Moments ago, I interjected myself uselessly into a text message thread sussing out details for my neice's upcoming birthday party. It's going to be Frozen themed and at some point, one of the other folks said "I was going to let it go. see what I did there?". Up until that point, I hadn't said anything because nothing coming from me would've added value to the conversation. That didn't stop me from crafting a contextually relevant message that incorporated as many Frozen [2] song titles as I could manage (with the help of Kayla). This is not my first rodeo doing something like this.

It's a fun exercise that I've done for quite a long time, tracing back to doing spelling in school. Every week, I'd have a list of ten words that I'd have to learn how to spell, the definitions of, and demonstrate understanding by using them in written sentences. In what was a combination of laziness and just for the sheer sport of it, I'd try to figure out how to use those words in as few sentences as possible. I've no doubt some of them were a stretch, but it was a fun challenge to an otherwise mundane task. Pretty sure my mom wasn't about it and eventually set a rule that there needed to be one sentence written per word. I'm pretty sure just once, I did a combinatory sentence that was repeated for each word it used until the rule was changed to a unique sentence per word.

More recently in life (but not as recently as the intro paragraph), I've applied that mental challenge to shout out messages in a podcast I enjoy. This podcast is famous for its recurring bits, so when I've purchased a message, I try to pump each one with as many bits as possible while actually delivering a message. It's a challenge, especially when the message is limited to the size of an OG tweet (RIP).

Maybe this is a normal thing people do. Maybe it's something nerds do.

Maybe it's just something I do and I'm a fucking weirdo.

The daily blogging challenge gets incredibly difficult to maintain after a time. Even when I have a big topic that I could pontificate about right in front of me, it's still a mental drain to put the nuances of being dad and husband to baby and baby mom. Thus, in the past, I'd come up with the minute blog post. I will set the timer for one minute, right out whatever is on my mind, and when that minute is up, that's it. So, let's do that.

GO!

Summer is upon us and summer means mojitos. I like a lot of cocktails for sure, but there's something about the crisp refreshingness of a mojito when the weather is warm that just can't be beat. It's a trickier drink to make, but well worth the effort and open to a lot of fun options, such as adding fruit. One of the best mojitos I've ever had was on a particularly hot day at Disneyla-

I was actually on a roll with that one, but the timer went off and the timer must be respected. I believe that catches me up on daily blog posts, so yay me.

In this whole parenting thing that I have yet to write about meaningfully, I've been given the great privilege of a whole sixteen weeks of paid parental leave. By normal people standards, this is a bonkers amount. By Bay Area tech job standards, it's somewhere around average (at some point, Netflix was giving out a whole year). I'm now six weeks into that, not including a week of PTO I tacked on right before the wee baby was born. So, it's been seven weeks since I did anything that can be considered paid work.

Initially, it was a weird feeling. I'd had a habit of keeping on top of work Slack on my phone, trying to keep the amount of unreads for the morning down (also, to make it look like I work harder than I actually do :D). That got signed out of in the hospital, so that was a reflex I had to break. The idea of there being no point in looking forward to the weekend because every day was a weekend was also strange. I tried to keep track of days so the weekend felt somewhat special, but that has since dissolved as a notion and I barely know what's up with the calendar anymore.

The contents of a day itself is just keeping on top of house chores and keeping my two loves alive (recovering mommies require work just as much as a baby does; perhaps I'll write about that in a three part series eventually). If I'm holding the baby, he's either being actively fed or I'm just watching bullshit on YouTube or dumping even more hours into Tears of the Kingdom while he sleeps. If I'm not holding the baby, I'm probably catching up on baby related chores, like cleaning bottles, or making sure the formula pitcher is full, or something something the diaper pail. An entertaining habit has come out of people visiting, wherein I will hand off the baby to said visitor and then, instead of socializing, I will immediately begin tending to the dishwasher...

What was I talking about?

Oh, not having work. It'll be interesting to see where this shakes out in another ten weeks when I "return to work" (read: mostly work from home). But, on that note, I did sort of return to work today. I'd logged into my work laptop to get on Slack so I could round up the usual suspects for a work provided meal enjoyed down at the local beer garden. All of this was under the guise of meeting the baby, of course. It was an interesting scenario, because I remember the few times I'd go to my dad's office as a kid was to parade around whatever sibling was new at the time. Now it was my turn. Also strange was roaming the halls of the office with a stroller and a fussy baby, reminding myself that a fussy baby in the office is weird and distracting... for the five other people that were there. Still, it was a good time catching up with coworkers, and the lovely beers and cafe food was delightful. While it may sound like the wee baby was not cooperating, all he wanted was a bottle and a clean diaper. He literally slept the rest of the time like a good visitor. Makes me wonder what other kinds of things he might be a good trooper for.

Making videos for an electronics YouTube channel?

