Apocalypse as light beach reading

Wordle 1,041 4/6

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The week before last (probably the 10th, maybe the 12th, but it doesn't matter), I was browsing in a bookstore for beach reading and picked Meddling Kids. I thought it would be a fun read and I was right. In addition to the plot and characters, I enjoyed the world-building. (To put it in spoiler-free terms, a Lovecraft variation.) It seems more realistic and detailed than most. I vaguely pondered setting a post-apocalyptic story set in a world where the antagonist of this book succeeded.

Before we left I also searched our shelves for a book of T.'s I hadn't read that looked interesting. I picked The Fifth Season, the start of a fantasy series by N.K. Jemisin. I'm almost done with it now. It's pretty good (although calling it "fun" might be too strong; I'm pretty sure the climax will be traumatizing). I've soured on high/epic/voluminous fantasy in general in recent years but I'm more inclined to read the sequel to this than I have been in a while. 

It also has volcanism in common with Meddling Kids. And during and after reading Meddling Kids, I learned that a series called "The Famous Five", by Enid Blyton, was an even bigger influence on it than Scooby-Doo, and while on vacation I saw a Reddit thread about her for the first time I can remember. Bader-Meinhoff phenomenon all over!

Costa Rica

Wordle 1,040 4/6

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Costa Rica was fun. (We got back in the evening of 4/21, I just didn't get around to writing this until now.) To put it in listicle format, we saw:

• Iguanas
• Monkeys
• Green macaws
• Sunsets directly on the ocean
• Half a dozen friendly cats
  

And that's without leaving the hotel! It was a great place, an owner-operated bed and breakfast on the beach, that a friend recommended to us. Four guest rooms plus a suite for the owner, a tiny pool on the roof, breakfast free with the rooms and lunch and dinner were worth it too, and we could eat (and drink) while the kid played in the surf. It was on a beach a little less than a mile long, with at least three other restaurants on the beach and some more just off it.

So that's where we stayed and what we did within walking distance. As for other stuff:

• On 4/16 we took a trip with a local driver to Rincón de la Vieja, a national park centered on a volcano. We zip-lined over gorges, went tubing in a river that was mostly lazy but had a few whitewater-like parts, went for a short horseback ride, and got painted with volcanic mud and bathed in hot springs. (The hot springs were man-made; I'll take the park's word for it that the heating was geothermal. The mud smelled like sulfur, at least. And we didn't feel up for hiking up the volcano itself on top of all the rest. Maybe next time.)
• On 4/17 we drove a shorter trip, to Playa del Coco, a beach at an actual town. We got ice cream and did a little shopping.
• On 4/18 we went on another expedition with the same driver. This time we saw (and swam under) a waterfall, and visited a coffee/chocolate plantation and took a short hike through the rainforest. We were probably never more than half a mile from the plantation and other examples of civilization, but we got to see wildlife anyway:
• A toucan before we even got into the forest
• At least five sloths (probably the same one twice? A mother and child together?), one of which was within arm's length
• Leaf-cutter ants hard at work
• Some monkeys, but at a distance and through trees
• A cute harmless green frog sleeping on the back of a leaf
• A bright red frog we knew better than to touch
• A bunch of birds and butterflies I couldn't tell you the names of
• On 4/19 we took a boat (it picked us up right outside the hotel!) and fed some monkeys by hand (probably not a good practice, but oh well), did some snorkeling (harder than I expected), and visited a beach with a natural tunnel we could have walked through at low tide but it was high tide and the waves going through it were too rough.

We spent the rest of our time lounging around the hotel and beach. The kid wanted to spend every minute she could swimming, which isn't bad but wasn't as much fun for us. She also spent a lot of the watching TV. We were more lenient about it than usual because it was a vacation but even so it got to be a bit much.

We all got some reading done; I'll probably have a separate post on that. Our stay overlapped by one day with our friends who recommended the place, so we got to have dinner with them and reconnect a bit.

If I had to pick my favorite activity, it was the tubing. If we go back, maybe we'd find another place with the same activity and other stuff as well, or a way to spend one whole day doing just that? If I had to pick my favorite "thing" overall, it was the sunsets on the beach. This was my first time so close to the equator and I was struck by how regular sunrise and sunset was, not just while we were there, but year-round. If not for the kid, I could imagine going and just spending even more time lounging around on the beach reading.

Relaxing in Costa Rica

Wordle 1,031 4/6

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Saturday, getting ready to travel, had ups and downs. I got some unexpected time to myself, but I also got less exercise than expected, and should have planned dinner better or should have planned shopping better days before. 

The travel Sunday was fine. As fine as it could be, considering that we left the house by 5 AM. Everything went basically as planned. Once we got to the hotel we just relaxed.

