Rest

It's finally the 14th of July (*15th by the time I finished drafting this). And I have today written down in my schedule as "a day well deserved rest".

I'm honestly exhausted, after the full week of 6-hours-a-day streaming. And while you can already watch the recordings from the BugsDoneQuick streams, I do want also to write a few recap posts, so that I would have a written summary for reflection and posterity. Yet, for today, I would rather focus on the restful day ahead.

Keyboard cleaning—time consuming, but surprisingly relaxing if you aren't in a hurry

How did I rest?

First, I made sure to get ample sleep. During the week before, I had streamed for 6 hours a day, then babysat the uploading of the recording for another 3 hours, then went out for a ~1-hour walk and also took a shower. Meanwhile, I also took some time to prepare an open-source project for the next day, and also tried to shed off a bit of stress by watching videos or joining games on #werewolf on libera.chat. Unfortunately, all the things I had to rushing resulted in me getting less sleep than optimal—so getting back on track with that was my first priority for the rest day.

Then, after I had woken up, I set out to clean the house. I had stuff and dust piled up on my desk even before I started BugsDoneQuick, and it just got worse with all the extra streaming technology around. The messy desk annoyed me quite while I was streaming, so cleaning it out was actually cathartic. I also did the dishes and listened to music, of course. Finally, all of the floors got a nice bit of vacuuming.

Afterwards, I got around to doing some crafts. Whether for nostalgia or for the fact that I'm doing things with my hands, paper crafts are one of most enjoyable low-energy activities for me. I had bought a package of origami paper some weeks prior, and figured it would be a great time to actually use them. So armed with a tutorial on origami elephants by Idea King, I made myself an elephant head:

An origami elephant, name still pending. I guess... "Susie"?

I still prefer "Bernie the musical elephant" that I folded way back, but the new one is also nice, especially with the googly eyes.

"Bernie", the musical elephant (that was folded from a sheet music misprint)

Finally, I had invited friends over for dinner—a great way to end the day without falling back on spending extra time in front of a screen.
For that, set off to make some baked meatballs with sauteed potato, after a quick shopping trip. I also served some elderberry flowers juice—a local specialty—which almost tastes like lemonade if you add enough lemon 😁 Everyone enjoyed the dinner quite a bit. Plus, there was this one very large tomato for the salad, that I sadly failed to take a photo of in time!

After dinner, we played a bit of boardgames: Catan and Skip-Bo—both being long-time favorites of mine. Then, it was too late to stay awake, so everyone just went off to sleep. And that is, in a nutshell, how my day of "well-deserved rest" went. ✨

The meatballs recipe

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Ingredients (serves around three people if complemented with salads and such):

  • 1 zucchini
  • 1 potato (medium-sized)
  • 1 egg
  • 1 slice of bread
  • 500g of ground meat (in my case, ground beef, but ground pork or a mix of the two should work just as well)
  • Optional, ~100g of (meltable) cheese of your choice
  • Salt, seasoning, as needed

Steps:

  • Add the following ingredients to a mixing bowl:
    • Grate the zucchini (and lightly sprinkle it with salt. Let it sit in a separate bowl for a while, then squeeze the water out of it.
    • Grate the potato; if it's a wetter variety of potato, let it sit and squeeze it like the zucchini, otherwise you may add it directly to the final mixing bowl.
    • Soak the slide of bread with water and thoroughly mash it (with a fork), then add it to the mixture.
    • Grate the cheese, and add it to the mixture.
    • If you are not adding cheese, you may consider adding a bit of salt instead.
    • Break and add the egg.
    • Add the ground meat.
    • Add some kind of meat seasoning of your choice. E.g. I added a bit of cumin to mine.
  • Mix all the ingredients thoroughly, making sure there's no air left between them. My personal recommendation here is doing it by hand by squeezing parts of the mixture; you will have to use your hands to shape the meatballs later anyway, so you are going to get just as dirty, while mixing things by hand is faster than using a tool.
  • Prepare a sheet of baking paper in a well-sized backing pan. (When I was making this, I could easily shape 16~20 meatballs with this amount of mixture—so, plan accordingly.)
  • Shape out meatballs from the mixture (there are a few different techniques, feel free to look up a video; my favorite is tossing the mixture from one hand into the other), and arrange them in the backing pan with a bit of distance between them. There's no need to flatten the meatballs; you should rather aim for making spherical ones, since they are going to be baked.
  • Once ready, bake the meatballs at 180°C on the middle tray of the oven, eventually flipping all of them over once the top part looks good.
  • Serve with something carb-y to offset the proteins. Potatoes are a good choice and go well with the meatballs.

Did livestreaming change me?

To answer my question from the end of last article, I think I did change a bit through streaming.

I'm a bit surprised as to how readily I eschewed computer media for my rest day—hopefully that's not a temporary change. Before I streamed BugsDoneQuick, my go-to resting activity was watching videos—and it was getting out of hand. But, the whole week of complete mental exhaustion had done its part, and yesterday, I wanted to keep as much away from computers as I could.

In addition, while I do take care of myself as I go—whether that's eating, taking breaks, or stretching whenever I feel my body itching for it—after a week of little self-care time available, I think I can better appreciate the value of caring for myself. If anything I'm more aware now of how badly I need to take regular walks, to stand up every now and then, to get away from the computer screen, and to sleep well. And I can better appreciate the effect self-care (or lack thereof) has on my mood, ability to focus, and productivity.

Finally, I think I can now better understand some of the disconnect between contributors and enthusiastic users in open-source software. Contributors face thousands of issues they can work on, and collectively can't find the time/energy to cover all of them. Meanwhile, users end up finding one or two "tiny" issues that impede their specific workflow, and can't believe that there has been no one irked enough by those issues to fix them in the intervening decades. I need to let that thought simmer for now, but it would make a good future article. 😊

At any rate, I'm glad to have had this livestreaming experience; it challenged and changed the notions I had about the open-source world, let me experience a tiny bit of "burnout" in a controlled and relatively safe environment, had me practice my marketing and putting-yourself-out-there skills, and overall—improved my confidence as a programmer and self-claimed "FOSS enthusiast".

And, best of all, I left the world a tiny bit better, with 20 "tiny" issues less for others to worry about. ✨

...Though, then again, if prospective contributors watched my streams/recordings instead of contributing, did I really leave the world better off? Hard utilitarian questions right there! 🤔 😂

This is my 18th post of #100DaysToOffload. Curiously enough, Daniel (somewhat-)recently posted their own article about rest for #100DaysToOffload. I guess it's just this time of the year? 😂

  1. Also pictured, a DIY keycap puller made following the tutorial over at Switch&Click↩︎