Category: NJ

Still staying at home

From Where Americans are still staying at home the most, in the Washington Post:

In New Jersey, second only to New York in covid-19 deaths, people are spending 96 percent of their time at home, just 1.7 percent less than at the peak. That is both the highest stay-home percentage and the smallest change of any state. Gov. Phil Murphy (D) reopened state parks and golf courses on May 2, but his stay-at-home order is still in effect.

I’ve been going out a bit more over the last week or two, but not by much, and I’m wearing a mask now almost every time I go out. (I’m still skipping the mask on my early morning walks, since I don’t generally see more than one or two people that early, and I can easily keep my distance from them.) Generally, I’m alone in my apartment for 23 to 23.5 hours each day.

ready for May

I’ve been blogging about once a week through this pandemic. But, for some reason, I’m going for three days in a row this weekend (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday). I’m not sure why. Probably because it’s the end of one month and the beginning of a new one, so I’m taking stock and thinking about stuff. The Washington Post published a long overview article about April yesterday, and it’s a doozy.

I did a couple of fun things yesterday evening, including watching most of Mark Evanier’s Cartoon Voices panel live, and all of a live webcast of Neil Gaiman speaking with N. K. Jemisin. So I got a little bit of the feel of being at a good comic con. And, for some reason, watching these things live always feels a little more exciting than watching the recording later.

I’m feeling a little better this morning than I did yesterday. I didn’t sleep too well last night, but it was better than the previous night. And since I have nothing at all on my to-do list for today, I can just take it easy. I went out for a half-hour long walk this morning, and that was quite nice. Not too many other people were out. The rain had stopped, the sun was shining, and the birds were chirping.

After my walk this morning, I uploaded some more photos to Flickr, updated my March/April album, and created a new May album. I’m not sure how long I’ll keep taking photos and uploading them, but, for now, it’s a nice little thing to do.

It’s supposed to get up to 78º later today, so that might be a problem. I don’t really want to close the windows and turn on the air conditioning, but I might have to. Otherwise, my allergies will really kick in and I won’t be able to sleep again tonight.

I’m again looking at the “On This Day” sidebar on my blog, and I see that five years ago today, I went into NYC, and visited the Whitney and the High Line. This would have been a great weekend to do something like that.

I’ve been meaning to post a bit about the music I’ve been listening to lately, but haven’t gotten around to including that in any of my other recent posts. I’ve been listening mostly to slow, quiet, stuff. Yesterday, I pulled up Max Richter’s Sleep to help me relax and take a little nap. (I bought a copy of that back in 2018, and it’s come in handy on several occasions.)

And I just bought a copy of Ludovico Einaudi’s Seven Days Walking, which is a seven-part work, coming in at about six hours total. It’s quite simple and relaxing, and works well as background music. I didn’t know much about Einaudi, but I’ve looked into him a bit, and he’s apparently quite popular, as classical composers/musicians go. He’s “the most-streamed classical artist of all time,” according to this article. But, apparently, he’s somewhat looked down upon by serious critics, if this review in The Guardian is any indication. Or this one, which compares his music to Thomas Kinkade’s painting. (Ouch.) I’m fine with that, though. I’m enjoying his music, and it’s helping to keep me sane.

And for a couple of shorter works: I recently bought Neroli (Thinking Music Part IV), by Brian Eno and the ZeroZeroZero soundtrack by Mogwai. I’ve also been thinking about picking up some stuff by The Necks, after listening to a bit of their album Drive By and reading some stuff about them, including this old article from the Times.

So, as you can see, it’s mostly been quiet, slow, instrumental music. I’ve also been listening to a bit of WQXR on weekday mornings. That gets me started with some shorter classical pieces, some nice chat from their morning host, Jeff Spurgeon, and a little bit of news (but not too much).

It’s nearly 11 AM now, so I should really wrap this up. I still don’t have much of a plan for today, but that’s fine. I think I’ll go out for another walk before it gets too hot out, then have lunch and read some comics.

still here, still home.

My Day One journal has been showing me some interesting stuff via the “On This Day” feature recently. I’ve also been poking around my blog, via the “On This Day” plugin. Here are some examples:

  • One year ago today, I was on my way to Redmond for a Microsoft event. (I mentioned it here when I got back.)
  • Four years ago today, I went into NYC and went to the Met and MoMA. (I just checked, and I’m pretty sure I haven’t been to the Met or MoMA since October 2019.)
  • In 2005, on this day, I went to a Dreamworks Animation presentation in NYC with a friend.
  • Three years ago on 4/29, I went to the Star Trek Original Series Set Tour in Ticonderoga with a couple of friends. (We’ve talked about going back again this year, but hadn’t made any plans.)
  • One year ago on 4/27, I went to the Somerset Patriots season opener. (The Patriots are doing an opening day at home thing today. It’s a nice effort, but there’s not really much point to it.)

