2026-03

A- was away all week, so there’s been even more routine (getting kids to school, home, doing chores) than usual.

We’ve got a leaky gutter that’s causing water to seep through the brickwork. As we live in a fairly high building we first need scaffolders to construct safe platforms for the roofers to do their work. I spent a couple of days letting them in and out and upping my swearing game to fit in.

I sat in on some user research sessions at work on Thursday. I really enjoy this process when I get chance to do it, it’s great to see how things really work and I hugely admire the stamina it takes for my research colleagues to run a whole day of these sessions.

I found this Introduction to screen-readers tutorial that you can follow with along with a screen reader very useful. The default screen-reader on Ubuntu is pretty terrible though, so if anyone has suggestions of how to improve that I’m all ears. There’s no comments on my blog but mailto:blog@chrislowis.co.uk.

I spent a couple of evenings gluing card and various junk together. I’m drawn to the dystopian sci-fi terrain/modelling of Eric’s Hobby Workshop but I think I mostly just need excuses to do something with my hands rather than on a screen.

N- and I continue to play some Stardew Valley together. He loves it and some intricacy of the rules is usually the first thing he asks about when he gets up. We built a shed full of preserving jars to give us some “passive income”. You gotta learn to love the grind. Because life IS the grind, kids.