Category: health

Apple stuff, vaccine stuff, and more

I’ve got a few things to blog about, and I think I’m just going to write a hodge-podge post with a random selection of subjects. I guess that’s a reasonable thing to do on a cold and dreary Saturday morning.

Apple stuff

I noticed in my “On This Day” widget that I bought my current iPad two years ago today, and my first Apple Watch five years ago today. The iPad is still in pretty good shape, though the battery life isn’t what it used to be. Next week’s Apple event will probably include an announcement about new iPads, but I think I’ll stick with my current one for a while longer. I primarily use it to read comics and browse Twitter and Facebook, and it’s fine for all that.

As for the Apple Watch, I’m quite surprised to realize that I’ve been wearing one for five years now. I’ve got to say, Apple really got it right with the Watch. I was leery about a few things when I first bought one, but it’s been great. I got used to the Sport band pretty quickly, and haven’t ever bothered to try a different style. I don’t want to give the Watch all the credit for the fact that I’ve kept my weight down and my fitness level up over the last five years, but honestly it probably deserves a lot of credit. It’s dumb, but closing my rings does motivate me to get out and exercise more often than I would otherwise.

Vaccine stuff

I’ll finally be eligible to get the COVID vaccine, starting Monday. I’m registered with the state of NJ, so we’ll see if anything comes of that. I’m also getting myself ready to try other avenues, including RWJ, CVS, and Walgreens. This (subscriber-only) NJ.com article has a good round-up of vaccine resources. The suspension of the J&J vaccine and the opening up of eligibility on Monday may mean that I won’t have much of a chance of getting vaccinated any time soon, but I’ll give it the old college try, and maybe I’ll get lucky. In general, availability seems to be better in south Jersey than around here, but I hope I can find an option that’s relatively local. I really don’t want to have to drive down to Atlantic City.

Apparently, more than a third of adults in NJ are now fully vaccinated, and more than half have received at least one dose. So that’s good news. Meanwhile, the global death toll has passed three million. So we still need to take this thing seriously.

Reading, Watching, Listening

I dropped my cable subscription down to Broadcast Basic this week, and I’m doing fine with that so far. I miss TCM a bit, but I still have eight or nine TCM movies on my TiVo that I haven’t watched yet, so that’s no big deal. And I miss The Daily Show, but I can always watch bits of that on YouTube.

I’ve had Apple One for about a week now, but I haven’t watched anything on Apple TV+ or played any Apple Arcade games yet. I did get all my photos up to iCloud though, and did a bunch of organizing there.

My two favorite TV shows right now are probably Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney+ and Invincible on Amazon. Both, coincidentally, have related podcasts from Comic Book Club. There’s a whole mini-industry going right now around podcasts and web site articles recapping and discussing various nerdy TV shows. Sometimes, I think there’s a bit too much of that. Even the NY Times does recap articles now. But, hey, it doesn’t do any harm, and sometimes the discussion is interesting and fun. I’ve been watching/listening to the Comic Book Club guys on and off for more than ten years, so they seem kind of like old friends. (You can read a bit about their history here.) I never made it to any of their live shows in NYC, and now I kind of regret that, since they never be able to start those back up again.

The Invincible show has gotten me interested in the Invincible comic book again. I bought and read the first four volumes some years ago. I enjoyed them, but didn’t get around to buying any more, until 2016, when I bought volumes 5-13 from Comixology during a sale. There are 25 volumes, so I need to pick up 14-25 to get the whole run. There’s another sale going on at Comixology, so I can get them for half-price right now, but that’s still enough money that it’s not an easy impulse buy for me. I haven’t actually read those volumes that I bought back in 2016 yet either, so I don’t think I need to be in a hurry to complete the set. But, of course, the collector’s mentality has kicked in, so now I’m probably just going to go ahead and get them.

I’m somewhat tempted to buy physical copies rather than digital, but I know that’s a bad idea. I have way too many books in my apartment now, and I haven’t been able to get rid of them via library sales like I used to, since my local library system suspended their book sales when the virus hit. As I mentioned recently, I’ve stopped ordering comics from Westfield, so hopefully I can start putting a dent in my backlog of physical books (both comic and otherwise) and then find something useful to do with the ones I’ve read. Maybe the library can start up their book sales again over the summer. Maybe they can do them outdoors in the parking lot or something like that. That would be cool.

