2019/11/24, restarting from scratch

9 months have passed

It's a bit heartbreaking to read previous entries and see how happy I was to start something new again, after so many years. Although there are also things I am happy I did, the last few months were a mess.

So, let me make a list of things I can be relatively proud of and of things I really should reflect on.

The good, mostly not related to tech

After the Takamatsu kendo competition last November, I did resume practice and the result was a nice first-round victory in April. I lost during the second round, but that was a first in my life, pretty much. Yesterday, there was the 2019 Takamatsu Cup again, and I again lost during the first round, but there is definitely a huge improvement over last year and plenty of areas to improve until the coming April competition.
I've also kind of resumed shakuhachi practice. Or not really resumed in the meaning that I practice to improve, but rather mostly to cool down and empty my mind. I'm working on the first piece of 明 (みょう) 暗 (あん) 尺 (しゃく) 八 (はち) (myōan shakuhachi) , which is called 調 (ちょう) 子 (し) (chōshi) . It's not like I play the piece once a day, maybe once a week, maybe more often, sometimes I'd play it for an hour before stopping. I'm not really trying to be able to play without reading the notes, but that's definitely the next step. That way I can free myself even more.
I've decided unilaterally that I'd move from our house, where we live with my mother-in-law, to an apartment that we'd rent in the center of the city. Until we move in, I've decided that I'd live on my own, on an island 30 minutes from the coast, where we can use a house and where there is a thriving Wordpress community, among other interesting people. It's hard not to be every day with my wife and kids and without doing a lot of explaining it can sound like a very weird thing to do. But I count that as a good thing because even though it will cost us money we're moving forward.
I'm closely working on side projects with two friends. Two separate projects. Related to selling stuff. It is always something I had considered, but never on my own. It's going slowly and I like it that way.
I have my first co-translated book out. A translation of the Japanese "Black Box" by journalist Shiori Ito who describes her struggles with the police and society at large after being raped by a high-ranking journalist who had promised her a visa to work with him in the US.

The bad, I'm not sure where to start...

November was when the mess started. Personal, familial, everything, all at once. It was painful.
I stopped everything related to tech. I was barely able to work on this computer. Just did translation work.
I thought I could focus on something different and decided to consider starting a MSc in agronomy, to work on stuff I had just discovered: "carbon farming" or how to use natural farming to increase the carbon absorption rate in the soil, or, in other words, to create efficient carbon sinks while producing foodstuff. Obviously, that was not going to solve any of my issues and was mostly going to create more problems, including financial, without any guarantee that I'd break even in the near future, by using that as a way to increase our income.
I'm still not finished with the tax paper work of last year, not even to talk about this year's. I'm glad the tax office has been extremely understanding with my situation, but that can't last. I need to get my act together.
There is still a job I need to deliver from last year. The client was messy and the job was not well paid, but I need to complete that, get the money and move on. It's a published translation so it's even more painful to see how incompetent the client was. It was seemingly their first attempt at publishing a multilingual version of one of their books. And it showed very early that they had little skills in multilingual jobs management, especially on the technical side. The fact that the job was paid at a nominal rate considerably contributed to my lack of enthusiasm. And there are still questions left unanswered as I proofread by early work, but there will be my name somewhere in the book so I really want to deliver something that I'm satisfied with...

What's next?

Well, I'm not sure. The place where I live now has no internet connexion. So I use my newly acquired phone to provide the access but I don't want to use too much of my data plan on tethering to my laptop. We won't have "home" internet access until we completely move in the new appartment so I may have to stay on low bandwidth tethering longer than I thought. But I guess that's a good thing. I'm re-learning to see the text-web, without images. I found a bandwidth simulation tool for macOS that limits my use of the net too.

I've just checked w3schools.com and it is reasonably accessible without graphics. freecodecamp.org seems to have issues with very low bandwidth access. I can't have access to the login page. exercism.io loads, but the github login took some time. 100dayscss.com loads fine but the css rendering seems to take forever. Weird. I guess I'll focus on w3schools.com for now.

Translation. I'll be partnering with a site that translate Japanese novels. So I'm reading novels. I have no idea where that will take me but that's better than being refused translations by publishers.

Et voilà. That's a long update, but thin in contents when you consider it spans 9 months. I'd like to think of them as a gestation period after which I'm reborn a bit more resilient. We'll see.