Category: personal

sick days and comic books

I came down with a cold on Easter Sunday, and took a sick day on Monday. I felt good enough to go back into work on Tuesday, and made it through Wednesday and Thursday too. But things started going downhill on Thursday and I called in sick again today (Friday). I went to a doctor, and there’s nothing horribly wrong with me as far as he can tell, so I’m just resting and taking a (hopefully) stronger decongestant.

So this week has been good for comic book reading. On Sunday, I read B.P.R.D.: The Dead Remembered. On Monday, I got through B.P.R.D: King of Fear, and some other miscellaneous comics. Today, I read Baltimore: The Plague Ships and a bunch of DC Rebirth issues. Somewhere in there, I also managed to finish the Star Wars Omnibus that reprinted the first couple of dozen issues of Marvel’s Star Wars comic from the 70s, and start into the hardback collecting Paul Pope’s One Trick Rip-Off and some of his other stuff.

So, yeah, I read a lot of comics. I’m enjoying getting back into Mignola’s universe, but I’m not sure how far I’m going to go with that. On the B.P.R.D. side, I’m done with the “War on Frogs” story now, and “Hell on Earth” would be next, if I decide to go on with it. Hell on Earth runs through 15 trades, so it would be a pretty big commitment. (I think I have the equivalent of the first volume in individual issues, but that still leaves 14 more.) Baltimore runs through seven trades and a prose novel, so that’s a little less daunting, but still a pretty big story (and I’m not sure it’s done yet). And I’ve got a handful of random Hellboy comics to read too, plus the full Hellboy in Hell series.

On the DC front, I’m still enjoying Rebirth, but I also still have some mixed feelings about it. I have the first issue of The Button crossover, but I haven’t read it yet. I was at one point thinking that it might actually be a good point for jumping ship on the whole rebirth thing, but I’ll at least give this particular story a chance. If it looks like it’s leading into something horrible, I’m more than ready to drop it all. I’ve found the current DC books to be nice escapism, but I probably wouldn’t miss them if I stopped reading them.

I was kind of planning on going into New York tomorrow for the NYC version of the March For Science, but I’m clearly in no shape for that. So I guess my support for the march will have to come from my living room couch, in the form of supportive retweets and good thoughts.

a birthday, a parade, and a good book

Tomorrow will be my 50th birthday. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to mention that on the blog, but I’ve previously posted about my 35th and 45th birthdays, so it’s not like it would be hard for anyone to figure out how old I am, if they wanted to know. So here it is: I’ll be 50 tomorrow.

The Somerville St Patrick’s Day parade is going on right now. I’ve been watching a bit from my window; it’s too cold out for me to want to go outside and watch. And I’ve been getting wrapped up in the final chapters of the final book of the His Dark Materials trilogy. I started re-reading it a few weeks ago, and I’m almost done now.

I had been planning to visit a friend yesterday to celebrate my birthday, but that fell through. That will probably happen next weekend now, but that means it’s been a generally uneventful weekend, since I didn’t plan anything else.

I used my Starbucks birthday reward to get a free chicken sandwich for lunch, so that was my big birthday meal. I’ve got a couple of Justin’s peanut butter cups I might eat later, in lieu of birthday cake.

I’m expecting that tomorrow will be a pretty normal, quiet day at work. But we’re supposed to get a lot of snow on Tuesday, so I think it’s going to be a chaotic week overall. I decided this year that I’m no longer going to be the guy who valiantly drives in to work in a snowstorm, so I expect I’ll either be working from home on Tuesday (and possibly Wednesday) or taking a PTO day. And if we get as much snow as expected, the whole week will be a mess. Here’s hoping that something vaguely approximating Spring gets started soon!

President’s Day

I’ve got today off from work, because it’s President’s Day. (We’re not actually closed, but we get a floating holiday that can be used today.) And it’s a nice day out. So of course I decided to stay in and get my taxes done.

I’ve been using an accountant for the last several years, but I’ve been feeling kind of silly doing that, since my taxes really aren’t that complicated. So I decided to go back to using tax software this year. The last time I did my own taxes was in 2011 (for my 2010 taxes), and I used TurboTax that year. Prior to that, I’d used TaxCut every year from 2001 to 2009. I decided to go back to TaxCut this year, though now it’s just called H&R Block Tax Software. I bought it for $30 from Amazon, with free Federal e-file, and paid another $20 for NJ e-file. I paid my accountant more than $500 last year, so $50 total is a big difference.

The H&R Block software is still quite similar to what I remember from the last time I used it. One new option is the ability to download some tax documents rather than enter them. This option worked with my W-2 and my 1099-DIV, so that was nice. Overall, it was quite easy. I’m likely to stick with the H&R Block software for the next few years at least, assuming there’s no big changes in my life that complicate my tax situation.

