Sam's L33t Journal

One thing omitted from my last post: I was back in the studio for my trainer sessions this week, after 2.5 years of doing those by video call. I think that will be good for my workouts (it's nice to have the full set of equipment and not deal with the delay of setting up the video connection) and for my work (since the gym is partway to the office).

Erica's school open house was also this week, so it was cool to see her classroom and some of the other facilities. The school seems nice! Last year I wasn't in her classroom at all, and only got to see it through the window.

The weekend was pretty busy. Yesterday, I went to the farmers market in the morning. Then I took Erica for lunch in the North End followed by a visit to the aquarium (stopping at two playgrounds along the way, and returning for ice cream after).

Today, we went to a new crepe place for breakfast, then to the playground across the way, then to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Then Julie took Erica to lunch and the Children's Museum and I went home to do laundry and cook.

The last few weeks back in Cleveland with Erica have been pretty packed. We went to pet the animals at Majestic Meadows Alpacas, walked the corn maze at Lake Farm Park, ate some great ice cream at East Coast Frozen Custard and Kirtland Creamery, went on some hikes. Erica got some time out with both of my parents, including an afternoon at Memphis Kiddie Park. We had shabbat dinner with Dan and Anne and Isaac yesterday, and I got a night out catching up with Markos while my parents did Erica bedtime. Today, I went downtown with Erica and Solomon and we visited West Side Market and went up to the observation deck at Tower City.

And I've managed to get in a bit of reading and games and watching shows, too. Still pretty tired even with the help, Erica is very high energy.

Mostly the weather has been great, a bit hot in the early evening but cooling down later at night. Though I did get caught out in a downpour yesterday after lunch.

Julie seems to be keeping busy, hopefully is making the most of the quiet time at home.

Heading back on Tuesday just before the start of school.

This is a busy bit of summer, I'm handling the early-ish camp pickups for Erica while Julie takes the earlier shift. Trying to get in some family activities and some one-on-one adventures with the kid in between weeks of day camp.

Last weekend, it was very hot. We went to Constitution Beach on Saturday. With the GLX it's a quick ride from our neighborhood. The beach is off of a very sheltered inlet of Boston Harbor, across from the airport. Not a bad spot. It's shallow with no waves to speak of. There's noise from the airport, but it's fun to watch the planes. I need to get some new beach shoes, though, the sand was scalding.

That Sunday, I took Erica to the Legoland Center at Assembly, which was a fun day.

Yesterday afternoon, I took Erica on a New England Aquarium Whale Watch trip out on Stellwagen Bank. The weather was perfect, with flat, calm seas, and we got some great views of several humpback whales, including a mother-calf pair. The calf came very close to the boat (even up on deck we might have been within 20 feet?), and it's amazing to see such a large animal up close.

Today will be a quieter day. Next week maybe I'll try to arrange a family trip to George's Island?

Another post that's many posts because I don't get around to things. Let's see...

Father's Day was last weekend, and Erica planned quite an exciting day for us (including drawing out a map of the day's adventures). We went to a yakitori restaurant at Assembly for lunch, headed down to the Boston location of Taiyaki NYC for ice cream, and then went to the Children's Museum for some family time (where Erica and Julie enjoyed making origami by the Japanese House, Julie's really good at it).

Erica went to climbing camp at Boston Bouldering Project this week and really enjoyed it.

Today, Julie and Erica left early in the morning to visit Julie's family, giving me a few days of blissful alone time. (I'll be taking kid in turn and visiting my parents at the end of the summer.) I went to the aquarium by myself today (very relaxing), played a bit of Ingress, had some nice food.

Transit in Boston is currently completely screwed by a construction site disaster at the Haymarket Garage demolition partially closing several T routes and service cuts by the short-staffed MBTA in the aftermath of several accidents. At least the weekend closures of one of the airport tunnels has been delayed. First train from Union no-showed at the scheduled time this morning, causing Julie some stress. At least they made it to the airport.

Watching the January 6th hearings has been really interesting. Thought a lot of it would be old news, but there are still new things coming out of the investigation. For example, it was news to me that Trump was far enough in a plan to replace the head of the DOJ with someone who would go along with his "just declare the election corrupt" plan (to the point of prematurely referring to Clark at the "Acting Attorney General" in WH logs) and that he was dissuaded by the prospect of mass resignations. Also notable that several members of Congress explicitly asked for Presidential pardons. (Gaetz in particular was especially eager to get a blanket pardon for absolutely everything for all time.) That last impeachment may have actually done some good in preventing a post-coup pardon spree. Certainly would have been a bad look.

