Keeping with the routine

 Wordle 254 4/6*

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Posting in the morning because I've found it a good habit in general, but there's not much to say here since yesterday's entry was posted 12 hours later than usual.

In addition to food, we also bought a lot of stuff over the weekend. Delaware has little or no sales tax, and there is an outlet mall near the beach and not much else to do in that area in February. I got sandals, which I needed; my old ones were falling apart. T. got pants, a dress, shoes, and sandals; fair enough, we were at outlet malls, and our clothes shopping has been reduced in general over the past two years. The kid got sandals, water shoes (Croc-like but not Crocs, basically), and seven books. She likes to read in some sense but she can finish an Xavier Riddle book in 20 minutes and doesn't have the patience for most longer books. Except comic books, but those aren't really a challenge either for different reasons. We got a kite. We also spent over a hundred dollars at the liquor outlet, partly to get stuff that's hard to get closer to home, they have a great selection of beers, but mostly just because we were there. 

I complain about our problems with clutter and unnecessary stuff around the house (and that list is mostly bad examples, since liquor gets consumed, most of the books are educational, and most of the rest are necessities), but I think in general I'd rather reduce our intake than try to organize or cull the stuff we already have.

Happy birthday

 Wordle 253 5/6*

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Yesterday, after posting the previous, we had breakfast in the hotel breakfast nook. Then we went to the beach to enjoy the sun and ~38 degree weather. Then a little shopping in beach tourist trap stores and lunch at a sort of diner. Then swimming in the hotel pool. We were in the water for over an hour, and it was just the three of us. Then shopping, not in the stores walking distance from the beach, but about 2 miles away in the outlet mall. Then dinner at a fancy restaurant we like nearby. 

Today is T.'s birthday itself. This morning I got the kid out of the hotel room as soon as she got up so T. could sleep more. We read one of her new books in the hotel lobby until the breakfast nook opened. T. joined us about 20 minutes later. Then the kid and I went swimming while T. packed up the room. This time we didn't have the pool to ourselves; there were at least 6 other children there. The kid played with me for a bit and then appointed herself teacher to another girl.

After that, we got dried off and checked out. Then a little more shopping. Then a drive home. We arrived around 5:30 PM and had dinner reservations at St. Anselm's at 6:30, so we had to unpack and get cleaned up quickly. Dinner itself was good. The kid discovered Mad Libs today, but gets frustrated with spelling and similar things sometimes, so scenes were made, or almost.

In addition to that I'm glossing over several other 1,500-calorie meals. No one to blame but myself, and hopefully it'll get better as the weather improves enough to exercise regularly, but anyways, it really is time to cut my food intake a bit.

A brief getaway

 Wordle 252 6/6

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Tough word.

Yesterday morning was crazy. No problem taking the kid to camp, and I guess I could have been more on top of things immediately after getting home. At 9:45 there was a meeting about a school parents group. Right then, T. called me, because she was downtown and wanted to park in a place where it's managed by app and she didn't have the app set up on her phone, I did. So I tried to sort that out while in the school meeting. I had to reset my password for the app, and the first parking place was a loading zone. Then at 10 there was a work meeting about the future of teleworking. Nothing conclusive. Then at 11 there was the sequel to that meeting the day before, which I had to take minutes at. It went until around 11:50. Either this week was particularly bad or my management underestimated how big a commitment this was. At 11:55 we had a parent-teacher conference, by Zoom of course. T. joined from the car. To summarize, the kid is doing fine. 

Then I logged off the computers. I took a half-day yesterday for a weekend trip. We packed, picked up the kid a bit early, and drove to Rehoboth Beach to celebrate T.'s birthday. Got to the hotel around 6 PM, not bad. Dinner wasn't fancy but it was okay. Discovered a new beer we liked. 

Today's Wordle is the first one I've done on my phone instead of my computer because I'm in the hotel lobby now.

It's over with

 Wordle 251 5/6*

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That was a tricky one.

Yesterday morning I took minutes at a meeting that's new to us. New huge surprises. It'll be annoying but probably harmless except when there's a schedule conflict. Other than that I basically just got ready for the presentation. In hindsight I almost think I over-prepared, but presumably the presentation would have gone worse if I hadn't. It took less than 10 minutes and elicited no questions. I guess I wish I had put a little more time into the graphic elements, but my speech sure was polished enough. The actual presentation was in a meeting starting at 4 and the kid had to be picked up from salsa camp by around 4:30 today, so T. went to get her without me. 

I had a few minutes to myself after the meeting. I walked down to H Street. I got a birthday card for T. I thought about going to the ATM at the 7/11 but the 7/11 was closed. I thought about a minor surprise birthday present for her at the bookstore (there are already one or two other presents she knows about) but nothing jumped out at me. I still have a few hours to order something if I really feel the need...

A better day

 Wordle 250 5/6*

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Yesterday morning, shortly after dropping the kid off at camp, there was a team meeting. Not too much of an agenda, just possible process improvement stuff. Then I worked on that presentation I have coming up about what my team does. Preparing for it means (1) getting our own documents in compliance just in case anyone checks, (2) coming up with PowerPoint slides to go in the larger presentation, and (3) thinking about or actually practicing what to say. (1) is the least important so naturally it's what I've spent the most time on, such as those documents I got feedback on yesterday. For (2), the deadline was yesterday at noon, and I got them in by 1:45 but there were no problems with that. Good enough but I'm not proud. For (3), I've been thinking about it especially in the course of working on the slides, but I reeeally need to actually practice soon.