How Social Isolation Is Killing Us

This is an interesting article, though the title may be a bit overblown.

I need to do more to maintain my relationships, both for my own sake and for the sake of those around me. That second part is easy to forget; it’s easy to get wrapped up in your own bubble and forget that other people around you need help and support.

A great paradox of our hyper-connected digital age is that we seem to be drifting apart. Increasingly, however, research confirms our deepest intuition: Human connection lies at the heart of human well-being. It’s up to all of us — doctors, patients, neighborhoods and communities — to maintain bonds where they’re fading, and create ones where they haven’t existed.

Source: How Social Isolation Is Killing Us

New Year’s Day 2017

I’ve gotten into the habit of writing a post on New Year’s Day, reviewing some goals and events from the previous year and thinking about goals for the new year. Last year’s post was pretty long, and took quite a while to write. I’m not sure if this year’s post will be quite as long, but, for reference, it’s now 8:05 am. I’ve got the radio on WQXR, a cup of coffee at my side, and nothing else to do this morning. Let’s see what time it is when I finish!

For reference, here are links to my last three New Years Day posts:

Weight and General Heath
I think I’ve successfully transitioned from losing weight to maintaining my weight. I started 2016 at 150 pounds. I’ve stayed between 145 and 150 all year. I’m currently at 146. I’m still using Lose It to track everything I eat, and I’m staying within my budget most of the time. So I’m feeling pretty good about that.

On the fitness front, I’m not really doing much. Since I got my Apple Watch in April, I’ve been wearing it every day, and doing my best to meet the activity goals. So I’m making some effort, and I have the watch to help me keep track of what I’m doing. I was doing a lot of walking when the weather was nicer, but I haven’t been terribly active this winter.

Medically, I haven’t had any huge problems this past year, except for the migraines I started getting back in May. I got an MRI done on my brain, but it didn’t find anything interesting. I’ve also been getting more general headaches than I used to. I’ve been dealing with a generally higher level of pain and fatigue this past year, overall, but I’m not sure I can point to anything specific enough to be actionable. Maybe I’m just getting old.

And I’ve still got the neck and back pain that I’ve been living with for a few years now. I did buy a new mattress in June, as I’d planned, but it hasn’t helped me at all. In fact, I think I might need to toss it and try again this year, maybe with something different, like a Casper mattress or something similar.

Speaking of which, my sleep quality recently hasn’t been too bad, but also hasn’t been too good. I’ve been quite good about getting to bed (and getting out of bed) at a consistent time. I’m generally in bed around 10pm and awake at 6am, on both weekdays and weekends. I think I’m doing a lot of things right, in terms of the usual advice you see about limiting screen time before bed, keeping regular hours, and so on. I’ve occasionally had bouts of insomnia in the past year, but I’ve been OK lately. Being in an apartment building on a busy street, there’s a lot of stuff that’s out of my control. But I’m trying to do my best given the environmental constraints.

Blogging and Journaling
I’ve done a fair bit of blogging here this past year. Looking at my stats, I apparently wrote 193 posts in 2016, so that’s a lot. I’ve tried to work in some useful posts, in between the self-absorbed ones. As to journaling, 2016 was the last year in a five-year diary I started back in 2012. I didn’t actually write much in it in 2016, so I think I’m going to quit that and just stick with Day One. I did a fair bit of writing in Day One over the last year, so I think that’s working out well.

Professional / Education
I’m still at SHI, and will hit the four-year mark this month. Things are pretty stable there. I’m still mostly doing Dynamics AX work, but I had an opportunity to work on some SharePoint stuff too, which allowed me to write some C# code, which was nice. And I did learn a lot about SharePoint this past year, which might not be exactly what I’d have chosen to learn, if I had a choice, but it was fun and interesting nevertheless.

I signed up for a Pluralsight subscription last month. We’ll see whether or not I get my money’s worth out of it this year. So far, I’ve just been using it to work through some SharePoint stuff. I hope to find time to use it to learn some of the newer .NET stuff this year. I haven’t done anything at all on EdX or Coursera lately, and I probably won’t in 2017, since I’ve got the Pluralsight subscription.

Organization / GTD
I feel like I’m really in the groove on this stuff lately. One of my projects for 2016 was switching all of my bills over to paperless (finally). I’ve done that, and I’ve kept up with downloading the PDFs, paying the bills, filing them away in subfolders, and all that exciting stuff. I blogged about going paperless in December 2015, and it feels like I’ve done what I wanted to do there, and kept up with everything.

I’m using Evernote pretty effectively too, I think. Though, looking at it now, there’s a bunch of stuff in my “inbox” notebook that I should really do something with. None of it is really important, but I should make up my mind about what I should consider a project and what I should just file away in the “someday/maybe” category.