With the arrival of our wee baby, so too has arrived a big increase in our TV watching. When you're at home all day with a baby who prefers human contact all the time, there's only so many forms of entertainment to turn to. Since we're modern cord-cut millenials, all our video watchings get streamed over the internet. And with this uptick in watching, that's meant we've come very close to hitting our monthly bandwidth caps. But, I've been finding little ways to curb that in an epic battle against the number of bits coming in and out.

To get an idea of where all the bandwidth was being pissed away, I turned to the daily reports that my eero router provides. It breaks down bandwidth usage grouped by device type (computers, streaming devices, phones, etc) and then further by device. This tells me exactly where I should be looking for reductions. By far the biggest bandwidth suck was on the main TV, so that's where a lot of my effort has been focused.

Step one was to stop watching so much streamed video. However, you've still gotta watch video. I've got a pretty good library of shows and movies, so I did a deep dive into disc ripping, and started repopulating my Plex library with stuff off the shelf. Honestly, this has been on my bucket list for a while, so that was really just a win-win (disc ripping has made a lot of strides in the last several years). Though, it does confine me to things I've already purchased. That really put a damper on my desire to watch Star Trek: Lower Decks... until I just bought the Blu-rays off of eBay and ripped it into the library. Probably more expensive than overage fees, but now they're mine and I got the best quality possible (a statement I will negate in the next paragraph).

Another genius idea I had was to simply dial down the resolution of the Apple TV. Streaming apps will only stream whatever resolution makes snse for your TV, so if the Apple TV is reduced to a 1080p signal, that's what it'll get. This has resulted in bigger bandwidth savings than streaming from the Plex server and, honestly, I can't really tell the degredation in quality from how far away the couch is from the TV.

Finally, scouring the list of devices using data when the device itself wasn't being used, I simply started turning things off. The TV computer is used rarely. OFF. The crib monitor isn't being used while we're not using the crib. OFF.

Over the last couple of weeks, it's been a marked reduction in bandwidth usage. Going by the week's end report, ~20% reduction week-over-week for two weeks straight. That's progress! To the reader, this is nothing super interesting, but it's been an interesting back-burner brain teaser. Of course, there's one thing that could once again throw off the balance of bandwidth usage...

Uploading videos to an electronics YouTube channel...

There are certain dates I try to remember. Birthdays, holidays, and important relationshp dates. Today, Facebook served me up one of its "this day in history" posts, which was full of photos of Kayla and I being cute couples forever ago. I didn't understand what was up with that until she later texted me while I was at the store "happy day we met four years ago". Doh! I don't think I've covered the "how we met" story anywhere outside of our wedding, in which the tale was woven by a certain Rev. Tim. So, I shall regale that here.

One of my favorite questions to yield from people is "where did you two meet", to which we both reply (sometimes in unison) "the internet". That's true, but more specifically OkCupid. I don't remember how Kayla was served to me as a match, but I do know how I introduced myself. As a response to a picture of her in front of the Dublin zoo, my first words to her were "is that dublin, california or dublin, dublin"? Why she answered, I'll never know, but that kicked off a long chain of messages that went on for weeks. It probably wouldn't have gone on for weeks except for the fact that I was days away from a long vacation to Oklahoma and Michigan to visit friends and family. That made me nervous: the longer the delay between first contact and actually meeting, the higher the chance of that meeting never happening. But we kept chatting good chats and I eventually returned home, where we arranged a date. (For a while, we joked that this was actually date two due to the amount of talking we'd done while I was away).

Said date happened at a now defunct Italian restaurant in downtown San Mateo. In retrospect, I'm not sure why I chose that restaurant beyond it being mildly fancy... except, it was more fancy than I had remembered. We had lukewarm conversation over a very expensive meal, and then went to my apartment to watch Coco (if not Coco, it was some other Disney movie). I spent the entire time on the couch being nervous as hell, but not making any moves even though it seemed like moves were expected. Those didn't come until the walk back to her car where I made a motion to hold her hand, a motion which was accepted. And, we held hands all the way to the parking garage where she'd parked. It wasn't a long walk, but I felt a little more at ease holding her hand, having done something instead of anticipating the need to do something.

The walk to the parking garage wasn't long, so we hung out next to her car for a few minutes lightly chatting, awkwardly putting off a ?"good bye". It was there in the B street garage that we kissed for the first time... or I tried to eat her face off for lack of technique. On a scale from 1-10, I think we both rate that kiss a three. Still, that kiss wasn't enough to keep a healthy amount of dates flowing over the next couople weeks, culminating in the road trip to Disneyland where we made the whole thing official.

Hard to believe that was four years ago; seems like yesterday but also forever ago. I can't imagine that either of those kids would've thought that in scant few years, they'd be married with a newborn. Lord knows where we'll be four years from now. Probably have another kid.

Maybe a successful electronics YouTube channel...