May is almost here:
What I'd like is a continuation of Apr.
- Some action items from the book / finish the book
- Steady progress at work - UA / device atlas / missing imp / AWS / shopping
- Z - bathe, walks, b, food, diapers
- Need a backup solution / other drop off options for day care
- bright horizon backup care
- day care red tape
- immunity supplements
- cook and clean
- find a workout schedule - swim / yoga
- weekend parks / class booking?
- more consistent sleep times
- passport / CA
- mint review / accounts / cutting down on expenses we don't use
- undertstand rollover roth
- networking
- get physicals scheduled for Rat and me
- S and plants
- mattress
- airtel bill / IOB account
- drive
- events - library / rummage sale /
- book on housing / little investment book
- 529 plans
- tax loss harvesting
- investment post mortem - fees / returns
- think about mentoring
- Z haircut
- Z photos
- sawtelle flowers
- Z weekend nutrition
- book swim class
- search trends
- streaming media
- Tanmayi
- mindfulness retreat in June in Santa Cruz
- understand GAAP and RNOT
- Nachi talk
- Legal AI talk
- make a plan for AWS
- MRV fee
- make a plan for AI/ML learning/NLP
- home improvement
What did I practice / push today?
- May 1st to May 3rd : Cooked , pushed little work, Z things, read, sold stocks, rested.
- 4th - lots of new branches in proj/ meetings. cooked. Z bath, Z reading, feeding.
- 5th - networked and understood about ginsu. worked a bit, laundry, dishes, reading
- 6th - read, beach, checked a daycare, cooked , cleaned a tonne, and exercised a LOT of patience with Z. bathed her. bookshelf chaos.
- 7th - cooked, shopped some home improvement things - storage shelves, pots.
- 8th and 9th - pushed work a little, 1 swim, organized the book shelf
10th - (period, cake, TV), some work
11th - (period, briyani), some work, lots of reading
12th - working on java and maven the first time in many many years.
13th and 14th - house organization.
15th - laundry, walk, tickets, little cooking
16th - closing tickets, dishes, shoe shelf, fold clothes, walked and read to Z, read the streaming media magazine.
17th - device atlas. helping teamie, swim, cook.
18 - device atlas. Comedy show, music, walk
19
20 - dishes.
21 - beach, trail, met tanmayi , went to yellow chilli.
22 - ticket and a LOT of lying around with my thoughts and better sleep
23 - dishes, cooking, meetings
24 - Scooter, sleep, scooter
25 - ticket
26 - grocery, yoga, walk, read, lazy cooking, laundry 1, laundry 2, ate, read a book to Z, swam.
27. Slept unnecessarily late and dealt with tiredness for the most part. Sorted my clothes, sorted Zaya's clothes, sorted documents.
28. Again, groggy. Sorted medicine shelf, cosmetics, electronics shelf, some of the trinkets stuff and stationery. It feels like an 8 hour job just sorting. Super tired. And it's 1 already.
29. second iteration organizing stationary shelf, Z's craft stuff, throwing away things, Z bath, me bath, cooked. chilled in the verandah, put a face pack, got AJ to use a foot pack, did Scooter's claims.
30. Insomnia, day care red tape, massage, water, early dinner, shef bag prep, wind down schedule.
31. planned and improved how I sleep, but had to wake up early for an offsite call, feeling so fucking burnt out. cancelled swim in the evening - just gonna focus on rest till I become functional again. There's the stress of pending tickets eek.
Happiness:
I like the pace of life. the balance of things. the boundaries between different aspects of life, and the improving focus within those bounded areas.
Z runs to me everyday after she comes from day care. Yesterday she rightfully swung herself onto me and fed me the leftover wafer that she was chewing on. Most times you don't need to overthink if you are a mom, a good mom etc. Your child knows and she will tell you in her ways.
Was only able to briefly talk to Lavs, but her gentle suggestions help me try something new here and there, especially with parenting - this time it was about nutrition and food before for sleep.
