Staycation

posted on 2022-04-03 21:15:00

Norma and I are at the end of a lovely week on vacation at home. It was extremely welcome, quite relaxing, and over all too soon like any vacation. I often struggle with breaks but I think a few things conspired to make this one feel different.

1. I had about an hour of work or chores each day to give me a little structure.
2. Norma was also off so we could hang out together.
3. I was able to alternate between friends, Hollow Knight, and streaming emulator hacking.

Historically, Norma's work in non-profit means she gets less vacation, or has a harder time taking it, than I do. Streaming has also been an interesting experiment. For most of our relationship, I have struggled to pull myself away to work on coding projects. I spend so much time sequestered with my computers, I hardly want to do it more when I could be with her. But then I can get frustrated or down on myself because I haven't made more time to learn or experiment. Streaming helps me feel like I'm not just wasting time alone in the garage.

I'm going to try to continue streaming every Sunday and see how it goes. It's also been interesting to work on an emulator again. I'm reminded that the workflow with Common Lisp and Sly or Slime is as good as any I'm familiar with. I still love the language. But I was disappointed today to realize that after almost 20 hours of streaming, I wouldn't finish the CPU of my emulator this week. I don't think it's the fact that I'm not finished ultimately. I think I'm surprised that I still haven't been able to solve the problem to my satisfaction. Sure, I haven't gotten scrolling working on previous attempts. More than that though, the code still feels awkward and messy in various parts and the hard bits are still hard. Writing a reasonably accurate and efficient emulator in a high-level language is still fairly tricky it turns out. Or it is for me anyway.

I don't entirely know why this task continues to be something I want to tilt at. But until it isn't, I'll keep trying. Cheers.

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