Comic-Con Special Edition and thinking ahead

As I mentioned yesterday, The SDCC folks are going to try to put on an in-person con in November. There’s been a lot of reaction to that online. Mark Evanier has a reasonable blog post about it. Rich Johnston has gone all-in and booked a flight to San Diego (from London) and an Airbnb already. I wish I was optimistic enough to do that. But we’re really not doing great with the pandemic here in New Jersey right now. In the US, overall, we’re looking at a fourth wave, and the director of the CDC is using phrases like “impending doom.” So I guess I’m not going to make any plans that involve traveling more than, say, 50 miles from home this year.

COVID-19 Death Toll Reaches 500,000

I watched the tail end of Biden’s White House ceremony tonight honoring the victims of COVID-19. The death count here in the US is now just short of 500,000. Or maybe it’s a little over 500,000 now. Either way, it’s horrific.

Here in NJ, we’re almost at 23,000 dead. Meanwhile, though, we’ve got more than 500,000 people fully vaccinated in NJ, with more than a million having received a first dose. (There are about 9 million people living in NJ though, so we still have quite a way to go. It’s a good start though.)

We’re about a year into the pandemic now. Maeve Higgins wrote an essay for The Guardian looking back on the last year, and thinking about what she misses from her pre-pandemic life. I miss a lot of those little things too.

I don’t have anything insightful to say about any of this, really, but I thought I’d at least mention it here on the blog. It doesn’t seem right to just ignore it.

meditation apps

A couple of weeks back, I mentioned that I might want to write a blog post comparing Insight Timer and Calm. I was primarily using Insight Timer (the free version) for meditation last year, but I switched to Calm this year, since I got a free one-year premium subscription, via an AmEx promotion.

In general, I’ve been sticking with my meditation practice this year, though I’ve only been doing ten minutes a day, five days a week. That’s pretty similar to what I was doing last year, though I wasn’t always that consistent. I’d skip days if I got too busy at work, or if I just wasn’t in the mood.

With Insight Timer, I was mostly just using the timer function. I did occasionally try a guided meditation. Insight Timer has a ton of guided meditations available (over 50,000), most of which are available even for non-paying users. And I tried a few of their live events too (which are also available to everyone). I found a few instructors I liked, including Hugh Byrne and Joseph Goldstein. Overall, I didn’t really have any reason to switch away from Insight Timer. I was just curious about Calm.

With Calm, I’ve generally been doing the “Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt” meditations. Levitt is their “Head of Mindfulness” and the Daily Calm is a daily ten-minute guided meditation. I’m not sure if they’re actively creating new ones every day, or if they have a set of them that they cycle through. Either way, I haven’t heard the same one twice since I started. They’re pretty straightforward and not too “woo-woo” (if you know what I mean). They generally just concentrate on breathing and reinforcing the basics of meditation and mindfulness.

They also have a new series called The Daily Trip with Jeff Warren that started up about a month ago. I listened to one of those, out of curiosity, but I’ve been sticking with the Levitt ones. At some point, if I get a little more ambitious, I might try doing the Levitt ones during the day and the Warren ones in the evening, and see how that works out.

Calm also has a library of miscellaneous guided meditations, though I don’t think they have nearly as many as Insight Timer. I think that their selection is more “curated”, whereas Insight Timer lets just about anybody sign up as an instructor and start posting meditations.

When I started using Calm, I was kind of surprised to find that they didn’t have a simple timer, like Insight Timer does. I did eventually find one, though it’s buried in their app (under the “less guidance” category) and isn’t as functional as the Insight Timer one.

Both Calm and Insight Timer have been doing celebrity meditations, which I’m not terribly interested in. Calm has LeBron James. Insight Timer has Gisele Bündchen. Personally, I’d rather have a trained meditation teacher rather than a basketball player or a supermodel, but that’s just me.

Both platforms also have music. I don’t really see much value in this, and I can get plenty of ambient music elsewhere, but it’s kind of interesting to see what they’re doing. Insight Timer has a fairly odd selection of stuff from artists you probably haven’t heard of. Some of it is pretty good though. Calm has some pretty well-known artists in their music library, including Moby, deadmau5, and Sigur Rós. Though, again, I don’t know why you’d want to listen to this stuff in your meditation app rather than your music app.