Bubbles - who knew I'd get so excited to see bubbles at this age. Huge bubbles that fly far and wide have a certain awe to them.
we had to change how the bookshelf was laid because Z's been a monkey and climbing everything she can, touching the shoes, pulling things apart, one Z based anxiety down
the magic of being able to sit in the front seat and put Z in the car seat - someday magically I hope she will also sleep without needing me.
she's been doing cute things as usual - like she can now take things to dada if I ask her to, she wanted to reach something, so she threw books down and got on top of them to get some height.
She is suddenly interested in books and words, with absolutely no pushing from our side. She picks a book, comes to us and asks us to read it for her. It's just awesome to do things for her when she initiates it vs we do it.
At daycare she has two favorites - Iqra's two kids and she learns from them for sure. they like her, she likes them - she learns hugs and words and nice things from them.
Every time Z finds something new to mess with, we find solutions and it also turns into home improvement ideas. how can we make it work for her and us and make it look welcoming at the same time. started with some nice polka dot storage to close our book shelf so she does not throw them.
cake to forget period pains. a husband that takes the time to get it :)
Arya Dhayal - kabhi kabhi aditi , que sara, kabhira
the happiness of knowing you don't have to be the best as per anyone's definition. you just be the best you can be - and find happiness within it.
Chocolate croissant from the farmers market
Chinchikurin okonomiyaki... Was tasty and looked amazing.
Bougainvillea and fake grass for the verandah.
couldn't cook much last week cuz periods/ mood/ cleaning etc so we ate out and also AJ managed the kitchen.
Had a wonderful lunch with chicken AJ made and the portobello mushrooms side that he made too.
spinach croissant
closing tickets
I read Z's story books with more intent than she does. So I can't close the book without finishing it. She's got one book about trucks and it's quite interesting how many different kinds of trucks there are. Yesterday I played a video reading of a book called 'Mike Gulligan and his steam shovel' . I loved it. It's about the steam shovel that gets out marketed by new innovations and how much she can do. The steam shovel even has a name - Mary Anne. Today when I took Scooter walking I paused and watched a truck lift an entire storage container using a machine and pulley system. It's amazing how so much weight was lifted by just chains.
Z's learnt to rawwwwr. Her mouth goes oval and nostrils flare up as she goes rawwwwr!!
T's house in Corona was nice as a community, had a beautiful swimming pool with an amazing view. A great trail, dog park. It was a nice day had. We went to Yellow Chilli, it was americanized Indian food - it was too rich for my taste and less spicier for Indian food.
Rat's been to YMCA 2 weeks in a row.
Arj got a job - it's not the easiest one - not the most well-suited one either., But it's a start, something to use and develop a work ethic off. a stepping stone.
Thankful that Rat was available to take care of Scooter with his worsening health. Thankful that doctors exist. it's costly - these things - and I hope Scooter recovers from all of this and has a smooth life.
gotta admit. Shruthika's videos are funny
Happy about removing some costs off Scooter by during some critical thinking and comparison with his vet's costs. It's still an unfair system but saved $400 and delayed another $400 to see if necessary.
Good news he is much better than we initially assumed.
Rat made chapatis for dinner the last two days. This morning after trying for a few days we finally got to have breakfast. Again, Rat made it. I've been having blood sugar and fatigue issues and I decided I can't afford to skip breakfast anymore. And he also offered to take Scooter to his office so I can use my day off today outside the apartment if need be. If course he packed Z's food too. He has been super helpful at the cost of going late to work. I can't get his help this way. We have to try and wake up earlier and be respectful of each others time. Anyway I'm super thankful he did all this and dropped me at the gym too. I'm going to use this privilege well.
If u had a definition of angel, it would be Z waking up in the morning and giving me one of her precious smiles.
Had soon tofu at Seoul tofu. Was an amazing experience. You get an amazing tofu soup with half cooked egg. I chose the veggie soup with veggie broth. And you get an amazing set of 6 sides. Kimchi. Mashed potato. Vinegar sweet radish. Fish cake. Bean sprouts. Broccoli. Then, rice. And then if you get it as a combo you get a huge dish. I got spicy barbeque chicken - it was the best fried chicken I've had in a long time. Rat got the bimimbap combo. The tofu soup is like mapo tofu, very flavorful with mushrooms, squash. All the flavors together were great. Loved the simple kick from the kimchi , radish and even bean sprouts Oh and then we went to bsweet and had a fudgiest brownie - I loved it.
