The Mad Schemes of Dr. Tectonic

Quarantine time is weird. On Tuesday, I went to the store first thing in the morning and then I went to the office to pick up my chair (which I can already tell is helping my ergonomics a lot), and then by Wednesday afternoon, it felt like that had happened a full week and a half earlier. But then two weeks have gone by since I last posted and it feels like nothing has happened at all.

Which is kind of because nothing much has happened. Work and bills go on, but everything else is on hold. I'm going grocery shopping once every 7-9 days, and otherwise don't go out. Two exceptions: picking up the desk chair (which I had to make special arrangements for), and on Thursday, the charger cable for my laptop died, so Jerry went and got me one from Target.

I ran my Star Wars game over Zoom this evening, and that went pretty well. Need to remember to schedule breaks, though. Last weekend I played Neal's D&D game using Zoom & Roll20. (It works, but the interface is pretty clunky, so I'm glad we don't need it for my Star Wars game.) We also found some services for playing board games online and played Dominion with Chris Floyd on Saturday of last weekend. We just called on the phone and put it on speaker, and that worked well. Not as good as games in person, but a lot better than nothing.

I have gone for a few walks around the neighborhood and discovered that I think a lot of the bunnies live in the rock wall embankments that run along the edges of our subdivision. I saw one vanish there and realized that there are big holes between and behind the rocks that have plenty of room for a rabbit den.

Work is going reasonably. I have struggled a bit to be productive some days, although not more than other times when I've been stressed out about other things. Overall, working from home 100% has honestly been less disruptive than I thought it would be. Having no commute is nice, as is being able to eat based on when I'm actually hungry and not when the cafeteria is open.

So, yeah. I'm doing okay. The situation is dumb and I hate it, but I'm also less worried now that it's here than I was when it was coming, so at least there's that.

Two thoughts on COVID-19:

First, from Iain M. Banks' Excession:

There was only one problem with the Land of Infinite Fun, and that was that if you ever did lose yourself in it completely - as Minds occasionally did, just as humans sometimes surrendered utterly to some AI environment - you could forget that there was a base reality at all. In a way, this didn't really matter, as long as there was somebody back where you came from minding the hearth. The problem came when there was nobody left or inclined to tend the fire, mind the store, look after the housekeeping (or however you wanted to express it), or if somebody or something else - somebody or something from outside, the sort of entity that came under the general heading of an Outside Context Problem, for example - decided they wanted to meddle with the fire in that hearth, the stock in the store, the contents and running of the house; if you'd spent all your time having Fun, with no way back to reality, or just no idea what to do to protect yourself when you did get back there, then you were vulnerable. In fact, you were probably dead, or enslaved.

It didn't matter that base reality was petty and grey and mean and demeaning and quite empty of meaning compared to the glorious majesty of the multi-hued life you'd been living through metamathics; it didn't matter that base reality was of no conse­quence aesthetically, hedonistically, metamathically, intellectually and philosophically; if that was the single foundation-stone that all your higher-level comfort and joy rested upon, and it was kicked away from underneath you, you fell, and your limitless pleasure realms fell with you.

It was just like some ancient electricity-powered computer; it didn't matter how fast, error-free and tireless it was, it didn't matter how great a labour-saving boon it was, it didn't matter what it could do or how many different ways it could amaze; if you pulled its plug out, or just hit the Off button, all it became was a lump of matter; all its programs became just settings, dead instructions, and all its computations vanished as quickly as they'd moved.

It was, also, like the dependency of the human-basic brain on the human-basic body; no matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic rewards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if your heart just gave out…

That was the Dependency Principle; that you could never forget where your Off switches were located, even if it was somewhere tiresome.

Few things are more intensely frustrating than abruptly losing momentum on a project because of something like your computer deciding it has to reboot to apply a software update now. We make grand plans that depend on all these layers of civilizational infrastructure continuing to work as normal, and then something goes wrong and you have to scrap it all, and it's just... tiresome. Very, very tiresome.




Second, the Litany Against Fear, from Frank Herbert's Dune:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

This is my preferred text to recite while washing my hands to ensure that I wash them for the requisite twenty seconds. The only change I make is to the first line: I say "I will not" rather than "I must not" to emphasize that it is a choice I make, not something externally imposed.

I think, maybe, I am finally recovered from the end of 2019, which was exhausting.

Basically, a bunch of work deadlines all converged, most of which were completely non-negotiable, so back at, like, the end of September, I looked at my to-do list and realized that if I was going to finish it all on time, I had to start now, and then I was just running in overdrive mode for three months.

