There are four seasons: 1. Ski Season (we are fully entering here) 2. Glacier climb season 3. Alpine rock season 4. Trail running season (we are partially still here)
Are the season transitions a matter of some debate? Here, I think open water swim season is mid/late May to early/mid September. But a friend swam in April and as recently as last week. I'm not convinced she isn't going to get a December swim in as a matter of principle. Eventually ice will force her out of the water. If I had to define seasons: 1. Empty pools, running that has a lot of laundry, indoor cycling, fun hiking. 2. Busier pools, great running, cycling on dirty roads, goopy hiking. 3. Busy pools but open water swimming too, running that makes me question if something is wrong with me, great cycling, hot busy hiking. 4. Quiet pools and great wetsuit swimming, great running, good cycling with layers, great hiking. I might have just realized fall is my favorite season.
There are others! Rock climbing season overlays with 3 and 4. Self-care season is mostly seasons 4 and 1, 2 and 3...suffers...every season is relationship building season. I love that Green Winter and White Winter, might borrow that phrase.
There are 168 hours in a week. I sleep through about 40 of those. By the guidelines/handbook, my current workload should be 54 hours (20 on thesis, 20 on coursework, 7 hours per TAed course). Working out takes me around 10 hours. All the minutia is probably another 10. I shop once a week at most, and most of my cooking devolved into big pots of stew or soup that last me days. The leftover 54 hours should be my free time then. Hell, let's even high-ball and subtract another 20 for miscellaneous internet stuff, Hubski included. That's still 34 hours, almost exactly five per day, yet I can barely remember when I spared an evening to enjoy a book, you know? But I know where that time goes: work. Good? Maybe. Hell, by my adviser's assessment, I could likely compose the thesis and defend in about two or three semesters from now. Said my stuff is already more advanced than many he'd seen in their fourth year. So the time wasn't wasted, simply made me lose whatever touch I began to develop. It's dawning on me that I mistook a job for a lifestyle, and this is just stupid enough to have my name smeared all over itself. And it's not really OCD or anything like that, one look at my room should make such notions laughable, but it's far from a surprise to anyone I get excited and obsessive.
This will be general and vague, which isn’t conducive to receiving advice... but an outlet of any sort is appreciated - so thanks, pubs. Tested for Covid 3 times before deciding to stay with family from Thanksgiving to next weekend. It’s been needed, though not a panacea for the undercurrent of stress from work and life driving me to be more insecure than pre-covid. It’s not a good look. Exercise helps as always, but the fact that I’m all hot and bothered for any stretch of time without it is enough of a signal I should make a change. What’s frustrating is an un-answered question of “Would this be alleviated if life was back to normal?” - even more frustrating is the small voice saying it wouldn’t. LittleBits I’ve been up to: - Picked up Dune for my night-time wind down. Fiction is a welcome segue back into reading... will hop back on the horse of non-fiction after (index funds, compound interest and my future, oh my ) - Investing a tad in BTC and a little less so in ETH as a precursor to understanding what I can expect from a stock exchange.
The Arecibo radio telescope collapsed fully, destroying everything that was left. Trump spent $3m on a recount only for them to find another several hundred votes for Biden. One of the coffee shops I try to support 2-3 times a week had to close due to a COVID case. The biker bar I get a takeout breakfast omelette from on Saturdays (to try and help them out) had to close due to two cases. I finished all the shows I was watching with my wife on our streaming services, so we watched the latest "Bill & Ted" film and are watching Bones now... both of which are OK, but nothing more. Learning how to use my new synthesizers has me watching endless hours of YouTube videos and downloading dozens of updates, to get everything sorted out... which then means the YouTube videos are out of date and talking about versions/features which have changed. And very little music-making happening... I finished removing the old duct work from our old oil-based heating system downstairs... and had to insulate and do a bunch of reframing where the old heat vents used to be. And framing in a space 11 inches tall by 12 feet long by 3 feet deep is just fucking impossible... so I cut all the wood pieces about 1/8" too big, and just wedged them into place, so I could get my battery powered nailgun close enough to put in a couple of tack nails in to kinda hold it all in place. Gonna regret that in the future, I'm pretty sure. Got the final bid for replacing the deck on my house and it's the astonishingly enormous sum of $35k for a 15x15 second-floor deck with a staircase!! Which is less than the $40k bid, but not enough to matter. And I just can't see spending that... but my deck is rotting and coming apart at the seams... so I have to do something... but there are no "good" options... And work at my day job is winding down - my company closes for 2 weeks over Christmas and New Years - and so I have even less to do, but still need to be at my computer and available on email and slack for all the inevitable questions Salespeople will have as they try desperately to meet their numbers before we close down for the year.... interminable waiting interspersed with panicked flurries of urgent pointless chaos... Man... I'm just done. Can we just skip ahead to this exact same day, 2021, please?
Have you considered doing part of the constructing yourself, leaving the critical construction details to the pros? Doing the floor and the railing (apart from the posts) shouldn't be too hard with some tools and know-how, which you seem to have.