The general theme here being, of course, that late April and early May are usually a good time to get out of town and do some fun stuff. Not this year though!

We just got the news at work today that we’ll be working from home through to at least June 1. And, while Governor Murphy is reopening state parks this weekend, most of the “stay at home” restrictions will likely remain in place through most (or all) of May. We’re making some progress in NJ, it seems, but there’s still a long way to go. And I think it’s going to be a very long time before I want to go into Manhattan and do any of the things that I used to enjoy doing in NYC, like visiting museums, seeing movies, and all that stuff.

I’m trying to enjoy some of the “at home” stuff that’s being done lately, but I haven’t had time for too much of it.  I did watch the Space Songs: Through the Distance event that the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum did last night, and that was quite good.

And I want to watch the Cartoon Voices panel that Mark Evanier is going to do on YouTube tomorrow. I missed the Sergio Aragones thing he did earlier this week, but I will probably watch the recording of that later. (I would have liked to have gone to WonderCon this year. And San Diego, though that was already ruled out for me.)

The Met and MoMA have both been posting a lot of interesting online resources, but I haven’t had the time to look at any of them, really. I should maybe take some time for that this weekend too.

Anyway, I guess I’ve survived working from home and spending approximately 98% of my time alone in my apartment through most of March and the whole month of April, so there’s no reason why I can’t make it through May too.

Easter Sunday

Well, today is apparently Easter Sunday. I haven’t really celebrated Easter in a traditional way in several years, so being at home alone on Easter isn’t that weird for me. Still, I usually try to get out and do something on Easter. Last year, I went out for a nice walk and uploaded some photos to Flickr. I could of course go out for a walk today, and might do that a bit later, but I’m thinking about just staying in all day. I had to go out a few times yesterday, and it was exhausting.

I have a bunch of stuff that I want to blog about today, and I’m not sure how to organize it all, so this post may be somewhat scattershot. We’re about a month into this whole social distancing thing, and there’s a lot on my mind.

Masks

I guess I’m going to start with masks. Here in the US, the initial advice to everyone was that wearing masks in public was unnecessary. This gradually evolved into the situation we have today, where mask-wearing in public, here in NJ, is now required in most public places. It was required in supermarkets starting last week, and has now been expanded to include situations like picking up take-out food. If you’re interesting in the science behind mask-wearing, Ars Technica has a good article on that. And the Pinboard guy has been pushing for public mask-wearing in the US for a while, and has a good blog post on the subject.

Acquiring masks here in NJ hasn’t been easy though. I haven’t seen them for sale anywhere, though of course I’ve only been to ShopRite and Walgreens in the past month. I watched a video showing how to make a mask with a bandana and two hair ties, and managed to make myself one that way. (I had a spare bandana, but I had to buy hair ties.) That will do in a pinch, but it’s not great. I also went online and ordered masks from a few different sources. Only one of those orders has shown up so far. It was an order of two apparently homemade cloth masks, via eBay, which shipped from Texas. They’re reasonably well-made and fit me OK. I don’t know if they’re going to last through too many washes, as the straps don’t seem too sturdy. But hopefully, they’ll be good enough for now. I also ordered a five-pack from Buck Mason, which should be shipping at the end of April or early May. I’m hoping those will be good quality and will last me a while. The options for mail-order face masks right now seem to be: (1) eBay, (2) Etsy, and (3) various mail-order clothing retailers that have added cloth masks to their stores, but aren’t able to keep up with demand. I found out about the Buck Mason masks from a GQ article. That article lists a bunch of other similar sources. (I found a fancy/ridiculous $185 face mask by following a link in that article. And, no, I’m not buying that one.)

My trip to ShopRite yesterday was my first adventure in public mask-wearing. It didn’t go too bad, but I found that my glasses were constantly fogging up. I’ve read articles about how you can prevent that (Kotaku, Lifehacker), but I’m not too optimistic about the methods they’re suggesting. I guess I’ll stick a tissue under the top of my mask the next time I go out and see how that works.

