Sam's L33t Journal

Erica had a dentist appointment this morning. They took full-jaw x-rays this time. The images are pretty cool to look at, since you can see exactly where the remaining baby teeth are, with adult teeth lined up beneath them. They recommended she get a consult with an orthodontist about an underbite. In the lead-up to this, Erica seems to have take a special interest in braces and is talking up how much she wants to get them, which seems kind of odd.

(Speaking of Erica special interests, she had a class field trip last week to Plimoth Patuxet and has also been talking about that frequently. Apparently she really wants to go again as soon as she can.)

The dentist's office is right across the street from Mount Auburn Cemetary, which is really beautiful, and I convinced Erica to take a brief walk around the nearby portion before her visit this time.

The rest of the day was pretty busy. Erica's friend George was over to our house again this evening, and I made mac and cheese for the kids. They played a trivia game that Julie picked up from some bargain bin and also a bit of Mario Kart. Though Erica is getting good at the game, she's still easily frustrated when something goes wrong.

I've been on the tail end of a chain of colds for some time now. I feel pretty well today, but the last bit of residual congestion is still really annoying.

Thanksgiving break went well. The travel was pleasant, and it was great to see my parents and siblings. My nephew, Simon, is two now and talking quite a bit and seemed excited to see us. We all went to the children's museum and he had a blast.

I've been so, so busy at work and on the home-front, both with condo logistics (hassling people about getting snow removal figured out as winter disaster impends) and with the usual cleaning / organizing / planning for the household.

I know I had more to write but I'm too tired to recall.

I did get a post written on my essay blog (complexmeme_feed) the other week, about Effective Altruism. Maybe I'll get around to updating that more than once a year, or maybe not.

Summer isn't done with us yet.

I've got this Nest thermostat, and if you're not familiar with that sort of "smart" thermostat, it does two things re AC in the summer:

1. Try to learn what temperature you like it.

2. Set it to much warmer than that temperature to save you money.

The feature that sets it warmer when you're actually not in the house is fine, but the "rush hour" feature that sets it a little warmer at "peak" times (i.e. when you, too, most want your air well conditioned) is a bit more aggravating. This year especially. It seems to me like in past years it would set things a few degrees higher, but when my schedule says 73 and the thermostat is like "how about 79?" that seems a bit much.

Actually, there are a lot of ways I wish Nest was a bit smarter. There's no way for it to look at my calendar and pre-cool/warm the house when I get back from a vacation. Or even have me tell it when I'm getting back manually and have it take that into account. It doesn't adjust the schedule to my preferences that well. It supports multiple temperature sensors, but only supports looking at one at a time and only can switch between on a fixed schedule. It can't do anything based on the difference in temperatures (in particular, I'd like it to run the fan if only some of the sensors are as cool as I want). The fan can be run automatically if it wouldn't otherwise be on, but only on a fixed schedule.

All right, enough rambling on that topic. Summer is coming to an end one way or another. My mom brought Erica back to town, had a wonderful time doing stuff together, she got to go to school dropoff for Erica's first day of second grade. Then she got COVID after returning home. At least she's feeling better after a prompt course of Paxlovid. We haven't gotten sick yet, but school year's started and stuff is going around.

Had a good long weekend with some extra climbing and a trip to the Science Museum. Also took Erica to the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum (touristy, but educational, hadn't been in ages). Erica -acted very closed-off and shy, but then said she enjoyed it.

This week, some of the computer systems are down at kid's school after some sort of security issue (a ransomware attack, maybe, they haven't been real forthcoming with the details).

I had one of Erica's friends over on Tuesday and Erica's at his house today. Nice to have a break, but sometimes I get stressed out when I have a break. So much to do, so little time. (And yet I manage to get to some things, like hammering some words onto the virtual page here. It's good.)

I'm enjoying the new Magic set, though I feel like I haven't figured out a deck to do well in new Standard. Want to play some limited of the new set, haven't had the time.

Also been really enjoying the Netflix One Piece. I'm not real familiar with the anime or manga, but people more familiar seem to think it's a good adaptation in addition to being generally good. Amazing how well you can do with that sort of thing when the people doing the adapting clearly like the source material and understand why it's good.

I was up a bit late with Erica last night after Julie ducked out for early bed, and Erica was very upset about something about a game; big feelings about little problems. But eventually she helped me finish cooking a batch of beans (which I enjoy because I'm finally figuring out how to get those really good in the Instant Pot). I appreciate her help on that, she's the #1 fan of beans in this household, so I really want to be able to make them up to her standards. We had some good conversation about all sorts of things, including how to describe different kinds of spices and computer security.

It's been a while again. Things have been busy.

Much of last weekend was taken up by Honk!, we went to that in Davis Square on Saturday and Harvard Square on Sunday. Saw Sarah and Steven and baby Sam there, the "fancy tea in the park" group met up in the park at Davis on Saturday, and Sarah was walking Sam around the festival in her coloring-book dress (a whimsical bit of participatory fashion art that always makes me smile) on Sunday. Little Sam's walking around now, too. Definitely a lot of vicarious fun to see babies in that stage. So much to do!

We also happened across an early performance in Union Square Plaza Thursday night.

Sunday morning, I did some cooking: Mixed greens with feta, homemade salsa with heirloom tomatoes and a mix of roasted and pickled hot peppers, chili in the instant pot.