Z and S fighting and pushing each other way to get prime real estate space on my lap. It's super cute. But it gets annoying very soon when you are sleepless cranky.
Dosa and chutney
thankful for the ulundhu ladoos Tanmayi gave me.
Food:
palak paneer, poori potato, rajma masala, salad, dhal and vazhakka, beetroot curry, fired rice, idlys and chutneys. briyani. beans poriyal, keerai poriyal, sweet potato masala. Puffs with leftovers.
chicken curry, brussel sprouts, sambar, paneer poriyal, green curry with meal maker, paneer, broccoli and sweet potato. Spinach dhal. Raita, veg Briyani, paneer. black eyed peas, beans poriyal.
Rat : pepper chicken, shredded chicken, mushroom, aspargus, mushroom. the tomato hummus in sandwiches. chapathis. Broccoli, sweet potato.
Outside : mayura, ny gyro, colony hawaiian chicken - none were great, blueys chicken sandwich, chocolate croissant, spinach croissant. Okinomiyaki,
Abiruchi - shrimp, Briyani, paneer Tikka.
Yellow chilli - costly, food tasted too rich for my taste.
Soon tofu at Seoul tofu.
Learning
How a book is written:
A compelling format is causing fear and creating anticipation for a solution against the fear and then addressing it towards the end.
lots of examples of what can go wrong.
listened to a podcast on how apollo thinks about yahoo and about the magic of finding good deals and making good deals - how by making the right strategic sales, they almost bought yahoo for free and how things look like at that level - a lot of the workforce think about about what products do, they start with what products make and then come to what products do. It was quite interesting how mergers and acquisitions and finance work. it was interesting to see how each of yahoo's product is a separate entity and how they see most of us - as people and culture from a company that failed. how management was replaced at upper levels. you understand how insignificant you are. but of course, you are always insignificant if you want to really think about it that way.
also how what one considers a dying business just because they come from the perspective of we are not the leaders, but when you flip the story to say, that even a 1% market share is 1B, now the focus changes.
work and presenting. I think presenting is definitely something that makes me grow.
Nachi's thoughts on AI/ ML/ NLP
- Deeplearning is a subset of ML is a subset of AI.
- supervised - classification, regression
- unsupervised - clustering, association, dimensionality reduction
- NLP - understanding / generation. statistical NLP - part of speech - neural NLP - word embeddings.
- loss function - difference between actual result and ML result and back propagation(calculus) to bridge the gap.
- Feature engineering - small number of features better for model but can land in local optima instead of global optima.
Watched this amazing interview of sakthishree on ss music. The anchor did a phenomenal job and there were two people speaking out their hearts and shakthishree showing how much love goes into her music for her to experience and share it to us.
Thoughts:
online shopping takes time. sucks time.
Watched a man called Otto. A movie that makes me sad, a little like Tuesdays with Morrie.
boring and stable is usually better than cool and unstable.
some anxiety - half stemming from money related issues , half from a bunch of tasks that are all progressing but have not been completed. the tasks - I have to keep working on them and they usually get better. The money issue is actually a people-issue - a partnership that feels unfair, taken-for-granted. I don't like someone else's mistakes impacting my life that I consciously craft and work hard towards. I feel anger at the carelessness and the insincerity. I have to be patient and I feel like I have been for a long time. A partnership is about two people working equally and being equally sincere and cautious about the choices in their lives. A partnership is not one where one allows drags on one's life because of impulsive decisions without enough thought put into it.
Dust needs to settle..
it's so hard for me to say 'I' .. I always resort to 'We' when actually I did most of the work. I also feel I should be the face of my work and in quite a few instances have been feeling it's not the case. Well something to learn and fill.
a pair of sandals, some memories about the wedding, some regretful feelings, another day of managing emotions by distracting myself with work.
they say your identity should not come from something that can easily upset you - that you don't have control over. Career makes life interesting for me. Perhaps the thing to identify with in the career should be the personal things like - the pursuit of knowledge, taking opportunities, finding growth.
There are several ways I can learn from my career: data engineering, advertising, fraud, advocating for oneself.
Bad mood and fatigue.
Scooter's heart condition is getting worse.
