The Mad Schemes of Dr. Tectonic

I keep intending to do a bunch of backposting on the weekends, but then I get done with all the other stuff and I'm just tired.

I took a break from work around 4 on Friday with every intention of going back to finish off some things after an hour or so, and then a bit later my brain informed me that no, it needed more of a break than that. So Jerry and I played some It Takes Two, which we have been enjoying together. And then I got a text from Joe and Bill asking if anyone wanted to play board games online. And they answer to that is always yes, so I joined them and we played a couple rounds of Kingdom Builder on BGA. I think I had played this long ago (maybe even with a physical copy?) but didn't remember anything, so I lost the first one by a fair chunk but did much better the second time around. I like it; it's got a good luck/strategy balance. Then we played 7 Wonders: Architect, which is new. It doesn't have the drafting aspect of regular 7 Wonders, but otherwise has a lot of the same feel. Floyd hopped on and joined us for a final round, which was excellent. And it was very nice to see friends I haven't seen in a while, even if only over video.

Yesterday we went axe-throwing with Matthew and (differnt) Joe. I was doing terribly for most of the two hours, but then the others were tired and I got to just throw over and over with no pauses for a couple minutes and all of a sudden I was good at it. So I think I need a dozen or two throws in a row to be able to calibrate power and range, and then I can actually do it.

Afterwards we grabbed some snacks from H-Mart, went home and walked the cat a bit, and then went over to Matthew's to play board games. We started up a game of Charterstone, which seems like it will be fun. I won, but I think I will have some catching up to do next game. We also played a game of Quarriors, which I enjoyed a lot more than the last time I played it. It's kind of deckbuild-y, but you can't get too invested in combos because you have to both draw the appropriate dice and have them roll correctly for that to happen. This time I was just opportunistic and didn't think too much about it, and I had a lot more fun. (And also won.)

Today was training day. Jerry has started teaching Matthew kung fu, and I have been joining them. I am still awful at learning physical movement things, but I had the realization that I can do just fine if I'm not actively trying to learn or remember anything. If I'm just following along and mimicking the motions, I can do it. And weirdly, some of it does end up sticking. I still have to have Jerry show me moves over and over, but today we did kicking and I remembered more than I expected to about how the pieces come together. (Like, for a back-leg roundhouse kick, you have to turn your lead foot first, and that kind of automatically gets your pelvis moving which translates into bringing the rear leg up and around, and once I remembered the bit about the foot, I had the rest of it in place.) I can't remember the names of any of the moves, and I think my ability to use words degrades significantly after the first half hour, but show me and I can follow along.

This afternoon I went grocery shopping and realized that I had made the tactical error of going to the store shortly before Superbowl time, because it was very crowded with people getting chips and suchlike at the last minute. But I checked the clock and realized that the game was starting soon, so I just filled my cart at a leisurely pace and by the time I was done the rush had subsided, so that made me feel clever.

I'm going to make beef stew because I realized that I didn't need to find sorghum or buckwheat groats to substitute for barley to make it gluten-free, I could just use wild rice and that should be fine. I chopped up all the veggies and browned the meat and threw everything in the crock pot and put it in the fridge, and I will do the actual six-hour cooking tomorrow. The new ceramic frying pan did a lovely job browning the meat. I'm still getting used to it, but it seems like a good replacement for teflon.

Borden American Cheese doesn't melt.

(This is a ludicrous topic with which to attempt to end a months-long journaling hiatus. I have a vast backlog of entries to post. But a highly random post is better than no post, right?)

How has it come to pass that I know this?

Well. My standard breakfast (since completely abandoning any attempt to eat low-carb at the inception of the pandemic) is a bowl of ramen with a couple fried eggs and a handful of baby spinach. The time it takes the water in the ramen pot to come to a boil is just enough time to get all the packets emptied into your bowl, melt a knob of butter in the frying pan, throw in the spinach to steam, add the eggs, splash some water in, and put the lid on. You pour out the noodles into a strainer and let the water fall out, then put them in the bowl and mix thoroughly, and by the time you're done with that, your eggs are all done sunny-side up and the spinach has steamed, so you scrape it out onto the noodles and slide the eggs on top. Perfect.

