Annual recap — 2022

Family

  • Parents visited
  • Bunch of paperwork
    • Some IRS interaction
    • Citizenship (!)
  • Joint 39th birthday party

Hiking

  • Panorama trail (discovered the “open space preserves”)
  • Arastradero Preserve

Small visits

  • Children’s Discovery Museum (x2)
  • Palo Alto Zoo (via a birthday party)
  • Taj Mahal (Agra trip)
  • Camera Museo, Aravali Biodiversity Park (Gurgaon)
  • Kinokuniya

Longer trips

  • Kauai
  • Big Island
  • San Diego: Legoland, Disneyland, California Adventure (!)
  • Los Cabos
  • Carmel

Activities

  • Playing with magnets and iron filings
  • Found an old board of Go
  • Bit of Tennis playing
  • Board games (Dixit, Ticket to ride), card games (Go Fish)

Notable Eating

  • Hawaii: Kuleana Rum Shack, Merriman’s
  • Vive Sol (many times)
  • New places: HiroNori, Kusan, Tilak, Little Blue Door
  • India: Kitchens of Awadh(Gurgaon), Sana-Dige (Chanakyapuri), Peshawari(ITC Mughal)

Me

  • Went for a 10K race after a long time
  • Mixed year at work
  • Discovered a new Barnes & Noble location (Redwood City) and a new used books store (Menlo Park)
  • Catching up & meeting with various people

Exploring/making

  • Tweaks to personal website/blog
  • Tinkering with Urbit, Darklang, Mathematica
  • Made a small puzzle RPG

Home

  • Living-room refactor, painting, curtains
  • Lots of car trouble with the Subaru; trade-in for an X3
  • Carpet cleaning
  • Minor changes: Nest cams, wifi routers

Tara

  • Birthday at Little Gym
    • Weekly gymnastics here
  • Apps: Minecraft, codeSpark
  • Swimming
  • Things that didn’t work out: Skateboard, T-Ball
  • Things that did work out: Chess
  • Fun little habit: playing Hangman with characters from Disney/Harry Potter
  • Peninsula Youth Theater (summer camp)
  • Some unintended gluten intolerance
  • Some school tours for next year
  • Various playdates

Reading/listening

  • Audiobooks (me):
    • Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
    • Plato’s Republic
    • The Dawn of Everything
    • The Return of Holy Russia
    • The Red Book
    • Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carrol
  • Audiobooks (Tara):
    • Harry Potter (Goblet of Fire)
    • Wings of Fire (books 1-3)
  • Reading (with Tara):
    • Fantastic Mr. Fox
    • Mysterious Benedict Society
  • Reading (me):
    • Nemo (Alan Moore)
    • The Untethered Soul
    • Against the Day (finally completed!)

Watching

  • Animated:
    • Big City Greens
  • Re-watched
    • All of Harry Potter 1-5
    • Edge of Tomorrow (on the plane)
    • Nightmare before Christmas (“family viewing”)
    • Midnight in Paris
  • In the hall
    • Marcel the Shell
    • Top Gun: Maverick
  • Misc streaming
    • Glass Onion
    • Shaun the sheep
    • Troll, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Bullet Train (weekend binge)
    • Where the Crawdads sing
    • The greatest Showman
    • “The woman in the house across the street from the girl in the window” (very forgettable, but it led to us purchasing the same wine opener)
    • Drive My Car
    • Death on the Nile (nowhere close to the original)
    • Dropout, Inventing Anna
    • Moonfall (went too far)
    • My Little Pony: New generation (disappointing)
    • Stranger Things (latest season)
    • Abbot Elementary (loved it)
  • With Tara
    • Rings of Power (colossal letdown)
    • Harry Potter and the half-blood prince
    • Junior baking show
    • National Geographic wildlife documentaries

Resolutions

  • Better sleep (long elusive)
  • Minimal “good habits” around physical/mental health

One thought on “Annual recap — 2022

  1. Re “The Dawn of Everything”

    Unfortunately, that book lacks credibility and depth.

    In fact “The Dawn of Everything” is a biased disingenuous account of human history (www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity ) that spreads fake hope (the authors of “The Dawn” claim human history has not “progressed” in stages, or linearly, and must not end in inequality and hierarchy as with our current system… so there’s hope for us now that it could get different/better again). As a result of this fake hope porn it has been widely praised. It conveniently serves the profoundly sick industrialized world of fakes and criminals. The book’s dishonest fake grandiose title shows already that this work is a FOR-PROFIT, instead a FOR-TRUTH, endeavour geared at the (ignorant gullible) masses.

    Fact is human history since the dawn of agriculture has “progressed” in a linear stage (the “stuck” problem, see below), although not before that (www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything ). This “progress” has been fundamentally destructive and is driven and dominated by “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room” (www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html ) which the fake hope-giving authors of “The Dawn” entirely ignore naturally (no one can write a legitimate human history without understanding and acknowledging the nature of humans). And these two married pink elephants are the reason why we’ve been “stuck” in a destructive hierarchy and unequal class system , and will be far into the foreseeable future (the “stuck” question — “the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode?” or “how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles” — [cited from their book] is the major question in “The Dawn” its authors never really answer, predictably).

    “All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode of organization. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer an absolute reassurance.” —Guy Debord

    A good example that one of the “expert” authors, Graeber, has no real idea on what world we’ve been living in and about the nature of humans is his last brief article on Covid where his ignorance shines bright already at the title of his article, “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.” Apparently he doesn’t know that most people WANT to be asleep, and that they’ve been wanting that for thousands of years (and that’s not the only ignorant notion in the title) — see last cited source above. Yet he (and his partner) is the sort of person who thinks he can teach you something authentically truthful about human history and whom you should be trusting along those terms. Ridiculous!

    “The Dawn” is just another fantasy, or ideology, cloaked in a hue of cherry-picked “science,” served lucratively to the gullible ignorant underclasses who crave myths and fairy tales.

    “The evil, fake book of anthropology, “The Dawn of Everything,” … just so happened to be the most marketed anthropology book ever. Hmmmmm.” — Unknown

    “Never hide the truth to spare the feelings of the ignorant.” — Mikhail Bulgakov

    Like

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