Here is my July 2016, installment of what I had done at 8:16 PM each night during the month. I also found it helpful writing down what happened during the day as a small journal/diary of what was good, bad, or interesting.

Little Background

I started keeping track of what I was doing at 20:16 (8:16 PM) every day for the last month after reading Kitt Hodson’s Pastry Box article from Jan 1, 2015. Which was about how a year earlier she read Erica Douglass’s article about writing down what she did at 11:11 AM and 20:14 (8:14 PM) everyday.

July 2016 Events

Jul 1 – checking on my computer what if anything news on television being that it’s Friday before Fourth of July. Most of my “early leave” day was spent working on the FRD for the accessible SVG map.  After coming home early from work, I read a bit and then managed a three and a half hour nap.

Jul 2 – waiting to be seated for crab dinner at the Crab Deck in Kent Narrows, MD.

Jul 3 – Watching “American Pickers” after a slow day of going to DuPont Circle Farmers Market and having an excellent pulled pork veggie leaf wrap with dill lime rice, thinly slide age cured ham, pickled red onions, and pickled yellow beets. Then it was off to the Georgetown flea market and then home to read until I met up with my buddy Sam to go to José Andres’s American Eat Taverns for their indoor picnic. The picnic included a great variety of food which included cured aged ham, Serrano ham, three types of deviled eggs (jalapeno, pickled, and traditional), pickles, etc. Then the next batch of food was suckling pig jambalaya, shrimp fried rice, fried oyster slider, cheeseburger, bacon wrapped mini hot dogs, and Texas beef brisket chili. Next moved on to the seafood of shrimp cocktail, Alaskan King Crab cocktail, and other mixed seafood. Finally, made it to the desserts which were mini key lime pie, mini chocolate cake with chocolate whip cream in a small jar, dark chocolate tart, more of a lemon tart/pudding. The meal was well worth the cost, but will go earlier next time so some of the dishes won’t have sat out so long, since being the Sunday of 4th of July weekend not so many people were there. After dropping Sam home went and took a few hour nap and never had dinner until close to 10 PM because I was still full.

Jul 4 – watching and taking notes during Amy and Alex’s 30 x 500 “Sales Safari in Action” with special guest Brennan Dunn.

Jul 5 – was visiting with a friend from Ottawa Canada and his family and mother. I met them at their AirBnB in Capitol Hill area after stopping to grab some cheese and crackers to go along with the wine I brought with me. I left cheese, open wine, and an extra bottle since they were going over to other friends for dinner on Wednesday after a visit to the National Zoo.

Jul 6 – sitting at my desk in my spare bedroom adding removing people from my EventBrite mailing list. Doing this should take more time than it does to create a new event and prepare and e-mail announcing the event. I should be able to see which people asked to be removed and those that bounced. Plus, be able to add easily new people that signed up. Once done with that relaxed to watch some TV.

Jul 7 – walking out of the kitchen after grabbing a few slices of hot soppressata, along with a Kind bar while the two samosas I pulled out of the fridge get to room temperature before heating them up as my dinner. Worked on adding my accessible SVG map HTML and CSS to GitLab. Had to work on a readme file after I created and an empty one to make things easier. The process took much longer than planned because we tried using one product before giving up on it and that I did not have the proper access to be able to add, updated, delete, etc. on GitLab.

Jul 8 – Driving to Momo Sushi listening to “Dinner Party Download” on NPR. After dinner, I stopped at Sugar Shack Donuts and picked up a red velvet cake donut along with a maple bacon yeast leaven donut. I have noticed I like their cake donuts better unless you can get the others once they come out such as their salted caramel leaven donut.

Jul 9 – Sitting in Bocatto Lounge starting to read “Wild Fermentation” by Sandor Ellix Katz. I’m in the process to see how to make vinegar and pickled items such as beets, cabbage, carrots, etc. Spent my morning going to the Courthouse Farmer’s Market to pick up herbs (basil, mint, sage, oregano, dill, tarragon, etc.). Next, I stopped at St. Elmo’s to visit with friends before heading to the Del Ray Farmer’s Market where I got a few more bunches of basil so I can make two large batches of pesto and pork and beef empanadas. I then went to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters for a hot chocolate while catching up on e-mails and taking notes from e-mail newsletters and blog posts. Finally, headed home after stopping at Pho 75 for lunch to read and nap.