And both apps also have gotten into the sleep stories trend (and other sleep-related audio). Calm has stories narrated by Stephen Fry, Matthew McConaughey, and Keith Urban. Insight Timer has an eclectic collection of sleep stories, talks, and music, but no big celebrity sleep content, as far as I can tell. (The sleep tracking app I use, Sleep Cycle, also has some sleep stories, though I haven’t tried them.) There’s an interesting article in the NY Times, from 2019, about Calm and their sleep-related content here. I haven’t really tried out the sleep stuff at all. Maybe I should give it a shot, one of these days.

In general, I’d say that, if you’re new to meditation, and don’t mind paying for Calm (or can get it for free like I did), it’s not a bad deal. I don’t place much value on the celebrity content, but the regular daily meditation content is pretty good. Since I’d already been meditating for a few years (on and off) when I started with Calm, I didn’t bother checking out their beginner content, but it’s probably pretty good. If you’d rather go with a free app, Insight Timer has some good content for beginners, including their Learn How To Meditate In Seven Days course, which is free. They also have a free 40-day course called Mindfulness Daily At Work, which I did last year, and it’s really good. (Their other courses generally require a premium subscription.)

If you’re an experienced meditator, and you just need a timer, then the free version of Insight Timer should be fine for you. If you’re looking for a wide range of guided meditations, then, again, Insight Timer is great (though you may need to wade through some mediocre ones to find the good ones). If you’re experienced, but looking for some professional, high-quality, guided meditations, and you don’t mind paying for a subscription, then Calm is a good choice. Likewise, if you’re experienced and don’t mind paying for a subscription, but you’re looking for a good selection of courses, then the premium version of Insight Timer might be best for you. (Hope that’s not too confusing.)

For myself, I’m going to stick with Calm this year, for the most part. I may go back to Insight Timer occasionally if I just want to do a simple timed meditation, or if I want to try out one of their live events. And I keep trying to talk myself into meditating seven days a week instead of just on weekdays. But I keep getting distracted with other stuff on the weekend.

Another Sunday Morning

This post will probably be a lot like last week’s Sunday Morning post. (With a few differences, maybe.) Unlike last week, I did actually sleep kinda OK last night. A friend dropped by yesterday, and we split a pizza, so I was a little worried that might make it hard to sleep (on top of all the other things that make it hard to sleep right now). So I took Tums, ibuprofen, and melatonin before bed. And I took a shower before bed too, to try to ease some muscle pain and clear out my sinuses a bit. So all that added up to me being able to (kinda) sleep through the night. I didn’t get out of bed until 7:30 though. I’m not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. I seem to be making it through the day without too much trouble so far. It’s 11:30 now, and I’ve managed to go out for a 10-minute walk and a 15-minute ride on my exercise bike. Neither of which sounds really impressive, but it’s really cold out, so it wasn’t easy to talk myself into going outside at all. And, these days, I have trouble making it past 10 minutes on the exercise bike, so 15 minutes is pretty good for me.

I just read a year-old Washington Post article about how exercise reduces anxiety and makes you feel more connected. A lot of the benefit of exercise applies whether you’re exercising alone or in a group. But, apparently, there’s even more benefit to group exercise. The article was written before the pandemic really took hold, but it’s interesting to think about how the lack of group exercise might be affecting people, and whether things like Apple’s Fitness+ or Peloton actually come close enough to simulating a real in-person group experience to actually matter. Peloton (of course) thinks it does, according to this blog post. I wonder if mounting my iPhone to my old exercise bike and watching an Apple Fitness+ video while I’m biking would help or if it would just annoy me. I tend to think it would annoy me, but who knows. (Today, I was listening to an old podcast interview with Weird Al while I did my exercise. I’m not sure a Fitness+ video could really top Weird Al. Come to think of it, can we convince Weird Al to record some fitness videos? That would be awesome.)

I’ve also come across a few references recently to a new book titled Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding. I’m probably not going to read that book, but I’ve bookmarked a couple of videos and podcasts featuring the author, and I’ll probably get around to watching/listening to one or more of them at some point.

One more Peloton-related link: I wonder if Joe Biden’s security folks have figured out if can use his Peloton bike without compromising national security yet?

