Category: personal

Thanksgiving weekend check-in

Today is the last day of the four-day Thanksgiving weekend. I had a bunch of stuff on my “maybe to-do” list for this weekend, and one of those items was “write a blog post,” so I’m going to go ahead and do that now. I have a bunch of stuff on my mind, so this is likely to turn into one of those rambling multi-topic posts.

Thanksgiving day itself was uneventful. I don’t really have anybody to hang out with on major holidays anymore, and I’m honestly not even that interested in doing so. I get tired easily, and I get sick easily, so sometimes it’s better to just stay at home and rest.

I wasn’t really sick this weekend, but I did have a kind of low-level thing on Friday that kept me from getting too ambitious about anything.

On Saturday, I had a pretty eventful day. My brother and his wife were driving back to Georgia from Massachusetts, and stopped by here for brunch. So I got to spend around 90 minutes with them, eating a waffle and drinking a bunch of coffee. It turns out that my brother’s wife has some friends in the area who were getting together in Somerville, so that may have been their main reason for stopping here, but either way, I’m glad they could stop by and spend some time. (And I’m now realizing that, for me, a 90 minute brunch counts as “an eventful day”. I didn’t really do much else that day!)

Back on the subject of my “maybe to-do” list: I had a mental list of stuff, of varying levels of actual usefulness, that I could do this weekend. And I did a few of those things. And I did a lot of reading and TV watching. So I’m going to throw some notes about all of that in here.

Book Stuff

I did a good bit of book-related stuff this weekend.

  • I bought a few random “Black Friday deal” ebooks, from Kobo. I’ve been going back and forth between Amazon/Kindle and Kobo recently, when buying ebooks. Sometimes, I find something on sale at Amazon, then I check to see if it’s the same price at Kobo, and if it is, I buy it there. I’m not boycotting Amazon, but I’m not super happy about them lately, and I think it makes sense to try not to rely on them for everything.
  • I also bought a Humble Bundle of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret books this weekend. I’ve been curious about them for quite some time, and the recent Maigret TV series brought them to mind again.
  • And buying that bundle, and a few Kobo books, got me thinking about adding some more of the random non-Amazon ebooks in my library to Goodreads. So I spend a bit of time doing that. I added all of the Discworld books that were part of the bundle I bought last year. And the books from the Ursula Le Guin bundle I bought last Thanksgiving weekend.
  • I also spent some time updating my Calibre setup, including plug-ins, and pulled some more stuff into my Calibre library.
  • And, in terms of actual, y’know, reading: I finished the first book in John Jackson Miller’s Star Trek: Prey trilogy, and started the second. It’s a fun series. I bought the Kindle books back in 2018. (I have so many unread ebooks!)

TV and Movies

I haven’t watched any movies this weekend, but I may finally watch the Fantastic Four movie on Disney+ before the weekend is over.

I started watching Stranger Things season five. There are four episodes up, and I’ve watched one episode per day, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, so I’ve got one more to go. It’s pretty good. I’ve enjoyed Stranger Things since the beginning. (It is, of course, explicitly designed for people in my demographic, so it’s not surprising that I’d love it. But I don’t resent that, and I do, in fact, enjoy it very much.) I hadn’t really kept up with the press around it, so I didn’t realize that the four episodes that went up this weekend aren’t the final four episodes. Per this article: “Stranger Things 5 will debut in three volumes this fall: four episodes are now streaming, three episodes
 on Christmas, and the finale episode 
on New Year’s Eve.” So I guess that gives me something fun to do on Christmas and New Year’s too!

Hardware

I did a bit of shopping this weekend for three Apple devices that I’m overdue to replace: my iPhone, iPad, and Watch. My iPhone 14 is three years old, and isn’t holding a charge as well as it used to. Other than that, it’s fine for me, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to replace it soon. My iPad was purchased in 2019, so that’s the oldest of the three devices, and maybe in most need of replacement. The battery isn’t great, and it’s only got 64 GB of storage, which isn’t quite enough for all of the comics I’d like to keep on it. The Watch is a Series 6 from 2020, and that too is having battery issues. As with the iPhone, it’s really fine aside from the battery issues, but I should probably replace it.

I found deals on both an iPad and Watch at Costco that looked pretty good, but I didn’t order them yet. I’m still not sure if I will or not, but there’s no reason not to.

