Between trying to drum up work for Yvant, starting a climate change course, and the regular whirl maintaining a sane balanced family life, things are starting to get really busy. I don't help myself though.

On Wednesday night with 2% battery remaining in my laptop I ran an update: sudo pacman -Syu. The battery indicator must have been incorrect because the laptop shut down part way through the update. Then it wouldn't reboot. I tried to recover by creating a Live USB and running the update again while chrooted into the main partition, but I hit a number of issues. Then I decided to just reinstall. Luckily my Linux skills have improved over the last few years and I was able to recover everything of importance. Plus I now have a clean, encrypted Arch install with no hint of Windows anywhere. The downside was that I lost, effectively, a full day. Note to self: spend a day automating this so you don't cost yourself more days in the future.

Another week down, another week without a significant work lead. A chunk was written off with my laptop woes, and more of a chunk than I'd have liked by the Terra course. It's frustrating. You start to wonder whether anything will ever land. But I guess all you can do is keep plugging away.

My sister brought two beautiful, identical twin girls into the world. 2 on 2/2/22, a nice easy date to remember. They're teeny and cute, and my sister and her husband look so happy.

Aside from two new additions to the family the most notable thing that happened this week was that I booked my flight home to Australia. I really struggled with this decision. I wrote on my 2022-03 weeknote that I was questioning whether to go out of concern for my (flight's) impact on climate, and I still am. But too many things aligned: my wife finishing a contract and being available for the kids, my sister having twins, 2.5 years since I last saw my family… and a weak moment on Monday when I was really missing home. I plan to use Compensate to calculate the ecological footprint of my trip and offset it as best I can. I'm aware that my decision isn't totally aligned my current values and direction, but I am really looking forward to seeing family and friends. It's been 2+ years.

I finished my first week of content for the Terra.do Climate Change: Learning for Action course. We learned the basics of climate change, climate models, used a basic climate model to calculate the average surface temperature of the Earth, stastics in climate science… a whole bunch of stuff. There's a lot to take in and the workload, if you do all the peripheral reading, is significant. But I'm enjoying it. I'm going to try to keep a record of my experience in a project here on this site. Our first assignment was due today and I've published my submission here.

Somehow I knocked another minute of my most recent best 10km time. Two weeks ago I was quite happy with my time of 44:03, having not broken 45 minutes in the last year or so (though not trying to). Today I suprised myself by clocking in at 43:02 for the same run. My body is feeling really good at the moment. I think I've only missed 3-4 sessions so far this year. Consistency is the key and is really paying off.