Well, I started this blog post with the idea of writing about my current meditation habit, and how I’ve switched from Insight Timer to Calm, but now it’s lunchtime, so maybe that’ll have to wait until the next post.

Monday links and pandemic thoughts

I often spend a few minutes spelunking through the links in my “On This Day” sidebar, if I happen to pull up my home page for some reason. I know that’s not really a productive use of my time, usually, but sometimes I find some fun stuff. Today’s links included a reference to a 2016 NY Times article titled How Social Isolation Is Killing Us. However isolated I was feeling back then, it’s nothing compared to how I’m feeling after ten months of working from home, not traveling outside of NJ, and spending nearly all of my time alone in my apartment.

I’d like to think things are looking up now, but looking at some more recent links:

  • Two Masks Are the New Masks – I think I’m still fine with just one mask, but if I ever actually have to take a train to NYC or something like that, maybe I’ll try doubling up. (And maybe I should look into those KF94 masks they mentioned in the article. I already have a few KN95s. Can’t hurt to have a few different options, I guess…)
  • How to Take a Walk – This is kind of silly, but I get it.
  • It’s 30 Degrees. Shall We Have Brunch Outdoors? – There really isn’t anyplace here in Somerville that’s still doing outdoor dining. I should have taken more advantage of that, back when the weather was nicer. Of course, back then, every place that was doing outdoor dining was too crowded.

I’m looking at the calendar now, and thinking that, at the end of this week, I’ll at least be able to say “I made it through January!” My hope is that things start getting better in February. I’m hoping that vaccine distribution will start ramping up, the weather will start getting nicer, the days will get longer, and Tom Brady will lose another Super Bowl. Then we can move on to March, which is when things will really start getting better. (I hope.)

New Year’s Day 2021

I’ve been writing big New Year’s Day posts on this blog every year for the last several years. I might as well do one this year too. Obviously, last year was a doozy, and a lot of stuff has changed, and a lot is still in flux. I’m not even sure where to start. So I’ll start with links to the last few New Year’s posts:

And I guess I’ll follow a format not too different from previous years.

Health, Weight, and Sleep

My weight has been pretty steady at around 135 pounds this year. It dipped a bit in spring & summer, getting down to 130 briefly, but has rebounded back to 135. I dropped some weight at the beginning of the pandemic, probably because I wasn’t eating any take-out food. I’m still logging all of my meals with Lose It, which I’ve been using since 2013.

I’m also still using Sleep Cycle as an alarm clock and to log my sleep. I’ve been having some weird dreams this year, but apparently so has everyone else. My sleep quality has been mixed, I’d say. Some nights I’m fine, and some nights I’m not.

I was pretty good about exercise through the spring and summer. I did a lot of walking. I’ve cut back on the walks now, since it’s been getting colder. If I don’t go out for a morning walk now, I try to do ten minutes on my exercise bike instead. (I’m glad I didn’t get rid of that thing.) I need to be careful about not letting up too much through the rest of the winter.

On the meditation front, I’ve certainly done more meditation this year than I’d usually do. One of the reasons for that is that I’ve been working from home since March, so it’s easy to take a ten minute midday meditation break. Back when I was working in a cubicle, I was too self-conscious to meditate at work. (And, really, the office environment is too noisy for meditation anyway.) I was using Insight Timer for most of this year, but I switched to Calm in December, since I had a deal to get a free year of Calm Premium. I have enough opinions on meditation apps right now that I should probably hold them for another post. But overall, I’d say that meditation helped me get through this crazy year.

I did finally get my hearing checked this year, in March, just before the pandemic lockdown really kicked in. The results were pretty much what I expected: I’ve lost a lot of hearing in my left ear. My right ear is fine. The doctor said that I’m not really at the stage where a hearing aid would make sense. My hearing issues haven’t really much mattered this year, though. If I’m talking to anybody at work, it’s on my computer, and I can just turn up the volume as much as I need. And I’m never in a crowded restaurant with a lot of background noise, so that’s not a problem either.

Work and Professional Development

I’m feeling very lucky to have had a good, steady, job this year, and to be able to work from home. My performance review for 2020 was very good. I didn’t really expect a raise this year, given the general state of the economy, but I got one. So that’s all good. There are going to be a lot of challenges ahead, going into 2021. Again, that’s probably a whole blog post of its own though.