Note here that when I say "packet of ramen" I'm not talking Maruchan or Top Ramen -- I mean the good stuff from an Asian grocery store. With little packets of dehydrated vegetables and flavored oils and spicy pastes and so on. They cost several times what the cheap stuff does, but it's totally worth it.

Anyway, one of the types of instant ramen that I like is kimchi flavor. And I read that one of the things that Koreans do with their ramen is to throw a slice of American cheese in there. So, having previously tried and enjoyed Ottogi cheese-flavored ramen, I thought I'd give it a shot.

And it. Is. GREAT.

The cheese doesn't just melt, it vanishes completely, dissolving into creamy, savory goodness that permeates the whole dish and bumps everything up by at least two notches. So I have started occasionally buying a stack of American cheese singles to melt into my kimchi ramen egg spinach breakfast.

UNLESS IT'S BORDEN!

For some utterly inscrutable reason, Borden has decided to make a special "melts" version of their American cheese that melts quite well, and to formulate the regular American cheese so that it... does not. It get warm and kinda comes apart into smaller pieces, but it doesn't dissolve into creamy goodness. What, I ask you, is the point of that? The entire purpose of American cheese is to be melty! You wouldn't eat it otherwise, because as cheese, it's terrible! It exists only to melt atop your burger or between two slices of bread or amongst your noodles!

And now I have almost finished the big 16-slice package and I still have an entire nother one to go, because it was on sale, so I bought two. Uuuuuuuugggh! Caveat emptor caseum.

In the biweekly online D&D game Neal is running, our party is 80% tiefling (half-devils). Not for any role-playing reason or anything, it's just during character creation, there were a couple different people thinking about it based on stats and abilities, and somebody said "hey, wouldn't it be fun to have an all-tiefling party?" and now our characters' homeland is officially majority tiefling.

So anyway, I was poking around with the subrace options from one of the books and got dissatisfied with them because they didn't seem like they were very thematic or consistent with lore, and long story short, I got carried away and ended up redesigning all 9 of the existing options and adding 18 more. Not that I actually care about the official lore or even knew it before I started, but you know how it is, sometimes you start fiddling around with a thing, and then it grabs you, and before you know it, you've sunk a whole bunch of time and effort into it? Yeah. That happened.

Anyway, I was also poking around on various subreddits for D&D and homebrew content, and it turns out that there are websites that let you lay it out all pretty and official-looking using just a bit of markdown, so then I had to play around with it some more to make it all fancy and nice and share it online, because upvotes.

Which is to say, I made a thing, and I'm pleased with how it turned out:
https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/b8DOvJS2hrFk

On Tuesday two weeks ago, I gave the talk that I was scheduled to give a year ago before the conference I was giving it at was cancelled. It's still weird giving talks with absolutely zero feedback from the audience, but I had several people tell me later on that they really enjoyed it, so I'm counting it as a success. Especially since it was a talk about philosophy of science stuff at a conference on improving scientific software, so people weren't automatically going to be interested in the subject matter.

I then took half of Thursday, all of Friday, and all of Monday off, because I had been pushing hard on a lot of different projects and was feeling frazzled.

Which was good, because on Thursday I got email from Kaiser saying I'd reached the front of the line and could come get my first vaccine shot on Monday!

I got a mid-morning appointment up at Rock Creek. It was down in the basement, and the line stretched down the hallway (largely because everyone was distanced six feet, of course), but they moved people through at a good clip. I didn't even feel the needle, but later on in the day I had a little soreness and then my energy levels plummeted ("I was very busy on a molecular level," as the Daves say), so the vague wonder if maybe the guy missed or something vanished.

I have another appointment in three weeks, and then two weeks after that I should be fully immunized. It's weird to think about all the things that have been forbidden that I'll be able to do again. I am trying not to anticipate too hard, lest I get itchy and impatient, but I can't help but look forward at least a little. Weirdly, one of the biggest ones is just being able to go to the store whenever, without having to think about whether it will be crowded or if it's an unnecessary trip.

And then this last Thursday was my and Jerry's 20th anniversary! Spring of 2001 was when I flew out to Oregon and we put all his stuff in a moving truck, drove back to Colorado, moved in together. It's hard to pin an exact date on it, so a few years later we decided to just call April 1st our nominal anniversary, since it's about halfway between our birthdays. We got takeout from Afghan Kabob and watched some TV together and played a few rounds of Earth Defense Force, and it was lovely.

