Now We Are Three

Well, not quite, but it’s a long weekend of celebrating Maeryn’s third birthday. She asked for red cake with sprinkles and so she got as much food dye added into a Momofuku Milk Bar birthday cake recipe that I could risk, as well as little red cakes coated in a wd~50-style strawberry glaze. “It tastes like strawberry fake skin!” — my PR school is available for hire for desserts, Christmas parties, and plunging the world into another polycrisis.

Anyway, a quiet but fun birthday celebration was had on Saturday. Cake, presents, and people. The most popular present so far is the Intro To Capitalism 101, or the Melissa and Doug Vending Machine. Although it does have a small flaw that the buttons work without needing money to be fed into its slots…

Last week, I fretted about a rather worrying week of AI usage. This week, I finished writing an agent harness to do the research without me, presented it to the entire company on Thursday, and am now about 80% through the arxiv paper write-up¹. And I slept better!

It’s going to be something of an odd week. In a reversal from our usual pattern, Tammy is out for a week. Only four hours away and in the same time-zone, but it means a lot more to-ing and fro-ing from daycare than I’m normally used to during the working week. It’ll be fine though; Maeryn and I are both taking time off tomorrow to celebrate her birthday by joining the library and eating our first mini eggs. Well, her first mini egg, anyway…I have definitely lost count…