hiassen trope seems to spring from the woodwork. There’re campaign signs of some guy running for office and he looks like he keeps gators in his basement while he pawns off the everglades. The number of neck tattoos stun me. A girl’s profile on tinder says simply, “I’ve made some mistakes but I’ve changed, I promise.” Umm.

Florida man is real.

I ran my first half marathon (ever) on Sunday! It was grand. A flat course (650 ft over 13 miles--flat enough) and coastal weather made for a wonderful run.

The weather was good--low 60s the entire time, with the sun peeking through the clouds towards the last third. Since it was in a coastal town, the air was nice and refreshing as well. Decent number of water stations, fairly well marked course (although I was disappointed to learn that they didn't close the roads and we ran in the bike lane as a few folks occasionally drove by).

While my Fitbit didn't start capturing GPS data right away (grr) at least I have Strava data (GPS, sans heartrate) for the run.

I ran a 1:56:16, which more than met my target of 1:59:59. Very pleased.

I've been working a lot. I have a video conference call tonight at 10pm with investors from Singapore. I'm going to be tired. It's a pain in the ass. The last few days have been beautiful here. I've taken to playing baseball with my son when I get home from work. It's a lot of fun. He's excited to play tonight, but I'm pretty sure the weather will not permit it. It's actually supposed to snow overnight tonight.

I am heading to NYC the first week of May for work and to go to a friends wedding. It's also my birthday that week. I'll be 42. Wow. My stem cells are just 38 ;-)

Have a good week, Hubski!

Art: I recently discovered a paper maker by the name of Dard Hunter. He heavily researched traditional methods in paper making and printing, writing many books on the subject, was the first person known to create his own book from start to finishing being involved in every aspect from writing, to type setting, to assembly. Lastly, he was a huge promoter of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The dude is just all around awesome and I can't wait to read some of the stuff he has written.

Wildflowers: Spring is definitely here, and with it, the spring flowers. For boring reasons that I won't go into, my plans for a small wildflower patch in the backyard have to be scrapped. It's a little disappointing, but life is like that sometimes. Dala and I have still been able to really enjoy the wildflowers this year. We have so many kinds speckling the lawn, blues and purples, yellows and whites, tiny little things all of them. They're not loud and showy, but small and subtle, where spying individual little buds is like a little surprise, and a collective patch, is like a tiny splash of color against a green background, easily overlooked.

As great as it's been in our yard, it's even better at the park where we walk the dog. There's even more flowers there, in variety and volume. They're really something to behold and I'm kind of sad that in about a week or so, the majority of them will be gone until next year.

Windows: The weather has been so nice lately that, barring rain and and no one being home, we've had the window near the couch where I sleep open pretty much all of the time. The fresh air has been amazing, and as I'm typing away, I'm listening to the songbirds in our yard, the sound of traffic just up the road, all occasionally punctuated with the sounds of a crow cawing or a neighborhood dog barking. I told my wife that when we finally get our own place, if the temperature is between 60-90 degrees and it's not too humid out, the AC will be off and the windows will be open.

Birds and Snakes and Assholes: Yesterday we were at the park, walking the dog, and admiring the sights around us. Said flowers, songbirds flittering about, and we even got to see a vulture perch in a near naked tree, not more than thirty feet from us. It was an amazing walk all around and I think for the first time, I had more fun being at the park than my dog (that dog loves the park).

At one point as we were walking, we came across a robin struggling with what at first seemed like the biggest, fattest worm ever. As we got closer though, it was quickly evident that what the robin caught was actually a baby snake. Thinking that there's no way this bird was gonna be able to eat this snake, and wanting to save said snake, I walked towards the robin to shoo it away.

Giving the dog leash to my wife, I decided to get a little bit closer to the snake, not too close, about two or three feet, to get a better look. It was coiled up in a striking position, which I should have paid attention to at the time, but I didn't because I was too curious. It looked like a baby rattlesnake, about six to eight inches long, but we didn't seem to be in the right area to come across one, so I wanted to take a picture of it to confirm. I turned around to walk back to my wife to borrow her phone to take a picture, at which point she informed me it lunged at me and then slithered away. I looked up local snakes this morning, it was indeed a baby rattlesnake.

Necessary Edit: Reading more about the snakes in my area tonight, it's a bit on the small side for a baby rattlesnake. There's a very real chance I mis-identified the snake. To further complicate things, there are a few non-venemous species that'll mimic rattlesnakes, because let's be real, that's actually a pretty good defense strategy. Now I really do wish I was able to safely get a picture.

Edit aside . . . If you look up "assholes" this morning, you'd probably find a picture of me. I didn't respect the fact that the robin and the snake were doing what nature does, and instead of leaving things alone, I injected myself into the situation. While I didn't get too close, I didn't respect the snake's personal space nor did I respect the fact that it was clearly agitated at just escaping a harrowing situation with an animal much larger than it and it probably wasn't too pleased that I was close by. Lastly, baby snake or not, venomous or not, I did not respect that this thing could see me as a threat and try to defend itself and I put myself in a risky spot, even if the risk was very minor. All in all, I let my personal feelings and curiosity overtake any common sense and respect for nature and from start to finish, I handled that situation very, very poorly. I literally know better and I didn't behave to the standards I hold myself to and today, that makes me a bit of an asshole. I'd like to think next time I'll do better, because I usually do, but I'm frustrated with myself for behaving like I did. For anyone reading this, don't be like me, don't do what I did, animals deserve their space.

Toggl added a calendar view of time tracked, and it makes me disporportionally happy to see a productive day filled up with a bunch of colors like that. The purple block was me doing some spring cleaning on my personal website. Deleted my failed attempt to create a Jekyll-based Github Pages website and redesigned the page to be more about my writing. I want to write more but I've yet to find a good reason / vessel / to do that regularly. The only writing I do now is my academic paper that's still in the works.

I've been spending way too much time on Twitter even though it's awful and its CEO is insane and/or has an eating disorder. I follow a lot of left wing activists and journos so I see them call out Nazis and the alt-right every day. We live in the stupidest timeline imaginable. When Newsweek prints the phrase" Pizzagate, the debunked theory that Hillary Clinton and other Democratic officials ran a child sex trafficking ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizza shop" in an article about Congressional candidates something has gone horribly wrong. I deleted the Facebook app when I got sick of looking at boomer memes. There's gonna be a tipping point where I delete Twitter but I'm not sure what it'll be.