One Week of Nothing to Do

All the things I could do

I have next week off. No reason except that I need a week off. That means I have one week of nothing to do. No travel, no big family events, kids are still going to school, my wife is working, and I have nowhere to be and nothing to do.

What do I want to do in a week with nothing to do? Here’s a list of things that popped into my head while pondering that question:

• Go for a long bike ride.

• Go to lunch with my wife at this restaurant here in town that we both really like.

• Watch a very good movie I haven’t seen before.

• Keep digging into the Zig compiler, following the same approach that I took last week.

• Write a Monkey in Zig, using as many patterns from the Zig compiler as I can.

• Finish reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb. I’ve been at it for far too long now. The book is like a companion by now. I’ll miss it.

• Work out every day. Last week was heavy and that kicked my butt. I’m hoping to get some accessories in this week.

• Hack on Ghostty. GUI programming is still alien to me. Maybe I can add a little feature.

• Fix the sealing of the patio roof. Noticed some heavy water drops making it through and fall is the time when it’s especially nice to sit outside with a roof over one’s head.

• Pre-write some newsletters.

• Visit my dad.

• Do some gardening. I have to cut down the hydrangeas.

• Learn how to bake pizza. After years of thinking about it, I ordered a new pizza stone last week. Patrick gave me access to his pizza dough recipe. Gonna try it out for lunch, to share with my wife. I don’t want to make the kids cry with my first attempts.

• Just like last few weeks: drop off my daughter at school every day.

• Go to spa with my wife. That was a birthday present to her. Now we’re doing it.

• Finally try out Tailwind.

• Play around with Dall-E.

• Go for hike, uphill with weight vest on. Always a good feeling for the rest of the day.

• Flesh out README for my compiler. It’s been sitting around unused. Maybe fresh coat of paint will tell me what to do with it.

• Migrate my Vim config to Lua so I can use lazy.nvim as the package manager.

• Play GTA V, which I’ve last played probably 6-7 years ago. This time I’m going to play it not on the old PS3, but on my gaming computer. See what that’s like.

• Go for a walk in a residential area of a town around here I haven’t been in. I always enjoy seeing other people’s houses and garages and gardens and what kind of toys the kids leave lying around outside and whether there are any garden gnomes and whether I can tell what the people living in the house do for work.

• Buy new glasses, or at least get new lenses for my glasses. Current pair is so scratched that I keep rubbing the screen, thinking there’s dirt on it.

• Take the kids to a playground we’ve never been to.

• Maybe visit a friend in Frankfurt.

• Drive to this one butcher’s shop in the town I grew up in and buy some sausage. I don’t know why I crave this. There’s something about going to a normal shop on a weekday’s morning.

• Turn this idea I have of this tiny, absolutely minuscule book into maybe a couple of pages of draft.

• Watch the Strange Loop talks that I didn’t get to watch while I was there three weeks ago but that have been recommended to me: this and that one.

• Clean up the shed. As always.

• Finally assemble the IKEA furniture we have sitting in our bedroom.

There you go. A week of nothing to do.