Growing Pains
It's the start of October. This year's Autumn started, FWIW. Once again life interfered with my writing schedule. Aside from the pandemic, and the health situation back home, I also quit my job. It's like a torrent of events that never ends. I am happy, though. I joined the remote workers' club by starting a job for a company in New York that does genomics. I am a part of the engineering team that handles their software needs. The codebase of the projects we have is very functional. Everything passes through proper channels and is working efficiently. Switching to a Mac was frustrating at first because I've been a Linux person for a long time, certified to work with software in most major distributions, but I am getting a hang of it. The field the company works in, genomics, is a very interesting field providing insight into building blocks of organisms. I am still battling the administrative part of starting a home office, like invoicing and reclaiming costs. I don't have a proper working desk yet because IKEA is slow to replenish their stock. Yup, growing pains.
We also had to go to the embassy to prolong our absence from the country because the notification expired. I started collecting the papers for the citizenship application. There are some hoops to jump through, but my application should be straightforward enough. One other thing to look forward to.
In other news, Vesna and I didn't travel anywhere, despite her low-key campaign to just "go for it", and the upcoming second wave of pandemic is making things even scarier. Instead of spending money on travel expenses, we've invested in some additional household items to automate things further. The ever growing family of devices was joined by one smart kettle and a robotic vacuum cleaner. They both work great and are following a schedule that we're accustomed to already. The amount of menial tasks is reduced and now we can focus more on things that matter. Things that make us happy.
Right now I think that the amount of crazy is diminishing and I can start properly writing, painting, programming, cooking.
I know that Hacktoberfest and Inktober started, both with their share of drama. Hacktoberfest started with spam on the GitHub repos, and Inktober had the controversy between the author of it, Jake Parker, and Alphonso Dunn, who claims that Jake Parker stole content from Alphonso Dunn's book. I actually bought the Pen and Ink drawing book some time ago. I like how Dunn is presenting his material. His channel on YouTube is really good to learn from.
The following month is NaGa DeMon and NaNoWriMo, but I am already playing catch-up with all of the things I failed to do in the past few months. Not that you need a special event to do things, but it's good to have all of them so you can get inspired to do things on your own.
Vesna got me one of those fancy gloves that has only two fingers for gliding across the graphics tablet so I don't leave sweat stains all over. I am painting, but it's nothing to show because it's a learning process. Recently, for most of the time I've just been doing it for the sake of doing it, building a routine. I also bought a new version of Corel Painter, 2021 to be exact. So I will get my bearings and figure out the right workflow so I can start doing digital artwork more seriously. I sure could use that desk I keep trying to order from IKEA.
Also, if you are interested in cooking, Wil Yeung has a great channel with recipes so be sure to check it out if you want to try some new things. Ramen with peanuts is very nice.