Comics

I have a few follow-ups to last week’s post on the state of the comics industry, and other comics-related stuff. First, here’s an article from the NY Times on the situation. It’s actually a pretty good summary of the situation. It used to be that mainstream articles about the comics industry routinely got stuff wrong, over-simplified things, and/or indulged in overused cliches (usually related to the 1960’s Batman TV show). But they’ve gotten a lot better in recent years.

I was going to link to some other stores about the current state of the comics industry here, but there’s probably not much point. There’s a lot of speculation, but nothing much solid. I will say that now is probably a good time to support some indie comics and charity fundraising bundles. I recently bought a Firelight Isle Kickstarter and a COVID-19 Humble Bundle. There’s probably a bunch of other stuff out there I could be buying, if I had the time and inclination to go looking.

I realized just yesterday that this weekend would have been WonderCon. I went last year, and had been seriously thinking about going this year too. It’s funny to think that, as recently as February 29, it still seemed possible that WonderCon wouldn’t be canceled. There’s a fairly low-key WonderCon at Home thing going on this weekend instead. I poked around on the site and checked out the Twitter hashtag, and there’s some cute stuff there, but I haven’t been able to work up too much enthusiasm for anything there.

How I’m Doing

(…for lack of a better section header.) I’m very glad that I still have a job, and that I can work from home, and that work stuff seems to be pretty stable, so far. And I’m glad that I appear to be healthy, and have enough to eat, and have TV and comics and books and music with which to distract myself. I’m very worried about how bad things could get if this crisis drags on for too long though. I’m worried about myself, and my friends, and the world at large, I guess. I mentioned above that I kind of exhausted myself yesterday, just dealing with some everyday stuff: laundry, grocery shopping, and a trip to the bank. All the hand-washing, mask-wearing, awkward maneuvering around other people, keeping up with new rules, dealing with the spotty availability of everyday things. It all adds up to extra stress. I’ve been hoping that, at some point, things will settle down a bit, and I can get into a good rhythm. But there always seems to be something new that throws a wrench into the works. Yesterday, it was the new rules around mask-wearing, the fact that all of the self-checkout lanes at ShopRite were cash-only, the broken change machine in the laundry room… I found myself with a headache in the afternoon, and of course immediately started to worry about whether that was a symptom of COVID-19 or just a regular everyday headache. I’m thinking it’s just a regular headache, but it’s persisting a bit today. I’m going to try to take it easy today and just rest and relax and hope that tomorrow will be a nice “normal” work day. And I hope that anyone who made it this far down into my self-indulgent ramblings is having a good day, a good Easter (where applicable), and is happy and healthy.

 

today’s Coronavirus post

OK, I know I’ve been posting too much about this lately. I promise that this post will only be Coronavirus-adjacent, and not Coronavirus-centered.

First: one silver lining in this grey cloud is that I probably don’t have to worry about Real ID this year, since it’s now highly unlikely I’ll be traveling by plane any time soon. The Somerville DMV has been clogged lately, presumably due to demand for Real ID licenses, and they’ve been thinking about shutting it down on Saturdays, just because the parking situation has gotten so bad. (It seems to me like maybe having it open more often would be a better solution, but what do I know…) Also, NJMVC is granting automatic two-month extensions on all driver’s licenses expiring over the next few months, so if you’re worried about going to the DMV right now, you can put it off for a month or two, at least. (I’m only really posting about this to have an excuse to point out that someone either at Patch or NJMVC has created a dummy NJ license for “Renee Montoya,” living at “321 Gotham Avenue” in Trenton. As a big Renee Montoya fan [preferably, the original B:TAS version], I approve.)

Second item: I’ve been wondering what’s appropriate to do to help other people through this. Is it better to patronize small (or large) businesses right now, or should I just stay home? I got an eggplant parm from my local pizzeria last night, and it was pretty empty in there when I went to pick it up. I usually just buy two slices when I go in there, and I’ve definitely decided to put a moratorium on buying slices for now. Those things can sit out there on the counter for hours, and god only knows what gets on them. Right now, I’m trying to decide if I should go out and get a sub for lunch, or just stay in and make myself a sandwich. I like the guy who runs the local sub shop that I go to, and I don’t want him to suffer, but I also don’t know how clean he’s keeping things in there. I know that the cancellation of the St. Patrick’s parade is going to hurt some downtown bars and restaurants. And I see that they’re allowing free parking in the town lots for the next month, so maybe that’ll help.