Jul 10 – ENTERED 08/13/2016 – Since it is a Sunday night I was most likely watching TV, but not sure because I was too busy it seems to write anything down.

Jul 11 – in drawing class attempting to draw using one, two, and three-point perspective. My drawing was of three boxes stacked on top of each other but offset a bit for the middle box. Created QA sign-off document along with some testing and found issues with the search results not being correct anymore. My guess is mismatched code to content.

Jul 12 – Watching Massimo Bottura of Osteria Francescana which is in Modena, Italy, in the Chef’s Table documentary series on Netflix. Not eating dinner before the show is not the best way to watch the show because it makes you even hungrier than if you had eaten s at all the great food. Worked with the team to come up with ideas of what needed to be done to make updates to developer.dol.gov for now having offset for the APIv2 datasets. I went to the website and looked for all the broken or redirected links and any other weird things I noticed. Plus, created a list of all the pages that were using APIv1 and the few that were using APIv2 along with which section.type of dataset they were.

Jul 13 – having chicken, fig, and pine nuts risotto with a mixed green salad along with a Nigella Lawson’s sour cream chocolate fudge frosting and cake at Evan’s. I was there with two other couples, one of which live in the condo downstairs. We had one wine before dinner with some cheese and roasted cherry tomatoes on garlic toast. One of the best dishes was the watermelon gazpacho with finely chopped cucumber. All this came about because I had been wanting to drop off the new “Food Labs” book to Evan while killing some time, so the metro bus was less crowded because if metro’s yellow line is closed between Braddock Rd. Metro Station and Pentagon City metro. Most days it’s taking over an hour and a half to get to work or come home afterward.

Jul 14 – either walking around the beer section of Wegmans or checking out at the cashiers after shopping but first having dinner from the hot bar. Worked with co-workers to do QA testing of the new Appeals elastic search along with updating the dollar and cents of the earnings disparity column for the District of Columbia.

Jul 15 – ENTERED 08/13/2016 –  Since it was a Friday night I was most likely either at Wegmans grabbing dinner and then shopping, or I was at or driving to or from Pho 75 for dinner.

Jul 16 – walking around the parking lot of screen 2 at the Family Drive-in Theatre in Stephen’s City, VA, waiting for Ghostbusters to start.

Jul 17 – watching the “Chef’s Table” episode about Niki Nakayama of “N/Naka Restaurant” in Los Angeles.

Jul 18 – working on my first charcoal square to create the class portrait of Samuel Becket.

Jul 19 – since I wasn’t in Cabin John for wine or beer tasting I was in the process of unboxing my new 34 inch Ultra DELL monitor.

Jul 20 – met up with Mike and Kevin who were in DC for Drupal Gov Con. We were at Bangkok Golden with Sam for Loa food.

Jul 21 – waiting at a stoplight on Telegraph Rd.  On my way to Wegmans to grab dinner and do a bit of grocery shopping before the almost 100F heat until later next week.

Jul 22 – sitting in my car at the corner of S. Joyce St. and S. Glenn Rd. Waiting for the light to change on my way from dinner at  Pho 75 to get vanilla custards with hot fudge at Dairy Godmother for desert.

Jul 23 – ENTERED 08/13/2016 –  Since it was a Saturday night I was most likely either at Wegmans grabbing dinner and then shopping, or I was at or driving to or from Pho 75 for dinner.

Jul 24 – walking in front of the White House while on a walking/bus tour of Dc with speakers and other attendees from An Event Apart DC. While dropping off my annual cupcakes to the An Event Apart staff, they asked if I wanted to go on the walking/bus tour since they had an extra seat. I said yes even though it was going to in the upper 90’s F with a heat index over 100F during the tour which started at 7:30 PM. The tour was great because I got to learn a few more facts about DC, such as Constitution Ave NW used to be a canal and the stone building at the corner of Constitution Ave NW and 17th Ave. NW was the lock keeper’s house which he lived in with his wife and thirteen children. The house is extremely small even for two people let alone 15.