The iPhone is a little more complicated, since I moved to Consumer Cellular. I can order an iPhone from CC, but they’re out of stock on the iPhone 17, and have been for a while. They have the iPhone 17 Pro, though, so I could get the Pro model this time around. But I don’t need it, so maybe not. Of course, I can buy an iPhone 17 direct from Apple, but CC isn’t one of their supported carriers, so I I would have to get an unlocked one and set it up myself. Which shouldn’t be difficult, but it’s another little barrier that makes me stop and pause. And the trade-in value is a factor too. Apple will give me $220 for my old phone, while CC will only give me around $180.

So I haven’t made a decision on any of my iDevices yet. I did make a snap decision on a device from Amazon yesterday, though, and got it today. I decided to replace my Echo Dot with an Echo Spot. I got the Echo Dot in 2020, to replace my old iHome alarm clock. It’s been a nice little unobtrusive clock, sitting on my nightstand, since then. I don’t really use the Alexa features. It’s just a relatively cheap puck that sits there and shows me what time it is. Once in a while, I say something that sounds like “Alexa” and it starts talking back to me, so that’s frustrating, but it doesn’t happen often.

I’m not sure if I’ll like the Spot more or less than the Dot. The screen is fancier, but I don’t know if it’s going to more readable or less readable, if I wake up at 4 AM and want to know what time it is. I should probably give up on these “smart” things and just get this Braun alarm clock from MOMA.

Final Thoughts

So I guess that’s all of my random ruminating for this weekend. For today, I’ll probably watch some football, read a bit more of the Star Trek novel, and watch the next Stranger Things episode. I already went for a 25-minute walk, so that’s a good start to the day.

The farmers market here in Somerville finished up last weekend, so I don’t have that to look forward to today. I guess I need to get into winter mode now. I started using my humidifier this weekend, so that’s a start.

I’d really glad I got a good four-day weekend of doing “not very much.” I’ve been wearing myself out with work recently, and really needed a break.

COVID again

I felt like I was getting a cold last weekend, on Saturday. It got worse on Sunday. Long story short, I got COVID again. I took off from work Monday through Thursday. I started Paxlovid on Tuesday. I went back to work today (Friday), working from home. I’m feeling a bit better, but very tired.

My last bout of COVID was in 2023. I’m hoping this one is pretty much done now. I’ll be taking the Paxlovid until Sunday, then I hope I’ll be all better. I’d like to have a “normal” week at work next week. I’ll test myself again on Sunday or Monday. If I’m still positive, then I’ll try to at least work from home next week.

I’m fairly exhausted right now. I had to stay up for an after-hours deployment today, which is now done. So I can go to bed. Of course, it’s Friday night in Somerville, so Main St. is pretty noisy. Maybe I’ll try to watch the rest of the Phillies game before bed.

status update

I wanted to come up with a more imaginative title for this post, but I think I’m going to stick with “status update.” Once again, I’ve got a bunch of thoughts in my head, so I’m going to try to get some of them out of there and onto “paper.”

First item: I fell down last Sunday, while out for a walk, during the Somerville street fair. It was bad enough that I had to let the rescue squad take me to the emergency room. Short version: I got three stitches in my forehead. I had those taken out on Friday, by my regular doctor. I still have a black eye, and both of knees are still bruised up. Getting old sucks. I can’t even trip and fall down without it becoming a major life event.

The most expensive part of this accident is probably going to be replacing the lenses in my glasses, which got scratched up a bit when I fell. That’s going to cost me about $900.

I’m trying not to let this accident scare me too much. I’ve been going out for my usual walks almost every day since the accident, and I’m doing fine there. But I’m trying to be more careful, and keep an eye out for cracks in the sidewalk and stuff like that.

Second item: I’m watching the men’s final from Roland-Garros this morning. I’ve been enjoying following the tournament, on and off, this year, via both my HBO Max subscription, and via Radio Roland-Garros, which is really great.

I’ve been curious about the poster for this year’s RG, which was done by a comic book artist, Marc-Antoine Mathieu. The French love their comics, of course, so it’s cool that they did a comics-adjacent poster for this. I thought about buying the poster from the RG store, and it’s only €10, but shipping would be a lot, and I’m not sure if I’d wind up having to pay extra for tariff surcharges. So I decided that wasn’t worth the grief. Then I thought about trying to buy it from eBay, and I did find several sellers offering the poster, but it looks like they’re offering US-printed copies of the poster, so I’m not sure what the quality would be there, or if they’ve actually licensed the image or not. So maybe I should give up on buying the poster.