At 3 I heard from the tier 2 tech support again, and with his help I was able to resolve the problems with the work network on my personal computer in 15 minutes. Woo hoo. In theory this shouldn't affect work either way but it makes everything other than work much easier. I celebrated by going for an afternoon jog. It was 65 degrees and sunny. Yay global warming. T. and I left the house a little after 4:30. We did some very quick grocery shopping on the way to pick up the kid from camp. Traffic was terrible. We were about 5 minutes late. Luckily she wasn't the very last person there, but still, bad parents. 

For dinner I made air-fryer chicken (easy and hard to screw up) and glazed carrots while the kid practiced her guitar. She was grumpy most of the afternoon/evening. I suspect she was tired herself, after the night before last. I put her to bed and she was asleep more than half an hour earlier than usual. After that, T. went to a repeat of this gathering. I watched a little TV - Simpsons episodes I had never seen before, this time - but got to bed earlier than usual myself.

I want a pan galactic gargle blaster

Wordle 249 X/6*

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Ugh. Thus endeth a 40-day winning streak. 

Total time to troubleshoot the insurance settlement issue has passed one hour, maybe even one and a half, and it's not resolved yet.

Yesterday work itself was simple enough. Team leads' check-in meeting in the morning. I got what I needed to get ready for an upcoming presentation about my team (but still need to actually do it!) In the tech writers' team meeting we discussed a lot of little issues. There was one annoying incident where a teammate gave me feedback on a document but I didn't ask for it and technically don't need it. I took or will take it, it's good feedback and it would be dumb to reject it just because it was unsolicited, but it's still a bit annoying to have to deal with extra stuff on a task like that.

In between work I troubleshot problems like the insurance settlement payment. It was painfully absurd, like something out of Catch-22 or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The initial text included a phone number to call with problems. I tried that and it turned out to be a Bank of America help line and they could only help me with problems making a deposit in an account with them; they said I'd have to talk to my credit union. I called my credit union and they said the problem was with the banking app. I called the banking app and it was hard to speak to a human. Among other things the automated menu included two options that weren't mutually exclusive, something like "press two about problems with transfers, press three about problems with client bank apps", when I'm apparently having problems with a transfer via a client bank app. When I finally got to a human, he said that the problem was that my bank didn't have my phone number registered in the right place. It's a joint account with T. and she's the primary account holder in some sense. I haven't got around to following up yet but I think my next step should be the insurance company again.

In between those problems and actual work, I troubleshot problems with the work network on my personal computer. On Friday at 8 PM someone from tech support had reached out to me. He didn't seem surprised to hear from me again until yesterday. Apparently my ticket got assigned to someone who usually works the second shift. We weren't able to resolve it yesterday and I think we actually made things worse. 

After work, the kid had a swimming lesson. Yay. I planned to work out at the gym. When I got there I found that I had forgotten my towel. I worked out anyway and just hung out outdoors afterwards. If the weather had been different I might have not worked out, or regretted it.

Dinner was chicken lo mein from a bag. Easy and relatively fast.

The kid woke up at 4 in the morning this morning due to a nightmare, she said, and came into bed with us. She never fully got back to sleep on her own. She read for a while in her room, and then in the bathroom, right next to our room. When I got up at roughly the usual time, she came downstairs with me. After she got ready to face the day she watched TV. She was well-behaved except for being annoyingly cheery.

A good day should feel better

 Wordle 248 3/6*

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Yesterday was the first day of February vacation for the kid, and for T. and I, it was a day off, because our offices observe President's Day. So what did we do with the free time?

I started the day feeling kind of grumpy and out of sorts. We hoped to get several things done, but they're neither the most important tasks ahead of us nor the most fun, so I was disappointed before the day started. I'd call my mood depressed if it makes sense to be so clinical about a day-to-day or even hour-to-hour feeling.

The kid spent the day at a salsa dance camp. She'll spend the rest of the week there, why not the first day as well? After we dropped her off, we had breakfast sandwiches at a nearby cafe. Then we went to Costco for gas and some random shopping (food and similar things were logical, but there was also an impulse purchase a chair). Then Lowe's for mulch. We got back home from those errands around 11:30. T. did a lot of cleaning. I did a little cleaning and then went jogging. It was sunny and around 60 degrees; I figured I might as well take advantage. At 1 someone from a roofing company came to discuss problems with our gutter. After that we had a snack and I made a few phone calls. One was to Allstate, about the insurance settlement from the bike accident. We've got one check from them for damage to the bike itself. But we're told we can expect more for them for pain and general discomfort and the kid's doctor appointment, and that hasn't shown up yet, so I want to figure out why. I called, left a message, and emailed.

Around 3 we walked to REI to look at new bikes for me. T. made an impulse purchase of a chair there too. I borrowed a bike for 10 minutes to try it out. Just as I left the store, I got a phone call. It was the Allstate representative. She said the checks were mailed out over two months ago. Considering that they got lost, we decided on a phone/app-based way to send the money. As for the bike, it felt OK but I was annoyed about how basically all attachments - fenders, pannier rack, even the kickstand of all things - had to be bought separately. T. encouraged me to check the other bike store within walking distance. We walked over there, and sure enough, in the window they had something like the one I had tried out, for a similar price, including most if not all of those attachments. We had to look at it through the window because the store is closed Mondays. Whoops. Maybe today or tomorrow?

After that it was time to go get the kid. She had had fun at camp, apparently. Dinner was tortellini and broccoli. 

After that I tried to take care of the insurance money. It was a frustrating process, (probably) requiring an app I didn't already have (could be either of two apps! I don't know!) but the way it works doesn't (seem to) match the instructions. I spent at least half an hour on it fruitlessly. One annoying thing is, even if I do get this to work, I'm not sure it's all the money they've said we should expect. Another crazy thing about it is, it's sort of free money; is it really worth the aggravation? We've already got the check for the damage to the bike itself. If on Dec. 16 they had told me that that was all they'd cover, I would have shrugged and probably considered it good enough. Not great, but much better than any previous bike accident. But at some point they said we could expect more, so I've been expecting it, and having to jump through all these hoops to get it is fucking annoying.