I did get (almost) everything finished, so that was good. I got a reprieve on finishing and submitting the data archive paper by the end of the year, because my boss decided that it was more relevant to working group 2, for which the deadline is not until sometime this summer, and that she was too overloaded with working group 1 stuff to work on her piece of it. On the one hand, I'm a little bit disappointed because I did set it as a goal and didn't quite achieve it, and I was looking forward to having it finished and off my plate. But on the other hand, I think it really was for the best; I think I could have pulled it off, but I've been in recharge mode since the middle of December and only now starting to feel back to normal, and I think hitting that end-of-year deadline would have drained my battery all the way to zero and taken considerably longer to get recover from.

Plus, I'm still not sure that I'm fully back up to snuff. I caught a cold on New Year's Eve; I felt it coming on Wednesday and got my zinc lozenges in early, and I thought I had gotten over the next day, but I had planned to work from home at the end of the week, and it really just didn't happen, and it's only today that I've finally had enough gumption to do more than the essentials. And it's the same with recovering from overwork strain; I keep thinking "oh, I feel better," and then some time passes and I think it again, so maybe I'm still not all the way back yet.

So, holidays:

We got back from AGU (post forthcoming) on Monday the 16th, and I was right back at work on the 17th. Went to Kent's holiday party on Friday the 20th, followed by birthday party at Eaton Street (for Brandon & Jon) on the 21st.

For Christmas, we went to Naponee. Jerry had to be back on the 26th, so we drove out on Monday (the 23rd) and drove home on Christmas Day. Along with Mom & Larry, Leslie and Layne and Joyce (my step-sister, her son, and her mom) were there, because back in November they moved out there to get away from Denver's high cost of living. Leslie has found a job working at a group home for the disabled, and they found a house to rent, but at Christmas they were still looking. So it was a very full house for our visit, with them plus Joyce's dog Booger (a good boy but very barky). Lots more presents than usual to open on Christmas morning. But it was also good downtime; I was out in the trailer (where Jerry & I were sleeping) on Tuesday afternoon, and it was just silent in a way you don't get in developed areas.

Side note, I read The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison on the trip and really enjoyed it. It's an unusual book; fantasy, but very constrained, almost claustrophobic. No adventure, just steampunk court intrigue about people and politics and psychology. It's very good. My only complaint is that the names are very strange I had a terrible time tracking them.

Scheduling problems derailed Star Wars on Sunday the 29th, so we went over to Jeff's and played some of the new games I got for Christmas (Dominion: Nocturne, Squirrel or Die, and Sakura) with him & Jeff.

Douglas is in town and came over to visit on Monday the 30th, so we got all caught up on our trip to SF and suchlike.

New Year's Eve we spent at Craig's. I brought ramen eggs, which I realized are more convenient than deviled eggs because (1) they're easier to make and (2) easier to transport; you can just cut them in half once you get there, add a dab of crunchy chili-garlic topping, and there you are. We played a bunch of Jackbox games, and then everyone said "okay, I'm old" and we all headed home by about 12:30.

New Year's Day we went over to Neal's to play Tapestry, which is a big and complicated civilization-building game. I had a good time, though I had to apologize for grousing about being seriously behind in the midgame, because I misjudged my position and was able to pull seriously ahead at the end. Would play again, though it's one that needs some space between plays.

I also binged 4 seasons of Taskmaster while I was too tried to brain very much. It's a British show where the contestants (5 comedians) compete at performing ridiculous tasks, and it's very funny. The first two seasons are on youtube, and others can be found by googling.

I still need to do a couple catch-up posts for AGU and all the big stuff that happened in the fall, and I have some other thoughts in prep, but hey, I'm at least caught up on recent doings now.

I am working on the Final Report for one of our grants, and it is the worst thing. It's going to be the only work thing I do all week, and it's going to eat up time over the holiday and the weekend, and it's No Fun At All. Yuck-ptoo ugh bleah!

We got about 8 inches of snow last night. The office was closed today, so I worked from home, and I left early yesterday to avoid nasty traffic. Looks like it should be reasonable to go in tomorrow, though. And I am taking a moment to be appreciative of (1) having a garage in which we park our cars, and (2) having some chunk my HOA fees, much as I dislike how high they are, going to paying other people to deal with shoveling all the snow. Yay!

