Category: personal

sick again

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

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

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

A Weird Week

Well, that was a weird week, wasn’t it? In addition to the election, I was supposed to go back into the office last week, on Thursday. The plan was for normal employees to start coming back one day a week. But we had a couple of COVID cases at the office, plus with New Jersey’s increasing number of cases overall, that plan got altered, so now I can continue working from home for the foreseeable future. So that’s good, I guess. (I mean, it would better if we didn’t have any cases at the office, and if NJ overall was doing better, but given the circumstances, I’m glad the company adjusted the plan.)

The big news this week of course is Biden being declared the winner over Trump, finally, yesterday. A lot of people were very happy about that, judging by my Twitter and Facebook feeds, and also judging by some of the activity out on Main St yesterday. I’m glad, and relieved, but only just barely optimistic. (I could probably write at length about that, but I probably shouldn’t. Let’s just say that a lot can still go wrong, and that a lot needs to be done before we can get back to anything resembling normal.)

It was a beautiful day yesterday, which probably helped everyone’s mood. A lot of people were out on Main St., and there was a lot of music and noise on and off throughout the day. (The annoying guy who plays saxophone outside my apartment was back yesterday, and played until after 10 PM, so that kind of sucked, but I guess I can’t blame him for trying to make some money while the weather was nice and everyone was happy.)

My friend Paul stopped by yesterday, and we went out for dinner, eating outside at a Korean restaurant on Main St. That was the first time I’ve eaten at a restaurant since the pandemic began. It was pretty weird, but it felt really good to do it.

I also ordered a new Apple Watch this week, and picked it up at the Apple Store at the local mall yesterday. I’d been thinking about getting one, and finally talked myself into it. I bought a new Series 6, to replace my Series 3. I got the Series 3 a little less than two years ago, for Christmas in 2018. So I feel a little bad about replacing it when it’s less than two years old. But, still, I’ve skipped the 4 and 5, so it’s a big enough jump that I don’t feel too bad about it. I’ll probably post more about the Watch later, after I’ve had it on my wrist for long enough to form some opinions.

Overall, yesterday turned out to be a fairly hectic day, with much more time spent outside the apartment than usual, and a lot more human contact than usual. I’m hoping that doesn’t result in me getting another cold, or even worse. We’ll see. My plans for today are not terribly ambitious. It looks like it’ll be another nice day, so I will probably go for a walk after I’m done with this blog post. Then maybe I’ll just relax and do some reading, and maybe watch a movie.

Halloween Blues

I’ve been feeling sick since Wednesday afternoon. I’m pretty sure I caught a cold Wednesday morning, probably when I brought my car in for an oil change. That’s pretty much the only time I was out of the apartment and around other people since last weekend. This is the second cold I’ve gotten this autumn. The last one was only about two weeks ago, and this feels pretty much the same. This time, I took a whole day off from work, on Friday. So, between that and the general situation, I’m not really in a festive Halloween mood.

I ordered my groceries from Whole Foods last night, since I didn’t want to have to go to ShopRite today if I was still feeling sick. I usually select the 8-10 AM delivery window when I order from them, but they only showed the 6-8 AM window as open, so I picked that, and hoped the guy wouldn’t show up right at 6. Well, he did actually show up exactly at 6:01 AM. Luckily, I’d gotten out of bed at 5:30 AM and had just gotten out of the shower when he called to get buzzed in to the building. So that worked out well. I opened my apartment door at 6:05 to see five bags of groceries right outside. I’ve had mixed success with delivery from Whole Foods, but this time it worked out reasonably well. They only had to make one substitution, and they didn’t skip any items at all. And nothing was messed up. The eggs are all whole, the bread wasn’t squashed, and all the produce looks OK. I don’t think I want to go with that 6 AM delivery option again though. That’s just too early.

So now it’s 9 AM, and my laundry and grocery shopping are all done, and I can probably just spend the rest of the day reading comics and napping. I might as well add a few random items to this blog post before I give up and take a nap.

I’ve mentioned Evernote a few times recently here. Since the last time I mentioned it, I’ve upgraded to the new client on my main desktop PC, but not yet on my Mac. So I’ve got the new client everywhere but the Mac. I’ve hit a few bugs and annoyances, but they’re pushing out new versions frequently, and at least one or two of my issues have already been fixed. So, as of now, I still plan on sticking with Evernote.

