Personal

Maggie passed away a little more than a year after Bunny, on July 13th, 2022. I didn’t have the heart to write this at the time, but I wanted to memorialize her before the year ended.

Feeling mostly better other than being a bit more tired than usual. The final timeline: 10/29: almost certainly my initial exposure — I was at a loud crowded event without a ton of mask usage. 10/31: light symptoms. 11/1: first positive test (all my tests were at home). 11/2: Paxlovid course started. 11/6: Paxlovid course ends; maybe a couple of negative tests in the next few days? Can’t recall. 11/11: testing positive again; feeling sick but able to focus. 11/13: negative test (probably because at-home tests are not 100% reliable). 11/15: positive test again; able to focus well enough to deliver budget presentations. 11/19: able to write code again! A surprisingly important milestone. 11/23: negative test again, and this time the negative tests stuck. Haven’t tested positive since. 11/27: still getting a bit tired here and there, as noted, but I feel pretty much OK otherwise. All told that was three and a half weeks of positive tests, and I felt pretty sick during most of that. Able to focus but definitely not great. Please get vaccinated and boosted.

One of the ways I knew I was getting sick was that my ability to code dropped through the floor, so I’ve been fiddling with things from time to time as a test. I’m still veering between faint positive tests and negative tests, but I got a wild hair and wrote some Python today. Credit for the underlying text and mechanics goes to Oliver Darkshire (original). I have taken the liberty of skipping assassination attempts when there’s no chance of success and decided that you can’t try an assassination attempt after an ending is reached. ...

Well, “no big Paxlovid bounce” remains true, but last week was certainly a small one. I tested positive again on Friday and the weekend was pretty much no fun; no huge symptoms but I’ve just been tired and a bit fuzzy. Testing negative again today, which hopefully will continue. S. is still fine. We’re masking diligently, we have house zones we keep to, and we have air purifiers running.

Capturing this for my own reference and in case reading about the mechanics of health care are useful to anyone. I had not previously had covid to the best of my knowledge.

In no particular order: Bainbridge Island (Streamliner Diner, Poulsbo and viking cups) Goofy train rides in Snoqualmie Ape Caves & maybe staring into the crater of Mount St. Helens Poke my nose into Cougar Mountain Big Four Ice Caves

I completed my superior court jury duty a little while ago, and enough time has passed so that I can write up some coherent thoughts on the experience. This is as much for myself to help me process as anything, but I do have some helpful tips if you ever find yourself serving on a jury. Mundane details: jury selection was over Zoom, while the trial itself was conducted in person. It was a homicide case, although we had scope to consider manslaughter as well. The whole thing lasted almost exactly four weeks, including a little more than a week of deliberation. We were unable to reach a verdict; the judge and the lawyers were very clear that we shouldn’t consider that a failure on our parts. There will be a new trial. I’m not talking about details in public for various reasons, but feel free to ask in private if we know each other.

My apologies if you’ve seen this already; I mostly wanted to capture the memories in a place more mine than Twitter is. If you are sensitive to pet death, probably move on.

This seems like a good game to play. I’ll go! Miso paste. I’ve been cooking more during the pandemic and because food gets dull, I’ve been making myself branch out from the usual. Miso paste is the latest ingredient I’ve added. It’s just awesome for a burst of umami. I’ve put it in eggs, S. has put it in vegetables, it’s great. Criterion Channel. I have a lot of streaming services; this is the one I’d keep if I had to cut it down to one. It’s not just classics; they’re running a New Korean Cinema program right now that’s full of great movies. They’re (slowly) getting better at Black representation. And I’ve seen at least two movies on there this year that took my breath away. My local community Discord. A pal of mine set this up, it’s got something like a hundred active people, and it’s well filtered into categories so I don’t have to pay attention to the Among Us players if I don’t want to. It serves as a social center, link exchange, and support nexus. We’ve crowd-funded a couple of urgent needs for people. It’s great. Grant Morrison’s Batman comics. I read the first third of these a while back; a month or so ago I noticed that the complete run was collected in those big heavy omnibus volumes. I am in the middle of the second volume now. It’s very Grant Morrison with these jagged edges of sincerity poking through the glossy madness from time to time. Online tabletop gaming and every pioneer who spent time figuring out what works and what doesn’t work. Right now I’m involved in two ongoing campaigns, and I manage to keep a decent stock of one-shots going as well. It’s the only thing that brings me new human faces during the pandemic, plus I love gaming.

If coronavirus isn’t gonna get me to start blogging regularly again, nothing will, huh? To quote myself on Instagram: We’re doing just fine. We’re self-isolating — shopping once a week, not socializing at all, sane amount of food in the freezer, working from home. We drove down to Magnuson Park this morning and were happy to see it wasn’t crowded. Walked down to the water, admired a couple of ducks, waited for people to pass by on the main path, walked back to the car. ...