The rest of politics was mostly a cavalcade of the most extreme conservative activism in Supreme Court rulings: Limiting people's recourse if they are not informed of their Miranda rights, declaring gun restrictions like those in NY and MA unconstitutional (and basically all gun restrictions presumptively unconstitutional, possibly including the very minimal bipartisan bill just passed by the Senate), requiring that state money go to religious schools if charter schools are allowed (with that if next up on the chopping block), and of course, overturning Roe v. Wade.

Coercing someone into carrying a pregnancy to term for any reason is tyrannical. The restrictions enabled by the Dobbs ruling will lead to egregious violations of privacy and liberty. They will also require people to wait to no benefit until impending medical emergencies become actual ones. (Or even until actual medical emergencies reach a final, fatal resolution.) They will require people to take on risks that far exceed the baseline risk of pregnancy (e.g. being forced to put off treatment for cancer or other serious disease). They will prevent women from accessing necessary medical care after miscarriages, and require them to carry to term pregnancies that are not viable. They will restrict access to birth control and fertility treatments.

It's a disaster, and Thomas's concurrence with the ruling makes it clear that they're coming after Obergefell and Lawrence and even Griswold next. He makes it clear that he wants to get rid of the idea of substantive due process entirely. The originalist view leads to a very anemic version of constitutional protections, protecting just the liberty people from centuries past enumerated, as enjoyed by just the people they considered worthy of consideration. Except it's not even that. Judges are generally not historians, and we're ruled not just by originalism but shitty originalism. (e.g. it's not just interpreting the law as if it were still 1791 or 1868 or whatever (which it's not), but specifically a cherry-picked version of that which flatters the biases of J Thomas et al.)

It's been a tiring week. Julie's been so busy. But she did take Eris out this morning to get a gift for a school-friend's upcoming birthday. I went to the farmers market this morning and got a variety of nice things.

I've been meaning to return to my essay blog, and I wrote a brief piece this morning about the topic of imagination in children's television.

Current events are very sad. Apropos of potentially lots of things (news, the upcoming Memorial Day holiday, increased general awareness of history), kid has developed a strong interest in past calamity, asking e.g. what's the worst disaster to ever happen in Boston, or who was the worst person to exist during my lifetime, or what would happen to someone if deprived of necessities (sleep, water, food, etc.). It's not like she can escape awareness that people die, that evil people exist, that no one is invincible or invulnerable to misfortune and tragedy. I don't want to be unwilling to talk about hard topics, but I also don't want to dwell on bad things, or to frighten with gruesome and unlikely possibilities. I want to share my overall sense of optimism. People are resilient, life is good even in the face of tragedy (though it's right and natural to want more), "look for the helpers".

First hot weekend of the year, and a busy one.

Yesterday was the first day for the Union Square Farmers Market. I've been looking forward to that so much. It was back to the parking lot at the Union Square Plaza, the 2020 layout. Some of the less-effective communicable disease mitigation have been ditched, and face-masks are required only for the first hour. There's still hand sanitizer at the entrance, which seems like a good idea in general.

(It's not that surprising that the location changed back. 2021's plan of "close part of Somerville Avenue in the middle of every Saturday" was quite surprising to be able to pull off for even one year. Maybe next year it will be spread out over the plaza again in the 2019 configuration.)

Later, we had lunch at Bronwyn with a school acquaintance of Julie's who'd just recently moved to town. Somerville Porchfest, the city-wide music festival, was in the afternoon, and Erica's school friend's family was hosting their dad's band and having a potluck dinner after. Porchfest turns the whole city into a sprawling party that rolls across town, and people were out in Union and Prospect listening to music, enjoying the weather, picnicking, selling lemonade, and flagrantly violating those stringent open-container rules. (Legalize having a beer in the park!) The potluck had enough food to feed several armies (I brought rolls from the farmers market), and Eris had fun playing with several of her school friends.

Today, I made beer-can chicken, something I'd been thinking about doing again this winter but failed to get around to. I cooked a whole chicken from Stillman that I picked up at the farmers market. And Eris had a birthday party to attend, at Prospect Hill Playground.

Last week was record-setting-by-far in terms of how many COVID cases were caught in testing at kid's school. It seems that we've wandered from "the CDC isn't recommending masking anymore" to "okay, so they are recommending masking again, but the time for expecting anyone to do anything in particular is over". People have baked in the assumption that the second Omicron wave can't be worse, but the numbers only look a hair different from five or six weeks short of the previous peak.

In addition to case counts, I really wish I had more data on repeat cases: Percentage of all cases, distribution of time since last case, correlation with severity of last case. Would help us know what we're in for.

Kid bedtime changes are doing well. Still high intensity, but at least we're getting more sleep. Work has been high intensity, too, but overall going well. Had a nice team week onsite at our office for the wider Android Stylus Team.