Meanwhile the kid was watching TV. By the time it was her bedtime, I had run out of patience and didn't put up with the usual shenanigans. I feel a bit bad about that but it's hard to handle on a normal day, which this wasn't. I went to bed earlier than usual and needed it.

Oh well. I got good exercise yesterday, at least. I didn't finish as much as I should have or would have liked to, but I tried.

Can't complain

 Wordle 247 4/6*

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The night before last, I used up some extra onions by carmelizing them. It took almost an hour to do properly. Yesterday morning we had omelets, with the carmelized onions, crumbled bacon, and manchego cheese for filling. The fanciest breakfast I've made in a long time. 

Around 11 we walked to a playground so the kid could play with two friends (siblings). It was cold (sunny, but in the 40s and windy) so we didn't think it would last long, but the kids kept playing nicely for more than an hour, and then someone suggested lunch together too, so we walked to Union Market. When the group broke up, T. went to Trader Joe's while I walked the kid home. 

After that the day was lazy other than doing the laundry. We tried to set up another play date for the kid but friends weren't available on short notice. Seared tuna steaks, a recipe I haven't made in a while, and roasted cauliflower for dinner. We did get out a card game we had bought her a few weeks ago, so that was sort of fun.

It would be rude not to make holes in the walls

 Wordle 246 2/6*

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Yesterday we had a leisurely morning. Shortly after noon we went on a couple errands. First we drove to Arlington to give that storage shelf and a wine rack from the pantry to a friend. (The bike had actually arrived Wednesday and had been sitting in the living room, waiting in the box to be assembled.) Then we went to recycle a few random things (shoes, electronics) and did a little grocery shopping. Then the kid went to play with a friend while T. and I assembled the bike. It looks good. 

I have a wall mount for a bike I plan to assemble, but there wasn't time yesterday, and we might need more materials to get it secure (heavy bike, weak wall), and anyways I feel like it's not urgent. The bike fits better than I expected in the pantry. 

Made shrimp alfredo pasta for dinner.

I hate Fridays

 Wordle 245 6/6*

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Work sucked yesterday. The formerly weekly, now biweekly, report depends on inputs from team leads or their deputies. There are 11 of them. In theory they're due by close of business Thursday. In practice, as long as most of them are in by 8 AM Friday and none are later than 10 AM, we can easily finish editing and compiling them by noon, which is our internal deadline to get it to our own team lead. Yesterday, we were still waiting for two by 1:30 PM. The submitters were aware of them and were in contact with us, they just had more important things going on, apparently.

Dealing with problems with this report is an ongoing battle. The process recently changed from weekly to biweekly, which is good, but I wonder if it has caused people to forget about it until too late or something. 

After school the kid came here with her pod-mate and the nanny to play for a bit. They left at the last minute for us to get the kid to her gymnastics class. Then T. had to call a roofer because her dad was freaking out about problems we may have, so we were a few minutes late to gymnastics. While the kid was flipping around, I returned a phone charger I didn't need and T. went to the library. Then we both went grocery shopping. We got burritos just in time for the end of the class and ate at home.

New shoes

Wordle 244 4/6*

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Daily stuff

Yesterday I found the 9th WoT book in the second box I checked. Could have been worse. Started rereading it after all.

I was lazy yesterday morning. I worked hard yesterday afternoon. I didn't have anything too urgent going on, I just wish I hadn't put it off until the afternoon. But I knew I'd be busy today with the WAR and I wanted to get new sneakers yesterday, so I scrambled through several emails and document edits at the last minute. I left the house in time to get the shoes, but not for grocery shopping, so we'll have to do that tonight. 

The kid had her guitar lesson this afternoon. It went well enough. The weather was great; I was happy to be walking around outside in just a sweater on these errands. 

Shortly after we got home one little thing went wrong and the kid had a complete bawling meltdown. (What went wrong was me spilling water on her, sorry, but that was definitely just a straw breaking a camel's back sort of thing.) I didn't get all of it but apparently she was miserable because her friends weren't getting along with each other? There were arguments about who was BFFs with whom? A wanted to play with B but not C? The kid just wanted everyone to be friends with each other, and likes to spend her time solving friendship problems. (A phrasing she probably got from My Little Pony.) We tried to gently explain to her that that's difficult. She calmed down while I made a simple dinner.

After dinner, the kid and I got out a version of charades and the two of us played it. It was OK, better than letting her watch TV indefinitely, but she's so competitive it's not too much fun to play games with her. 

Meanwhile T. went to a gathering of other mothers at the kid's school. A social event at a bar rather than something organized or productive. I put the kid to bed for the second night in a row, a rare event in this household, and watched some B-movies. 

Musing

Today I got a bit depressed to realize I have basically no friends. More details a general "before and after" post I'm working on, but basically, my social interaction is roughly 10 percent of what it was in the Before Time. Sad. Not sure what, if anything, to do about it, but it's one more admittedly minor reason to look forward to going back to the office. 

Chocolate and cat treats

 Wordle 243 4/6*

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Work was uneventful yesterday. I finished my edits on a SOP of our own. If my teammates have no changes, I can officially reapprove it myself. Everything other than work, though...

I finished the eighth book in that Wheel of Time reread yesterday morning, and that might be it. The 9th, 10th, and 11th are in a box in the closet. Maybe they're in different boxes, and they're definitely under something heavy. Do I want to bother with that for the weak part of the series? I guess I could skip to the 12th, which is easier to reach... So instead, I spent a lot of time yesterday reading Project Hail Mary, and finished it right after dinner, including giving the kid some extra TV time so I could. It was a Christmas present. I liked it. 