Then I thought I should look into Marc-Antoine Mathieu, and see if any of his work was available in English, from a US publisher. It turns out, not much of it is, and it seems to be mostly out of print. Some of it looks interesting, though. Here’s an interview with him that I haven’t read yet, but it looks cool. And an article from Paul Gravett’s website.

Last topic: I wasn’t feeling too well yesterday, and it was raining out, so I watched a bunch of TV. (It looks like I’ll be doing the same thing today.) One of the random things I watched was the first of the Rebuild of Evangelion movies. I feel compelled to blog about it a little, since I’ve mentioned Evangelion on this blog before, a few times, first in 2003, and more recently in 2019. I’ve been meaning to watch these movies, ever since they were added to Amazon Prime Video back in 2021 (I think). Watching that first film is bringing back some strong memories. I’ve realizing that I’m a different person than I was back when I watched the original series twenty-plus years ago, but I’m still probably suffering from the Hedgehog’s Dilemma.

New Year’s Day 2025

Well, I made it through another year, I guess, so here’s my usual New Year’s Day blog post! I went to bed around 9:30 PM last night, after watching the first two Thin Man movies on TCM. I got out of bed around 6:15 AM this morning. My days of staying up late on New Year’s Eve are pretty much done, apparently.

WordPress stats

I like to use these posts for both useful self-reflection and pointless (but fun) stats. I’m going to start with some pointless stats related to this blog. I ran a quick SQL statement to get my posts per year, over the life of this blog, and got the following:

blog posts per year chart
blog posts per year

So that’s 49 posts in 2024. My most active year was 2005, with over 200 posts. The least active full year was 2013, with 33 posts. I don’t know if any of that is super-interesting to anyone but me, but there it is.

I was trying to think of why 2013 would be a low point, and I guess it probably had something to do with starting a new job that year. And that’s still my current job (SHI), almost 12 years later. (More about that later.)

I also looked at traffic stats on the blog. Nothing interesting to report there, except that December 2024 was my most active month ever, by a long shot, with more than 3000 views. All of that traffic was on one day though: December 9. And I’m pretty sure it was all search bots or AI training bots or whatever.

Health

I’ve been fighting a low-level cold since Thanksgiving (or thereabouts), so my health situation is pretty much business as usual. I remember having a pretty good run of “not being sick” at some point this year though. Maybe in the spring? I thought I’d made a note of it in Day One or somewhere, but I can’t quite pinpoint when it was or how long it was.

As for my weight: I started 2024 at around 160, and ended it at 165. I’ve been fairly stable at 165, plus or minus two, for the last three months. So I’m hoping that I’ve stopped gaining weight and have hit a stable point. (In 2023, I went from 150 to 160, so my gain this year was half of last year’s gain.) And I’m still logging all of my meals/snacks with LoseIt, as I have been doing since 2013.

I think I still need to do some work on getting my snacking under control. I need to cut down on cookies and pastries form the various bakeries and coffee shops here in town. (Having a good French bakery almost directly below my apartment, in the same building, has turned out to be a bit of a problem…)

On the exercise front, I’m doing good. I was going to look for some summary stats to support that, but I’ve just realized that Apple’s Fitness app doesn’t have any kind of “year in review” thing, similar to Apple Music Replay or any of the other end-of-year things that have gotten big over the last few years. Odd, since that would likely be really popular. You can get some yearly graphs in the Health app though. So, from that, I see that I’ve averaged about 45 minutes per day exercise and 550 calories per day on the “move” ring. That’s pretty good, and I see that it’s been pretty consistent over the whole year.

And, having written all this, I realized that I hadn’t gone for a walk yet, so I did that just now. Here’s a photo!

New Year's Day morning walk
New Year’s Day morning walk
Work

Wow, I could write a lot about work this year. My old boss retired at the end of 2023, so I’ve just finished out my first year under the new boss. I had a pretty solid relationship with the old boss, but I’m still working on building one with the new guy.