And I worry about how much this thing is going to hurt independent musicians, artists, and cultural institutions. I’m not worried about the “big boys.” Apple and Disney will be fine. But I am a little worried about small-time musicians who make most of their money touring (since they get so little from streaming music), and maybe some independent comics creators who rely on convention sales to make some money and find new fans. So maybe I should pick up a couple of things from Bandcamp this weekend (maybe this, for instance), and maybe look into the #ECCCOnline thing (see here and here) and buy some comics.

Third item: I swear I’m not panic-buying anything, but I did pick up an eight-pack of bamboo toilet paper today, since it was the only kind of toilet paper they had left, and, OK, I guess maybe I panicked a little about the possibility that the whole “paper products situation” might not return to normal until after I’d exhausted the eight rolls I have in my pantry. So now I get to find out what bamboo toilet paper feels like.

one more Coronavirus post

OK, I should stop now, but here’s one more Coronavirus-related post. I took the day off from work today. I had a doctor’s appointment in the morning, and had originally planned on maybe doing something fun with the rest of the day. Well, obviously, that plan got scuttled.

For the record, the doctor was an ENT guy, and I was just getting my hearing checked out. Nothing surprising came out of that: I’ve got some hearing loss in my left ear, but not enough to warrant a hearing aid. He told me to stay away from loud heavy metal concerts and get my hearing checked every year from now on.

After the doctor’s appointment, I went to ShopRite to see if I could get some grocery shopping done. It was, shall we say, a madhouse. It was very busy, and people were buying a lot of stuff, but I managed to get pretty much everything I needed. They’re still out of hand sanitizer, and now also nearly out of liquid soap. There was plenty of regular bar soap. The shelves where they keep the toilet paper were empty, but they had a pallet of 20-packs of Scott TP out. Luckily, I don’t actually need toilet paper or hand sanitizer right now. If they’d had six-packs of TP, I would have bought one, just to be safe, but I really don’t need a 20-pack.

My employer issued some more Coronavirus guidance, but they’re still not requiring or encouraging anyone to work from home. So I guess I’m going in to the office on Monday. We’ll see how that plays out.

Meanwhile, I see that both WonderCon and Tribeca Film Festival are canceled. (Technically, they’re both postponed, but  rescheduling either of them would be difficult, if not impossible.) I went to WonderCon last year, and was seriously considering going to it this year. Then, when that started looking like a possibly bad idea, I started looking into going to a few movies during TFF as a lower-risk mini-vacation. But I guess they’re both off the table.

Once I got the doctor’s appointment and the shopping done today, I spent most of the day reading Batman comics and listening to WQXR. That was a good break from both work and my Coronavirus anxiety. I even worked in a nap and a walk. So I guess the day wasn’t a total loss.

[EDIT: Ten minutes after I posted this, I got a memo saying that we’re allowed to work from home next week. Yay!]

Somerset County changes

I don’t post a lot of political stuff on this blog, but here’s an article from the Courier News that contains a few items worth noting:

  • This is the first time since 1965 that Democrats have controlled the freeholder board in Somerset County.
  • “Since the Democrats last had control, Somerset County’s population has more than doubled and the non-white population has increased from 3.2 to 32 percent.”
  • “About 70 percent of the county’s population was not alive when the Democrats last held control.”

So that seems like a pretty big change. Somerset County has certainly changed quite a lot just in the last 25 years, which is about how long I’ve been living here. I don’t know if the change in the freeholder board will actually matter much, in the grand scheme of things. But it’s an interesting change and it’s worth noting.

On a national level, it’s also been interesting to keep an eye on our new local House rep, Tom Malinowski, over the last year. He’s the first Democratic House rep we’ve had since I moved to Somerset County. I’m trying to figure out when Somerville last had a Democratic House rep, and it’s a little confusing, since we switched districts at least once. We’ve been part of the 7th district since 2000, I think, and the 7th hasn’t had a Democratic rep since 1980. Prior to that, we were in the 11th, where Rodney Frelinghuysen was the rep from 1995-2018, and the last Democratic rep was a guy who served from 1963 to 1984.

Back when Frelinghuysen was our rep, it just seemed like a given that he’d get re-elected every two years, and that was never going to change. In 2000, Michael Moore ran a ficus against him in the primary, to make a point about how House incumbents often run unopposed in primaries and how often they get re-elected. Frelinghuysen was part of a political dynasty that stretched back to 1793. (Malinowski, in contrast, was born in Poland and came to the US as a child.)