In the snow/ice storm a few weeks back a cable pulled out of where it was attached to our house. It was functional but now hanging low enough that it was in the way of us opening the back door, among other things. Between bad weather, work, and other problems, it was hard to find the time to do something about it. I finally got out a ladder and jury-rigged something yesterday. It's not where it used to be but it's good enough.

In the process I had to paw through the basement a bit. It was disorganized. It was frustrating. We've had friction over clutter in the house. That's my side of the story; she'd probably say it's caused me being wasteful (why give away this perfectly good pan we've literally never used?) or disorganized. Some of the problems, I've solved only by shoving clutter into the basement, but that's not really a solution, is it? Cleaning it up is on the agenda for this spring, summer at the latest.

I've also mentioned (wow, this was a long time ago) T's habit of buying junk food. In the middle of the afternoon I came downstairs to find a bag of artisanally-crafted chocolate cookies. "Where did these come from?" I asked.

She was in another room at the time. "They're a birthday present from me!" is the answer I heard. Her birthday is coming up. I was a bit offended by the assumption that I wouldn't buy her anything, or anything she liked. I was also a tiny bit bothered by having more junk food around. Great, more temptation for me to resist. I wouldn't complain openly about her getting herself something, I should be an adult and resist the temptation, but still, I got a bit snippy at her about this and she got a bit snippy about me being snippy. 

Then half an hour later, she mentioned that she also got a card from her friend Meilee. Not a present from "me", from "Meilee". That puts things in a completely different light. I certainly wouldn't want to complain about what a third party gets her.

Later, right before bed, we were talking about the cat. For years we would only feed him dry cat food and he was happy with that. He has recently developed a taste for treats. Two or three flavors of this special kibble, including one with catnip in it. He begs for them whenever he's downstairs. We've got one half-empty bag in plain sight and two more, including one much bigger (let's say 8 oz. when full vs. 1 lb.), taking up most of a drawer by the door. As I was heading upstairs for the night, I said offhandedly for T. "Oh yeah, by the way, thanks for getting those extra treats."

She replied, also offhandedly, distracted by a game she was playing, "Oh yeah, let's remember to get him some."

We cleared up the confusion right away. She had forgotten we had bought them and thought we needed to get more soon. Her pack rat tendencies and junk-food-hoarding tendencies extend to junk food for the cat. I was cracking up until lights out for bedtime.

Slow day with big news

 Wordle 242 4/6*

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Those results look weird. 

Yesterday we got the kid to school a couple minutes late. She got up on time and was well behaved overall, but things just took too long, especially her going to the bathroom at the last minute. 

Work wasn't too busy. A training in the morning about changes to the CR process. I'll hopefully never have to use the process, but I might have to write about using it in a SOP, so I might as well be familiar with it. After that I sent a quick email, sort of reminding someone that I was waiting for them review a document, and worked on updating our own SOPs. A quick team meeting in the afternoon just to check in.

Normally the kid would have a swimming lesson at 5:30 Tuesday, but the teacher called in sick. (Or rather, called in experiencing-side-effects-from-booster-shot.) So instead T. and the kid just went swimming themselves and I jogged on a treadmill at the gym. Not bad. 

Yesterday (but I didn't notice the email until this morning), they announced the start of returning to the office on Feb. 28. No word yet about what it means for my team.

Busy day

 Wordle 241 4/6*

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Yesterday at work I worked on evaluating that problematic wiki space. Meanwhile the house was being cleaned. We've hired someone to do it more or less randomly in the past and T. is talking about making it a regularly scheduled thing. I'd be fine with it if not for how long it takes. She was here from roughly 8 to 4. That feels like a long time to have someone else in the house doing their own thing. (But then, I survived the pod...)

I also called tech support about the problem getting into the work network on my personal computer. Tier 1 took half an hour and was fruitless, so at the end they put in a ticket with tier 2, I'm told. We'll see how that goes and how long it takes.

A little after 5, a friend came over for dinner. Her husband is traveling for work, she didn't want to have Valentine's Day alone, and we had already had our fancy date Friday. T. made enchiladas, her main dish. Our friend brought a bottle of wine and a chocolate cake. 

In addition to the Valentine's Day date Friday, yesterday I gave T. a card. I had got chocolate-covered strawberries at the grocery store Friday and had planned to have them for dessert on Valentine's Day, but with our friend coming over, we had them Sunday night instead. T. got me a card and Reese's peanut butter cup hearts. We got the kid a card (T. got it, signed for both of us) and T.'s parents got her a card and several trinkets.

The Wheel of Time goes around and around...

I started reading The Wheel of Time series in the 90s, when I was around 16 or so. From book 8 on, I read them as they came out, until the last one in 2013. Then I put them aside until recently. T. and I watched the Amazon show, and that got me nostalgic. First I reread the last one, then the first one, then the second, and then I kept going. I thought I might stop at the seventh because it's around when the story turns into a slog and it's the last one I have in paperback, but I just picked up the eighth, so who knows. 

In my teens and college years I used to reread books a lot. I had a lot of free time and nothing better to do with it. In my 20s and early 30s I would do so more rarely. Less free time, and more and better computer games, which can be an infinite time suck. But now I'm not commuting, it's easy to read now and then while working from home, and Wordle only takes 10-15 minutes per day...

It's interesting to reread these books now, years after they were written or I last opened them. I'm noticing things I didn't notice before (but then, how can I be sure? It's so long, I could misremember). 

I don't mean just foreshadowing. Most of that was discussed to death in the proto-Internet back then as fans tried to figure out what prophesies meant and how mysterious plots would turn out. I mean things more like characterization that the writers trusted readers enough to leave implicit. For example, if I had written a high school book report on book 6 or 7, I would have said that by this point Rand was basically a competent leader and heroic figure except for being psychically tortured, both by mundane trauma and by the Dark One's taint. It would have seemed implausible how fast he became a competent autocrat, but a lot happened off-screen. 