Summary
It’s now 9:30, so I’ve been working on this for about ninety minutes, which seems like long enough. There’s more I could write, but I’m going to hold off. Looking back through this post, I don’t think I’ve set any really ambitious goals for 2017, but I’m fine with that. I think I mostly want to keep doing a good job at work, keep doing whatever I can on my health, and try to be a good friend and a good citizen. I think 2017 is going to be a challenging year, for everybody, and honestly I’m a little afraid of it. But I’m going to do my best.

Paying for Pluralsight, and other subscriptions

Pluralsight extended their Black Friday sale by a few days, so I gave in and paid for a year last night. Part of my reason for that is that I noticed that there’s a series on SharePoint 2013 programming with JavaScript by David Mann that looks like it might be useful. (Now I just have to convince myself to watch it.)

I was happy to see that they added the paid subscription to the end of my free period, rather than just start it immediately, so it will last until January 2018. I paid for the subscription with a virtual card number, so it won’t auto-renew, so that will give me a chance to think about whether or not I want to continue with it in 2018.

I’m in the middle of listening to a Mac Power Users episode on managing subscriptions, and there’s a few good ideas in there. For stuff that renews annually, my approach is generally to pay for them with a virtual card number or (where possible) a personal check, so they don’t auto-renew. Then, I have to make a conscious decision to evaluate and renew (or not) each year. I also try to keep track of them in Evernote, and set reminders so I know when they’re coming up for renewal.

I tend to review subscriptions at the end of each year, so I might as well do that now. Looking at a few of the big ones, I see that my Office 365 subscription is good until December 2018, so I don’t have to worry about that one for a long time. But my Evernote subscription is set to renew next month, at the $70 “premium” level. I’m still not happy about their increase from $50 to $70, but I do get quite a lot of use out of Evernote, so I’m pretty sure that I’m going to let that one renew. (Though maybe I should read up some more on their iOS app redesign, before I commit to that.)

And I just checked my NY Times subscription. I originally subscribed at a promotional rate of $10.50 every four weeks, for a year. That was in January, so that promotional rate will be over soon. I don’t mind paying that, but I expect that the renewal will be done at whatever the current “regular” rate is. The Times is kind of sketchy about pricing. My account page doesn’t say at what rate the subscription will renew, so I’m not sure if it’ll still be $10.50, or something else. Looking at their current rates (by going to their site in a private browsing window), I think it would be $15 every 4 weeks. And looking at the cost of subscribing through their iOS app, I think I could get a subscription for $130 per year, which comes out to $10 every 4 weeks. So, to get a good rate, I may need to cancel my existing subscription and resubscribe through iOS.

I could choose to look at supporting the Times as being a little like a charitable donation though. I think we’re going to need a robust, independent, (relatively) unbiased press over the next four years. And the Times seems to have gotten under the president-elect’s skin more than any other media outlet. So they’re worth supporting, for that reason, at very least.

Giving Tuesday (a bit late)

Since I posted about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, I figure I should write a Giving Tuesday post too. I’ve been really indecisive about giving to charity, since the election results came in. I think there are a lot of charities that will need help over the next few years, and it’s hard to choose which ones to support.

A friend forwarded me an article from NPR about choosing charities to support this year. It’s somewhat helpful. And there’s Nick Kristof’s annual column about holiday season charitable giving at the NY Times site.

Gratitude

Happy Thanksgiving! Coincidentally (or not), I’ve been thinking about gratitude a bit lately. I stumbled across Berkeley’s Greater Good site recently, and spent some time perusing the gratitude section. The site, at first glance, seems a bit new-agey (or maybe hippy–dippy?), but it appears to be science-based, and might be worth a deeper look.

And I recently listened to an episode of Note to Self featuring Chade-Meng Tan, a former Google employee who has written a couple of books on happiness and mindfulness. I keep telling myself that I need to read up on some of this stuff, and maybe give meditation a try, but I never get around to doing it. (Then, I feel guilty about that, and that’s certainly counter-productive…) Maybe approaching the subject from an engineer’s point of view would make it easier for me to get into? I guess I’ll add his books to the big (virtual) pile of stuff I’d like to read (but probably won’t get around to).

Looking at Facebook this morning, I saw a number of Thanksgiving morning posts, and was struck by how eloquently and genuinely some of my friends expressed their gratitude for family and friends today. I have trouble doing that without working in a degree of sarcasm. The phrase that comes to mind (for some reason) is “sand in the vaseline” which is the title of a Talking Heads best-of compilation (and has nothing to do with anything, really, but that’s how my mind works sometimes).