I had gotten used to near-perfect performance reviews from the old boss, so I was a bit surprised to get an average review from the new one. (Basically, a rating of 3 out of 5 on everything, and a lower raise than I usually get.) I have a feeling that he didn’t put that much thought into the review, since he doesn’t actually know that much about me or what I do. So I’m not too worried about him just clicking “3” down the row of questions on the review form; it’s not that I did anything wrong, he just doesn’t have much to go on. But I think I do need to try to build up some kind of relationship with him in 2025, if I can. It’s hard, since he’s in Texas and I’m in NJ, and since he has a fairly large number of direct reports, and responsibility for three main groups (AX, CRM, and ServiceNow). So I guess I need to just keep trying to be a good employee and make sure to do the stuff he wants me to do.

In terms of systems and projects this year: We’re still on AX 2012, and haven’t made any real progress towards moving to D365 F&O. Maybe that’s too simplistic a view. Some stuff is going on behind the scenes, I guess, but there’s really no concrete progress on the real work of moving off AX 2012 and getting to F&O. For 2025, we’re planning on upgrading our SQL environment and getting on the latest CU for AX, so that’s something, and likely a necessary start. At the start of 2024, we were saying that getting to F&O was a three-year project. I think it’s still at least a three-year project, and I’m not sure if 2025 is going to count as year one, or if 2025 will be more like “year zero” with the real project starting in 2026.

We’ve been going through what they call an “agile transition” over the last year.  We’ve been using something like scrum since 2022, but the new boss (and new IT management in general) has been trying to really formalize that. We now have a scrum master, daily stand-ups, and multiple standard meetings (the usual stuff). And our group has been broken up into two separate “feature teams.” Also, we’ve stopped doing weekly deployments, and now only do one deployment per sprint (every two weeks). So that’s been a lot to get used to. And for 2025, we’re switching from using Azure DevOps to Jira for our agile/scrum management. So, just when things are getting smooth, we’re going to upend it all again.

Learning and other fun Stuff

OK, that’s enough of the serious stuff. Now let’s go through some more fun stuff. Let’s start with my Goodreads year in books. Just 27 books for 2024, though some of the Wheel of Time books were pretty long (Lord of Chaos was 1049 pages.) I had set a goal for myself of finishing the WOT series in 2024, but I’m not quite done with the final book. So maybe I’ll finish it by the end of January 2025. I’m not quite sure what I’ll tackle next; WOT has been eating up a lot of my reading time. I have a bunch of Dresden Files and Laundry Files books in my TBR pile, so maybe some of those. Or Discworld? And I have so many comics piled up too!

In terms of professional learning, I only see three books on my list that count towards that, and they’re all fairly general books. I don’t seem to have learned any new programming languages in 2024, or anything else big.

Looking at my Pluralsight history, I see that I completed around 15 courses there in 2024. Some of those were work-specific, as part of Pluralsight “challenges.” Some were just stuff I wanted to learn on my own. So there’s a mix of agile/scrum stuff, C# stuff, AI stuff, and miscellaneous “soft skill” stuff.

At some point during the year, I started looking at maybe getting an AZ-204 certification. But I didn’t get very far with that, and I’ve pretty much dropped the idea now. Back in 2013, I also started thinking about a D365 F&O certification of some kind, but I’m not going forward with that either, at least not yet.

During my performance review, my boss said that he wants me to pursue a SAFe certification for 2025, so I’m starting to work on that. Honestly, I’m not too enthusiastic about it, but it’ll probably help my career, and I’m open-minded enough to give it a try, I guess. I’ve started a leaning path in Pluralsight, and a video series on O’Reilly. I might also try to read the SAFe Distilled book at some point too. I don’t know. This plan may fizzle out, honestly, but I’m going to give it a try.

Okay, back to fun stuff. Here’s my 2024 year in film, from Letterboxd. I watched a little over 100 movies this year. I started and ended the year with After the Thin Man. My five-star ratings for the year went to The Thin Man, Casablanca, When Marnie Was There, and 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki. The only film on that list that was new to me was When Marnie Was There.

My Apple Music Replay is kind of weird. My top song for the year is Hell of a Ride, by Nourished by Time. My top album is Songs of Surrender, by U2. And my top artist is Bombay Bicycle Club. I guess those all kinda make sense, though they’re all a little surprising. I guess the U2 album being on the top is mostly because it’s a four-disc set, and I added it in January. Looking at albums that I added to my library this year, none of them really stand out. There are some really good ones, but nothing that really stuck enough for me to listen to a lot, or that really blew my mind. At the moment, I’m pretty enthusiastic about the new Joan Armatrading album.