On the professional development front, one nice thing to come out of 2020 was a lot of free virtual conferences. I didn’t participate in as many of those as I would have liked, but I did manage to watch some content from Microsoft Build and Microsoft Ignite. Most of my efforts at learning new stuff this year were centered around SharePoint Framework (SPFx) and Microsoft’s Power Platform stuff. I wasn’t really successful in getting any projects done with any of this new stuff in 2020 though. I have a couple of big projects at work that will really need to get done in 2021. I’m still not even sure if I’ll be using SPFx or Power Platform or something else though.

Looking at last year’s post, I see I was talking about trying to learn maybe Rust or Swift in 2020. I definitely didn’t do that. The one new general thing I tried to learn in 2020 was React. And that was mostly because I needed to learn it for SPFx.

Finance

I’m in pretty good shape, financially. Certainly better than most people, given the state of things. I’ve actually seen my checking account balance grow this year, presumably because I didn’t spend any money on travel, or on day trips to NYC, or even on a lot of little things like restaurant meals and gas for my car and Starbucks coffee. I expect 2021 will be similar. Given how little interest I make on my checking account, I really need to shunt some money over into my Merrill account and buy some more shares in an S&P 500 fund. The stock market (after a brief crash back in March) has done surprisingly well this year. And I probably need to sit down with a financial advisor at some point in 2021 and move some money around. There’s some stuff I want to do to simplify my finances a bit, but I can’t do it without figuring out the tax implications.

I opened two new credit card accounts this year, which is pretty unusual for me. I traded in the AmEx Green card I’d had since college for an AmEx EveryDay card. That was done mostly because the fee on the Green card had gone up to $150, so I wanted to replace it with a fee-free card. And I finally gave in and got an Apple Card. I’ve only used the Apple Card to buy my new Apple Watch, in November. I don’t really anticipate using it for anything other than Apple Store purchases.

I’ve also been thinking about getting an Amazon Prime credit card. I spent nearly $2000 at Amazon this year, so the 5% back could be as much as $100 for me. There’s really no reason for me not to get it, other than not wanting to add yet another card to my wallet.

Subscriptions

I’m always obsessing over subscriptions. The pandemic has caused me to pull the trigger on a few subscriptions that I’ve been holding out on for years. Partially because I have some extra money to spend (as noted above), and partially because I have some extra time to kill at home. So I might as well spend some money and time on nice stuff that’ll distract me from the horrible state of the world right now.

I finally subscribed to Apple Music. I signed up for a six-month free trial in October, so I don’t need to start paying for it until April. But I will likely keep it going when that happens. After years of trying to resist switching from CDs & MP3s to a subscription service, I’ve finally given in and embraced the new way of doing things.

I’ve also signed up for Disney+ and Hulu. I wanted Disney+ for The Mandalorian and Soul. And Hulu had a Black Friday deal where you could get the ad-supported tier for $2/month for a year, so that seemed worthwhile. I’m still resisting HBO Max, but I might give in on that one too eventually. If Wonder Woman 1984 had gotten better reviews, I’d probably have done it by now.

I might also sign up for the Apple One subscription bundle at some point in 2021. I don’t really need Apple TV+ or Apple Arcade, but if the pandemic keeps going, I’ll probably give in on that.

Books and Comics

According to Goodreads, I read 86 books in 2020. I’d set a goal of 100 books, and I didn’t reach it, but I’m OK with that. Most of those were comics, but (again) I’m fine with that.

For my Great American Read group, I didn’t really get through much, but I did finish Gone With The Wind in March, so that was a big one. I also read White Teeth, Invisible Man, and The Outsiders from the TGAR list. I’m still an admin in that group, and we’re still posting monthly group reads, but I’m not sure why I’m still bothering with that. The other admin is doing about half the work, so that’s good. I feel like we’re going to have to wind that group down in 2021, but I’m not in a hurry to do so.

My favorite comics of the year were probably the Resident Alien collections that I read back in May. And the Locke & Key series was also surprisingly good.

