Sabbatical Update (Week 5)

July 9, 2021

Summary: (2 July 2021 to 8 July 2021) Continuing work on Grandpa's autobiography, finishing Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, and starting The Deficit Myth.

Reading

I finished Modern China: A Very Short Introduction. I'm now reading The Deficit Myth.

Grandpa's autobiography

One of the main reasons I took a sabbatical was because I had projects that I knew were important but I could never find the time or energy to do. My grandpa's autobiography is one such project. Back in 2018 I did a bunch of interviews with my grandpa. He told me stories of his life. I transcribed the recordings and organized them chronologically. I got the content up on a bare-bones website and found some photos. But then my progress stalled. It's been 2-3 years since we started the project! He's not going to live forever, I would like to give him a mostly complete work while he's still on Earth!

I'm happy to say that I made some progress on the autobiography this week. Specifically, I:

• Found relevant photos from the San Francisco Public Library's Historical Photograph Collection to supplement my grandpa's stories
• Re-organized the content (consolidating chapters, moving incomplete stuff to drafts, etc.)
• Got the tony.basqu.es domain working
• Got automatic Netlify deploys working
• Polished up the site UI and presentation

It's all online, you can check it out at tony.basqu.es.

I'm a bit frustrated that it's still not done, but I'm sure my psyche is happy that it's much closer to done now!

What's next

Next week I have a bunch of chores to get out of the way. E.g. scheduling a flight back to the United States, scheduling dentist appointments, adding an RSS feed to this site, etc. Hopefully they won't take all week. I think it's an interesting experiment to spend a week specifically focused on chores, though. Let's see how it goes!