Jul 25 – Sitting in my basic drawing class at Torpedo Factory Annex using charcoals to draw white cloth draped to form shadows.

Jul 26 – reading Twitter to see if and when to meet Kevin Hoffman other An Event Apart speakers/attendees to see Ghostbusters at the AMC Hoffman 22 Theater. Ended meeting there for the 9:35 PM show and dropped them back at the hotel after the movie to save them a cab or Uber/Lyft fair back to the hotel.

Jul 27 – Sitting at Blackboard listening to the end of Denis B.’s Accessibility DC UX talk.

Jul 28 – was at Wegmans grabbing dinner and then doing a bit of grocery shopping. I worked home so I could attend the GSA PULSE tool call and then head to the cemetery for Tony’s mom funeral. After the ceremony at cemetery went to Knights of Columbus hall for lunch and then headed home for a 3-hour nap.

Jul 29 – driving on Route 27 towards Washington Blvd to grab Pho at Pho 75 for dinner. I had a small bowl of Pho with raw eye round and fatty brisket along with extra noodles and more fatty brisket. Spent most of the work day figuring out the accessibility issue we had from the new GSA PULSE tool, along with other DOL websites. I noticed that the HSA tool had not scanned the home page of MSHA. I also ran a maximum of 200-page scan of each website I had never run before to get an idea of how right or wrong most were. Of the seven I tested four were 90% or higher, two were in the 70s, and one was in the mid-30s.

Jul 30 – ENTERED 08/13/2016 –  Since it was a Saturday night I was most likely either at Wegmans grabbing dinner and then shopping, or I was at or driving to or from Pho 75 for dinner.

Jul 31 – walking in my house after going to three farmers markets (DuPont Circle, Palisades, and the one near Big Bear Lounge in NE). Spent test of the day in four coffee shops answering e-mail and getting rid of a few hundred browser tabs by either reading articles, closing tabs, or placing it as a bookmark for later.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this has been helpful to you and gets you to keep track of what you do a particular time of the day, along with a short daily diary entry to see what you have done or can accomplish over the course of a year.

If you want to meet up to do something exciting at 8:16 PM some evening, please leave a comment. Or a suggestion of something that is not part of my ordinary life you think I should do.

Another month’s worth of what I have been doing at 8:15 PM every night. Doing this has become a great way to see what I’ve been up to on a particular day along with what else I add in about my day. It’s become a regular habit of what I’m doing and what has happened that day and a wonderful little one paragraph diary/journal of my actions and thoughts.

A Little Background on This Post

I started keeping track of what I was doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) every day for the last few months after reading Kitt Hodson’s Pastry Box article from Jan 1, 2015. Which was about how a year earlier she read Erica Douglass’s article about writing down what she did at 11:11 AM and 20:14 (8:14 PM) every day.

I thought this was a great idea to see if I could find any patterns in my nights. So far, I tend to watch TV Monday, Thursday, and Sunday nights when I’m home. Also on the weekends I tend to be leaving or coming back from dinner, sometimes even eating dinner.

Here is my post on what I’ve been doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) in January, February, March, April, May, and June.

JULY

Jul 1 – ENTERED – 07/04/2015 – Reading Twitter on my bed along with complaining about its new iPhone application that had buttons moved to questionable places, which corrected it once I restarted the application. Still now my favorite improvement, but better than when using it the first time after update.

Jul 2 – ENTERED – 07/04/2015 – Having wine at Tony’s in Cabin John with Jeff, Barry, Hannah, and Andrew. I brought a whole bunch of cheese and cured meats from Di Bruno Brothers South Philly store. For some reason, the different German smoked sausages from the Reading Terminal Market were all moldy and a but slimy. Hung forward can’t store more than a few days in brown paper in the fridge.

Jul 3 – ENTERED – 07/04/2015 – Reading Twitter after two and a half hour nap. Spent part of the day at Tony’s in Cabin John out on the back deck drinking wine, talking, and watching the awesome birds (inside joke you had to be there to enjoy). The woman I had met before at the house brought her eleven-year-old daughter, which made for interesting conversation, she could carry a conversation better than a lot of adults I know.