Ten Years Ago

I’ve been doing this so long that I can now look at my post from ten years ago (and even twenty years ago) and try to think about some big picture stuff. (The post from 20 years ago is just a one-liner about a song, so that one’s not too valuable.)

So, ten years ago:

  • I noted that I’d gone from 200 pounds to 165 over the course of 2014. So I’m starting 2025 at the same weight at which I started 2015. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but it is what it is!
  • 2014 was my first full year at SHI. I’ve been there since, so overall that’s gone well, I think.
  • I talked a little about consulting and volunteering in that post. I haven’t done any consulting in a long time, and I’m not planning to. I think those days are done, unless I decide to do that part-time after I’m retired. And I haven’t done any volunteering either. I’d like to do some of that, but I’m getting to the point where I’m too tired to do much of anything outside of my normal salaried work. (And I’m OK with that.)
  • I finished 30 books in 2014, so that’s pretty similar to this year’s total.
  • I moved this blog to WordPress in 2014, so I guess I should have celebrated my ten-year WordPress anniversary in 2024. I’m still OK with WordPress (even with Matt Mullenweg’s shenanigans).

perfect Sundays

I feel like I’ve been having a nice run of near-perfect Sundays lately, so I thought I’d blog about that a little. Since at least 2020, I’ve been organizing my weekends so that I generally get all of my chores done on Saturday, and I can spend Sunday relaxing. And I’ve developed some habits that work well for me.

I started reading the Sunday Routine articles in the NY Times around 2020, and enjoyed a lot of those. I haven’t kept up with them, but I think I may have taken some inspiration from them, without really meaning to. A lot of them are easy to make fun of. But many of them are also inspirational and interesting.

Anyway, here’s my Sunday routine: I generally get up at 6, because I’m old and I can’t really sleep late anymore. But Sunday is the one day I don’t need to get up at 6, so sometimes I’ll sleep in until 7, if my body lets me do that. I almost always make a variation on the same breakfast: two eggs, one slice of pork roll, and two slices of toast. And I make coffee with my Moka pot. At some point after breakfast, I go for a walk. Generally for 20-25 minutes, just around the neighborhood. When I come back, I read a few chapters of whichever Wheel of Time book I’m currently reading. At 10 AM, I walk over to the Somerville Farmers Market and buy some stuff. I’ve been going to that consistently enough this year that a lot of the vendors know me now, and I can have some little chats with them. So that’s quite nice. After that, I might go back to reading my Wheel of Time book. For the afternoon, I might make a sandwich and watch a movie on TV, or a football game. There’s usually an afternoon nap in there somewhere.

So there’s not much of a point in writing all of that out, but I like thinking about it. And it’s good to recognize the nice things in your life and be thankful for them.

And all of that is leading me up to thinking about the election results from last week. I have to admit that it all kind of broke me. (I was going to link to a news article about the results here, but browsing through them now is only making me angry again…) I’m trying to think back now to how I felt in 2016. And, because I have a blog, I can check on that! Here’s a post from (coincidentally) today in 2016. It’s kind of funny to see that I embedded a bunch of Twitter posts into that blog entry. I would never do that now; Twitter is worse than useless at this point.

There was a lot of reaction to the election on the social networks I now follow (Mastodon and Bluesky, mostly), but nothing I feel like I need to share. In fact, I avoided social media for the day after the election, except for a couple of quick check-ins to see if there was anything I needed to know about. I’m starting to rethink my media diet again. I’ve found that I’m not ready for stuff like Colbert or other typical last-night humor again. So I might lay off all of that for the rest of the year. I will probably keep watching NJ Spotlight News, but I might be fast-forwarding through parts of it now. (That’s what I was doing last week. I just couldn’t bear to watch anything related to the election results.)

One thing I did see on social media today was a post from Michiko Kakutani on Instagram quoting W. H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939, which I’ve mentioned on this blog before. I was going to stick a quote from it in here, but you’re better off reading the whole thing. (It’s not long.)

And there have been a lot of blog posts and essays and think pieces written about these election results. (Of course.) I’ve looked at a few of them, but haven’t read many, past the first paragraph or two. (That’s probably healthy. Reading too much of this stuff would only make my state of mind worse, and probably wouldn’t result in any useful action on my part.) I’ll like to one piece though: And Yet It Moves, by Ken White.

OK, that’s it for now. Back to relaxing.

subscriptions

I seem to have a lot of yearly subscriptions coming up for renewal soon, and I’m spending a little time thinking about them today. So I thought I’d write up some notes.