But now? Late in *A Crown of Swords*, there's a couple chapters where a romantic relationship blossoms, he starts negotiations with the leader of the Sea Folk, it starts off well but triggers his recent claustrophobia, so he makes an excuse and leaves early. Then he goes off to deal with these rebels who have been a minor annoyance for weeks, bringing only his new girlfriend with him. This isn't competent leadership, this is a young man trying to impress his girlfriend! He's not going mad in the magical sense, he's high on puppy love!

Or the name of the book. The "crown of swords" could be called the McGuffin of the book. Rand getting that crown resolves a plotline that started in book 4 if not earlier, so that might be a good reason for the name, even if that exact phrase doesn't appear until the last few pages of the book. But on a reread the book is obviously about the problems of leadership. Rand had them earlier but he has them in spades now. He tried to avoid causing the death of a political enemy in this book even though she really deserves it (ethical politics is complicated, but she really did screw up big) and fails. He delegates things he shouldn't and doesn't delegate things he should. Rand aside, his friends are dealing with similar problems. They've all come into power in various ways and are trying to figure out how to use it. 

We survived

 Wordle 240 5/6*

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That was a tough one. 

Yesterday we ordered bagel sandwiches for breakfast. Then we worked around the house. A few months ago now, T. ordered an electric bike for herself. It has been delayed due to supply chain issues or whatever but it's finally due to arrive this week. (Yesterday we thought it would arrive Wednesday, but 10 minutes ago she got an arrival notice that seemed to say it's coming today. Nick of time!) Electric bikes apparently have to be stored indoors. We didn't have the space for it. The only option we could think of was the pantry. Putting it there would require getting everything off a storage shelf. 

That shelf was 20 inches wide, 34 inches long, four shelves on top of each other. It stored the air fryer, slow cooker, cast iron pot, cast iron frying pan, wok, two casserole pans, four beer growlers, our main mixing and salad bowls, two sets of plates and bowls (or more depending on how you count them), electric eggbeater, julienner, spiralizer, and more. I would have thought we couldn't clear it off without giving away massive amounts of things, either those things or things elsewhere that they would displace. I anticipated many fights about what's worth keeping even though we never use it. But somehow, by the time we had dinner last night, we did it. 

There were still some... maybe not "fights", but let's say "friction", where I wanted to get rid of things and T. didn't. And I think some things are in places that won't work forever, and we did identify two banker's boxes of things we can happily give away. But still, we did it. Yay.

Meanwhile, the kid was going stir-crazy. It was like 35 degrees out and wet, so playing outside wasn't fun. We reached out to the parents of three friends of hers but they were all too busy for playdates. She cleaned her room a bit, practiced her guitar, entertained herself out of the way a bit, and I played with her a bit in between cleaning. She also watched more TV than usual, drove us up the wall for a while, and nearly had a temper tantrum. It only got worse at dinnertime. I made chicken with a vermouth and caper sauce - fancy! And sauteed squash, which she just couldn't handle. There were tears when I told her she had to eat squash if she wanted dessert.

Aquarium

 Wordle 239 2/6*

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I used a new starting word today. It helped.

Yesterday we took the kid and a friend of hers to the Baltimore Aquarium. It was fun. Her friend had never been there before. We had but several exhibits were new to us. The touch pool was a hit with the girls. They loved playing with jellyfish. Apparently it was a kind that was harmless to humans. And by "playing with" I mean "stroking gently with up to two fingers at a time, on the top of the jelly if possible." Aquarium staff were watching to make sure people weren't hurting the jellies. "Jellies" is the preferred nomenclature because they aren't fish.

The girls behaved well. They got kind of impatient near the end, but on the whole it was fine.

We got home around 5:30. We technically could have cooked but it would have been pretty late and we were tired. So instead we ordered Indian delivery.

Early Valentine's Day

 Wordle 238 5/6*

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Once again I feel like I should have got it earlier. That fourth guess had two letters I knew were wrong. Even the third guess wasn't technically wrong about anything, but the ultimately correct answer seems much more likely in hindsight.

Yesterday morning I made a few minor edits to a SOP and started a spreadsheet to audit exactly how messy that wiki space is. We (the team) also happened to chat a lot. Team bonding and stuff, to justify it from a management perspective. It started with me complaining about technical issues. I have a lot of them. That might not be luck or incompetence on my part, it might be because I have a less stable work space than either of them. I work in both the dining room and the guest bedroom at various times, on two different computers, and I'll often take my personal computer in the living room too when not working. Maybe switching from the router to the router extender screws with things, or turning on my corporate computer at 8 one day and 2 the next, who knows? That got into a discussion of what our work spaces and homes in general are like. 

At 2 I left for a podiatrist's appointment. Walked to the metro and took it to the downtown office rather than try to find parking - haven't done that in a while. He said it was maybe a mild ingrown toenail and recommended a new brand of shoes. 

On the way back I went grocery shopping. I wound up carrying a lot home, but I hadn't gone jogging, so walking to and from the metro and carrying stuff was my only exercise. After that I sent one or two more quick emails before logging off for the day.

At 5 we left to get the kid and take her to the usual gymnastics class. Unusually, we put her in an extended late-night (i.e. until as late as 9:30) program. Then T. and I went to a fancy restaurant for an early Valentine's Day dinner. Dinner was great. Then we went to a nearby bar for cocktails. The bar was a bit too crowded to feel totally safe these days, but oh well, it was a special occasion. 

The evening was only marred by what happened after we picked the kid up. She ran to the car, threw open the door, and slammed her hand between the door and a tree parked near the car. I could have parked it better and she could have been more careful but mostly it was just bad luck. She was crying all the way home.