I did take a look at Notion recently though. I hadn’t previously considered that as an Evernote replacement, largely because I didn’t know that they had a Windows version. Their home page only shows screenshots from iOS and macOS, but if you dig a bit, there is a mention of a Windows client. Their desktop app is definitely an Electron app (as is Evernote’s new app), so switching to Notion wouldn’t resolve any issues/annoyances that are due to Electron. Still, I might sign up for a free account and mess around with it a bit, if I have time.

I’m still having fun with Apple Music. I’ve been listening to some jazz and classical this week, including Louis Armstrong’s Satch Plays Fats and Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach: Unaccompanied Cello Suites. So, yeah, I guess I’ve finally given in and accepted that streaming music services are fine, and I’ll be paying for one. Once my six-month free period is over, I might even go ahead and sign up for the individual Apple One bundle.

 

Splendid isolation

Sometimes, I take a little time and go through my unread Pinboard links, and try to clean them up a bit, deleting some if they’re no longer applicable, and maybe reading a few random articles that I’d bookmarked long ago. Today, I stumbled across this one: Splendid isolation: how I stopped time by sitting in a forest for 24 hours, a fairly long article from The Guardian that I’d bookmarked back in January.

I know the phrase Splendid isolation as the title of a Warren Zevon song, but apparently it’s a term “used to describe the 19th-century British diplomatic practice of avoiding permanent alliances,” according to Wikipedia. (And I see I’ve referenced the song previously on this blog.)

Anyway, that article from January predates the pandemic, of course. The concept of “isolation” in general has cropped up a lot this year. I’ve been following Suleika Jaouad’s Isolation Journals, for instance, though I’ve fallen behind in reading those emails, so they’re piling up in my “read/review” folder, along with a bunch of other stuff.

Isolation has come up in some music I’ve listened to this year, including this Music For Isolation project and this Isolate With compilation. I’m also kind of interested in Ulrich Schnauss’ ‎A Strangely Isolated Place. It’s an older album, but I’ve only started to listen to Schnauss recently. I don’t suppose there’s much point in just linking to a bunch of music with the word “isolation” in the title, but it amused me for a few minutes, and it’s all good music.

Anyway, the article I started this blog post with is a pretty good one and has got me thinking about my relationship to time right now. It definitely changes, when you’re home all day and the lines between home and office pretty much disappear. I find myself getting distracted a lot and then feeling guilty for not getting enough work done. And I’m trying to impose some discipline on my “free time” also, feeling guilty if I don’t make some progress in a book I’m reading, or fall too far behind on a TV show I’m watching, or whatever. I feel that I need to try to maintain a certain schedule and a certain amount of discipline to keep myself sane and on track, but it’s starting to wear me down.

I have several vacation days left that I have to use up before the end of the year. I’ve scheduled a full week off in early December. In any other year, I’d have plenty of interesting things to do with a week off. But this year, a lot of my usual options are either closed off or a bit too risky for me right now. I kind of like the idea of disappearing into the woods for a day and just sitting in a circle and doing nothing for 24 hours. But that’s maybe a little too extreme for me. Maybe just having a full week where I don’t have to get through work every day will be enough to let me hit the reset button on my anxiety, at least a bit. Maybe I can relax into some unstructured randomness. (Though I suspect the results of the election will affect my anxiety level, for better or worse, more than any amount of vacation time will.)

Afternoon Walk

I’ve been going out for walks nearly every day since the pandemic began, and taking photos. I haven’t posted any of the photos to Flickr since May, though. So here are a few photos from a walk I went on this afternoon. It was a nice autumn afternoon walk. (I’m trying an embedded album below, which might or might not look OK here. If it isn’t working, try this link.)

I had my Airpods in, and was listening to Invisible Man, which I started in May, and still haven’t finished yet. (I’m just at the part where he realizes that he can be invisible, so I’m getting near the end.) I don’t usually listen to audiobooks while I’m walking. Usually I go with music or podcasts. But I really felt like making some progress with Invisible Man today, so I gave it a try. It worked out OK. I managed to give enough attention to the book, and also managed to not get hit by a truck while crossing any streets.

afternoon walk 10/24/2020

NJ MVC, IFTTT, RSS, and other acronyms

This post may wind up covering a variety of barely-related topics. I have a bunch of stuff in my head today and I’m making connections between things that might not make much sense. Buy anyway…

I had to renew the registration for my car recently. I normally do that by mail, and I did that again this year, and got the registration card back, no problem. But then I got a letter saying that NJ MVC had undercharged me by $7 due to a computer glitch and I’d have to pay that. The letter didn’t really include any helpful information about how to submit that $7 to them. It wouldn’t let me do it online. And there was no indication that they’d accept it by mail. I definitely don’t want to go near an MVC office right now, since they’ve been mobbed ever since they reopened in July. (Apparently, the line at the Somerville MVC starts forming at 4 AM every day.) I really wasn’t sure what to do, but thankfully I found an article on nj.com today explaining the problem and indicating that it was OK to mail in the $7, and gave the address to send it to.