Actually YES! Just yesterday. My wife and I went out into the beautiful crisp sunshine with a tape measure, a pad of paper, and a construction pencil. We took a close look at the existing framing and joists, and saw that our deck - contrary to our loosely-held belief it was 'rickety' - found it to be stoutly built on 4x10s, and all of the joists (except maybe one) are in great condition. It's just the decking that has failed (due to a lack of diligent care for the wood), and the top boards on the railings have warped over time. So we measured everything. Figured out how many linear board feet I'd need to replace all the decking - about 1,300 feet or so - and priced lumber and composites. Various lumber is around $1 per board foot, and composites are up to about $3.50 or so. Worst case, that's $5k of materials. That I can EASILY install myself. Which leaves us a healthy budget to do a nice black anodized aluminum railing, with a composite material top rail. ($7k, or so.) That would use narrower vertical aluminum pipes, rather than wood, which would greatly improve the view of the yard from the various second-floor house windows. So yeah. I'm pretty jazzed about the whole thing now! This is all preliminary right now... still need to do the structural math (composite is heavier than wood) and consult with the people at Dunn Lumber about decking solutions, but I'm very optimistic about the future of our deck for the very first time...
Mixed week. Am building a new PC which is a lovely puzzle as I'm building on mini-ATX scale. Government continues to stumble and fail in new ways. Had a terrible workday yesterday because of a bad and restless night before. Today was wonderful, I spent my first workday in three? months in the office becauseI genuinely missed it and I loved it. Slowly seeing more people again... I know the risks awfully well but I am also keenly aware of my less stable mental health. Hope it goes okay.
174 deaths and 5400 confirmed new cases in the last 24 hours. Travel recommendations for Christmas is coming next week. My plan is still to go see my parents as long as I'm healthy even though it's a six hour drive. Gladly accepting all suggestions for how to do it safely if any of you did something similar for Thanksgiving. I'm planning to do my last trip to the store etc a week in advance and bringing sandwiches and coffee from home to not have to stop on the way. While up there I'm staying out on the island which has like three other households, and only seeing my parents, as well as my brother and his wife who I will be traveling with.
There isn't any "good" way to do it. You have to contravene most best practices to have any sort of anything with family. Every one of these measures is on a scale, of course, but when visiting family at home, ALL of these factors are at the wrong end of the scale. Probability likes it when you only have 1 or 2 factors in the red zone... COVID likes it when you have ALL of these factors in the red zone. Here's the nuts and bolts of it: - the vast majority of transmission happens when exposed for a long period of time, in an enclosed space (pretty much defines any visit with family at home) - wearing a mask mostly protects OTHER people from YOUR virus, but doesn't do much to protect YOU from THEIR virus (so everyone needs to wear a mask, all the time, which isn't going to happen while eating, drinking, talking, doing puzzles, etc.) - 6-feet of distance is the minimum to help REDUCE the amount of exposure you get... but again, you in an enclosed space (the house/living room) with people for an extended period of time. So social distancing is pretty much useless in this "family having a holiday together" setting. - a two-week quarantine before anybody hangs out together is ideal, but impractical. Someone is going to break quarantine procedures, and could be exposed. - and with symptoms appearing as long as 4-5 days after exposure, that "one quick trip" Mom made to pick up more eggs the morning you showed up, could be the moment she was infected, and she spent 4 days spreading it to everyone else in the house before she woke up with a cough, or over-salted the potatoes because they "didn't taste right"... My sister works in senior care and lives with my parents in their 70s and 80s. The whole family discussed all of these factors before Thanksgiving and decided FUCK IT, and just went with a Zoom call. I will also point out that maintaining this level of alertness and awareness is completely fucking exhausting and makes the family holiday social time miserable. You get about 1/2 an hour of people sitting in corners of the room, with masks on, trying not to touch the same utensils, glasses, or hors d'oeuvres... and then diligence breaks down. Someone lowers their mask to cough or have a drink. Someone shares a photo on their phone, and hands it to someone else. And shit breaks down from there. By the 2-hour mark, everyone is grumpy about everything, and tired of this shit. At that point, either all protections break down, or people start leaving. Keep this in mind on your six hour drive... And I'm truly sorry things are this way. But that's just the situation we are all in.
This is true. To date, it seems the only way to combat it effectively is to take the decision making out of the public's hands by instituting a full scale lockdown with statement of intent to suppress it in the community. And doing that is too much like political suicide for many leaders, given the media and information landscape.I will also point out that maintaining this level of alertness and awareness is completely fucking exhausting and makes the family holiday social time miserable. You get about 1/2 an hour of people sitting in corners of the room, with masks on, trying not to touch the same utensils, glasses, or hors d'oeuvres... and then diligence breaks down. Someone lowers their mask to cough or have a drink. Someone shares a photo on their phone, and hands it to someone else.
Ultimately, the government's role and influence in this pandemic has been completely neutralized. (At least in the USA.) So there will be no way for the government to effectively control any of this. It will just come down to individual choice and decisions. It's all in the hands of us individuals, and whether Thanksgiving/Christmas is worth dying for.