Not much to say

 Wordle 237 6/6

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I'm going to start playing with hard mode on. My 4th and 5th guesses didn't even use that yellow letter from the third guess. Whoops.

Not much to say about yesterday. Worked steadily at that follow-up task from the day before, but in the middle of the afternoon I was told to hold off on it. Management had seen the first draft and was asking for big changes, so anything I did could be invalidated. Also got comments back on a document that I had been waiting over a week for, so it was nice be able to make even partial progress on that. Also had a meeting (a one-on-one Teams voice chat meeting, might as well call it a call) with a team lead. Nominally it was to gather information about their wiki usage. Informally it was also an opportunity to catch up. We used to work fairly closely together - not interacting daily, but maybe weekly, and my desk was just a little down the hall from his. The pandemic made us both remote, of course, and the reorganization shortly after had us interacting a lot less for work as well. So that was nice.

I went jogging again. Two days in a row of exercise is my best streak since November. Unfortunately I probably can't make it three; I have plans this afternoon. Maybe later this morning or right at noon but it would be hard.

For dinner we had tilapia and corn on the cob. There was a time when fish was basically the only protein I ate; I was pescatarian for about three years. But the kid doesn't like most fish much so that makes it harder. I'm so out of practice that I used a pan that's really hard to clean for the fish. Oh well. 

Blizzard has announced that the next World of Warcraft patch will be in a week and a half. I'm tempted to rejoin, but I feel like I should give not-playing more of a chance than this, and there's nothing I need in there on launch day. If I'm going to start again, I wouldn't miss anything by doing it in April or May. Or later.

The opposite of a headache

 Wordle 236 4/6

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Yesterday the kid got up a little earlier than usual. I started the workday with a to-do list of five items. I got four of them done by 9 AM and the fifth, hardest one by 11:20. Good for me. Unfortunately it generated a follow-up by yesterday afternoon, sooner than I would have expected. But it's so rare that a task moves promptly I guess I shouldn't complain when it happens.

Yesterday it was in the mid-50s. Because global warming is going to doom us all, I went jogging around 2, the same route as I was taking last summer. Good for me. It went well enough, much better than jogging at the gym last week.

I made macaroni and cheese for dinner last night, a big recipe from scratch. It came out well enough but took a lot longer than expected. 

Last night I was waked up by a pain in my toe. Something has been wrong with it - maybe more than one of them but definitely the left big toe - for a while, and last night it got bad enough that I had to take aspirin to get back to sleep. I've been assuming it was a nascent ingrown toenail but I'm not sure. I seriously think I might have to make a doctor's appointment about it.

A bad day in 4 hours

Wordle 235 6/6

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Good thing that wasn't hard mode. In hindsight I think I had the information to get it on the fourth guess, but I couldn't think of any words that fit without eliminating several more letters. Oh well.

Yesterday morning and early afternoon was fine. It wasn't quiet in a literal sense, city contractors were cutting down a tree on the sidewalk right outside, but it was figuratively quiet. One easy meeting at 11, one easy meeting at 1. But things started to go sideways just before 2 PM...

Our team got an email asking to have a document updated "asap". A little rude to say so without more details, but so be it. Before I got around to the usual reply email, the leader of the relevant team gave us more details: it was urgent because the previous version had a security risk in it of some kind. Sounds important and unusual! I quickly restricted access to the previous version, asked if that addressed the immediate concern, and then asked several follow-ups about how to handle the new version. 

Before getting an answer to those questions, J., one of my teammates, said that he was already working on edits to this document. Cool, not my problem. He proceeded to work on it, making minor edits that they had missed or ignored. If it was my document, I would have held off on publishing the new version until an answer to my questions. But it wasn't, and it was also an opportunity to get a big, slow-moving task finalized (yesterday afternoon he had complaints about those minor edits and other issues), and he took that opportunity. Fair enough. He published. 3 minutes later, the relevant team lead responded to say thanks. My questions went completely ignored. 

Meanwhile we got a new task from our own team lead. While I researched a thorough answer to it, our team co-lead sent a quick reply. (Lead emeritus? Our true team lead, with the other one being our future team lead in a slow transition process? Let's say for now that the new task came from Lead B and the quick reply came from Lead A.) Lead B had a reply to that with a follow-up question for me. I finally got something out responding to both the original question and the follow-up. It resulted a new task for me, working on a new template for our office, and it's not in quite the usual process. Oh well. The current step of it for me is easy, at least, and the overall task shouldn't be too bad.

I worked until around 5, the last minute before picking up the kid and taking her to swim class. Like last week, I planned to work out in the gym while she was in the pool. We got there with few problems, but when I was in the locker room, I found I had everything I needed - towel, change of t-shirt, underpants, and socks, sneakers, shower sandals, and book just in case I had a few minutes spare! - except for fucking gym shorts! I wasn't going to try to work out in jeans, so I read more than I had planned. 

Oh well. Dinner and bedtime for the kid were fine, at least. After that there was a meeting online about starting something like a PTA. We support it in spirit and plan to participate when it gets off the ground but feel like we can offer no more than that for the foreseeable future.

Repeated failures

 Wordle 234 5/6

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Daily stuff

Yesterday was fine, despite the title, that's focused on the musing. I had three meetings but only one required any action by me. I've got a couple important-seeming documents out for review and I can expect a lot of work when the SMEs are done with them but no idea when that will be, so until then I can enjoy a lull and try to work on some more long-term stuff.

The kid helped me make dinner last night. Only a little, and it's scary to watch her knife work, but it's still a good habit to get into. 

After that I had a meeting with a parent group. It's frustratingly slow going, but I'm not going to say it's pointless yet. If there was something more productive, in theory I might be interested in taking part in both.