    • Instapaper is $60/year now, having doubled from the old price of $30/year. I’ve thought about switching to Pocket, which would be $45/year. But I’m used to Instapaper, and it works fine, and I can afford the $60. The weird thing, though, is that it should have renewed several days ago, but hasn’t yet. Every time I check my account page, it says that my renewal date is “today”. I don’t know. I guess I’ll let it go and see what happens.
    • I just got a renewal notice for my AAA membership, which expires at the end of the year. I don’t have that on auto-renew. I thought about canceling it last year, since I never really use it, and I can get roadside assistance through my regular auto insurance. Maybe I’ll finally drop it this year. I’ve been a member since I got my license and first car in the early 90s, but it doesn’t really seem useful anymore.
    • My Costco membership is up for renewal too. This is another one that might go into the same category as AAA. I’ve had it for years, but I really don’t go to the local Costco anymore, since COVID, and I haven’t ordered anything from their website lately either. I might let it expire, and just re-up it later if I need it.
    • My GoComics subscription renews soon. That one’s a no-brainer, at $20/year for my daily comic strip fix. I occasionally consider also subscribing to Comics Kingdom, which is $30/year, but I don’t really need it.
    • My ACM membership is coming due soon. That one’s also a no-brainer. I get a fair bit of use out of the O’Reilly Learning access that I get through ACM, so it’s worth it just for that. I’ve fallen way behind on reading my ACM newsletters and the CACM magazine though. And in fact, I just checked, and it seems like I turned off emails on some of the ACM stuff a while ago, so I’m not getting notices when new CACM issues come out, so I guess I should fix that.
    • And I guess the last thing would be my Poe subscription. I have really mixed feelings about that. It’s $200/year, which is a lot. I’ve gotten a good bit of use out of it, but it’s annoying that it’s blocked on my work computer, which is where I need it most. (At work, I’m stuck using Copilot and/or our own internal AI chatbot.) I originally signed up for it because ChatGPT Plus signups were on hold, so Poe was an alternative. I might cancel the Poe sub and switch to the $20/month ChatGPT sub. Really, I don’t know if I need a “pro” AI chatbot service. A year ago, I was trying to learn this stuff, figure out what it was good for, and get some experience with it. Now I think I know where it’s useful and where it’s not. And I’m not too interested in doing any API stuff with it right now.

Laundry and smoke detectors and other exciting stuff

I think this post is going to be a bunch of little updates on things. I’ve got a lot of thoughts in my head, and a bunch of things I want to blog about. Let’s see how far I get through them before running out of steam!

First, an update on some boring mundane stuff. We got four new washing machines installed in my apartment building, so I was able to do all of my laundry in one fell swoop this morning, in my own building. (See this post for a previous update.) Of course, the new machines cost a little more than the old machines. And one of the new machines is already broken.

My other big apartment-related issue lately has been my smoke detector. It went off in the middle of the night Sunday night, twice. Not the actual alarm, but the double-beep that normally indicates a low battery. I’d replaced the battery only about a month ago, so I opened a maintenance request with my landlord. The maintenance guy came in on Monday, told me he thought my new battery wasn’t strong enough, and replaced it. Of course, he was wrong, and I got the low battery warning in the middle of the might again, on Tuesday night. So I opened another request, and the maintenance guy came in and replaced the unit. (I was working in the office on that day, so didn’t get to talk to him about it.) I hoped that would be the end of it, but then, the next day, I came home from work and saw that the new unit had come loose and was now hanging from the ceiling by the wires that hook it into the building system. I opened another maintenance request on that, on Thursday, but the maintenance guy didn’t come in on Friday, so now I guess I have to deal with a smoke detector dangling from the ceiling for the whole weekend. At least it’s not beeping.

This is all completely useless information to anyone other than me, of course, but it makes me feel a little better to write it up and get it out of my head.

And this is all background to talk about my general state of mind, which has been influenced by (1) not getting enough sleep on multiple occasions this week, and (2) feeling like everything is an uphill battle that always takes multiple tries, just to get to a semi-stable situation that isn’t any better than the previous semi-stable situation.