Anyways, I keep putting off writing and then trying to reconstruct my thoughts instead of just, you know, write about what's going on, so skipping over a lot of things to about the present.

We're currently all in Cleveland for kid's April break, visiting my parents, and it's been 2.5 years since we were last all here. Nice to be here for Passover. And my sister, Melissa, is visiting with her family, too. So I get to spend some time with my new baby nephew, Simon, which is really great!

Travel went smoothly. Nice to take the new Green line connection on our way to the airport. We ran into one of Eris's school friends in the terminal, which was cool. COVID situation still looks very alarming, though how bad is still TBD. At least we escaped getting sick pre-trip. (Very much hope during as well!) I'm very glad to be here, but also feeling very exhausted. Travel is always pretty tiring for me, and I was pretty tired to begin with.

All right, I guess I'll loop back to some recollection:

My indie tabletop RPG group has been playing Sig: City of Blades (a Blades in the Dark-style with a setting that's a bit of of off-brand Planescape). It's been fun so far.

I've been able to have some fun playing Magic: Arena, though I can't build all the decks I want to and I've been perma-stuck at Platinum rank in constructed.

I finished watching Eighty-Six, and thought it was pretty good. Doesn't overreach with it's ending, but I think it earned a little dwelling on its epilogues.

I had the mushroom sunchoke sandwich at Clover on Monday, and it was really stand-out amazing. Tender and savory mushrooms, crispy bits of fried sunchoke, fresh greens, sharp cheddar, fresh-baked pita.

I'm always extremely impressed with Clover. They're a vegetarian fast-casual chain (originally just food trucks, now a lot of brick-and-mortar restaurants as well) that uses local ingredients, develops their own point-of-sale infrastructure, prototypes and iterates like the best of tech startups. It's always just so organized, and the employees seem at the top of their game. Local chef luminary Jason Bond joined them recently while between locations for his restaurant, and while it must be quite a change of pace going from fine-dining to fast-casual, so many of the qualities of Clover seem like they'd make a fine-dining chef feel right at home.

In other sandwich news, I made sloppy joes for the first time on Tuesday, served them with oven fried potatoes and cheesy broccoli. Easy and a crowd-pleaser. Even picky Eris ate some, though she objected to the bits of onion.

So we're travelling for the winter holidays and visiting Julie's family for the first time in two years. If I'd made the plans in December rather than November, they probably would have been different. But ultimately I couldn't put Eris through the last-minute cancellation of her holiday plans after all she's been through so far. So it's down to vaccines and masks and tests and hope. At least we're not going to Cleveland.

It has been very wonderful seeing Julie's family, including meeting the twins in person for the first time. We're staying with Julie's parents (who bought a new house very close to Julie's sister, Kristin), and Kristin and Jimmy are hosting some of Jimmy's family. We had a nice Christmas dinner, and celebrated the twins' birthday, and went to a drive-through holiday lights event at the Dallas Zoo.

I'm trying to relax a bit before I return to town and start on my new team at work. I did bring my work laptop this time (I usually don't) in case our return ends up delayed.

Loyal Nine in Cambridge is closing. Another favorite gone. I wonder what will be there next. The space is so incredible, if another restaurant doesn't take up the mantle it will be a real shame. Anyways I spent the whole weekend pretty bummed out about that, though we did go there for a last brunch. Service was very slow and lobster popovers were no longer on the menu. It was still very good, but it had a feeling of "the best is behind and the days are numbered". So many fond memories.

We also went to Julie's company holiday party Saturday night, which was at an investor's apartment at the top of Boston's Millennium Tower. Was fun, the view was incredible. The second in-person social event I've been at since the start of the pandemic.

Eris stayed home with her babysitter, Mary, who brought over a gingerbread house to decorate. Eris was delighted with the project, which they decorated very elaborately. (She was just as excited to demolish the creation, which ended up broken down into quite a few gingerbread breakfasts.)

Anyways, on Monday I got word from Julie that she and her co-founder had been invited on a cross-country jaunt for a get-together with some of their investors and assorted VIPs. Seems like an incredible trip, obviously if I were in her shoes I wouldn't want to miss it and it's big for the company, too. So I wish I'd been able to suppress my annoyance at having a few days of solo-parenting dropped on me on a few hours notice. As it was, I was angsty for a bit before I got over it. The thing with startup life is that it's always important.

The solo parenting has gone swimmingly. We've been watching some of Netflix's School of Chocolate, a cooking class/competition taught/hosted by Amaury Guichon (a genius pastry chef who creates desserts like this and chocolate showpieces like this). Eris loves it.

Also, it looks like team transfer at work is going to happen for real. Uncomfortably excited.