I’m still ordering a few titles from Westfield every month, but I think I’m going to wind that down over the next few months. I haven’t gotten on board with DC’s Future State thing, and I’m not reading any Marvel books. So that just leaves a few books from smaller publishers, and it’s probably best if I just switch to digital and/or trades for those. Also, my Comixology backlog is nearly 200 books (mostly collections, not single issues), so just working through that could take me a few years.

Movies

As I mentioned recently, I watched a lot of movies in 2020. Looking at Letterboxd, I see that I watched a total of 73. Probably my favorite film of the year (that actually came out in 2020) was Soul. My second favorite would have been Onward, so the year for me was bookended with solid Pixar films. I did a rewatch of all four Avengers films early in the year, and a rewatch of all the Daniel Craig Bond films just recently. Those were both fun distractions. I also tried to watch a bunch of Kurosawa films, but I only got through four. For 2021, I want to watch some more Kurosawa, and maybe rewatch a bunch of Miyazaki films. (I bought several of them on Blu-ray earlier this year, and haven’t watched any of those discs yet.)

Summary

I am kind of proud of myself for getting through 2020 in one piece, not too much worse for wear. I managed to avoid putting on weight, picking up a drinking habit, getting COVID, and losing my job. I think my mental health is reasonably OK, all things considered. I’m trying not to stress about things I didn’t do. I’d like to have spent more time on “enriching” activities and less on pure distraction, but I’m mostly OK with having watched 73 movies and lots of TV, and having read a lot more comics this year than novels or non-fiction books.

I’m expecting the first couple of months of 2021 to be pretty rough. I think the vaccine rollout will be slow. I don’t expect a change in the status quo on mask wearing and social distancing and working from home. Winter will probably still be in full force through to early March, so we’re not going to be able to do much outdoors. I think the current surge of COVID cases will continue through February, and not start to let up until March. I don’t see us all being able to return to anything like normality until very late in 2021, if at all. But, hopefully, by summer, we’ll have enough folks vaccinated and the political situation will have stabilized enough that we’ll start on the road to “normal.”

I’m thinking a lot about short-term strategies for getting through winter. Things like getting my groceries delivered, watching a lot more “comfort” TV, reading a lot of comics, working out on the exercise bike, meditating, blogging, journaling, whatever helps. I’m not making any resolutions for 2021. I’m going to take it day by day, and I think that’s what we’re all going to have to do.

 

the rest of the year

I still seem to be dealing with a lingering cold that I picked up last weekend. So this weekend has been pretty quiet. I finished reading The Outsiders, finished watching Young Wallander, and started watching Giri/Haji. I did my laundry yesterday, but that was it for productive work, really. I had my groceries delivered from Whole Foods, so I didn’t even get out to the grocery store. And I’ve mostly been living off leftovers from some takeout barbecue I got on Friday night.

Last week, I attended a remote workshop for Microsoft’s CSP program, and this week, I’m supposed to be attending a week-long class on Microsoft’s Power Platform. Last week’s workshop took up only about 3 hours each day, but this week’s class is supposed to run from 9:30 to 3:30 each day, so that’s going to take up most of the day. Normally, this would be an in-person class, but of course now it’s going to be delivered remotely. The CSP workshop was done over Teams and went pretty smoothly, but it wasn’t very interactive. I’m wondering about how the Power Platform class will go. I assume it’ll have to be more interactive than the CSP thing was. And I think it’s being done over Zoom, rather than Teams. For various reasons, I’m going to need to do the class directly on my work laptop, using only the laptop screen and keyboard. So it might get a little tough to follow along with the instructor while also working through examples on my own in a separate window. I wish I could get a multi-monitor setup going for that, but there’s no practical way to do that right now. So, anyway, it’s going to be an interesting week, trying to get through the class while also keeping up with anything else that comes up at work. (And, again, I’m very grateful to have a job right now, never mind a job that’s letting me work remotely, and paying for me to attend workshops and classes and whatnot. I’m very lucky.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the rest of the year is going to go. Thinking back to the summer, I guess I was vaguely aware that we might be going through a second wave at the end of the year, but it’s looking now like it’s going to be a doozy. I’ve been spending maybe too much time doomscrolling on Twitter, but there are a lot of reasonable people talking about how bad it can get if people aren’t careful around Thanksgiving and Christmas. So I’m trying to get into the proper lockdown mindset.