Later on Sunday, I dropped by the Vans store with Erica for some new shoes. Her current shoes still fit, so I thought I should try up a half size, but turns out that current pair had really stretched out and she was a full size up.

On Monday, we went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum for a bit.

Today I had a dentist appointment mid-day for a cleaning. And had a solo-parenting evening, Julie was out late for some work event. All went smoothly.

A little further back: Last weekend Erica went to a friend's birthday party. The party venue ("Jump On In", with bouncy slides and whatnot) ran things very efficiently, the kids had a blast. And we did other weekend-y things? I assume. It seems so long ago.

Work is busy, lots of C++ template wrangling, and a mix of writing doc and trying to clean up the design I'm documenting.

There's a Magic: the Gathering sealed tournament for the latest set at the office for the first time in few years. Fun to play with some of my colleagues again.

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.

Judge Kathryn Mizelle: Appointed by President Trump at 33 for a lifetime position on the Federal bench, confirmed by a minority of the Senate, rated "unqualified" by the ABA. And now the author of a ruling that rejects the CDC's authority to require masks on public transit during a respiratory disease pandemic.

The political coalition in favor of people being required or even expected to do anything in the way of pandemic mitigation had a tenuous hold from 2020 onwards, but with the improvement in conditions (hopefully enough to stay improved in the face of new variants that are some of the most contagious viruses in circulation period), that coalition has clearly started to falter. This judgment seems like a shattering blow. It's led to the lifting of mask mandates, like those on Boston's MBTA, that are not legally overturned by that ruling and are still recommended by the CDC.

The US wants to declare COVID "endemic" by fiat and hammer the give up button. Any further opposition to COVID-19 can be done with the spirit and effectiveness of libertarian individualism. Can only hope our surrender won't be too consequential.

Last weekend I took Eris to the aquarium. Might do science museum when the Green Line Extension opening next week puts that two T stops away from our door.

I made a Saint Patrick's Day dinner of corned beef and veggies in the Instant Pot, which was fun and surprisingly easy. Baked some soda bread, too.

I keep meaning to write something about kid's idiosyncratic way of pronouncing some things. Not sure where she gets all of her Erisisms: "Intertresting", "rememories", "geanz". I'm forgetting a few funny ones, I think.

Today, the weather was beautiful and we got food from Littleburg and ate in the park. And then got ice cream from Gracie's afterwards.

Mask requirements have lifted at kid's school this week, though some of the parents (including us) are playing it cautious. There are still cases of COVID in the school. Fewer this week than last, so at least that's not immediately taking off. But another in kid's class.

I like the Caltech approach over MIT's.

I've been watching more movies with the kid lately. Digging into the Ghibli catalog: My Neighbor Totoro, Ponyo, Kiki's Delivery Service, The Secret World of Arrietty. And also Cartoon Saloon's Song of the Sea.

The news this week has me tremendously stressed. Russia is attempting to conquer a country the US (and of course the Russians themselves, not to neglect that aspect) guaranteed security in exchange for giving up possession of Soviet nuclear weapons. This is a humanitarian crisis and a great crime in its immediate consequences, but it's also the end of the current post-Soviet order, maybe post-WWII-order. The paradox of mutually assured destruction seems to be that the more certain the thread of mutual destruction is to deter crossing some specific clear line, the more irrelevant it is to deterring anything before that point. (If it turns out later that the exact location of the line is actually ambiguous, that's even worse.)

Texas is threatening to split up families as part of a monstrous attempt to disappear trans children. Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners in Health who worked tirelessly to help some of the world's poorest people, died suddenly at the age of 62.

The CDC today changed their mask guidelines, moving the emphasis further from containing COVID and limiting the suggestion for indoor mask mandates to the highest of three categories. Cambridge mask mandate is scheduled to end March 12. Somerville's is set to be reconsidered starting March 3 if test positive rate is lower than 1%, but it has not gotten that low yet (and has been moving up a hair).

I wish I had a better idea of the properties of the omicron BA.2 subvariant (given my assumption that we didn't get that one).

It seems like we're heading into the world where lots of people get COVID every year, and it's "only" about twice as bad as the flu in terms of immediate consequences. Except that's really horrifically bad for quite a lot of people, and we don't yet know the long-term consequences of COVID infection in general and repeated reinfection in particular, given that COVID seems to sometimes cause long-term neurological and cardiovascular damage.

Kid started feeling a bit under the weather this evening (literally while I was writing that last post) and a CUE home PCR test came back positive for COVID-19. There were some cases in her class at the end of last week, at least one caught in follow-up testing on Friday after pooled test Thursday came back positive. So I'm assuming this is the real deal. At least we (probably, can't be 100% sure) escaped it until post-vaccines.

I need to write more regularly. I'm so scattered.

I got myself an eye doctor appointment earlier this week. It's amazing how fast it goes from "hmm, maybe I should get a new pair of glasses" to "I really need new glasses now". So really looking forward to getting a new pair.

Mystery Hunt was this weekend. My team did pretty well (came in third), and I was able to help with a few puzzles. Definitely a well-written hunt, another one run all online. Maybe in person again next year?

I watched a bit of AGDQ as well. Didn't realize it was on this week, I'll have to catch some of the replays.