Life freewrite - Oct 7, 2024
It's freewrite time! So that means I'm going to brain dump about stuff I've been doing and wanting to do.
It's been a busy few weeks lately as we've been working to re-organize and clean the house (I say we, but really it's 99% my wife). Our pantry had become functionally useless with haphazardly tossed items stacked wherever they fit, our medicine cabinet/linen closet was similar, and our drawer of plastic containers was so messy that it could barely close. So she's been making a push to clean that up and get it orderly and useable again which I've been helping with whenever I'm not working the 9-5 or watching the kiddos. We've completed the upstairs entirely, and we got rid of a bunch of junk that had been stashed away in closets and cupboards that we didn't need or want anymore.
Thankfully, this wasn't all just tossed into a bin for the garbage collectors. Where we live, there's a pretty handy little facebook community where folks post unwanted items for free, and someone who might want it comes and picks it up... I've seen everything from fully functioning dishwashers that had been ripped out to be replaced, all the way to freezer-burnt meat get given away. It's a really neat way to avoid adding unnecessarily to a landfill and still getting things out of my house that we don't want and aren't worth the hassle to sell.
So, with the upstairs tackled, it was time to do the same to our basement and that meant gutting the storage area and the secondary under-stairs storage. We found a bunch of stuff to give away and a bunch of stuff that is going to be bound for a dump, and are just about finished with that whole project - just in time, because feeling the wind out there in Saskatchewan the last few days... we're going to be seeing winter set in pretty soon I feel.
This process has allowed us to purge a lot of unnecessary items and set up a way better system of organization for what we do want to keep, which has been great. It has also proved that we need more shelving for books. Most of our bookshelves are small things designed largely for apartments that haven't been replaced in the two-ish years we've owned our home... and it's starting to get crowded on these little shelves. I've got a lot of tabletop RPG stuff now, and space to store that is at a premium, so I'm hoping to get some big shelves from Ikea or something to set up.
As far as my day job goes, I've been doing a lot of fighting with SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) lately. It's a tool that we use to build reports around our data, and it's a little quirky with how it actually works... plus we're using an absolutely ancient version of the tool from 2012 which means a lot of the documentation is difficult to actually find and apply in a meaningful way. All that said, it's been neat to mess around with and learn. I've got a lot more learning to do before I'd call myself competent at SSRS, but I know enough now to mostly achieve the kind of data displays I want which is handy. We're also looking to slowly move over to Angular, so I'm trying to stuff my hate of all things javascript into a box long enough to understand how this framework works and use it.
And with that said, my break is officially over so it's time for the braindump to stop. I'm currently reading book 6 of Dungeon Crawler Carl, playing Knave 2e (ttrpg, solo), and playing some Minecraft using the Direwolf20 1.21 modpack in the FTB launcher. I've also just been gifted Rimworld, so I'm going to be putting some time into that in the days to come. I don't know how much of these items will make it into blog posts in the near future, but I have a draft around more Knave stuff, and around a series review for DCC. I may add a few 3Speak videos to my ToDo list with regards to the FTB Minecraft and Rimworld, but we'll see. I need to finish recording and uploading my Dwarf Fortress vids too before I completely forget to return to that.
Anyhow, that's it for me.