You are welcome. It is a hard decision to make, I know. I've waffled several times with my family, and always regretted it later. We'd have a nice time, but then I'd be panicked for a week afterwards in case anyone got sick... and what if someone got sick (even through no fault of my own) and died? How could I ever absolve myself of the thought, "I killed my mom/dad/sister/friend."
If you haven't taken a good look at this Zeit article and tool on aerosol risks yet, you're missing out. Get good masks, bring some for your family. https://www.zeit.de/wissen/gesundheit/2020-11/coronavirus-aerosols-infection-risk-hotspot-interiors Personally we're doing a week of quarantine before meeting any at risk family member. Beyond that we're probably accepting the risks. The car drive there will be on the same order of magnitude of danger, realistically.
This is a totally bitchin' article. It deserves its own post. One of the things that drove me crazy building the birth center, but not so crazy that I felt like mentioning it, was that the City required us to have a "hospital grade" HVAC, plumbing and electrical system that all had to be designed by a "hospital" engineer. As you might suspect, this is not actually a thing. However, there are building codes for different specialties within licensed ambulatory medical facilities so we had to do that, and we had to hire an engineer that specialized in medical design. As a consequence we spent about $40k extra, and were delayed an extra two months, so that we could pretend to be a hospital as far as the City was concerned. This was water under the bridge until one of our midwives was freaking out about a potential accidental COVID exposure and complaining about the "cramped, stuffy rooms". At which point I felt the need to shut her the fuck up. Looked up the specs and ran the calcs - our facility was designed to the same stringency as a neonatal intensive care unit. We aren't quite an operating theater but we legit do more airchanges per hour than a fucking burn unit, especially when we turn on the exhaust fans and leave them on - that literally puts us over 11 airchanges per hour (ASHRAE standards for residential are 0.35 air changes per hour). So fuckin' hell our "NICU-grade medical HVAC system" is on the goddamn website now you damn betcha. According to this, with everyone masked up, the only way anyone is transmitting COVID during an appointment is if our patients start licking us. So that's nice to know 'cuz fuck, man, they're starting to shut down maternity wards again.
The shit little blue masks are closer to felt than woven fabric which gives them better stochastic barrier performance. They can also (aren't always, but near as I can tell are most of the time) hold an electrostatic charge which attracts small particles. We've switched from cloth to hospital masks, especially now that we can get them. My walkaround masks are triple-layer woven but I keep a couple KN-95s in the car for when I'm feeling paranoid.
I had not seen that article, thanks for the link. The social spaces of the house are spacious and have 5+ meter high ceilings, which seems favorable. The dining table normally seats 16 people comfortably so social distancing during meals shouldn't be an issue for five people.
I spent the last two weekends working on the house. I averaged 7 hours each day working on various projects. Thinking back, I honestly couldn't tell you what I accomplished. Well, I could point out a few things, but the time it takes to do those things barely covers a few hours. I must have spent an exorbitant amount of time setting up and cleaning up for the projects. Sometimes I just feel like I am spinning my wheels getting no where. I have two more weeks to push on the house and get things done before holiday vacation. My goal is to have enough done that I don't feel guilty sitting on my backside for a week doing absolutely noting but watching tv, reading books, and drinking. My wife has agreed with my plan, provided I finish up a lot of lingering projects. I took an old mac mini I had gotten when the kids were younger and converted it into a Proxmox host. The goal was to setup a bunch of web services to keep my own data. My plan was to run an rss aggregator/reader, code repository, document store, photo backups, bookmarks sync, etc. I really like Proxmox, but getting rDNS working was just beyond me for some reason. I wanted to publish based on domain/sub-directory, but couldn't get it to work right. Reading through various forums, the recommendation seemed to just publish to domain:port. So I decided to start playing with docker. I run fedora on my laptop so I am giving podman a try. I like that I don't have to run as root. Everything seems to be working, so now I need to wipe the mac mini and install fedora on it. Sounds like a great project for holiday break. For the past few weeks I have noticed my grandson watching me more. Like last night, we sat down for dinner and he took my normal chair. No big deal, so I moved to a seat on the other side of his mother. After a few minutes he got down and climbed into the chair on the other side of me and then reached across and dragged his plate over. When he sees me in my office he climbs up on my lap and starts tapping on the keyboard and moving the mouse around. I am not sure if it is a natural inclination to mimic male role model or if I just haven't been spending enough time with him. He always joins me when I am working on the house, so now he has his own tool set with hammer and pliers and paint brush. Hopefully the weather will be nice during holiday vacation so that I can take him biking and to the playground. There is a part of me that hopes the pandemic normalizes wearing a mask when out in public. I have always hated when the person in line behind me sneezes, then wipes their mouth and nose with their hand. It makes me think about all the people that were there before me touching the credit card terminal. Then I become paranoid about touching that, the doors, then I think about all the boxes I picked up to read the back of and how many people might have touched that. By the time I get to my car I just want to run home and shower. Humans are really just nasty. On the bright side, my wife is happy with progress on the house. She likes to so "Happy Wife, Happy Life". I try to correct her and say "Happy Spouse, Happy House" but she isn't buying it. I know she'll come round. It only took 17 years to break her of being a pack rat/hoarder.