Anyway, Malinowski has made national news a number of times since he was elected, and it’s mostly been for saying something reasonable or doing something useful, which is refreshing. This recent New Yorker article has a few quotes from him. And his Twitter feed is a breath of fresh air, compared to a lot of the political discourse that you see on Twitter.

This whole ramble started because I was curious to see if there was any mention in the news of an anti-war protest that happened yesterday here in Somerville. I didn’t find any, but I did find an article about a protest in Woodbridge related to the “SeaQuest petting zoo aquarium” in Woodbridge Center Mall. I have to admit that I had no idea that “petting zoo aquariums” were a thing, nor that there was one in Woodbridge Center Mall. I should really get off the internet now and start doing something useful with my Sunday.

NJ Transit

I stumbled across this headline in the NY Times yesterday, and briefly thought that they’d actually come up with a deal to replace or repair the Portal Bridge: “This New Jersey Bridge Will No Longer Sabotage Rush Hour.” But no, they’ve only come up with a deal to avoid opening it during rush hour. So it’s still going to sabotage weekend riders like me. (The NJ.com headline is more direct: “The rusty, commute-killing Portal Bridge will never open during rush hour again.”) The current status of the Portal Bridge replacement project is still, basically, stalled and going nowhere, as far as I can tell.

Meanwhile, the North Jersey Coast Line 2606 has been declared “the Very Worst Commuter Train in America” in a NY Times article. And NJ Transit has canceled as many as 29 trains in one day, due to a lack of engineers. But, hey, they added seven new engineers yesterday, so that’s a good sign. But, as the article points out, “they need a staff of 400 qualified engineers to avoid service interruptions. The current complement is 343.”

Black Friday

There was no repeat of the Christmas music incident last night, so I got a good night’s sleep (or at least as good as I can manage these days). So I may actually be in shape to do a few of the things that I was too frazzled to do yesterday. However, it’s still very cold out: 12° this morning. And Raritan Valley trains are running about 30 minutes behind schedule right now. So, combining those two factors, going into NYC today might be a bad idea. I’m not going to completely rule it out, but I’m definitely not heading out to the train station right now to stand outside in the cold for a half-hour, hoping the train eventually shows up. If I see the trains get back to normal, and if it gets up into the twenties, maybe I’ll go in later.

I started my online Black Friday shopping yesterday, and I think it might be amusing to list out some of the stuff I bought, yesterday and today.

  • I picked up some random comics on Comixology, from DC’s big Black Friday sale. I got Batman: White Knight, which I’ve heard a lot of good things about. And Tales of the Batman: Gene Colan Vol. 2. I really liked Colan’s run on Batman, back in the 80s, after he left Marvel for DC. And I got Grant Morrison’s Wonder Woman: Earth One Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. I generally like anything Morrison does, so I’m pretty sure I’ll like these. (These were $5 each.)
  • I bought Blade Runner 2049 and Isle of Dogs from Vudu. I hadn’t previously bought any digital movies from Vudu, but with the whole Movies Anywhere thing, I can buy from Apple, Amazon, or Vudu and the movies show up in all three libraries, so it makes sense to buy from whichever service is cheapest. (I was originally thinking about going out to see a movie today, but I think that, instead, I’ll likely stay in and watch one or both of those.)
  • I picked up Fantastical 2 for iPad for $3. (It’s regularly $10.) I’ve been using the iPhone version for years, but never got around to picking up the iPad version.
  • I bought a $100 iTunes gift card for $80 from Costco. It seemed like a good deal.
  • This morning, when I went into Lose It to log my breakfast, I got a popup offering a deal on a lifetime subscription. I’m always a bit leery of lifetime subscription deals, but I’ve been using Lose It for five years, and renewing my premium subscription every year, so I went ahead and paid $75 for a lifetime sub. Since I did that in-app, that came out of my iTunes account, nicely using up most of that gift card I bought last night. (Maybe I’ll pick up another $100 card today.)

