I’ve gotten to take a couple of trips out to the mountains with friends this past month: once to Empire for a celebration of Beltane (an old Gaelic holiday), and once to Bellvue for a friend’s birthday weekend. I’ll have yet another stint of outdoor living next week when a couple dozen friends and I head south for Apogaea, the Colorado regional version of Burning Man.

My friends Mark and Rex had a baby last week, the first time I’ve ever experienced close friends transitioning from non-parents to parents. (Their plan is to not drop completely off the face of the Earth these next few months, in which endeavour we’re all wishing them the very best of luck.)

I’ve stepped up into a couple of leadership roles within my friend group this month, as the financial lead for our Apogaea trip and as a newly-minted admin for our Discord server. It’s a ramp up in responsibility, but one I’m eager to take on and excited to support my community in.

I’ve recently been experimenting with taking each Wednesday off of work and pushing my tutoring and AoPS commitments to the other four weekdays, in order to regularly foster the sense of “infinite sky” that helps me circumvent procrastination and invest significant time into deeply working on my personal projects. I’ve really enjoyed playing around with Project Euler challenges these past few Wednesdays, and this very Now page was the product of a Wednesday afternoon flow session.

My enjoyment of this type of algorithmic problem-solving has prompted a fair bit of introspection regarding my career — in particular, it’s gotten me wondering whether I might add some paid work in this domain alongside my tutoring and teaching gigs. I know that even very experienced programmers have been having significant difficulties finding coding jobs recently, but if I happen across an opportunity in the realm of quantum computing (which I thoroughly enjoyed tutoring a couple years back) or smart contracts (which speak to my love of robust decentralised systems), there’s a good chance I’ll start devoting more of my time to skill-building and problem-solving in those areas.

A couple of my weekly exercise habits are currently on hold: CrossFit due to ongoing tenderness and pain around my right shoulder blade, and hip-hop dance due to EVQ disappearing from both Google Maps and the internet writ large. Correlated with this has been an increased restlessness during my waking hours and greater difficulty staying asleep, which has been nonideal. I think the move will be to return to CrossFit and simply ask the coach about workout modifications that will avoid aggravating my shoulder/back situation.

I recently finished reading Thor Hanson’s book Buzz and listening to George R.R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons, and began reading North Woods and listening to The Brothers Karamazov.