On the positive side, I’ve got a nice move streak going on with my Apple Watch right now. I’m at 40 days, which is the longest streak I’ve had, by far. Generally, if I get a move streak going, the watch suggests that I up my move goal, and I do that, and then I can’t meet it every day the next week, and the streak is broken. Or I get sick and rest for a day. So there’s a couple of interesting things going on here. First, that the watch isn’t asking me to up my move goal. And, second, that I’ve gone 40 days without getting sick. Which probably isn’t a lot for most people, but it’s a lot for me. So I’ve got at least one nice stable situation going this month! Plenty of walking!

Watch OS 11 will let you pause a move streak, apparently. I don’t think I’d ever bother doing that. It’s nice to have a streak going, if it motivates you to keep exercising. But I think it’s good to just let it reset once in a while. Or change the goal so you can’t meet it every day.

And here’s a funny video that’s related to the idea of walking for mental health. It’s actually a sneaker ad, of course, but it’s still kind of funny, and I definitely agree with it.

And that’s it for this post. I started writing some more stuff below about another topic, then realized that it didn’t belong in a post about laundry and smoke detectors.

Laundry Day

OK, fair warning, this post is mostly going to be me whining about dumb stuff. You’ve been warned.

My apartment building has a laundry room with six washers and four dryers. The washers have been breaking, one after the other, and the landlord hasn’t been fixing them. As of this morning, we were down to just one washer. I managed to get two loads of laundry done, then, on the third, that washer stopped working. I was feeding quarters into it, but it kept resetting. So I lost a bunch of quarters and had to give up and go over to the laundromat for my last load.

There’s a laundromat near my apartment, but I’d never been in it. I haven’t used a laundromat in at least thirty years. It turns out to be a pretty nice laundromat. Everything was clean, and I didn’t have any problems. It’s a lot more expensive than our laundry room though. I’d been paying $1.75 for laundry for many years. The machines at the laundromat cost $3.25. (And it’s all still quarters only. That’s a lot of quarters!)

The landlord sent out an email a few weeks ago saying that they’ve ordered new machines for our laundry room, but I don’t know when those are coming in and getting installed. So I guess I’m going to be going to the laundromat for a while.

It’s a small thing, relatively speaking, but it’s annoying that I’m having to change up my usual Saturday routine. Since 2020, I’ve been keeping to a pretty consistent schedule: up at 6, shower, start the laundry, eat breakfast, then move stuff from the washers to the dryers. Then, go over to ShopRite for groceries. Then, when I’m back, get the stuff out of the dryers and fold it up and put it away. I can get that all done by 9 AM, usually. Then I have the rest of the day for whatever.

Today was really inefficient, doing one load at a time for the first two loads, then not being able to do the third. And then having to wait for my stuff to dry before I could take the last load to the laundromat. Next week should be easier, since I can just take everything over to the laundromat and do it all at once.

Though I remember now that I’m supposed to do some testing for work next Saturday. We’re doing some kind of edge router replacement or something, and I have to test a few things after they’re done. That’s not a problem when I’m using the laundry room, but if I’m at the laundromat, I can’t leave my stuff unattended. So I have to get the laundry done either before the testing starts, or after it’s done. (Or I need to take my laptop to the laundromat, and tether it to my phone, and work from there…)

I also might need to get a laundry cart now. The laundromat is a short walk, but I know a full hamper of laundry will be a bit heavy to carry that far.

Oh well, at least the weather is nice today, and I’m done for now. I can have a nice lunch and relax.

new cubicles and other changes

This week, at work, my group moved back into our old space, after having it basically gutted and refurbished. I mentioned last week that I wasn’t too enthusiastic about it. Now that I’ve been working in it for a few days, I guess it’s not too bad. I still don’t like it, really; the cubicles are smaller, the walls are lower, and there’s not much storage space. But I’m getting used to it.

Overall, it’s been a rough week at work. We started using a new process this week that I designed and wrote (mostly) on my own, and we had some hiccups. I was hoping things would have smoothed out by the end of the week, but we’ve still got some issues that I’ll need to tackle next week.

One other random issue we’ve been having at work, which has been getting worse over time, is that Verizon cell phone reception keeps getting worse. It’s obviously a saturation issue, since it’s fine early in the morning, then gets worse over the course of the day. My cell phone is basically unusable by noon. It seems like AT&T works better, so now I’ve starting looking into switching carriers. That would be a big step for me; Verizon is the only cell carrier I’ve ever had, going back to when they were Bell Atlantic Mobile.

