April 5 to 10, 2026

Editor's Note: Past editions of Weeknotes have run Sunday to Saturday; practically speaking, I've realized the best time to wrap 'em up and send is Friday afternoons. So going forward these will cover Saturday to Friday.

• In last week's note, I mentioned that I was a bit under the weather. That continues to the case, and unfortunately, R-4 is (different!) sick as the week starts, with the kind of thing that keeps everyone up at odd hours and has you walking the fine line between "ride it out at home and get as much rest as possible" and "this is maybe serious and we should go to urgent care".

  • I think Baby M-0.25 is also sick, but only with a mild respiratory thing, and he is just generally extremely happy to here. What a champ.

• On top of family illness, there's other household chaos.

  • We have a concrete basement, the floor of which was (poorly) lowered sometime in the last 15 or 20 years. We've done a bunch of unsexy work on it (exterior waterproofing; added a sump pump; fixed a busted soil pipe), and now we're doing some, uh, sexier work?
    • Prior to M-0.25's arrival in December, we repaired some ripped-out walls damaged by a prior water issue and had a proper door installed on the front room, so now it's a nice enclosed little space
    • Now, we're having the whole floor levelled, so that we can put down vinyl flooring, and that front room will become my home office and an occasional crash space for visitors
      • Having this work done is great, but it's meant that the contents of our (very small, extremely hard-working) basement have been disgorged onto the main floor of our house and so we're living in a kind of hoarder house precarity
  • Our washing machine has broken down, I think permanently, and so we'll have to replace that in short order
    • Not great timing with sick kids!

• Tangentially: being a homeowner has given me a really interesting model of attention and anxiety to think about.

  • When we first moved in, I would often describe it as "many small learning curves stacked on top of each other to make one very large steep learning curve"
  • As you live in a space that you have to take care of, you develop a kind of sustained, material attention over the course of weeks and months and years to all of the different pecularities of the space and structure
  • In doing so, you find all kinds of things to become anxious about! Here are some examples:
    • I've noticed small areas of moisture in the corners of our basement this week -- think wet concrete on a dry day -- despite the exterior waterproofing
    • I am possibly gaslighting myself, but I feel like the gaps between the hardwood floorboards in my house are widening? In which case: WHY? (I will probably open up the basement ceiling this summer to try and answer that question!)
    • My shower briefly stopped draining in the coldest darkest dead of winter this year, until we poured kettle-hot water down and it drained again. Did the pipe burst? I couldn't check because the crawlspace was completely snowed in!
  • At the same time, the sustained nature of this attention paid to a single set of interrelated material conditions means you start to develop heuristics and instincts around what's important and what's not
    • A big part of this is just "old house familiarity"; my house is ~100 years old and so it settles and moves and still things stand
      • Old house asks you to hold in your heart both that it will move and warp and still stand AND ALSO you have to be ever vigilant against the creeping forces of delayed maintenance and entropy
    • More granularly, starting to build some familiarity with the systems of the house (from working on them, watching Youtube, listening to tradespeople, etc.) has meant that I have a working model in my head of what's a big deal and what's less of a big deal.
      • Roof and foundation, big deal almost always. Other structural stuff... maybe fine if the house is still standing?
      • Electrical, big deal if really degraded or if it's knob-and-tube, small deal if it's something like "lightswitch not working".
      • Water -- big deal if frozen or leaking uncontrollably or if left unattended
    • Another thing in my case is the helpful emotional posture of "behind every surface was a set of bad decisions".
      • I've come to discover that the previous owners or inhabitants mostly made clownshoes choices in maintaining and renovating this house. One neighbour characterized a previous owner's approach as "duct tape and garbage" and they are not wrong!
        • I do my best to be as generous as possible in interpreting these decisions -- some of the decisions were likely due to cost constraints. But there are definitely some that were lazy or illogical or cheap (derogatory).
      • This posture is helpful in the sense that a Buddhist acceptance that all things die is helpful. Anytime anything happens in the house, I assume it was done poorly previously or else ignored when it should have been fixed, and that I will have to spend money to do it right. Thus, I am never unpleasantly surprised (I am, in fact, still often unpleasantly surprised, usually by how much fixing a thing will cost).
      • I also think you start to learn about the mitigating mechanisms in the house: the water shut-off, how your electrical panel works, what suggests load-bearing vs. what doesn't, etc.
  • So, taking the anxiety and the instincts together, there's this interesting dynamic over the first few years of getting to know a house where the anxiety surface area grows (a big jump at purchase, then a gradual widening as you get to know the house) and ALSO your instincts around what's actually important also improves, but at a lag. So, with time, you have this broad attentional surface, and a kind of heatmap of anxiety and reassurance
  • A really powerful lever in this dynamic is 'becoming kind of handy'.
    • I am far from super handy, and the list of projects in the house is long, but the heat on many of the anxiety sources comes down when you know could at least attempt to repair or mitigate or explore them further.
    • The question "how do you become kind of handy" is an interesting one to me
      • In my case:
        • I've always liked building and designing things in physical space
        • My dad is a mechanical engineer, from whom I have inherited all the confidence of "I could probably work on that" with absolutely none of the actual technical know-how
          • Beyond just mindset stuff, my dad is a patient teacher and when we were kids he'd spend a lot of time making stuff with us for school projects and so on. That hands on practice is great
        • I'm pretty good at watching someone do something and then extracting and extrapolating the relevant lessons to the adjacent problem I'm working on (Youtube is great for this -- I love to watch renovation or carpentry channels)
        • I had a few practical, supervised projects making things through my teenage years: lego robots, popsicle stick bridges, beach boardwalks... I helped refinish a boat once?
        • I feel like I caught an early strain of the "you can just do things" mindvirus in, like, 2010 or so that has left me with a sense that generally you can open stuff up and tinker on things as long as you don't let hubris take over
      • And yet! My dear brother, who has many of the same characteristics and upbringing and inclinations, self-professes as a person who is not handy. I've heard the same from other friends, otherwise very competent folks who couldn't imagine picking up a drill instead of the phone to call a tradesperson
      • Maybe I am also a bit cheap, and would rather buy tools than spend money on tradespeople (with some exceptions, like electrical work and the more complex end of plumbing!)