That's the plan for the whole stay. I'm forgoing my morning exercise routine. We have scheduled events on three or four days but it's not a tight schedule at all. I brought two books and there are a bunch of loaners here. I'm a tiny bit worried the kid will get bored, but as for me, boredom is an irrelevant concept this week.

Touching Bases - Exercise

I feel like I'm getting in shape, sort of, slowly.

I kept my weight under 170 for 3 days, although it ticked up a bit after eating out last night. (Yay, Parent's Night Out at The Little Gym and therefore a date.) I've had two genuine workouts over the past week, plus generally being more active (high step count, biking the kid to school most days, running errands by bike, helping a bit with the gardening). 

All the above plus the shoe inserts and ad hoc physical therapy seem to be helping with the plantar fasciitis too. It's not completely gone, but it's not noticeably worse after exercise, and not so bad that it gets in the way of anything. I hope to see further improvement, but it's definitely better now than it was a year or two ago.

Fitness is a process rather than an end state, all numbers are arbitrary, sustainable habits are more important than any specific details, etc. The good news is, I think I'm making those too.

Touching Bases - Sleep Problems

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This post is the result of taking the use of labels to an absurd level, but it's not completely pointless...

T. getting a CPAP machine has been good for my sleep. Yay. It has taken her a long time to get used to the thing but I think she's there, or nearly. The past few days haven't been great due to various interruptions, and I'm worried about sleeping well as the days get longer and birds outside our windows get more active, but in general, I've had nothing to report about my previously endemic sleep problems. Woo hoo.

Touching Bases - Reading

I was going through Shada at a very leisurely pace. I was about three-quarters done with it on April 3. That's when I got a notice about needing to return Exhalation, a collection of short stories by Ted Chiang, which I had checked out at the same time. It was due on April 6. I liked Arrival but hadn't read anything else by this guy, but I've had good experiences with short stories before. I considered returning it unread, but decided to see how much I could complete, and in the end I finished it in the laundromat Saturday. Cool. 

The guy deserves his reputation. Every story was very different from each other, and from almost anything else I had read. Except where the similarities were clearly deliberate, like the time travel story in the style of 1001 Arabian Nights. If I had to pick my favorite story in the book, it would probably be "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom." If I had to pick the best, it might be "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," but that's a little too depressing to call my favorite. 

I'm planning to get some reading done during our upcoming trip. At a bookstore a few day ago on a whim I bought Meddling Kids, which seems to be a Scooby Doo deconstruction/Lovecraft mashup. I'm planning to grab at least one book of the shelf I haven't read before, just to pass the time while traveling and hopefully add another to the pile that can be decluttered.

Touching Bases - Warcraft

Warcraft lately has been, in four words, relaxing and that's OK.

On my main I've done nothing competitive in recent weeks. Instead I'm working on A World Awoken, the meta-achievement for competing basically everything in the current expansion. I've finished almost all of it except for the time-gated parts (as in, something that we can't make progress on indefinitely, we can only do so daily, or we get a chance to do so daily, or hourly, or on some other interval... yes, this is controversial game design, but it's a small part of the overall game and the time limit for it is long.) Individual parts of it might or might not be fun or interesting but they definitely aren't challenging, so I'm just zoning out while looking for certain treasures or killing enemies in a certain area or whatever. It might be stressful if it were close to the deadline, but it's not.

On alts I've been focusing on getting class sets. For each of the past 3 weeks, I'd clear the raid on Normal (LFR difficulty is too easy to be appealing) on 3 characters in hopes of getting set pieces, and when I finished one character's set, put them aside and work on the next. As of this minute I have the complete sets for seven classes (out of 13)(not counting multiple tints of certain sets): warrior, warlock, mage, druid, evoker, priest, and monk. I also have seven pieces out of eight for hunters.

That leaves five with very little progress, and honestly, that might be how it stays. Three of the remaining sets I'm not worried about, because they're roughly as easy to get in Season Four as they are now, but the other two will be harder to get then. Season Four starts on 4/23 and I'll be away for most of that time, on vacation. And I'd really be starting from scratch on most of the last 5; I'm not just missing the set pieces, I'm missing gear good enough to be invited to groups where I can get the set pieces. 

If I wanted to be sure to get them, I should have prioritized the ones that would be harder to get in Season Four weeks ago. I didn't. If I don't finish this, it's OK. "Get all the class sets" has never been a goal before, it'll always be possible if I decide I really need a certain set for a certain class someday, and none of the missing classes are my favorites. 

It's a game. This is a lull in it. When I complete all my goals in it for the moment, at some point I should look for new ones elsewhere.