Musing

Problems with working on my personal computer have continued. Yesterday I uninstalled and reinstalled that plugin and it didn't help. The only other thing I can think of is picking up the phone and calling tech support, but that feels like the nuclear option. Who knows how long it would take, and it might be hard to explain that it's not my primary work computer. 

But I wish it could be my work computer more often, for more things, than it can right now. 

I can blog on my work computer, but I'd rather not. It seems risky and like a bad practice. Wordle on the work computer seems safer than blogging, but on the other hand cookies or something on my personal computer have kept a record of my performance and that would be lost. Beyond that, there are tons of things I'd like to do on a computer during the workday but definitely shouldn't or can't do on the corporate computer. Physically moving the computers around is viable but a lot more inconvenient than alt-tabbing.

To put a positive spin on it, this might help my productivity. Quite possibly not, here I am right now, but it's possible. I think I've been fairly good compared to this era for example but my job still has a lot of tasks that would be good to get done but are easy to put off.

First World problems

Wordle 233 5/6

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The night before last I didn't get much sleep, and yesterday morning I didn't get much time to myself. The kid woke up at the usual time if not earlier even though it was Sunday. Although I will give her credit for something. Instead of watching TV until breakfast was on the table, she only watched about an hour, and then got interested in an arts and crafts project from the Chinese New Year event the night before. 

At 10 we took her to a friend's birthday party. It was in a playground, walking distance from home but we haven't been there in a while. Partly because we have less free time to fill than we did in 2020 and early 2021, partly because it's February. While she was playing and T. was supervising, I went to Eastern Market to run a few errands. (We had walked to the playground, 0.7 miles, and I walked another 1.3 miles on those errands, both figures one-way. Good for me.) After that, the kid practiced her guitar and had lunch. Then another friend of hers came over to play for over 2 hours. 

Meanwhile I was doing the laundry and a little cleaning, and T. was working on personal stuff on her computer. Among other things she was planning a trip for this summer. It's a big milestone birthday for me and she has been focused on a trip overseas as a present. I don't mind but it's not a high priority. Things that are high priorities for me:

• A new bike (we might call it a birthday present but probably won't wait for my birthday)
  
• Some home renovations we've been planning (won't be done this year or even the next but I guess we can hope we can make some progress)
• A return to normalcy (hah!)

Travel, on the other hand, is just a matter of balancing expense against stress against fun. We can hope that things will be better in six months but right now the stress is high and fun is low of anything like this. I can't help accentuating the negative. 20 years ago I thought of myself as the sort of person who liked travel, but I'm not sure how true that ever was, and now all I can think of is the difficulty of keeping the kid out of trouble in a place where neither T. nor I speaks the local language, and coronavirus-related issues.

I have tried to be clear about this with T. and therefore I haven't felt too bad about not being too active in trip planning. Until yesterday, when she actually admitted that she was getting nervous about the expense and risk of the latest plan, and I said I'm OK if we wind up doing something more low-key or nothing at all. (I think I've said so before, and I think I was polite about it both then and now...) She shifted gears to researching simpler options but I'm not sure how she would feel about that.

Don't drive to the Kennedy Center

 Wordle 232 4/6

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Yesterday we had a lazy morning. Around 11 or so we drove to Alexandria. First we went to a bookstore and got a birthday present for one of the kid's friends. Her party is today. Then to Best Buy. T. got a wireless keyboard and mouse. She has been trundling a setup with cords around every day to work on her laptop at the dining room table. (One of a hundred ways we're adapting slowly to reality. I'll probably devote a post to it for the 2-year anniversary next month.) Then we went grocery shopping. We got home from there a little before 4. We did some laundry and had an early dinner. 

A little after 5 we left for a Chinese New Year event at the Kennedy Center. We brought a friend of the kid's. Traffic was kind of bad on the way there. Then, at one intersection, the red light was broken. Cars going the other way had a green light. I don't know if I noticed a car coming at us a little too fast, the light on the far side of the intersection that wasn't broken, or it was purely the Force speaking to me, but I slammed on the brakes before it was too late. We easily could have been t-boned. 

The event itself was okay. Looked pretty, crowded but outdoors, cold but we were prepared, the kids were as well behaved as can be expected of 6- and 7-year-olds which isn't saying much. On the way home, our Google Maps tried to direct us into a bike lane. It was a two-way bike lane protected by bollards and T.'s phone clearly told us to turn into it. We could only guess that it was new and Google Maps hadn't been updated. On the way home we saw people repairing the broken light. 

So it was stressful. I indulged ourselves with different drugs than the usual beer or similar alcoholic drinks and T. had extra dessert.

Crazy day

 Wordle 231 5/6

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I feel like I shouldn't have needed that 4th guess to eliminate letters but I just couldn't think of anything that fit what I had.

Yesterday was crazy. Every other Friday is the busiest day of the two-week period for us technical writers due to biweekly reports. (They used to be weekly. Progress.) They were a bit later than usual. The last straggler I had to pick up the phone and track down. Apparently he had finished his report hours ago but forgot to mark it done. (Or had a glitch or something, who knows, but it wasn't marked done.) So that was a productive use of my time...

Meanwhile, problems with the office's wiki were mushrooming. The office has a library we technical writers control with an iron fist. It also has a wiki we do less with, other than making sure that things in there that should be in the library are. But several email discussions about it this week became our problem. One of those was actually with the person whose report was late. I was worried dealing with the wiki issue would take him away from the report actually due today. We got the essentials dealt with for the moment, but we'll probably have to start doing more things in the wiki, or get it organized differently.

Yesterday was crazy in one good way too. The kid has a gymnastics class Friday nights. A friend of hers is in the same class. This week our schedule happened to line up with her friend's, and her friend's parents could take both of them to the class so T. and I had extra time around the house to relax.