NJ.com has been reasonably useful throughout the pandemic. They’ve run a lot of good, useful, articles. (Mind you, they also run a lot of nonsense and clickbait.) They started asking people to pay $10/month to subscribe to the site at some point earlier this year, and I thought about doing it. But I couldn’t quite talk myself into it. First, there’s the aforementioned nonsense and clickbait. Then, there’s the worry that they won’t make it easy to cancel.

In the past, I’ve often used virtual credit card numbers when I’m subscribing to something that might be hard to cancel. Citi used to have a good program for virtual card numbers, including a Windows program that you could use to generate them on the fly and copy them into forms on web pages. But that program stopped working a while back. And the web-based version relied on Flash, and I don’t have any browsers left on any of machines that are still running Flash. So I kind of gave up on them.

I saw an announcement today from 1Password saying that they were going to start integrating with privacy.com to allow users to generate virtual card numbers right from 1Password. That sounded promising, but it draws from your bank account, and not from a real credit card. So it seems like there could be complications there. But that got me thinking about virtual card numbers again, so I checked Citi’s web site, and found that they’ve finally rewritten their virtual card functionality to work without Flash. (They’ve also eliminated the Windows program, which is a bummer, but I was expecting that.)

And I saw that NJ.com recently added an option to pay $100 for a full year, rather that $10/month. So I went ahead and paid for a year of NJ.com with a virtual card number. I figure their article explaining the $7 MVC mess was worth at least $20 to me. And somebody’s got to pay for all of their articles on pork roll sandwiches and ranked lists of 326 Bruce Springsteen songs, so it might as well be me. A year from now, I’ll figure out if I want to pay for another year.

Overall, I’ve been struggling with how to both consume and support local news during the pandemic. I generally watch NJTV News every night. Their newscast is pretty good and covers a lot of NJ news, but it’s mostly political state-level stuff. I don’t currently support NJTV or Thirteen, and I probably should. I watch enough stuff on PBS that I should toss them $5/month, at least.

I’ll also occasionally look at MyCentralJersey.com, which covers some local Somerset county news, but they’re hiding a lot of stuff behind a paywall now. They have a deal for $39 for one year, and I might go ahead and pay for that with a virtual card too.

I try to get a lot of my news through email and RSS. I use IFTTT to set up some email stuff, and The Old Reader to manage my RSS feeds (along with Reeder on iOS). IFTTT has recently introduced Pro subscriptions, and I would need to start paying for Pro to keep doing some of the stuff I’m currently doing with the service. I don’t really want to do that, so I’ve been looking at shifting more stuff into The Old Reader. But I hadn’t really looked too closely at IFTTT Pro. I just noticed a blog post from David Sparks that’s got me a little more interested in it. It sounds like they might be adding enough value to make it worth the minimum $2/month that you can pay for Pro under their current “set your own price” plan. It’s not quite clear, but maybe you can actually write code as part of Pro applets? That would be useful.

So, yeah, this is me going down a bunch of rabbit holes and thinking about spending a bunch of money. I should probably stop now.

six months

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we’re just hitting the six month mark on this whole COVID-19 thing here in the US. March 12 was my last day in the office. I took March 13 as a vacation day. Then, we started working from home on Monday, March 16. And my company is still working from home, with plans now to return to the office in November, with managers coming in two days a week and the rest of us coming in only one day a week. This is probably the fifth “return to office” plan we’ve had. The last one had us all returning in October, two days a week. I’m not complaining or criticizing; no one is having an easy time figuring this thing out, and I’m glad my employer hasn’t forced us to come back too early. But it seems like, through the whole pandemic, we’re always just about a month away from returning to “normal,” but we never quite get there. I’m only now really starting to see that, and thinking about things I could be doing differently, treating work from home as “normal” rather than “temporary”. So that’s all a lot of wind-up to say that I finally broke down and ordered a new USB headset for home use. (There’s still one sitting on my desk at work, but they haven’t allowed us to go back in and clean out our desks. I put in a request to do that, but I guess it’s stalled somewhere, since I haven’t gotten a response to it.)