Jul 4 – ENTERED – 07/05/2015 – Walking from Go Fish in Rehoboth Beach, DE, towards my car after having fish and chips with a side of curry sauce. Was heading home so I would be home in time to do my 90th day in a row of painting wine bottles on canvas as part of my #100DayProject. Earlier in the day I had shrimp and large crabs at Crab Shack in Kent Narrows, MD. I followed crabs up with a trip to Ocean City, MD, for ice cream because I couldn’t find parking in Rehoboth for fish and chips, plus I wasn’t hungry enough yet for dinner.

Jul 5 – Watching the United States Women’s soccer team in the second half of the FIFA Women’s World Cup Final. U.S. Women’s team ended up winning 5 – 2. Slept in until 10 AM and then read for two hours or so in bed, and then headed to Wegmans for lunch, more reading, and a bit of grocery shopping. Came home, read, napped, and read some more.

Jul 6 – Watching Penn and Teller’s “Fool Us”, where they gave other magicians did tricks to see if they can fool them. One of the guys did great things with Rubik’s cubes. The best one was the guy that used a little plunger to do card tricks. He did this by picking the person’s card even when the card was half way down the deck, along with being able to pick all the cards above them with the little plunger.

Jul 7 – Laying in bed reading “Starting and Sustaining” by Garrett Dimon, which is a great book on what to think of when starting a company/web application. In this book, Garrett talks about creating the bug tracker “Sifter” from coming up with the idea of building the application to launching to using other services to speed things up. How using other services, so you don’t have to build them yourself can save time and money, plus a whole lot more. I’m reading the book for a second time, since I have been toying with the idea of building my own web application to store places I want to eat while traveling. I’m always asking people or watching TV about where to eat in different cities. The problem is I end up with answers in e-mails, Twitter, Facebook, text, etc. I want one place where I can search by city.

Jul 8 – Sitting in my spare bedroom working fixing the spelling and grammar with Grammarly of what I’ve been doing for the month of June and first week of July. Also had been doing some work creating a Trello board for my “Got Eat Here” website. Mostly putting in the large ticket items/functions that need to be created. Along with the different phases of the project that are: analyze, develop, test (QA, security, and accessibility), and deploy.

Jul 9 – Again I’m reading Garrett Dimon’s book “Starting and Sustaining”. The chapter I was reading is called”Creating Interest”, which about he managed to get people interested in his bug tracker software “Sifter”. The main thing he said was he started a few years before writing about some bug tracking screenshots and gave away information about bug tracking all along gathering names and e-mail addresses for when they launched.

Jul 10 – ENTERED – 07/11/2015 – Finishing up wine bottle painting #96 of my 100 Day Project. Painted early so I could meet up with my buddy for a late dinner at Bonchon Chicken in Arlington, VA. DOL did an article on him as part of their blog post on people with disabilities prior to the 25th anniversary of ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act).

Jul 11 – Driving to Barnes and Noble to look and see if they have the latest addition to the “Great Discontent” magazine. Slow day of meeting friends for coffee, relaxing, a short nap, reading, some TV.

Jul 12 – In the basement putting stain remover on my work shirts. Needed to do four loads of laundry since I was about out of clothes. Most likely only going to get three loads washed and dried. Slept in until about 9:30 AM and then did a bunch of reading before heading out to Dupont Circle Farmers Market but couldn’t find any parking. So went to farmers market next to MacArthur’s. Ended up getting some kale along with a veggie and Thia sausage crepe. Did some shopping for roast pork and limes at Good Fortune market. Once done there drive to Wegmans for some hot bar food and cured meats.

Jul 13 – ENTERED – 07/15/2015 – Sitting in my spare bedroom updating the Accessibility Camp website with information about their camp on July 22nd. While FTPing the code to my server I noticed and odd folder I didn’t create with and index PHP page in it, which I deleted. I then went through my other websites and noticed a few other odd folders or index PHP pages that deleted too. Next step is to change my password, but I think they got into my virtual server from someone else’s.

Jul 14 – ENTERED – 07/15/2015 – Drinking wine at my buddies in Cabin John. As we normally we talked about many things. One being guy on NPR that was talking about the new Iran nuclear deal used the word “legitimate” twice, which none of us thought was a word.