Scheduling problems

 No Wordle because I got on my work computer first thing because I'm a bit busier today, and the link and cached history are on my personal computer. Ugh. (I can do this on my work computer, I'd just rather not.) I'll do it later and edit it in here.

Yesterday work was uneventful. Sent a few emails, the team got a new task and figuring it out was complicated but the task itself probably won't be that bad, etc. But the afternoon/evening turned out to be complicated.

T. and I left the house around 3. The plan was to deposit some checks at the bank and go grocery shopping together. Then I'd drop T. off at a political event at 4:30, pick the kid up from afterschool care, and take her to her guitar lesson at 5. After that I'd make a quick dinner and I'd have a video chat meeting for one of the kid's extracurriculars at 6:30. 

But we didn't think too hard about the locations and schedules of those things until we were already in the car. It would have been impossible to get from the bank, to the grocery store we had in mind and actually get any shopping done, to T.'s event in time. So instead we went to the bank, drove to T.'s event (only about half a mile but it's a very awkward route/layout), and essentially just sat in the car for 20 minutes until it was a reasonable time for T. to go to her event. While driving to get the kid, I did mental math and realized I'd have like 20 minutes to spare, and there's a grocery store not too far away. So I went there, raced through aisles of the store, got the bare necessities, and then went to get the kid. Things went to plan from then on. 

EDIT at 1 this afternoon:

Wordle 230 3/6

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I'm a genius

 Wordle 229 2/6

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Awesome.

Yesterday at work I got through several minor random things in the morning. In the afternoon I did my share of those 30+ "individually simple but annoying" tasks from yesterday. Good for me.

I mentioned having a long to-do list. To be exact, there are 11 items on a list I wrote up on the 1st. Yesterday I got through two of them, both tasks related to the new phone. I feel like that's a good start, considering how many would be impossible or unnecessary to do already.

Bedtime for the kid was rough. She bargains. When I put my foot down, she yells or just gets out of bed and follows me. I did what she wanted last night in return for a commitment of good behavior tonight and going forward. Let's see if she holds up her end.

Today is day 3 of only having browser access to my office network on my personal computer, and needing to go to the corporate computer for anything else. (Maybe more than day 3. I first mentioned it happening on Tuesday, but I'm not sure from memory it didn't happen earlier.) I think the next troubleshooting step is uninstalling and reinstalling the relevant plugin, so that's on my agenda for later today, but I'll try to get through some actual work first. It's annoying. I can't claim I need to use my personal computer for work, especially since one of the to-do list items I did yesterday was setting up two-factor authentication on the new phone, but it's nice. I like being able to alt-tab between a document I'm writing for work and, well, this, or commenting on a blog, or other minor distractions that I still wouldn't want to do on the official corporate or government network.

My legs hurt

 Wordle 228 5/6

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Yesterday morning (before or during that first entry) I wasn't able to get into the main office network on my personal computer. So instead I got in the browser-view version, which has reduced functionality. I made do for a couple hours then switched to my work computer and stayed on that for the rest of the day, being productive and reading a book when I wasn't. But now I'm having the same problem. I'll have to fix this at some point or get used to using my work computer...

When I was physically in the office, I used Outlook's AutoArchive plus a few very simple rules for announcement-type emails to keep my inbox from getting too big. Every six months or so I'd create a new archive file to keep the archive from getting too big. Very simple. But that doesn't work when working remotely. Something about the remote network screws up the archiving, or at least the automatic archiving. My inbox peaked at around 2,000 emails. So, in the summer of 2021 if not earlier, I started creating folders and sorting my emails into them. I worked on this sporadically. Over the past week I focused on it and basically finished, getting my inbox down to below 250 if not below 200, all of them related to active tasks I own. That was the culmination of a lot of work and should hopefully make my computer function noticeably better when working. I feel like I should be proud of it.

Unfortunately I can't report it anywhere, because no one except maybe family and friends cares about how emails are sorted. So that's frustrating. I also spent yesterday creating my second, more "polished" draft of a high-priority document, although none of my questions about my previous draft had been answered. And sorting a list of 30+ tasks to be divided between me and two other writers. The tasks are individually simple but annoying and there are over a dozen of them, but I can't be sure how many because the list was badly formatted. A productive day is rarely so frustrating.

After work we took the kid to her swim class. The rec center where the class is also has a small gym - treadmills, stair-climber, some kind of resistance machine. Jogging on a treadmill is my third choice for exercise at best, and that gym is minimal, and I'd normally listen to music on Pandora on my phone but I still haven't got that headset figured out, but despite walking and skating this weekend I'm overdue for exercise so I tried it out. 2 miles in 22 minutes. Far from my best and it was painful anyway, but at least I feel dutiful.

I was grumpy all day yesterday. No reason for it, or no one reason. In addition to the work stuff, and the problems with the new phone, and too-little-too-late exercise, I was tired. The night before last, the kid came into bed with us around like 4 in the morning. Same for last night, by the way. I'm not sure the new bedtime routine will help with this (too early to say, it's slow going) but we have to find something that does.

Something like normalcy

 Wordle 227 4/6

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I had the green letters to get it in 3, I just had a mental block on that letter pattern. Whoops.

Yesterday was fine. I did a little work on a few little small (or big but old and not-at-all-urgent) tasks of mine, and otherwise sorted emails. My system from when I was physically in the office stopped working due to remote network settings or something and I still haven't finished applying a new system. I made a good dent in it yesterday though. 

When we got home with the kid we happened to run into some friends and former neighbors of ours. They came over for cocktails and we wound up chatting for almost an hour. That was nice. It's been a while. We had to clean off cocktail glasses we haven't used in two years.