Regardless of all that, I’m going to be hitting the road soon, driving down to a friend’s house, and we’ll hopefully have a nice little Thanksgiving. I made a sweet potato pie last night, and bought a bottle of Gewürztraminer, so that’s a good start.

Splendid Isolation

A very clever DJ on the radio this morning played Pete Yorn’s version of Splendid Isolation (originally a Warren Zevon song). It seems apropos, after this week’s election results.

David Remnick’s An American Tragedy, from The New Yorker, is a well-written (but fairly depressing) assessment of the situation. Tim Urban’s It’s Going to Be Okay is a bit more hopeful.

Joshua Benton, at Nieman Lab, has written a good overview of the media forces at play in this year’s election. I’ve been reassessing my own consumption of media, though I think I’m probably going to keep reading and watching the same things, for the foreseeable future: The NY Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and PBS NewsHour for “real” news, and The Daily Show, Colbert, and Samantha Bee for “funny” news. I’m thinking about cutting back a bit though, especially in the short term, just to keep from going crazy.

I’m thinking a little bit about religion too, but I’m not at all sure what to do on that front. I think that the Catholic Church is going in the right direction, so that’s a ray of hope.

And a little escapism isn’t a bad thing. (I’m re-watching some of the Harry Potter films this week, for instance. And reading some comics. And listening to some Doctor Who audio dramas.)

And some cosmic perspective might help too:

(I don’t usually try to embed multiple tweets in a blog post, so this may look weird. But hopefully it works ok.)

I’m also thinking about doing something that I haven’t done in a long time: create a mind map. I’ve had a lot of thoughts going through my head about positive things I can do over the next four years, both to stay sane and upbeat, and to help others. But I really need to organize those thoughts. This NY Times Op-Ed piece by the Dalai Lama has given me some additional stuff to think about, but I’m really not sure where to go with it.

Migraines

A few months ago, I had an incident where my vision went all wonky for about 15 minutes, then I got a fairly bad headache right afterward. The vision problem was pretty scary, since I’m at risk for some serious eye problems, but since it cleared up on its own, I knew it wasn’t that. So I figured it was just some kind of weird headache, and forgot about it. Then, it happened again about a month later, then again a month after that. So I went ahead and saw my doctor.

To make a long story short, I guess I have migraines now. Initially, we thought it might be something else, because there’s no history of migraines in my family, and I’m a bit old to start getting migraines out of the blue with no previous experience. But I went for an MRI, and they didn’t find anything else, and said the MRI was consistent with migraines.

It’s been almost a month since my last one, so either I’m due for another one soon, or maybe I’m going to get lucky and they’ll go away on their own. (Yeah, I know that’s not likely.)

I didn’t really know much about migraines before I started getting them. Apparently, what I’m getting is called migraine with aura, and it’s pretty common.

I mentioned the migraines on Facebook, and I’ve gotten a lot of advice, some of which is probably good, and some of which is probably nonsense, but of course it’s hard to tell which is which.

For drugs, my doctor prescribed Imitrex, which appears to be a fairly well-established and safe medicine.  Some friends have recommended Excedrin Migraine, which also sounds like a reasonable thing to try. As long as I’m getting only one migraine a month, I imagine that I should be able to manage things with an occasional Imitrex or Excedrin.

One friend recommended Migravent, which is a supplement containing butterbur, which sounds like something out of a Harry Potter novel, but is actually a plant that might help with both allergies and migraines. The supplement industry, in general, is a poorly-regulated mess, and I take any claims about supplements with a grain of salt. But there does seem to be some indication that butterbur is actually useful. So, eh, maybe I’ll get a bottle of this stuff and give it a try.

There’s a lot of talk online about migraine triggers. So far, if I had to guess what’s triggering my migraines, I’d say exercise and bright light might have something to do with it. All of them happened on days when it was sunny out and I’d done a fair bit of walking outside during the day. The NYT had an article about this recently which indicates that exercise might indeed be a trigger but light probably isn’t. But it doesn’t seem like there’s really enough evidence either way.

I’ve been logging my migraines in Day One, which adds weather info and step count to journal entries, so that’s how I know my migraines happened on sunny days when I’d done a lot of walking. So, if nothing else, I guess this validates my use of Day One.

Oliver Sacks was a migraineur for most of his life, and wrote a book on migraines. I’m not sure I need to read a whole book on the subject, but Sacks is a great writer, so I went ahead and ordered a copy. He also wrote an interesting piece called Patterns, for the NY Times, about the patterns that people see in their migraine auras. It’s fascinating, though I’m hoping I don’t have to deal with these things too often. And that article is part of a blog on migraines at the NYT, which hasn’t been updated in a long time, but which contains a number of other interesting articles.