Today, I poured a glass of wine and came upstairs to what has so far been my favorite coding spot. I have a beautiful view of my backyard and the flowering cherry tree of a neighbor’s backyard. I fired up my laptop and a React Native training video.
Alas, the zoo had other plans: the dog and one of the cats wanted attention. Ada (dog) and Frankie (cat) let me know this right when I was trying to figure out why the Android emulator made a truly horrendous buzzing sound every time I clicked into a text box.
There are two main reasons the pets come to bug us. One is that they want to play. The other takes a longer explanation: our very nervous dog sometimes doesn’t eat and the only way we’ve found to let her know that we want her to eat is to give her a treat when she finishes a meal. So every time Ada finishes a meal, she gets a treat. The cats complained that this was unfair, so now they also get treats when the dog eats—though we do require them to sit for it, with which they’re mostly fine in a feline sort of way.
So Ada, Frankie, and I headed downstairs to check on Ada’s food bowl. It was full, which meant they wanted to play. If I was going to get any learning done at all, it had to be done. Frankie and I played with a fishing pole toy while Ada dog chewed the leg off of a squeaky moose toy.
So, my coding exercise so far has resulted in:
- 5 minutes of learning
- 2 minutes of navigating settings in an Android emulator to turn off the blasted noise
- 10 minutes of playing with Ada and Frankie
- An unknown number of minutes on Twitter, which for some reason I went to when I got back to my laptop
- However long it took to write this blog post
- But before that, I had to watch this because I Googled “Willie Nelson” after writing the title
In other words, the coding is off to a brilliant start!