Slow-blogged Saturday

Events had me out on the town by myself yesterday morning. I made my way to one of my favorite breakfast spots, MartAnne's, and started scheming on this idea to capture and share a lot of my day, but unlike doing it via tweeting or posting to Facebook, I'd just hold onto it all for a while.

So I put it all into Drafts, primarily using the quick widget from the home screen. Just taking notes, mentioning things to myself, and thinking out loud. Later, I figure, I would annotate the entries. (You'll see how the day sort of took a turn.) I also cleaned up a few typos, but wasn't particularly disciplined about this part.

This gave me an opportunity to figure out a good way to get all this stuff out of Drafts, too (explained more below).

I'm at Martanes for breakfast and there's no one else here. I thought maybe they weren't even open yet. It's quiet and peaceful, which is never the case here. Ordered chilaquiles (green) and coffee.

*annotated*: I wasn't listening to podcasts at the restaurant; that was contemporanous with taking out the dogs and having coffee at home. I get up early, and that morning time is one of my favorite parts of the day.

Stray note: hand rolling my own feed means I can make a one-off, separate page and still include it in the feed without doing anything special.

I could tell the story of this day in the style of "my perfect Sunday" that the reporter in Hot Fuzz keeps trying to get Angel to tell.

Oddly enough dire straits Brothers in Arms is playing on the stereo as I write that.

Explainer: Brothers in Arms doesn't actually appear in Hot Fuzz, to my recollection, but Romeo and Juliet does. Semi-synchronicity.

Gets a little more busy as I sit and eat my chilaquiles. Regulars, couples. This is a deep community joint.

I can't emphasize enough how unusual it is to wander into MartAnne's (there's the sitting-at-the-MBP spelling and then the Drafts on iOS spelling) and get a table and get one's food in under an hour. Shortly after I left, the line would be fifteen-deep. It's an institution.

I'm making all these notes in Drafts. I'm not sure I'm capturing location correctly. (Screenshot) I should look that up.

Drafts didn't quite have me pegged until I force-quit and restarted the app. Then, maps and locations as expected!

At least, I think so. Doesn't appear o be working even with location service enabled in privacy.

Going for a walk and taking some pictures. (Still not quite comfortable with calling it "making" a picture, though I get the intent.) light is very south, not harsh yet. Streets are still pretty quiet this morning.

I haven't downloaded the pictures from the morning's walk, but I do have one from the iPhone camera. It was a pretty morning. Unseasonably nice for this late in the fall.

Got a little chilly and, honestly, maybe a little lonely out here. Heading home.

I'm headed for home, tummy is a little upset. I have a workout scheduled later so I hope it doesn't bother me. Listening to Tech podcast, getting a little bored with tech podcasts.

noting that using dictation in drafts appears to have worked really, really well.

Took a couple pictures of our older dog laying on the grass. Autumn for her probably, too, it occurs to me.

My son is obsessed with the movie Nut Job. It ends with gangam style over the credits and animated dancing animals. He thinks the line is "hey disgusting lady" and we're not sure if we would rather he sing that or the actual "sexy lady" lyric.

I've tried to sit in the study with game pad and play shovel knight but he immediately found me and brought me some toys.

Arriving at workout. Actually interested in this Microsoft for band thing based in ATP. So maybe I'm not bored with tech podcasts altogether.

I am really happy working out regularly. It's group personal training and feels a little indulgent; friends and coworkers night recoil at the price of this, but it's something that for now my wife and I have decided to invest in for our health.

First couple of sets in the rower made me question if the chilaquiles were a bad idea. But I made it through.

I get a lot more upper body workout than I would direct myself to, here. After shoulder injuries and recent PT I have been pretty tentative; it feels very good to work my arms pretty hard and feel confident that that I'm not re-injuring just by being tired and sore. Stronger.

Regular workouts have also changed up my normal routine a lot, too, and I think this is really good for me. I feel good.

Missed a call from a friend who is going through a difficult time, but glad to hear she is doing okay.

Our son is feeling better after being sick much of the week. Better: he is bouncing off the walls, full of energy, driving us somewhat crazy. I'll take him to run some errands and I hope blow off some steam.

Zoo at whole foods, though, as it's the weekend celebration that our local natural market finally officially transitions to a Whole foods.

Our boy began complaining of tummy pain again about halfway through the trip and is breaking down a bit here, now. Not sure if this is out of discomfort, being tired or just growing and wanting his way. It's this early part of the afternoon that I get a little anxious about not being relaxed and making good use of my weekend.

Got a free t-shirt and canvas bag at the whole foods. Not sure anybody needs a whole foods flagstaff t-shirt except for the folks working at whole foods in flagstaff, but there we go.

Forgot to have some lunch after my workout. That breakfast platter carried me quite a while, but I started to dwindle a bit on the way into target, so I wolfed down one of my wife's energy bars. (macro bar, sesame date; not bad)

Beer and some idle computer time now, while boy has some snack and watches some tv.

Last couple of hours dealing with intermittent pain spasms with my four year old. So hard to see him in pain and we so hope that we are almost through this.

I've been writing these all using drafts, and it is working nicely. I do hope there is a bulk export action at the end.

On drafts: I love the notification widget for quickly opening a blank sheet to type in.

Took me three trips through the king knight castle to find that damn magic wand. Then I had to get through that damn jumping book thing again.

I'm really, really enjoying Shovel Knight. I can play on the gamepad, so I don't need to hijack the TV. It's just a great game.

Son if finally asleep, soundly in my wife's lap. Going on an hour and a half [of sleep], exhausted from his difficult afternoon and evening.

I thought I saved one more "bedtime" entry, but it didn't seem to stick. That's weird.

So this was my slow-blogged day (not sure that's the right phrase, but I like the sound of it). I wish the day had ended in the same spirit it started, rather than frustrated/anxious about our boy. This capture-heavy day gave me a lot to think back to and process, in a different way than live-micro-blogging does. I'm pleased with the exercise.

Colophon

That's what it's called, right? Anyway. Drafts has a function to export entries, but it's in the settings, not as a regular action --- all of which, as far as I know, only function on a single entry at a time. The export function can be applied to all or flagged entries, the latter of which was what I used; I just manually flagged each one, then went and ran export and sent the export out as JSON.

import json
import markdown

json_data=open('/Users/alan/Dropbox/DraftsExport.json')

data = json.load(json_data)
for entry in data:
    dateline = entry["created_at"] + "\n{: class=\"auto_date\" }"
    print markdown.markdown(entry["content"])
    print markdown.markdown(dateline, ['markdown.extensions.extra'])
    
json_data.close()

Everything but the introduction, inserted images, and this explanation was built like so.

slow-blogging my Saturday

Colophon