I went in to the office for the first time in almost a year today.

I put in the request for permission to enter the building a couple weeks ago because I wanted to get some notes for a talk that I'm going to give in April. Currently, they have to keep the building at less than 10% capacity, so you have to sign up in advance so they can coordinate who'll be present when. (Plus you have to do a training session on how to avoid spreading germs, but I did that back in October.)

I discovered shortly after I signed up that I already had the notes (I brought them home with me last March), but I figured since the opportunity was limited, I'd go in anyway and see what else I wanted to bring home.

Jerry came with me, and we were hoping to have lunch together outside on the Tree Plaza, where we got married, but alas, it was all closed off. Plus even it had been accessible, it was SUPER-windy up on the hill today, so that was a bit of a bust.

I brought home some folders for sorting out all my notes, and my work credit card so I can pay for things like online conference registration myself. More importantly, I was also able to grab MORE NOTEPADS for taking notes! I finally ran out and the only ones they had at the grocery store were little. aw yus office supplies

I also brought home my workout gear to wash. Our climate is dry so it didn't get gross or anything, even after sitting abandoned in a locker for a year, but I figured it would be nice to have clean workout clothes when I finally go back.

Finally, my co-worker Rachel asked me to get a chair out of her office for her, which she'll come pick up this weekend.

Even though it's only 20-some minutes, the drive there and back felt notably longer than when I was doing it every day. I think I'd like to continue working from home some of the time once the pandemic is over.

I'm done with work for the year! I'm taking today and the rest of the week and all of next week off, so I won't be going back to work until January 4th. (Work has been encouraging us to take PTO, because nobody's been using it and it's messing up the budgets...)

I spent, golly, almost the last 3 weeks doing AGU online. Which was... fine, overall.

I mean, there's no way to do a 25,000-person conference virtually and have it be anywhere close to as good as the normal in-person version. But given that, it was not bad.

Posters were done in this "e-lighting" format where there are up to 6 boxes in a standard configuration, and you click on each box to expand it, so presenters can put as much information as they want into each box. I haaaaaaaate this format in person (presented on touch-screens), because it's so slow and clunky to click on each box, wait for it to expand, scroll through it, then back out and click on the next one, plus you can't scan quickly to see if there's anything you care about, and it drives me crazy. But then I discovered that viewing them on the web, there's a "print" view that just dumps everything onto a single long page, and that works just fine. (I think the lack of length and layout constraints in the e-poster format encourages people to make bad posters with poor information flow and organization, but honestly most people make bad posters in paper format, too, so it's not that much different.)

For talks, everyone giving an oral presentation had to pre-record their talk and upload it about a week before Thanksgiving. The videos were available to watch whenever you wanted, and then there was a scheduled zoom session for Q&A where the speakers each gave a brief 3-slide summary of their talk before answering any questions. Not all that different from a live presentation, and there's one thing I would take from the virtual conference back into the real world if I could: the ability to change the playback speed. Most presenters speak WAY too slowly, and being able to speed people up to 150% was fantastic. Plus you can pause and rewind if you need to.

With no time conflicts and the fact that I didn't have to spend any time going between things or waiting for things to start, I actually go to see a whole lot more AGU than normal. They have an electronic program where you can tick a box to add a presentation to your schedule, so I go through and add everything that looks interesting (based on keywords, people I know, and skimming through the session titles in the Atmospheric Science, Informatics, and Global Change secsion), and normally what happens is that I then have a jam-packed schedule for five days and I end up triaging away at least half of it on the day. But this time, I ended up skipping only a handful of things, and by the end of it, I had seen almost 260 talks and posters. (I exported my schedule and made a spreadsheet...) There were plenty of things that I spent about 30 seconds glancing over before writing "meh" in my notes, but most of what I saw was good.

The thing that I missed out on, of course, was people. I only went to one live poster session (for a friend from grad school, not even in my field), and I didn't run into anyone in the poster hall or the lobby or have any good post-talk conversations or meet anybody for lunch. So that was disappointing. But I don't think that was because it wasn't run well, I think that's just a limitation of the virtual format.