Speaking of paying other people to deal with things, last week Michelle (my brother's fiancee, who is a contractor) came and fixed a bunch of stuff around the house for us. We now have a front door that opens easily, toilets that don't run, sinks that aren't cracked, nice bright light fixtures in the bathrooms, a bunch of walls that aren't all dented and scratched up, and -- best of all -- we can use the shower in the master bathroom again! The drain doesn't leak into the ceiling above the garage anymore! I had forgotten how nice it is, especially since it has the best water pressure.

Sunday afternoon we went over to Matthew (fineplan)'s place for birthday board games, and had much fun with him, and Mitch, and Jonathan, and Stephen, and... a couple other guys whose names I forgot because I'm a terrible person. We played a game of Citadels and a couple rounds of Codenames, and then the Cyanide & Happiness make-a-comic game, and then half the guys had to take off, so the four of us left played Organ Attack (birthday present) and The Table Is Lava, where you flick cards at a bunch of other cards and meeples, trying to knock them off. (It was a flicky game, so I wasn't any good at it, but it was decently enjoyable.) We also got to meet Matthew's ferrets and his cat Deimos, who is a sweet boy but very yelly.

(I still have lots of journaling to catch up on, but that's three things and three things make a post and my dinner is ready. Before I go back to reporting, waaa blah whinge boo.)

We're already halfway through November and I'm kind of not okay with that given how much work stuff I need to get done between now and the end of the year.

I mean, I guess I'm on top of it. Tomorrow I am giving a work-in-progress talk for my lab, and I've had the slides ready for a couple weeks. And last week I finished my poster for AGU, which is the second week of December. There's just a bunch more stuff looming in an alarming fashion. (And which I knew was coming, which is why I got that other stuff done early.) Just, ugh. It's gonna be a lot.

The thing that's weird about it is that in college, I was a terrible procrastinator. And I'm not sure what changed. It's not like I switched from being sorta lazy to being all ambitious or anything.

I think now I'm just lazy in this preemptive and long-range way, where I get stuff done ahead of time so I have more room to slack off later on. Like, I'm productive because it's waaay less effort than letting things slide.

Is that a thing? Well, it's how my life is going, so I guess it must be.

A long catch-up post, not so much because I expect it to be interesting as because my memory is terrible and if I want future-me to have some recollection of various goings-on.

We did tie-dying on the weekend of August 10th at Eaton Street. It was a big party; lots of fun. I went a little overboard and did five different shirts.

I did three ice-dyed shirts. The long-sleeved green-black one came out good. The short-sleeved green-purple one is a bit muddy, and I think I will tie-dye it black and leave that as the background. The short-sleeved red-orange one looks like fire and is AMAZING. The only downside is that it's a little tight...

I did a regular tie-dye of a silk shirt with wrapping up marbles so they make circles, and it turned out pretty good. I wasn't totally clear on what to do different with silk instead of cotton, and it took the color well but just kept bleeding every time I rinsed it. I let it hang for several weeks until I got around to dealing with it. I washed it with half a packet of Rit color remover in the washer, then ran it through twice with just water, and that seems to have fixed it.

Finally, I did a shibori shirt that I really like, folding it into triangles that make a neat lattice pattern. Could probably have folded it a little less tightly; it's still mostly white. Jerry make a tie-dye shibori using clips and marbles that looks beautiful and spells out "fuck trump" in Morse code.

Had a McGinnis family dinner at an Olive Garden down in Lakewood the day after. Enjoyable, though there were lots of relatives who I sorta recognized but mostly didn't know. Bo & Barb gave me a big packet of photos and genealogy charts my dad had put together.

Labor Day weekend I went to two pool parties: at CJ's on Saturday and at Bob's on Monday. Both were fun, with weather on the cool side. Jerry was able to come to the one at CJ's, hooray, but had to work Sunday and Monday, boo. But his hours are (finally!) going down now that they've hired on Sensei John.

Saturday Sept. 7th I cooked a whole bunch (I made fenugreek cauliflower and zucchini curry) and then Dave & Michelle came over and looked at home repair stuff. It looks like the phantom sink drip is probably not an actual leak, and all the rest of it should be doable. Still need to figure out if the downstairs shower is actually leaking.

That Sunday, we had dim sum at Star Kitchen with Jon, Gene, Brandon, & Matt. (JonGeBraMatt?) Nom! On the way home, Jerry and I stopped at Home Depot and picked out light fixtures and sinks for the home repairs. Adulting!