Jul 15 – Listening to  Yitzchok Willroth better known as @CodeRabbi  as part of his “Wisdom World Tour”. The talk was titled “Talmudic Maxims to Maximize Your Growth as a Developer” sub-titled “Everything I Learned About PHP I Learned at Rabbinical School”. Great talk on just start by doing something, being part of the community, learning, teaching, helping others, etc. The talk was the first time hearing Yiddish as part fo a tech talk or any other for that matter. At least Yitz translated everything so we all could understand what the Yiddish was.

Jul 16 – RE-ENTERED – 07/19/2015 – Attending the 99th Refresh DC at Atlantic Media Strategies. I’m hearing a talk about the need to be able to move up in your organization without having to be a manager or moving on. Great talk and even better discussion afterward to see what others had to say. Of course, we ended up getting into the discussion about doing speck work when the boss told you too.

Jul 17 – RE-ENTERED – 07/19/2015 – Was napping until about 8:30 PM after falling asleep around 6:45 PM. Had been tired all day after being out the prior three might until at least 10:30 PM and then not getting to sleep until after 12:30 AM. I had to be up at 7:13 AM to make it to work on time. I was supposed to go to Ron’s house to listen to him, and others played music but decided to stay home since I was late and hadn’t dinner yet.

Jul 18 – ENTERED – 07/19/2015 – Was waiting in Wegman’s bakery for someone to slice a loaf of bread for me. Asked a nice young woman by the name of Emma if there was anyone around that could do it since I didn’t see anyone else around. She said she didn’t work in the bakery, but knew how to slice the bread. Told her to make sure took her time and didn’t hurt herself or slice off any fingers. It took a bit more time for her to do it since hse hadn’t done it much, but it work out fine. I made sure to thank her for her efforts. Had to hurry back home to see the first episode of Mythbusters which started at 9:00 PM. Ended up about two minutes late, because I had to put away the food from Wegman’s and use the restroom. Earlier in the day went to St.Elmo’s to meet up with the gang. We talked about a bunch of stuff and some kind of deal to help motivate Big Dave to lose weight. Tried coming up with something to do with $20 each per week that he lost 5 pounds, which I pointed out at his size if he tried just a little bit would be easy for the first month or so to do. Next went to Courthouse Farmer’s Market, then to pick up some blackberries and herbs to make pesto. Then it was back to the house for reading and a nap.

Jul 19 – Eating a chocolate cream pie from Wegman’s while writing bills (four). Extremely hot day today. Went to Dupont Circle Farmer’s Market to pick-up a few things, along with having the three different veggie tacos from the stand down near 29th and Q St. NW. After that, I drove around a bit to cool off before heading to Springfield Town Center Mall, which has been updated. Ended up taking a walk around the mall a bit. Got some of walking in without having to do it outside in the mid 90 F  heat, which had a heat index of close to 105 F. Now re-typing the last three days worth of notes into Simple Note, since for some reason one of my browsers I looked at it with (iPhone or iPad mini) didn’t refresh with the latest information. Next need to through in some laundry, which includes the new pants I bought at JC Penney. I also purchased a pair of black and a pair of brown dress shoes.

Jul 20 – Talking on the phone with my brother to see about meeting up for dinner on Tuesday. He wanted to know if he should go to National Gallery of Art or one of the Smithsonian Museums. My recommendation was National Gallery or Art since he would most likely go with the family if they came to town.

Jul 21 – Laying on the sofa watching Anthony Bourdain bungee jumping off tallest building in Asia while cooling off after having dinner with my brother James. He was in town to speak to lawyers. Another hot day where it felt like 95F.

Jul 22 – Sitting at Long View Gallery listening to Kelli Anderson talk about her personal projects at the Adobe Creative Jam event. She did a lot of creative work with paper from building a five-page book that you make other things from the pages like a planetarium, a guitar, and much more.  Most of the day was spent gathering information about how to test mobile websites and native applications besides using VoiceOver (iPhone) or TalkBack (Android) phones.

Jul 23 – Sleeping after I fell back asleep after my iPhone alarm went off to wake up from my nap from 6:30 PM to just before 8:00 PM. Had been tired all day because I had stayed up past 1:00 AM for the second or third night. Managed to get up a bit before 9:00 PM. The plan is to get back to sleep by 11:30 PM.