My only major complaint about the conference was the scheduling. Following some asinine reasoning about trying to be a "global scientific society", they tried to make the schedule friendly to Europe and Asia. Which means it was quite UNfriendly to all the North Americans making up the vast majority of the attendees. The oral Q&A sessions were all scheduled early in the morning or late in the evening. My talk was at 5:30 in the goddamn morning. I had to get up at 4-bloody-30-A.M. in order to be presentable and conscious on zoom from 5-6 (because I needed to be there for the whole thing, of course), speak for less than five minutes in the middle, and have time to get asked one (not particularly relevant) question near the end because the moderators didn't do a great job watching the clock. I was less than thrilled. (And I went straight back to bed afterward.)

But overall, it was pretty useful. I saw a lot of good stuff about machine learning, which has moved from "we think AI techniques might be useful for this kind of problem" to "we used deep learning for this process and got it to work well." So I've got my student assistant working on some ML stuff.

And this year I had the time to sit down afterwards and go through my notes to distill out the best stuff, so I'm hopeful that I'll put more of it into use. Not a bad note to end the work year on.

I still miss getting to go somewhere for it and see people and all that good stuff. Next year.

Some time a while back (going on twenty years ago? Yikes!) I went to the Renaissance Fair down in Larkspur with some friends.

I decided to go in period costume.

Not the correct period, mind you. I went for late 1800s cowboy drag: boots, jeans, long-sleeve shirt, vest, jacket, cowboy hat. Except for the shirt, every stitch of it was black.

It was late summer, clear and sunny, with temperatures in the mid-90s.

It was amazingly hot.

But I discovered a neat little magic trick (of necessity, because I was too stubborn to do anything sensible like changing my outfit), which was that, although I kinda felt like I was walking around inside my own personal oven, if I focused my attention on other things, I could ignore the heat and pretend that I was comfortable. And after a little while, I would be. Not that I wasn't still hot, but it didn't bother me.

As long as I didn't move too quickly. If I made any sudden movements, the illusion would shatter, and I would become abruptly and acutely aware of just how incredibly unpleasant it was to be walking around in a near-zero albedo outfit and a mile less of air shielding me from the sun's radiant fury, and I would be quite unhappy until I managed to refocus my attention and restore my phantasmal comfort.

But when I was able to keep it going, the illusion became real, and I was fine.

* * *

This is my current answer to the question "so how are you?"

I think. I mean, time has no meaning during a pandemic, why should words? Am I okay? I seem to be, in general, except when I'm not. What does "okay" even mean?

Everything is terrible and on fire -- literally, for large chunks of Colorado -- I desperately miss parties and travel and going to movies and restaurants and people's houses and making long-term plans, and the near future is a vast and terrifying unknown, but on the local scale, in the local universe of the people and things I actually interact with on a regular basis, everything is... fine?

I scraped together enough gumption to start running my Star Wars game again. Work's going pretty well, and my to-do list no longer feels overwhelming. Online gaming is not as good as in-person but way better than nothing. We voted early and I'm still doing local policy stuff, so I've given myself permission to disconnect from everything political as outside my control. We have cats.

We drove out and spent the weekend with my Mom & Larry a couple weeks ago. It was really easy to avoid contact with everyone but the two of them, and it was really good to see them. The air was clear and not smoky, I made a tasty new mushroom and cauliflower recipe that's getting added to my regular repertoire, and Mom sent me home with lots of homegrown tomatoes.

Oh, and back in early September we saw goddessdster when she was in town, and had a nice picnic dinner and visit outside, so that was really good.

I'm getting ready for AGU, which instead of an opportunity to travel and see people will be a lot of deeply unsatisfying video-watching in my office at terrible times of day (there was no way for it to be anything other than lousy, given the pandemic, but the schedule is deeply sub-optimal and I'm not happy about it), but I got an oral presentation instead of a poster and I have cool science results about a very timely subject (wildfires), so that's neat.

And I'm a co-author on a paper where the research indicates that climate change may rescue a lot of bat populations threatened by white-nose disease, and that got me all choked up when I first read the results section.

So I dunno. I'm in a weird quantum superposition of chipper and depressed, calm and stressed, okay and not-okay.

I'm fine, I guess.

As long as I don't move too quickly.

