Final day of February

This morning, after changing Natalie’s diaper and feeding her a bottle and feeding Amelia and making myself coffee and a frozen waffle, Katherine woke up too and we hung out a bit before I took a shower and took Amelia out for a walk. Then I switched the cars around so Katherine could take Natalie to hang out with one of her mom friends and their son, after Natalie woke up from her first nap.

I put together a list of to-do items. Even while writing them out, it seemed like there were too many, and too disparate. So much context switching and trying to cram things in. But I hadn’t yet given up on anything. Here was the list:

• Collect paper tax documents — take to Kinko’s or FedEx to scan
• Design a tax collection system to document all the forms and make sure I’ve collected everything from me, from my wife, and upload to Google Drive and then to CPA portal
• Email intern applicant rejections (for work)
• Document intern application system (for work, for next year)
• Mail an old journal to Noah
• Write a journal entry on Suburban Dad Mode blog
• Write a section of Methodology book

It’s not some insane amount of things, but it does involve running around and switching gears. Well, I went to look at the paper tax documents and saw that there were papers in the same folder for last year and this year. So I immediately removed that from my list for this morning. Too much deciphering involved.

I drove to the post office, but a sign on their door said that their customer service center was closed, maybe due to a loss of power(?). Similarly, Whole Foods was closed yesterday, due to a loss of power. So I skipped the post office.

Over to the coffee shop, where my list was already shorter. I emailed rejections to the three intern candidates, reviewed a spreadsheet — that also had combined candidates from last year and this year, similar to my tax folder — and wrote up our current process and an updated process proposal on an .md file, then saved in over to the work Google Drive, formatted it in a Google Doc with logo, etc, and added it to Monday’s agenda. It took less time than I thought, and while it did involve me doing a bit of weekend work that I didn’t have to do, it’s easier than juggling it during the work week. Besides, I’d been off most of last week due to snow and daycare being closed, and illness, so I had some juice to reengage with work, at least mentally.

I then had Claude Code drum up a tax tracking system. I gave it the requirements, the formats we use, and showed it my tax folder. It came up with a CSV file that I then converted into an Excel spreadsheet, and made some tables. A really good start, with very little effort on my end.

And now here I am, actually journalling. I don’t know if I’ll get around to writing the Methodology entry, but it’s been quite a productive morning really. And I even took a dump at the coffee shop, so all my most important work has definitively been accomplished.