• I am in the part of the year where I leave my hibernation cave and try to rebuild an exoskeleton that solves for the pervasive executive dysfunction that I enjoy

  • I've not pursued any kind of clinical diagnosis or treatment around ADHD, even though I think it's probably at play
    • There's a lot I could say about why I haven't, but ultimately it boils down to the fact that for me (and I really do mean, for me), I suspect that medicalizing it would lead quite naturally to medicating it, and I'm not super keen to go down that path just yet.
  • But! I read a helpful deep dive by Fernando Boretti articulating Fernando's own exoskeleton for ADHD, and I decided I'd try a few things:
    • I've decided to declare informational/inbox (managed) bankruptcy. I am drawing down to Inboxes Zero over the next couple weeks, and packaging up whatever's left into Archive folders and starting fresh. It feels very liberating to contemplate this!
    • I'm switching from paper to-do lists (with which I have moderate success with during periods of adherence, but overall low adherence) to an app, Todoist, which Fernando recommends. So far, I like it — Fernando talks about the to-do list as an anchor habit, and the app has a few affordances that help it cement that behaviour:

      In a sense, the todo list turns many habits into one. You don’t need to remember “I will make my bed every day”, “I will floss my teeth every night”, etc., because the todolist remembers all those things for you. You only need to form a single habit: checking the todo list.

    • I'm trying to reclaim attention from garbage feeds on my phone by reinstalling Freedom, uninstalling Bluesky, and switching the screen to greyscale.
      • I find that the Freedom app install is so tricky, mostly because of Reddit — I'll install it, then find I want to read some product review thread or DIY whatever on Reddit, so I uninstall, and then before I know it I've been on a 3-day doomscroll binge.
  • We'll see how it all goes!

• Not much to say about work this week; mostly my life was bound up in minor domestic tribulations as described above

  • I made some progress on the Final Report, and the path to conclusion at EOM is clear
  • I've decided to start framing out a microsite for Project Fulgurite, both as a home for stuff I make but also so I can work backwards from the end-state -- what am I building towards?

• Watching: The Pitt, as we approach the end of S2 and everybody seems to unravel

• Listening: A beautiful cover of Dreams, originally by the Cranberries and reinterpreted by Meg Lui and Sufjan Stevens