I ordered the headset from Best Buy, since they had it in stock to ship right away, while Amazon still has a one-month wait on USB headsets, at least for the model I wanted. That turned out to be a bit dangerous, since it also led to me poking around in their Blu-ray selection, which led to me buying four Miyazaki SteelBook Blu-rays, plus the 25th Anniversary Ghost in the Shell Blu-ray SteelBook, and pre-ordering the Weathering With You Blu-ray SteelBook. I’m not particularly attached to SteelBooks, but they do look nice, and the Miyazaki ones were only $18 each. (Apparently, they’re also $18 at Amazon right now.) The Ghost in the Shell one was also only $18. Weathering With You was more expensive, but still reasonable. So now I have a bunch of new anime discs to watch. (Even though most of them are movies I’ve already seen multiple times.)

Yesterday, I watched a bit of DC FanDome and some of NCSFest. This second day of FanDome was done differently from the first day, last month, where they actually had a schedule, kind of like a real con. This time, they just dumped all the video content out there at 1 PM Eastern time, and left it up until 1 PM today. So you could watch whatever you want, whenever you want. The content was really a hodgepodge of random stuff. I’m pretty sure most of it was recorded at least a month ago. And there wasn’t really much content around the actual comic books. But I did watch a nice panel discussion with Brian Bendis, Gene Yang, and Dan Jurgens, talking about Superman. The feeling I’m getting out of DC Comics right now is that they’re really hitting the brakes on a lot of stuff and pulling back on things. I think that a lot of the FanDome content was prepared before the layoffs last month, so it’s not really reflecting the actual state of things at DC right now. I’m not really sure what DC is going to look like at the end of this year, but it’ll probably be a lot different from the way they looked at the beginning of this year, before Dan DiDio left, and COVID-19 hit, and all the layoffs happened.

NCSFest was done as one long live stream, via YouTube. They had a number of panels, interspersed with announcements of the Reuben awards. The whole nine-hour stream is available to watch on YouTube now. If you wanted to find a particular panel, I guess you could check the schedule, then do a little math and fast-forward to it. I watched a bit of the “From Panels to Publishing” panel, some of the Jim Davis panel, and some of the Mutts panel. All of them were fun to watch. Cartoonists are generally pretty cool, chill, funny people. NCS is really a professional organization, so the content isn’t necessarily geared towards fans, or towards self-promotion, more towards actual cartoonists. For me, that makes it even more fun. But if you don’t want to hear Lynn Johnston and Patrick McDonnell talking about what brand of ink they use, then it’s probably not for you.

I guess that’s my ramblings for today. There’s maybe not much value in any of this for anyone else, but writing these posts helps me get through things. Tomorrow starts another week of sitting alone in my apartment, staring at a computer screen, trying to do my job without going nuts. If random blogging about comics and anime helps, I’m going to keep doing it.

Labor Day

So, here it is, Labor Day. If you’d told me back in March that I’d still be working from home in September, and too afraid to take NJ Transit into NYC to visit a few museums on Labor Day, I’d… well, I’d be a little depressed but I probably wouldn’t be that surprised. I didn’t initially expect this thing to last so long, but there were good reasons to suspect that it would be around at least until the end of 2020, even back in March. I was ruminating in my last post about whether or not I could talk myself into going into NYC today; I’ve definitely given up on that idea.

Walking


I’ve been going out for a morning walk nearly every day since the beginning of this thing in March. That habit has been one of the bright spots of the last several months. I’ve gotten into the habit of taking a few photos on my walks and picking one of them to save to Day One, along with a short journal entry, usually just a sentence of two. Day One tracks streaks, if you post to it every day, and my current streak is nearing 200 days. (Looking back, it appears that my current streak started on March 10, just before the pandemic lockdown.) I post about other stuff in Day One too, but I almost always start the day with a photo from my walk.

Often I just walk a circuit down Main St, up one of the side streets, then down High Street, back to Main St, and back to my front door. I can get a good 20-minute, 1-mile walk out of that. On weekends, though, I’ll often walk along the Peters Brook Greenway. I can get some nice photos along there. I took the hibiscus photo in this post yesterday morning, just about one minute before getting bitten by a mosquito. That mosquito bite bothered me a lot more than it should have. I’d gotten so used to getting into a nice relaxed state on these walks, and it’s been so long since I’ve been bitten by a mosquito, that I took it as something of a personal affront. And of course my mind started playing out all sorts of nightmare scenarios. (Can you get COVID-19 from a mosquito bite? Almost definitely not. Whew.) But I got back out there this morning and did a nice 40-minute walk along the Greenway again. This time, though, I tried to keep a little further away from the water.