On Monday, I did the zoning meeting thing, which I wrote about previously. I found out at our board meeting that it passed, hooray! And apparently my speech did help, so that was nice. At Chris's games night that week, we played a neat coop game that Tom M. brought which was sort of a cross between Dominion & Sentinels. I liked it! (And then we played a quick game of Dominion.)

Saturday the 14th was lots of Getting Things Done. I went to the credit union and got a new credit card because the chip on mine had died. Then I got a haircut, and then I went to the Home Despot up on 120th and bought more stuff: 3 sinks, 3 toilet kits, and a folding door for the furnace room. I actually ran into Michelle there, which was a surprise. I ended up deciding that I actually wanted slightly different sinks with a better style of lip, so I took them and two light fixtures (because talking to Michelle I found out we needed one big one instead of two small ones) to a different store up north that had the sinks I wanted in stock. And THEN I went grocery shopping!

Lots more to come, but I almost lost this post to a reboot once already, so here it goes.

Monday night I went to a zoning hearing and argued in favor of an affordable housing development near my house. Which sounds pretty dull, but was a thing what needed doing.

I had been to one a few months ago and I knew that a bunch of my neighbors would be there being all gross and NIMBYish and saying "ew, poor people," and I felt it was important to counter that to the extent that I could.

(I am pretty disappointed this swath of my neighbors. Also in my HOA, which has been sending out lots of email encouraging people to show up to the hearing. Oh, but they "have NO opinion or position" on it. Really? Liars. If you really had no opinion, you wouldn't have brought it up...)

I also knew that there would be a huge number of people who wanted to make public comments. So I left work in the middle of the afternoon so that I could get to City Hall and be there waiting at 5 when the sign up sheets came out and be first on the list. I was hoping that I might set the tone a little, and also maybe take the wind out of some of the complainers' sails. (Also, I knew that if I had to sit through a bunch of people being awful, I would end up thinking about nothing but how much I wanted to set them all on fire when it was my turn to speak, and would not make a good impression.)

( What I said: )


The second speaker was a lady who works with the homeless, and the third speaker was a lady in a wheelchair who talked about how she lost her home after the car crash that disabled her, and how important affordable housing was to her. (The fourth speaker was a lawyer for some third party who started droning on about some point of procedure, and I didn't stick around after that.) So I think maybe we did set some tone.

I had my advisory board meeting this evening, and I found out that after three and a half hours of public commentary (until 11:30 pm, ugh), the council did indeed vote yes. Hooray! And the councilor who comes to our meetings said that my comments did have some influence, so that felt good.

I mean, it's a drop in the bucket when you think about the big picture, but it's not nothing. You gotta do good where you can.

I wasn't really aiming to be productive this weekend, but I managed to get a lot done, so that felt good.

Saturday morning I bought vegetables at the farmer's market, then got a haircut. (Making note of it because I keep losing track of how long I go between haircuts.) I got rice vinegar and some more little bowls for kitty wet food at POM (they were small but deep and had fishies on them, how could I not?), then hit a couple thrift stores looking for shirts to dye next weekend. (No luck, alas.) I then remembered that I needed to put air in the tires and actually did it, which was a bit of an achievement, to be honest. Dropped everything off at home, recovered for a bit, then went grocery shopping.

I wanted to make something to bring to the bonfire. Friday night I had made some ramen eggs (ajitsuke tamago) for snacking on (I made the first batch last weekend and needed more because they are AMAZING), and I was thinking I'd take those, but I didn't have very many and they don't halve well, so I decided to make deviled eggs instead. I tweaked some recipes I found online and ended up making Japanese deviled eggs with J-mayo, miso, mirin, wasabi, sesame oil, and crunchy chili garlic, and was very pleased with the outcome. I wrote down the recipe to make again, definitely.

Then that evening Jerry and I went off to Brighton for a bonfire at Bob's, which was very pleasant. Got some good hangout time with Geoff and Mitch and Brandon & Matt and Craig & Joe, and managed to get enough DEET on me that I wasn't eaten by mosquitoes.

Today we got going relatively early and went off to get some shirts for Jerry to dye and a new stunt ring (inexpensive and easily replaceable silver wedding band), since his previous one served its purpose by getting lost while we were in Japan. We stopped at the Goodwill on 120th, and not only did we find a half dozen shirts for him (plus a long-sleeved one for me that wasn't there yesterday), we also found some nice low shelves that we could use to clean up and organize a bunch of clutter in the living room (like all the board games). So we bought two sets of them.