Things that have happened more than once over the last couple-few months of pandemic:

Online concerts. Two, both for Abney Park. The first was back at the end of May, the second just last night. They sell "tickets", but it's just donations through a fundraiser website; they livestream the show on youtube and post the link on their website. They weren't taking any more donations by the time we got there for the first one, so it was free; I bought some compilation albums through their website the next day. There is, alas, no live crowd energy, but it's pretty cool to watch from your couch and to be able to pause or rewind the show.

Take-out. We've been getting take-out at least once a week to help keep restaurants near us afloat. We've now hit almost all of our top local non-chain restaurants: Yak & Yeti (no buffet, alas), Jewel of India, Sushi Yume, Mika Sushi, Oscar's Kabob & Gyros, Ho-Ho, Thousand of Wok, Two Sticks Cafe (in H-Mart), Pho 78, plus of course the occasional fast-casual chain like Chipotle & Smashburger. We got Ethiopian from a food truck the other day (the HOA has them come on Thursdays). We should probably start cycling through soon.

Cautious outdoor socialization. Our first venture out of the house was to Eaton Street for responsibly distanced socialization with backyard croquet. (Shades of Hyacinth Bucket's "candlelight supper with riparian entertainment"...) We also spent an afternoon at the Floyds', playtesting Jerry's game with Chris. Lately, we've going over to Eaton on Sundays to practice Japanese on the back patio with Matt & Jon. Oh, and we had a nice picnic supper at the local park with Van (takeout from Wishbone) a couple weeks ago. All wearing masks the whole time, of course, which is annoying, but at least we get to see our friends some.

Municipal Advising The work on policing policy for my municipal advisory board continues. I'm chairing a committee meeting over zoom every week or two, and our last board meeting was dedicated to a discussion with the police chief, which went really well; there were a couple items that I thought might be a hard sell (changes to training and unbundling first response) that it turns out they're completely on board with, so that's pretty heartening.

Haircuts. Two, so far, six weeks apart. It's not so much that I've been pining for a haircut - the trim Jerry gave me back in April was perfectly serviceable - but I like my barbershop and don't want it to go out of business, and since America apparently doesn't believe in safety nets... Masks are required for everyone and there's no waiting inside, plus both times I got there first thing in the morning and was one of the first two people there, so I think it's been acceptably low risk given rates in Colorado over the last couple months. I'll have to see how things look a month from now, though.

Gaming. Neal's D&D game is ongoing, and now we've added Jeff to the group. We've played Dominion online a few times with various folks (Joe, Matthew, Jon, Peter), and done a couple game nights on BoardGameArena. I haven't run my Star Wars game, but I finally have gathered enough focus to start prepping it again. That's still a work in progress, though. I have also played a whole lot of Monster Prom (humorous dating sim), a full playthrough of Arcade Spirits (romantic comedy visual novel), and a fair chunk of Into The Breach (turn-based tactics game, rec'd by Floyd).

Running out of oomph. A while back I just hit a wall, and ended up working half-days for about a week. I've had a couple more days like that here and there, but I'm getting back into the swing of things. Of course, I recently lost about a week and a half to dealing with migrating to a new work laptop because the battery started swelling on the old one, so I still have a pretty full to-do list.

Of course there have also been assorted one-shot things, like walking to city hall to drop off our ballots, and big zoom get-togethers with folks from college (though hopefully that one may become more regular.

We are very much enjoying having the house to ourselves again. I was talking to my mom about it and she pointed out that when something starts out as just a couple weeks and stretches on and on, you don't realize how much accommodation you're doing and how much chronic stress it generates.

So yeah, things may be grossly unacceptable at the global scale, but locally we're making do.

David V. is moving out.

More than two years ago (sometime in the spring of '18, IIRC) he called us to ask if he could stay in our guest room "for a week or two," which has turned into, well, two-plus years.

We have been trading a little light housekeeping for room, board, and a bit of spending money. More as a way to try to inject some dignity into the situation than because we were pining for help with the chores, but we tried to keep the exchange rate fair.

It was suitable for a good while, but we cannot afford to continue supporting him, so at the beginning of May we let him know it was time to start looking for a new living situation. He hasn't really found one, but we just... can't keep doing this. So.