And here are some things I’m looking at today:

  • Pluralsight has their usual Black Friday sale going on, where you can renew your subscription for $200 instead of $300. I’ll probably do that again this year. I don’t get a ton of use out of Pluralsight, but I guess I get enough that it’s worth the $200.
  • Jetpack has a 30% discount off all plans for Black Friday. I’m currently only using the free Jetpack services on this blog, but I could step up to their “personal” plan. About all that really gets me, beyond what’s in the free plan, is site backups, but that could be useful.
  • Apple’s Black Friday weekend event has started. As usual with Apple, it’s not that compelling. But it might be worthwhile for me, since I was looking at getting some new Apple stuff anyway. On the iPhone front, they only have deals on iPhone 7 & 8, and I was thinking about the XR, so I’ll probably skip those. Their Apple Watch deal is for a $50 Apple Store Gift Card when you buy a Series 3. That’s not much, but might be a good deal for me. My current watch is a “Series 0,” so a Series 3 would be a good step up. I can use the $50 towards my eventual iPhone purchase.
  • I’m thinking about picking up a second Sonos One speaker, either from Sonos directly, or from Amazon or Costco. I get a fair bit of use out of the one I bought earlier this year, and it would nice to have two, for stereo. I don’t know if I really need that, though.
  • It’s not exactly a Black Friday thing, but a friend of mine has a story in this anthology about… cannibalism. On the one hand, I’d like to support him, on the other hand, I don’t much like reading about cannibalism. But hey, it’s only $4 for Kindle.

Since I started writing this blog post, I see that the NJ Transit delays are now at almost an hour, so things on that front are definitely going in the wrong direction. And the temperature is up to 22°, so that’s going in the right direction, but maybe not far enough to motivate me to spend much time outdoors today.

Happy Thanksgiving

My Thanksgiving day this year is off to a rough start. They play Christmas music on Main St here in Somerville now, normally from noon to 8pm, but something threw off the timer a couple of weeks ago, so we’ve had a few instances of overnight Christmas music recently. And last night, it played all night.

It all started after the big snowstorm a week ago. (You might say that it wasn’t that much of a snowstorm, but as the linked article points out, it was “the biggest one-day November snowfall in 136 years.”) That night, the music didn’t end at 8pm, and kept playing until around midnight. My guess is there was a brief power interruption that screwed up the timer. So that wasn’t too bad. Either the timer stopped it at midnight or someone managed to turn it off.

Then, Saturday night, the music started at midnight, and stopped around 2am. My guess on that is that someone screwed up the AM/PM setting on it. (And I guess someone managed to shut it off after a couple of hours.)

I thought we were over all of that, since it’s been fine the last few days. But last night, again, it started at midnight. And never stopped. The last time this happened was back in 2012. That time, I called the police, but there was nothing they could do about it. And I sent an email to the group that’s responsible for the music, and they apologized, which is nice, but none of that gets me back a lost night of sleep. My best guess as to what happened this time is that somebody tried to change the schedule for Thanksgiving and screwed up the AM/PM setting again.

So I got out of bed at 5am this morning and I’m now eating breakfast and listening to some quiet music by Hugar, just loud enough to drown out the Christmas music. (Which is still playing.) It’s looking to be the coldest Thanksgiving since 1871, according to the NY Times. (It’s 20° right now, with a “feels like” temp of 11°, here in Somerville.) I’ve been trying to talk myself into going into New York today, and the continuing Christmas music assault might be enough to force me out of my apartment, even in 20° weather. I don’t really know what I’d do in NYC today; all the museums are closed. I’d probably go see a few movies, I guess.

I did put earplugs in last night, but they didn’t help much. On one of the previous nights, I also turned on my air cleaner, hoping the white noise would help. (It turns out that the earplugs do a good job of filtering out the air cleaner noise, but don’t help much with the music.)

So now I’m thinking about options for better earplugs, noise cancelling earphones, white noise generators, and stuff like that. Here’s a thread from Hacker News from earlier this week, about brain.fm and similar products/services. I’ve been wondering if I could actually use Max Richter’s eight-hour work Sleep to get through the night. I think I also need to look at some of the stuff in this NY Times article from 2011. Bose makes something called Noise-Masking Sleepbuds that might be good, though they cost $250. That got me thinking about whether or not I could sleep with AirPods in. That led me to a reddit thread; results on that seem to be mixed. (And battery life on the AirPods is only five hours, so they wouldn’t last all night.) I’m not at all sure what will work best. I may go on a bit of an Amazon binge today, ordering a bunch of random earplugs and stuff.

Now, it’s almost 7am, and I’ve moved from Hugar to Relaxation Tape for Solo Space Travel by The National Pool (which is quite good). There’s a lot of good ambient music on Bandcamp, but that’s a subject for another day.

This blog post is probably a bit scattershot, since it’s being written on zero sleep, but writing it has helped me get through breakfast and lower my stress level a bit, so that’s something. I’m hoping the Christmas music will stop at 8am, assuming my theory about the AM/PM screw-up is correct. If that happens, I may just go back to bed. (Though the three cups of coffee I just had might get in the way of that.)