I’ve successfully made a few changes to long-standing accounts recently. (See previous posts about YouTube TV, my renter’s insurance, and my new Marcus account.) So that’s emboldened me to look at even more stuff, like maybe switching some stuff around with my phone plan. The first thing I’ve decided to do, finally, is to park my old home phone number. Verizon cut the copper in my building several years ago, so I switched to their wireless home phone service. I’ve had no problems with it, but at this point, I’m really not using it. But I still don’t want to give up the home phone number that I’ve had for 30 years.

So I’m moving it to a service called Park My Phone. They have several options for what you can do with your number there. I’m choosing their $6/month call forwarding service, so I can continue to get calls on the number. I initiated that today. It may take a week or three to complete. I’m pretty sure Verizon will put up some stumbling blocks. I did remove one myself, by logging into the Verizon site and unlocking the number, so the transfer won’t be blocked. I’m sure there are other weird little details that might get in the way.

I initially tried moving the number to Google Voice, which wouldn’t have had any monthly fee, just a $20 one-time fee, but that didn’t work. (And, Google being Google, there’s really no one to reach out to for help.)

Once I’ve got the home number off the Verizon account, then I’m going to think about moving the cell number to either AT&T or Consumer Cellular (which uses the AT&T network, I think).

Consumer Cellular actually has a wireless home phone service similar to Verizon’s, so I thought about moving both home and cell lines to them, but I decided it was really time to retire the home phone. It’ll feel weird not having an old-fashioned phone in the apartment, but I guess I’ll get used to it, the same way I’m getting used to a cubicle with no bookshelf and only two drawers for storage.

disarrayed thoughts

My head has been a bit muddy lately. There’s probably a bunch of reasons for that, but I think a lot of it comes down to lack of sleep, which I think is mostly due to allergies. So this post might be a little dizzy.

First, here’s the latest on the fire. Main St is now open to traffic again, though the sidewalk in front of Mike’s and King Tut is still roped off. I’m guessing that Mike’s isn’t coming back any time soon, if at all. That’s a bummer for me, since I got food from there at least once a week. (And, yes, I know it’s a bigger bummer for the guy who owns Mike’s, and the people who lived above it, and so on…)

And here’s a couple of fire-adjacent topics: First, looking for news on the fire has reminded me of how broken local news coverage is. I’ve gotten info on the fire from a combination of sources: TapInto, Patch, MyCentralJersey, and NJ.com for “regular” news. All of those sources are, shall we say, flawed, though. And I’ve picked up bits and pieces from the Somerville town Instagram and Facebook accounts, and other Somerville-related social media accounts. But it’s hard to piece all that together, and there’s so much cruft to wade through. I guess what I’m saying here is that, if somebody wants to start a good local newspaper or news site, that would be nice.

And the second fire-adjacent topic: My renter’s insurance just came up for renewal. I’ve been with the same company (Liberty Mutual) for all 30 years that I’ve been in this apartment. I’ve never had a problem, but then again, I’ve never had to file a claim. The cost of the policy, 30 years ago, was fine, but it’s crept up, and this year, the renewal price was almost $400. So, for the first time in 30 years, I decided to shop around. It turns out that a Hartford Life policy, with AARP discount, would be about half what I was paying Liberty Mutual. So I called LM to cancel. And, of course, they offered to “rerun my quote” and see if they could get the price down. Well, they did that, and (with no change in coverage) they got the price down to $117. So, the lesson there is: maybe review your insurance more often than once every 30 years.

The fire isn’t stopping the Friday night classic car thing on Main St, but they did cancel the street fair this weekend. (If I had to choose one to cancel, I would have gone with the car thing, but that’s just me. It’s too noisy, and I’m old.)

Oh, and my last, totally unrelated, topic is this: We’re moving out of our temp space at work and back to our old (now remodeled) space. We moved into the temp space in March. We packed up yesterday; the movers should be moving our stuff over the weekend; and we’ll start working in the new space on Tuesday.

I’m not fond of the cubicles in the temp space, but I’m even less excited about the cubicles in the new space. The cubicle walls are a bit higher than the temp space, but not as high as our old cubicles. And the cubicles are smaller, with less desk space and less drawer space. (And no bookshelf.) The desks are sit/stand, with the monitors mounted on arms, so that might be cool. And we’re getting new monitors, so that’s nice. (Assuming they’re better than the old monitors.) I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to give it a shot and see how it all works out. I need to figure out if I can thrive in a more minimalist environment than I’m used to.