Hold it, wasn’t Easter like…3 weeks ago?
Easter was actually on April 12 (I just looked it up) but I’ll be honest; this year, it snuck up and caught us completely unaware.
In our house, however, disregarding Easter was not popular. For the kids, it was unacceptable to miss out on an opportunity to stock up on their candy stash. I therefore promised my daughter we would have a proper Easter with an egg hunt and a nice dinner at some to-be-determined point in the future. I promised this week after week. It got a little heartbreaking how optimistic my daughter was that it would actually happen when inside my head, I was thinking, we’re probably just going to let this one go. So 2 weeks ago, when my son and I masked up and went to CVS for a few essential items, I leveraged the section of (heavily discounted!) Easter candy. And today was finally the big day.
Totally fun, in the end. This morning, I stocked up the plastic eggs with candy (had to keep shoo’ing our food-focused cat, George, away), hid the eggs all around the yard (color-coded – learned that trick ages ago to avoid full-scale warfare), and the kids set out and did their thing.
Ha HA! Easter thought it could come and completely pass us by! Maybe next year.
To stick with the theme of missing deadlines, time passing, and general inadequacy, what about that coding course, you might ask? Oh my. I am SO behind. I may be learning some coding but – and possibly more important, I think hopefully to myself? – I am learning how stressful it is to be a student.
At this point, I’m a solid week behind in terms of watching lectures. But, of course, I can’t miss the in-person zoom meetings because we get these “Support your section leaders!” messages. So I sit there in section and wonder to myself, what in the world are these people talking about?
I did binge-watch a few lectures in a row prior to the last section to feel a little better about myself and to be able to hand in at least the minimum for assignment 2. Now remember – there is no grade in this class, no credit, no certificate, just glory! Or lack thereof. So with a fair amount of help from my son, I managed to crank out problem 1. When I suggested we call it a day and hand that in, my son and daughter were appalled. Simon: “You are always telling us to try your hardest!” and Lucy: “You always say, if at first you don’t succeed, try try again! At least that’s what you always tell me when I don’t want to do something!”
Well, with hints from Simon and Jonathan, I (we) managed to put together solutions for the next two problems. Feeling great about it, I turned the problem set in. Now those magical computer science people have a grading program that tells you, basically instantly, what score you got.
It turns out I’d rather not know right away. Especially since I (we) got 5 out of…14!!! I think it is because we used different language (text) in our programs. For example, instead of just saying “Great job with your addition!” we wrote “You are a god in human form! You are crushing addition!” Much better, I think.
Now to wind up and give us all a little respite from the pressures of the world, and to remind myself of what peace looks like, I pulled together some photos from a walk in the Mendocino woods for you. Hope that you all have a great week.
Up in the air 