There's no jewelry counter at the Walmart on 120th anymore, so after some lunch we found one at the one on Sheridan, got the ring, came home and put together shelves. Put lots of things away and rearranged the living room a bit, and then I spent the evening cooking.

Well, mostly chopping vegetables, since I made ratatouille. I made two batches, one traditional and one Indian. (Indian ratatouille: mostly the same, use cardamom, cumin, garam masala, and coriander instead of thyme and basil.) I used the bag of frozen tomatoes my mom gave us last fall, so I didn't have to spend much time cooking the tomatoes until they fell apart, just a long time simmering away all the water. I did both batches at the same time, and that worked well except for a bit where I got a little behind prepping the tomatoes (because I'd forgotten to do them in advance like all the other veggies) and the time when I spattered hot oil on my naked belly because while I had remembered to wear a shirt while I was cooking, I forgot that you have to actually button it to get any protection, yes, even when it's all hot and gross right next to the stove. (No actual damage, happily, just some ouch.) Anyway, both version turned out pretty well, I think, so that'll be nice for dinner all week.

Oh! And! I finally summoned up the gumption to call Dave & Michelle (who does carpentry & home improvement), and they're going to come over some evening this week and look at the various things around the house that need fixing, so we'll get that in motion finally, hooray!

Wer'e home! We came home on the 4th.

'O' was AMAZING, nay, astonishing. It's a Cirque du Soleil show, so of course it's all about mind-blowing feats of athleticism, but 'O' is also about water. They built a gigantic pool, and the stage rises up out of and sinks down into the water, so one minute people are diving into it from 60 feet up and the next performers are walking across the stage a quarter inch below the surface. People and things vanish into the water and never reappear. Pretty much the whole show, the entirety of my thought process was "what even just happened?!" A wonderful, wonderful experience. Highly recommended, and definitely worth spending extra on good seats.

(Tickets are ~$100, there are 1800 seats in the theater, they do two shows a night, five nights a week, and it was mostly sold out on a Wednesday. It's been open since 1998, and sales passed a billion dollars sometime in 2012. And it deserves every penny.)

After the show, we wandered outside and watched the fountains at the Bellagio, which dance to music every 15 minutes or so. If you ever wonder how lucrative gambling is, just consider that, in a city in the middle of a freakin' desert, someone was able to spend enough money to build a gigantic building with a lake out front the size of a city block, and every 15 minutes hundreds of motorized air cannons spout giant streams of water into the dry, dry air, and nobody charges admission; it's all completely free for anyone passing by to enjoy, because it's advertising, basically. (Advertising that costs, reportedly, a few hundred thousand dollars a month to operate.) And it works! Because the fountains are pretty darn nifty. There's also a whole ceiling of Chihuly glass in the lobby.

And then there's this weird garden area, which has all this decorative Italian stuff, like fake lemon trees and a giant sun sculpture and great big motorized swans and mosaics made of beans. Except it's all bad; the art is clumsy and the signs are poorly translated and the statues are creepy, and it's just weird because it's badly faked classiness, but it has to be intentional because the place makes so much money that they could very easily do actually classy if they wanted to; just take a look at the lobby not fifty feet away. So that was very perplexing.

We took in the Strip a little, wandering down to where we could cross the street, then back up the other side, and through a little indoor mall along the way. The amount of sensory overload was awful; I think working in a kiosk in that mall would be one of the worst things in the world. Anyway, after that we decided that was enough, and concluded that, yeah, neither of us really likes Vegas.

We flew home the next day, Thursday, with was the 4th. Got back to the house mid-afternoon. Jerry was wiped out and oversocialized after the week, but I was undersocialized, so I went off to Broomfield to hang out with Floyds et al (and see Marty, who's in town for several weeks, yay!) and watch fireworks. We got rained out; the fireworks were due to start shortly but the clouds were looking very threatening and there was a LOT of lightning, so we all decided that maybe it would be better to get indoors. I pulled over and watched fireworks from my car on the drive home.

I did a bunch of errands today, and I found a pair of lounging shorts at Old Navy for $1.87 and eleven volumes of Blade of the Immortal at ARC for $2.50 each. Since the cover prices are $15-20, that felt like a pretty significant score. Also a third white shirt to ice-dye sometime.

( Socialization catch-up )

( YIMBY ) So I think I've discovered a corollary to Hanlon's Razor: never ascribe to a philosophical/political stance that which is sufficiently explained by somebody wanting you to not bother them.