Jul 24 – Mindlessly watching some TV show called “Desert Garage” or something like that. They were building a show quality 1970’s Baracuda. Earlier in the evening was reading both a book and something on my iPad. I was looking for a nice relaxing evening.

Jul 25 – Watching “MythBuster” in which Adam Savage and Jamie Hynamann were training at a California airbase to be able to go up into space on a U2 plane. After four days of training, both passed the tests and had to decide which would go, which included simulating being in Space under pressure. Once they got to 65,000 feet the water in a bottle in the room started to boil, which showed what would happen to a person if there were problems with their suits or cabin pressure. In the end, Jamie let Adam go because he knew how important was to him to be able to go into space (70,000 feet), which only astronauts go farther. Adam seemed truly touched be his experience while up there.

Jul 26 – Watching “FantomWorks” car show where they are restoring a 1950 Studebaker Commander and a 1964 Barracuda. Spent the day driving out to the Shen-Valley Flea Market, along with the Front Royal Flea Market where I picked up a meat cleaver and a Japanese vegetable cleaver. Ended up getting a bit of a sunburn on my head and ears because I didn’t where a hat, and there was not much shade. Picked up two packs of jowl (face) bacon in Sperryville on my way home. Had to get home by 5:00 PM to meet Doug and Nguyet as they were coming over to put my painting of the horse head on a man’s body that I got in Nay of 2013. Building and stretching the canvas took about 45 minutes. After we had been done, we went to Holy Cow for burgers in Del Ray. I had a two cheese third if a pound burger with bacon and a fried egg, along with fries and a chocolate chocolate milkshake.

Jul 27 – ENTERED – 07/28/2015 – Was watching Penn and Teller’s “Fool Us” on the CW. The “Amazing Alison” was doing mentalist tricks (mind reading). She had Penn come up with a number between and 25 and 100. Then filled out her answer in a four by four set of squares, which all added up to Penn’s number 26. That is both across and down for each row, along with diagonally and a bunch of other ways. Next she had Teller draw a picture that she then drew after having to lean on each other and rub their butts together a bit. Also, there was a 16-year-old kid up on stage doing a great trick about tearing a card into eight pieces that he put back together with the one signed piece backward. Penn and Teller loved the trick because they thought he did it so well for someone so young and in front of such a large audience even though they knew how he did the trick.

Jul 28 – Working on updating Trello board about the “Gotta Eat Here” website and web application, after writing bills to be mailed tomorrow. While this was happening, I’m updating my iPad mini to iOS 8.4. Always update the iPad before the phone to make sure there are no weird thing going on. Not sure If I’m going to update the old iPad 2 with the shattered screen or not.

Jul 29 – ENTERED – 08/02/2015 – Watching TV after updating the Accessibility Camp website with information about the first New York City accessibility camp on September 26, in Brooklyn. Need to add website and Twitter information once they send me the information.

Jul 30 – ENTERED – 08/03/2015 – Walking out of South China restaurant with a takeout order of Malaysia Lo Mein which has tofu and shrimp. Then it was home to watch mindless TV that I can’t remember what it was. My guess is it was one of the car building shows or just bouncing around looking for something to watch to relax.

Jul 31 – Driving with Sam to Bangkok Gloden to have Loa food. We ordered Thai sausage, crispy veggie salad, Pork Larb, which is a sour meat dish with a lot of heat since we ordered it medium. Last I remembered reading the menu for their heat scale that mild was India hot, Medium was Thia hot, which is really hot for me, and the hot if Loa hot. Can’t imagine what Loa hot is like since the medium or Thai hot made my mouth burn. And the final dish was drunken beef noodles. They make some great food. It’s a place I would take people to try new things and something different from what they normally would eat.

Conclusion

In the future, I plan to post this information once a month at the beginning of the following month once I’m caught up.

Hopefully, this has been helpful to you and gets you to keep track of what you do a particular time of the day, along with a short daily diary.

If you want to meet up to do something exciting at 8:15 PM some evening, please leave a comment. Or a suggestion of something that is not part of my ordinary life you think I should do.

P.S. Need to go back through these 8:15 PM posts and add any links or photos that are relevant to make them more appealing.