Since I’ve spent so little money this year on travel and other stuff like that, and since I’m going to be stuck inside a lot, I’m thinking that maybe I should pop for Disney+. It’s only $7 a month, and I keep hearing good things about The Mandalorian. Plus, the next Pixar film, Soul, is going straight to Disney+. (And it won’t cost $30 extra, like Mulan did, which is nice.) Disney+ has been around for just about a year now, and seems to be doing really well. So I guess I should give in and sign up. Eventually, I might even talk myself into canceling cable TV. But maybe I’ll keep that going until the end of the year, since (again) I’m going to be spending a lot of time indoors and I have enough disposable income to pay for both cable TV and streaming right now.

The second wave, and other bad news

We’re definitely seeing a big second wave of coronavirus cases here in NJ. I’m glad I’m still able to work from home, and I guess I’ll be doing that through to the end of the year, at least.

Meanwhile, my local House rep, Tom Malinowski, who seemed to have won reelection, has seen his lead shrink as more votes are counted. (No shenanigans here; it just seems like more Democrats voted early and more Republicans voted late.) I hope he hangs on to his lead; he seems like a good guy. (While his opponent seems like kind of a jerk, to be honest.)

And also meanwhile, there has been another wave of layoffs at DC Comics. I think I’m actually going to give up on buying new DC books in 2021. I opted out of ordering any of the Future State books on this month’s Westfield order form, so I only wound up ordering 3 books total (one DC and two Dark Horse). And that might be my last Westfield order, unless I can talk myself into adding some more books from smaller publishers, like Dark Horse and Image. It’s not worth paying the shipping charges for just 3 or 4 books a month. And I’m far enough behind in reading that I should probably take a break anyway. I’m a little worried about the health of the market for regular old monthly comic books at this point. (But I need to keep reminding myself that it’s not my job to prop it up by buying a bunch of books that I don’t have time to read or room to store.) I might sign up for Comixology Unlimited at some point next year, but I have enough books piled up to keep me busy for quite some time, even without that, so I should probably hold off until I’ve put a dent in the backlog.

So that’s my bad news overview for the day, I guess. Obviously, the coronavirus stuff is the most important of these three items. I’ve been trying to get my head straight and prepare myself for the rest of the year, assuming I’ll just be working from home, and celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year alone in my apartment. (I might have been doing that anyway this year, even without the pandemic, but it would have been nice to have some options.) I’m realizing now that 2020 is going to be a full year without an in-person comic con, a trip to the Met, or MoMA, or… anywhere, really. I have a week’s vacation scheduled for early in December, and I guess I’ll just be sitting around in my apartment for the week, catching up on my reading. That’s not such a bad thing, I guess. I’ve got a job, and an apartment, and my health isn’t too bad, and that’s more than a lot of folks can say.

sick again

So in yesterday’s post, where I was talking about all the stuff I did on Saturday, I said “I’m hoping that doesn’t result in me getting another cold, or even worse.” Well… I started feeling like I was getting a sore throat last night, and this morning I had all my usual cold symptoms: sore throat, headache, and low energy. This is, I guess, the third cold I’ve had so far this season. It seems like any time I leave my bubble for any activities that involve moderate human contact, I get sick. I got sick pretty frequently before the pandemic, but I was kind of hoping that all of the mask wearing and social distancing would keep me healthier this year. I guess it did, up to a point, but now, it seems like I’m getting sick every other week. Oh well.

Back on the subject of my new Apple Watch: I’m fairly disappointed with the handwashing feature. I had it enabled over the weekend, but I’ve turned it off now. It had a tendency to get activated every time I was washing dishes in my kitchen, but only sporadically when I was actually washing my hands in the bathroom. I think that might be due to the noise from my bathroom fan. It’s pretty noisy, and I can’t turn it off without also turning off the light. And I guess there’s no easy way for the watch to distinguish between washing out a coffee mug and washing my hands. (I guess I could also commit to always washing my coffee cup for at least 20 seconds.) Other than that, it’s a great watch and I like it a lot.

I have a few random articles bookmarked that I kind of wanted to link to and blog about, but I’m too tired now to do that. I’m hoping I can get through this cold without taking yet another day off from work, but I will if I have to. I still have a few days to burn before the end of the year.