Touching Bases - Magic

Honestly, there isn't actually any news about this, except that it's been fun to whip out the Doctor Who cards while watching the show with T. and the kid. I haven't had the chance to play Modern since two weeks ago, but I really plan and hope to make the next one. It's good to have variety in my hobbies, especially considering the status of the other two big ones...

Touching all bases - general stuff

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It's been a while since I've posted in detail and we'll be away for the upcoming week, so this will be the first of a hopefully comprehensive series. 

Way back on April 1 I built the awning pictured below, because the cover for the bike had developed holes and had a condensation problem anyway. It's probably the most handymanish thing I've ever done. Good for me. 

Saturday morning the drip was noticeably worse, so I shut the water off for the whole house. The plumbers couldn't come until Monday, so over the weekend we drank bottled water and a jug I bought at a corner store, took laundry to a laundromat, ate takeout and at friends' houses (lucky we have good friends!), and flushed the toilet with water from a rain barrel (lucky we got those, all those years ago!). 

We also gardened. This was a problem when the plumbers dug where T. had planted flowers. Tempers frayed. She got mad at them for not listening to her about where to start and me for basically the same, and I got mad at her for getting mad at me or gardening to begin with when there was no water. Ugh. Not fun. But we basically kissed and made up by bedtime.

The eclipse was fine. Saw it while the house was being worked on. It coincided with some crime in the neighborhood of the kid's school, and everyone was outside for the eclipse, so school chats have been blowing up ever since then.

I've basically finished that personal writing project. Not done, but at this point I'm confident I'll be done. This is purely just for fun but even so, good for me for sticking with it.

Work has been fine. No significant accomplishments, but no major problems either, and progress on a lot of little things. 

Same for life in general. I think I've been in a good mood lately and progress on lots of things might simply be the reason why. Simply the fact that I have things to say about basically all the aspects of my life at the moment (i.e. the labels I use for posts) is a good sign.

The Money Pit; alternate title: I'm not crazy!

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On Thursday, as I was getting the kid ready for school, we heard a drip. More importantly, we saw it, on the floor between the living and dining room, roughly under the toilet. Uh oh, we had a leak. 

It grew over the course of the day. I called multiple plumbers until I finally found one who could come the following day. This also motivated me to reach out to lawyers about the renovation permit problems. Over dinner that night, T. remarked to me that the dripping was driving her crazy, so it must have been really bad to be around it all day. Yes! It was! Despite the serious problem, I've been relieved to find that I wasn't imagining things!

Friday, as fate would have it, the handyman was also scheduled to work on the roof. So he was working most of the day with no problems. The plumbers, on the other hand, took more than two hours to find the leak. It wasn't in the bathroom, it was in the pipe leading to the bathroom in the dining room wall. It took multiple holes in the wall to figure that out, and after all that, they couldn't fix it that day. So they're scheduled to come back Monday. Same for the handyman.

Minutiae of the office

Wordle 1,019 4/6

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Yesterday I went to the office for the first time in over a year.

Last week we got a notice that electrical power would be out at our house for some kind of work for basically the whole day, so I went to the office. I biked in, which took a little preparation, and I wasn't sure about until the last minute due to the weather.

I only miss two things about the old days: some of the people a tiny bit, but that doesn't matter because they're gone whether I'm there or not, and the fact that I get exercise easily. Biking is obvious, and in addition to that, I hit my phone's recommended step count by 2 PM. Even when I'm spending my working hours sitting at a desk, the bathroom and faucet for water are farther from it than at home, and I usually want to leave the building for lunch.

Other than that? It sucks. Phones don't have headsets by default, so if I want to make a phone call, I'm bothered by other people doing the same. If I want a conference room, I have to go through a whole process to reserve one. And the surroundings are sepulchrally beige. People seem excited that it's not in the basement like it used to be, but cubicles with windows got claimed early and they only have views of other brutalist offices. (Of course, it rained off and on yesterday, so that doesn't help.)

I picked one cubicle early. The certificates and paperwork on the desk left over from 2020 was funny. The chocolate bar next to them that expired in 2020 was a little sad or gross but mostly funny. But I later found a chocolate bar in a drawer which also expired in 2020 and had mouse gnawings on it and mouse poop around it. Not funny. I found another cubicle before having my lunch.

There's not even any benefit to work. In addition to the problems above, on-site collaboration isn't a thing because so many other people are home or at a different office. It's just as easy to procrastinate as it is at home. I can procrastinate anywhere I have an Internet connection - I wrote most of this there, after all. My productivity may or may not be a concern, but it certainly didn't get better being surrounded by cubicle walls. It was nice to meet in person someone I've only known through Teams meeting, I guess, but that was just recognizing his voice at the cafe.

I'm not completely ruling out going back at some point, but I'm disinclined.