Daily - 2025-10-25

Since I work in landscaping and live in a cold weather region, I get significant downtime roughly Thanksgiving to Valentine’s Day (US). These months are hard on me. We are already stretched thin financially and I feel awful being home not earning money while we pinch our pennies all winter. I also get bored without projects to work on.

Last year during this time I tried to make a habit of writing a daily note to help with managing my tasks, projects, and mental state (and not driving my wife bananas for 3-ish months). I fell out of the habit once work picked up. But, I’d like to make this a permanent habit. Something I do every day after breakfast and before the kids get up.

I’m also going to publish them. For now they will live on the main feed of my blog. However, if I do stick with this, I might setup a separate site to make publishing easier. I’m sure some folks would appreciate a separate feed if they want the dailies or just the blog posts.

So, here’s day one.

The layout of these daily notes is:

• Gratitude. To help with my mental health, I want to review what good things happened the day before.
• Yesterday recap. Brief notes about what happened the previous day so I can look back and recall the days.
• How are you feeling. A personal check-in. Essentially how many spoons I have for the day.
• Todo. What is on my agenda. This includes a section for “fun” so I make sure I make time each day to have a little fun.

The daily posts won’t have a preamble after this one.

Gratitude

• My wife and I had a good game night. We had been skipping these recently to watch spooky movies instead. I’m glad we picked it back up.
• Having an office day was nice. I was able to spend more time with the kids and had lunch with my wife instead of alone in my truck parked on the side of the road.

Yesterday recap

I had an office day to prep for a new customer that will have us do the sprinkler winterization for all of their properties. This is a big contract for us and it is going to take a lot of scrambling to get it done before freezing temps set in. I needed to see all the properties on a map and then come up with routes to minimize our travel time. I like the plan and now we have to start communicating with each of the tenants to let them know their date/time for the service.

It poured rain all day, so I had no plans on going out. After office work I helped my wife with her Friday chores, had homemade pizza for dinner, and watched WWE Friday Night Smackdown.

One night each weekend we let our two youngest do a “stay up as late as you want” where they go in their room and play until they drop, which is normally around 11PM. While they played, my wife and I played bean bag toss and had snacks while a Bon Jovi concert played on the TV. That was fun.

Then we learned the kids found a bottle of blue food coloring in the bathroom. We were called up to discover blue hands, feet, pajamas, and the bathroom floor. Luckily everything came clean, minus the hands and feet. That will just take time.

How are you feeling today?

Muted. I have some financial stuff to figure out and I’m still a little frustrated with the food dye incident last night. Not in the talking mood.

Todo

Chores

• Collect our AA batteries and portable battery banks for their monthly recharge.
• Put the outdoor furniture away for the season before a storm blows them down the street.
• Trim my beard.

Fun

• Halloween crafts with the kids. My oldest and her fiance are coming over to participate (◍•ᴗ•◍)✧*。.
• Watch AAA Héroes Inmortales. These Lucha Libre AAA events have been a blast.

Projects

• Get hibernation working on my Panasonic CF-SZ5 laptop. The swap partition is too small, so need to resize and then adjust a few settings.
• Run security updates on my public facing services, like this blog and GoToSocial.

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