Reading

I really didn’t do anything much useful yesterday, and I don’t plan on doing much today either. Yesterday, I read the “City of Bane” issues of Batman, which were the end of Tom King’s run on the title. My Goodreads review for the second half of that story nearly turned into a long essay on the Trump presidency, but I held myself back. Finishing that story got me thinking about King’s run on Batman, which started with the DC Rebirth event from the summer of 2016, which was of course just a few months before the 2016 election. That got me thinking about how much the world has changed over the last four years, and especially over the last six months. And how much it might change over the next, say, six months, or four years. I’d started reading monthly comics again in 2016 with the DC Rebirth event, and have keep reading them, though I’ve dropped Batman and Detective recently and I don’t have any titles on my current subscription list that were on it back in 2016. And I’m thinking of dropping monthly books entirely again. (But this is a subject I’ve blogged about too many times.)

Listening

Bandcamp has continued to do their Bandcamp Friday thing, where they waive their revenue share and give all the money from sales to the musicians. I last bought anything from them in June, so I was overdue to spend some money on music. I wound up spending around $75 this past Friday, buying seven albums (all digital), including something called Good Music to Avert the Collapse of American Democracy, a compilation benefiting the voting rights group Fair Fight. So I hope my $20 helps, though I’m not optimistic about the future of American democracy, to be honest.

almost the end of summer

Well, here it is, almost Labor Day, and almost six months since the COVID-19 stuff started. Things are continuing to open up a bit more. I went for a haircut on Saturday, my first since February. I’ve been trimming my own hair since then, and honestly not doing the best job. Since my regular barber decided to retire during the pandemic shutdown, I had to go to Sport Clips, which was… ok, but not really the same quality as the 80-year-old Italian barber I’ve been going to for the last 20 years. NJ has also recently allowed gyms to reopen, and will be allowing limited indoor dining starting this weekend.

I haven’t been keeping really close track of what’s going on with school reopenings, but I actually saw a crossing guard out this morning, so I guess at least some schools around here are open now, for (presumably) some in-person instruction.

The Met and MoMA are both open now. As I mentioned last month, I’ve really been missing my visits to both of those museums. Here’s a post from a year ago today, talking about a couple of my NYC museum visits from last summer. Sigh. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to try going into NYC this weekend, but I’m still toying with the idea. It’s tempting. I haven’t really done much of anything this summer, aside from work, exercise, reading, and watching TV. (Well, and sleeping and eating too, I guess.) I haven’t traveled more than 15 miles from my home since March. And I only went that far for doctor’s visits.

Here’s an article from the Washington Post, by someone who went to the Met and MoMA right after they reopened. And here’s a visitor’s guide from the NY Times, with some information on the current exhibits at the Met and MoMA, and the new rules for getting in. It looks like they’re both open Sunday and Monday (Labor Day), so… maybe I can talk myself into it. Or maybe I should just order myself copies of Making The Met, 1870–2020 and MoMA Now, and stay home and enjoy the museums from afar.

Five months and counting

We’ve just passed the five month mark since this whole COVID-19 thing kicked into high gear. My last day in the office was Thursday March 12. I took Friday March 13 off and, at that time, wasn’t even sure if we were going to be allowed to work from home the following week. Well, we were, and I’ve been working from home since. At the end of May, it looked like we might have to come back in August. That got pushed to September, and has now been pushed to October 5. Meanwhile, I never even got a chance to clean out my desk, so it’s probably still cluttered with a desk calendar stuck at March 12, a few boxes of granola bars that likely expired a month or two ago, and random scribbled notes from whatever I was working on in March. (The wasted granola bars bother me more than they probably should.) It seems like we’ve been living in a state of denial through this whole thing, where we’re always a month away from reopening everything, but that date keeps getting pushed back.

I’ve really been missing my trips into New York to visit The Met and MoMA. The Met is supposed to be reopening on August 27 for members and August 29 for the public, and MoMA plans to open on August 27. I don’t think I’m ready to go in to New York yet though. I’m not ready to deal with NJ Transit, Newark Penn Station, the NYC subway, or all of the extra stuff that would be involved in getting into and moving through the museums. But I’m tempted to give it a try. I spent a little time last night thinking through it, but couldn’t really come up with a plan that sounded like it would be both safe and fun.

One thing that’s probably a bright spot is how well the S&P 500 is doing right now. It’s at a new record high, which should probably make me happy, given how much of my retirement money is in S&P 500 index funds. But it’s a little unnerving for some reason. Maybe I just don’t know how to process good news? Or I just don’t trust anything that looks like it might be good news?

I have a bunch of other stuff I wanted to blog about, including some tech stuff and some comic book stuff, but I should really stop now and plop myself down in front of the TV and relax for a bit.