We took him to emergency today and in addition to the 500 we spent for a regular consultation, they slapped another 2500 on me today. Removed the blood pressure check for 170, removed the X ray for ~800 bucks and the x ray related sedation 90. The xray was available at his vet for half the price at $400 if necessary. the sedation for echocardiogram was 290 and the same sedation for xray was 90 just because of the procedure the sedation is associated with - which is just pure theft. the echocardiogram itself was 825 (850 at his vet). the emergency exam was 250 and the cardio consultation was 140 (which is 70 at his vet). Because we were not sure of the emergency, I did some cost analysis and got our bill to 1200. The xray is not necessary unless he has a breathing problem but he does not have one now. He also had better BP now. So it's just some regular meds and some anti-anxiety to get him to cooperate for the echocardiogram. I'm a little happy for making the cost analysis but it took quite some time to get the comparison from his regular vet to save us a possible 400 if not the whole 800 on the xray. there's also a radiology interpreter cost of $200. The medicines are available - 30 tablets in the market for the same price he gets 2 here- it's a mere $6 for me but the profit margin for the hospital on every box of medicine is 1:15. So yea the industry, the doctor education and the patient costs are all designed to screw us all. of course they add in real estate, reception, logistics and service cost itself.
The brain - it has it's strange thoughts. It can cook up things - on a normal day when everything is going fine, it can cook up an earthquake, an attack, a theft and problem-solve in your head. With some awareness we get to disregard the nature of the brain and focus on reality. Sometimes , if we add a pinch of emotion , memory, the feeling of lack to the mixture - it can get a little more sticky making up stories that aren't peaceful but you indulge in a bit. It's not fair to reality - you are taking your focus off today to indulge in these thoughts. The actual problem to solve is the feeling of lacking. The feeling of lack is informed to a certain extent by your imagination - and you can imagine just how much ever you want about what you can expect and the more you can imagine the more you can lack. Lack also comes from conditioning. That there are some social structures that you want. One thing is missing that the heart wants - and behind that one thing, a complex mindset.
want breakfast
Long weekend burning out:
It's a 4 day weekend and I can't believe I've spent three of those days tirelessly setting every nook and corner of the apartment. It's bordering an obsessive level. And with not enough sleep. The problem is that after all this, I actually have uncovered more things to do. I feel if I have a house, it will be way more complicated than an apartment.
Anyway what I have to do that is left is :
- Mop house, clean bathrooms, clean fridge side door. Clean the humidifiers and put them away.
- format electronics and do away with stuff.
- organize and arrange Rat's closet.
- make the guest room shelf more space and buy a mattress for the room.
- organize stationary and games a little better.
- clear up my table
- get small trellis and put plants on dresser. Get some more seeds.
Fix the peacock ceramic stuff.
- put the cycle, transformer, some jewel stuff for sale.
- what the process inspired me to do is probably use more of my make up and clothes.
Have to cook for the week, dishes, finish the book, give z a bath, do Scooter's claims, z day care docs.
Want to do accounting, z videos, photo organization. Book India tickets, get passport stuff completed.
For second half of year, want to drive, want to potty train Z, want to sleep better, maybe meditate. Want to read more on ML and AI.
For a house , a garden will be a big commitment, z will need a room for her and a guest / storage room would be great. I want spaciousness but don't want the complexity of managing too many things.
I want to sing with appa.
Anyway with so many things on my mind, I have to prioritize giving myself a break tomorrow. And that means waking up late, just put away the basic things - giving z a bath, cooking and eating well, going to a park and chilling / reading, finish z paperwork , scooter paperwork and focusing on sleeping in time.
For the short week I should focus on sleep, waking up, learning, ticket and presentation. I have a cardio, a swim, maybe one cooking and regular day to day stuff. Home organization stuff - as and when I have time.
Next weekend I have one more swim, after which I want to do self care - massage , color etc. I could summarize the book and spend 1 hour on accounting each day. I could also spend one hour each day on z videos.
The week after that - want to get started on projects, but also start ML understanding.
Eventually I want day to be like
Wake early, z help, breakfast, exercise, scooter.
Work / learning
Scooter, z , cooking , workout
Weekend
Cooking, project, learning, workout , one outing.
Experiment with clothes.volunteer.