I'm disappointed and embarrassed to be confronted with the fact that my charity is not boundless and unlimited. I really want to be the kind of person who is able to keep saying "oh, it's fine, we've got you covered" indefinitely, and I'm sorry that we can't do that.

I am angry that our society doesn't have a better safety net. He should have better options available, and it makes me livid that people who think gatekeeping benefits to the "worthy" is more important than caring for those in need have been able to destroy or cripple or block all the systems that would provide them.

I feel guilty about how terrible the timing is and that he's not moving on to something better. If I thought it would make a difference, I'd be happy to wait a little longer. But there's no reason to think it would, and days have had a way of extending into weeks and months, and that would not end well.

The whole thing just sucks and I feel bad about it and I wish things were different. I also recognize the necessity if it, because there's a whole host of things I'm not going to get into that I would be even more unhappy about were things to continue on as they are. And then there's stuff like the fact that I feel eager to get our space and our privacy back, but I feel bad about feeling good about that, but should I? Ugh.

I guess that's all there really is to say, is that it sucks and I wish things were different.

Things I Have Managed To (Sort Of) Do Despite The Lockdown: A Post

Go To The Dentist: The dentist's office has opened back up, and it was time for me to get my teeth cleaned. They're enforcing social distancing, so I had to wear a mask and call them from my car, then wait until they said it was okay to come into the building. Extra masks on the techs, and no ultrasonic waterpik, just old-fashioned metal hooks. Hand sanitizer all over the place. All in all, not too onerous, and also I think is about as safe as you can make a healthcare visit. They also moved into a new (unflooded) building, which is much nicer and only a smidge less convenient to get to. (Though I though the old place was kinda cozy, in that old-house-converted-to-business way.) Also, mid-afternoon appointments are much easier to manage when working from home.

Get A Haircut: My barber has NOT opened back up, but I was more than a month overdue and I couldn't stand it anymore, so weekend before last I got Jerry to cut my hair. We have clippers, and mostly I just wanted the back and sides back to a reasonable length. He did a really good job ("exceedingly adequate," he insists), and shortened the top up, too. I also gave my beard a good trimming, and I felt about a million times better.

Play Games With Friends: Online boardgaming is working out pretty well. I played some Dominion with Matthew and Floyd a couple weeks ago, and we've got more planned for this Friday. Played Puerto Rico with Joe and Bill tonight. The Monday night D&D game is going well, using Zoom instead of Discord for video. I haven't gotten enough prep together to actually run Star Wars yet, but I've made progress, and have reclaimed enough brain to at least think about it.

See A Movie With Friends: Before lockdown started, Alice pointed our "weird movie club" at Extra Ordinary, an Irish horror comedy about ghosts, and we were all planning to go see it in the theater. Not happening, obvs, but it's now available streaming. Rather than trying to literally watch it together, this weekend we all rented it and watched it at home, and on Monday (Memorial Day), we had a Zoom call to discuss it and socialize. Again, not as nice as actually going together in person, but I think we had at least as much conversation about it as we would have had standing outside the movie theater afterwards.

Patronize Restaurants: We've decided to get takeout at least once a week to help out all the local restaurants that we would like to survive. Pho 88 is in fact still open; we weren't sure because the first couple times we tried it wasn't, but I think it's just that there's only one guy working, so if he takes a day off, they're closed. We also got Mexican from Lucero's Tavern one night. Picked up the order about 10 minutes before closing, and when I paid, the cashier accidentally entered in a $100 tip and couldn't figure out how to undo it! She called over the other guy working, who couldn't figure it out either, so he said "Um, can I just give you $100 cash?" and, amused, I allowed as how that would be fine.

Read A Book: I got a copy of All Systems Red (the first Murderbot book) for my birthday, read it in a day, and enjoyed it very much. Worth mentioning because I've got other books that I'm having trouble finishing because pandemic stress makes it hard to focus. This one was just a novella. I think I'll have to get the others.

Not Fall Down Completely On Blogging: Look! A post!

As part of our annual reviews, my boss asked us to talk about how we were being affected by the whole pandemic situation, and my assessment was that overall, I am doing okay-not-great. Honestly, it's been a rough year (I had totally forgotten about how worn down I got at the end of last year), with a lot of course changes and unexpected turbulence to deal with. I rated my performance as pretty darn good, considering -- it's just that this year, there is a LOT of considering.