# This is a Blog Post

One way I can often tell that anxiety is rearing its ugly, and sometimes hard-to-spot head is by trying to write a blog post. Does the very idea of updating people with what I'm up to or how I'm feeling fill me with dread, or leave me daunted, feeling like maybe I'll do it later? If that's the case, then generally, my anxiety is on the rise and I need to take steps to get it under control.

# Well, Duh

I mean, at this point, is it really anxiety, or just common sense? [author's note: I just got up and filled the dishwasher with dirty dishes in the middle of writing this. I had no intention of walking away from this, and hadn't really realized what I was doing until I was halfway through the chore. See? Sometimes hard to spot.]

So, this is a blog post.

# How I Spent my Summer Pandemic

I've kept busy, mostly building things. I did want to make a list of the COVID projects I've been working on, so maybe this is the right place for it.

1. Mechanical Keyboard

• I bought some key switches a couple of years ago with the intention of de-soldering a broken keyboard and frankensteining some parts together. I finally did this and built a 40% keyboard. This could be the subject of its own blog post. Obviously it isn't yet, but maybe we'll get there.

2. Yard cleanup

• Like I said, it's mostly about building things, but this was definitely on the to-do list from last year. A couple trips to the dump, and moving the wood pile more than once saw this complete.

3. Dragon Cross-stitch

• I finished the red dragon, started and finished the green dragon, and started the silver dragon, which is the fourth and final entry on this pattern.

4. Fence the yard for the dogs

• This has been on my to-do list for years. Finally, with no derby, and nothing really better to do, we built a backyard where our canine friends can frolic and play. It also helps to keep the deer out of the garden. There's a little more work to do -- the front gate is on a sloped piece of ground, and there's enough room for Poppy to sneak under, so I'm going to build up the ground under the gate and hopefully that will be good enough.

5. Chicken Coop

• My family wanted chickens. We've been in the middle of building this coop for five years. With no derby pressing, four or five weekends of effort gave us a chicken coop and run. And chickens. And vast quantities of eggs.

6. Desk

• There were more than a few pieces of plywood left over from the chicken coop. Since starting to work from home, there has been a very real shortage of deskspace. I was sitting on one end of Kim's desk with a minimum of viable space for two monitors and a laptop, not to mention a keyboard, mouse, and notebook. So I took some of the off-cuts from the coop, as well as some 2x6s that were left over from the kitchen island construction, and built a desk. It isn't perfect. The wood is warped in places so that my trackball has a bit of a tilt, and the seams where two pieces of wood were shoved side-by-side to make a big enough surface make it a little annoying, but it's a good, sturdy desk, and I'm proud of myself for having designed and built it.

7. Deck

• Another thing that we've had sitting around half-finished for years, the summer afforded the opportunity to finally get all the deck boards screwed down properly, get the gate on the one end of the deck, and put the glass in the final panel of the rail. Everything is done except the last thing. The pane of glass we got from the company that sold us the kit is too big to fit in the panel, so we either need to get it cut to size or to buy a piece that actually fits. Haven't gotten around to that, so I guess this task isn't finished yet.

8. Keyboard

• Wait. But you just said... I'm swapping out the key switches on my ergonomic keyboard. I've already changed out half the switches. The other half will happen this weekend. It's a little odd typing on different switches with each hand, but it won't be for long.

9. Cross Stitch Software

• I haven't spent a lot of time looking at the cross stitch design software that's already out on the market. I know I did try to get in touch with the people who made one of the more popular ones on the market. I was hoping to get the specs for his cross stitch files so I could reverse-engineer them and use them as the basis for a piece of software for doing cross stitch -- keeping track of progress, automatically counting the number of squares from here to there, isolating a particular colour or set of colours... stuff like that. But I never heard anything back, so I decided to write my own creation software that outputs a completely transparent file format so that if anyone wants to build off of what I've made, they can feel free. This isn't done. I have a large number of the features I wanted in the creator, though there are a number that I haven't finished yet, and I've hardly started the pattern reader.

10. Writing

• Carl Sagan says that to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. I didn't go quite that far back, but in order to write a story, first I made a desk, then a keyboard, and I did revive my venerable Mac Mini and my even older Dell Inspiron laptop with SSDs. That out of the way, I've been organizing my writing into a single git repository and I've been writing. Since finishing the 40% keyboard, I've written something like 40000 words -- on pace to complete NaNoWriMo before it even starts.

I'm glad I finally took the time to write out the things that I've been doing to keep myself busy during the plague, and I'm glad that I got a blog post written. Because that's what this is.

A blog post.