a day much like any other

[cellio]

Get up, shower (because we do not let hygiene lapse).

Make coffee. I seem to have learned to drink coffee. Between us we're going through 4-6 K-cups per day; that jumbo box isn't going to last as long as it looks like it should. And that's with tea and cold drinks as well throughout the day. Remember to drink water; it matters.

Box of tea arrived yesterday. Good.

Plug laptop into dock, start work day. Visit the "pets" chat channel. Mon/Wed/Fri, join the virtual coffee break mid-morning just to see and interact with coworkers. Try to work productively. Pay particular attention to my mentee who joined the company two weeks ago in the midst of all this.

Novel for this week: attend the virtual repackaging of the conference we'd been working toward for more than a year. The people who managed to turn it into a successful online conference in just a few weeks are amazing. I'm glad many of our customers showed up to give talks and interact.

Wonder if Pennsic is cancelled. They haven't even cancelled AEthelmearc War Practice in May, but I assume they will. Origins Game Fair says they'll decide by May 1 if it's cancelled. That seems likely.

Cook lunch. In normal times lunch is usually something cold I can take to work, like salad or yogurt. Now that we're both home, we're having more eggs, soup, french toast, grilled cheese, etc. Also plenty of salad and fruit. I bumped the Imperfect Foods box up from biweekly to weekly a few weeks ago. Good call, but lately they're (not surprisingly) out of lots of things. Still, it's produce delivered to my doorstep; I'll take what I can get.

Time to run the dishwasher again? Yeah, another effect of lunches at home, in addition to the dinners that were already mostly at home.

Is this what retirement will be like? Not entirely; we'll presumably dine out sometimes.

We would have gone out for our anniversary in a couple weeks.

Work. Try not to look at news too often. Check data-tracker sites anyway. Try not to be obsessive; the stats are bad for the mood.

Hmm, dinner time. Guess it's time to stop working. I need better boundaries, but at least I shut the machine down and disconnect it. We could say that's for mental-health discipline, but originally it's because of cat-proofing. In order to make things fit and have the laptop's webcam do something useful during video calls, the laptop sits on top of a milk crate peeking over my external monitor. Too tempting for Orlando.

Evening. Move the desk chair a couple feet and surf Dreamwidth, work on Codidact, chat with people on Discord. I don't like Discord but it's where people are. I don't really like chat but it's where people are. The people on the Meta server are my last ties to Stack Exchange.

I miss the people of Mi Yodeya. I hate that being on Stack Exchange hurts too much. I hope Codidact succeeds. I hope Codidact succeeds before everybody wanders away. I started drawing wireframes this week to get some things unstuck. This reminds me that I should get nowhere near the actual aesthetics of the site, but we have people with graphical clues, fortunately. My focus is workflows, use cases, behavior.

And lighting fires sometimes. Let's not forget lighting fires. The fires of inspiration, not the fires of destruction. Hard to tell when I'm getting that right.

I've spent most of the day sitting in this chair, one way or the other. Tomorrow maybe I'll walk laps in my small backyard or something. The daffodils are blooming.

Today is much like yesterday. Yesterday was much like the day before. If it weren't for Shabbat I might lose track of time entirely. And next week, Pesach and the smallest seder I will have ever attended.

The cat wants snuggles now. I'll take it.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

days and days.

[zare_k]

Ah, yeah, in retirement I think you're allowed to leave the house.

One day does flow into the next without much demarcation. Remembering to do something every day is fine, but things I do every other day or less frequently I have trouble recalling. I have been pretty good about going out for a walk after work in the evening and that at least puts a boundary between parts of the day.

[dsrtao]

There's at least one purveyor of reusable K-cups, which you can fill with your preferred ground coffee. Much cheaper, as well as better for the environment.

Sadly, my preferred coffee roasters, CoffeeBeanDirect, are closed for the exigency. Otherwise I would point you at them.

[jducoeur]

Wonder if Pennsic is cancelled.

Personally, I give 80% odds that it is: I don't see a realistic scenario where having thousands of people in close proximity like that for two weeks makes sense as soon as August. But that's a long ways off yet, and we're still in early days (relatively speaking), so we'll see.

We would have gone out for our anniversary in a couple weeks.

... which reminds me that our Dinnerversary is coming up. With all the restaurants closed, not sure what we're going to do. Probably seek out a good restaurant that we don't know, that does takeout...

[cellio]

That's a good point. In normal times we drink coffee at home rarely; a box of a dozen K-cups lasts a few months. The Keurig was attractive originally because we wanted coffee *occasionally*, a cup at a time. These, however, are not normal times, so thanks for reminding me that reusable K-cups exist.

[cellio]

We often look for a good restaurant that we haven't been to before ("good" based on local reviews). We're going to look for something reasonable that's currently doing takeout.

The page of restaurant ads in the local Jewish newspaper this week had a small banner at the top that said something like "there are options beyond fast food". I'm going to assume that every place that's still advertising on that page is in fact open for takeout, and it includes a good Italian restaurant (nearby) and a good Indian one (farther away). We currently have an abundance of wine because the pandemic-imposed changes to our seder plans came after the wine order, so that aspect of "nice dinner" is covered.

[jducoeur]

Takeout is, fortunately, still pretty abundant around here, and a friend of ours has led a crowd-sourced effort to maintain a spreadsheet of restaurants and other local businesses that are still selling. The challenge is finding something nice that we haven't done before. (Which is the official theme of Dinnerversary for us -- Kate's and my relationship was quite literally founded on a mutual love of good restaurants.)

The upside is that a lot of the best area restaurants -- the ones that wouldn't be caught dead doing takeout traditionally -- are doing so now, as a way to keep the lights on. We've already ordered in from one of them (Sarma, which is high-end, small-plate, Mediterranean), and will probably look for one we haven't have a chance to get to yet...

[rhialto]

That brand name still sounds weird to me, being Dutch. It is a Dutch word, meaning "neat(ly)" or potentially "proper(ly)". I wonder if that played any role in the decision to use that as a brand name. I find the name rather inappropriate though, since I came across it in connection with the rather disgraceful use they make of optical scanning technology to prevent you from using random coffee cups. They actually use a camera and image recognition to look for their logo on the covers of the cups! I don't like it when technology is used to make life worse instead of better...

[cellio]

Wow, I did not know that. Using OCR to check for their logo? Ugh!

Thanks for the language lesson. Does Dutch use the same word for both adjective (e.g. neat) and adverb (e.g. neatly)?

[rhialto]

I tried to find again where I first read about it; of course I didn't find the exact same thing, but this seems similar: https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/heres-a-super-easy-way-to-get-around-keurig-20-drm-restrictions-121214.html It also contains a similar video.

Yes, in Dutch the form of an adjective and an adverb are the same. I've been trying to think of any exceptions (any language rule tends to have exceptions, right?) but I couldn't think of one. Maybe it explains why it is difficult in schools to explain what an adjective is. One "definition" I remember from primary school was along the lines of "the words that remain after you've categorized all other words" which isn't terribly helpful.