{"id":17032,"date":"2018-03-04T08:08:22","date_gmt":"2018-03-04T16:08:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=17032"},"modified":"2018-03-04T09:24:53","modified_gmt":"2018-03-04T17:24:53","slug":"assorted-life-updates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2018\/03\/04\/assorted-life-updates\/","title":{"rendered":"Assorted life updates"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Didn\u2019t sleep much or well on Friday night, I think mostly because I stayed up way too late reading and playing iOS games. Hung out with Karen and P\u00e4r and Jeremiah during the day on Saturday, mostly playing Terraforming Mars, which has become one of my favorite boardgames. Then came home to help Kam move a bunch of her stuff into my garage, and chatted with Jeremy for a while.<\/p>\r\n<p>By late afternoon, I was pretty sleepy (and possibly a little sick; headache and maybe fever). Which is unfortunate, because it meant I wasn\u2019t safe to drive up to San Francisco for a friend\u2019s birthday party. Instead, I watched an episode of <cite>Black Lightning<\/cite> and an episode of <cite>Jane the Virgin<\/cite>, and then tried to do a cryptic crossword puzzle created by Jim and Abby but kept drifting off. I lingered on the couch in a half-asleep state for an hour or so before admitting to myself that it was time to go to sleep.<\/p>\r\n<p>Slept well and long, woke up early, am lingering in bed. Today, more boardgaming: playing episode 1 of season 2 of Pandemic: Legacy.<\/p>\r\n<p>And writing the above led me to realize that I haven\u2019t posted here about other stuff I\u2019ve been up to lately. Some notes:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>Spent a very social week in Seattle recently. I was there for a work thing: a team meeting\/offsite.\r\nBut I also spent a day gaming and chatting with Debby and John and Rose and David, and saw Ellie and Dana and Esther, and had dinner with Geoff, and hung out with Lori and Brian, and went on a sort of a blind date, and recorded a video interview with Paul (as part of my family-history project). And did an escape room with co-workers (my first one; was fun), and went to the Living Computers Museum also with co-workers. And probably other stuff I\u2019m not thinking of. Good to see everyone, sorry to miss everyone I didn\u2019t see.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Continuing my photo-labeling project. I\u2019ve labeled 24,000 photos; a little under 14,000 left to go,\r\nwhich means I\u2019m almost 2\/3 done. If I can keep up a steady pace, I can finish in six months; but if I follow my usual pattern of getting out of the habit for weeks at a time, then it might take me another year.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Making a little bit of progress on Constellation Press. Finally saw a tax person about the company\u2019s tax situation. Have been discussing a possible book to publish. More news on all that as\/if things develop.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Finished reading my grandmother Helen\u2019s diary from 1926-1927, when she was eighteen. It\u2019s not as interesting or as revealing as I had hoped; her notes about her own thoughts and feelings are pretty minimal and oblique. But still nice to have it. I\u2019m gradually transcribing it, by reading it aloud into Apple\u2019s speech-to-text system and then cleaning up mistakes.<\/li>\r\n  <li>TV: Kam and I finished watching season 1 of <cite>Star Trek: Discovery<\/cite>, which is my favorite <cite>Trek<\/cite> show despite some flaws. We also finished watching season 6 of <cite>Deep Space 9<\/cite>, and have started on season 7; still liking it, but I\u2019m much more aware of its flaws than I am of <cite>Discovery<\/cite>\u2019s. I\u2019m also liking <cite>Black Lightning<\/cite>, and still loving <cite>Jane the Virgin<\/cite>, which I\u2019m a couple episodes behind on.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Speaking of black superheroes, Kam and I saw <cite>Black Panther<\/cite> last weekend. I liked it quite a bit, but didn\u2019t personally love it. But I\u2019m very glad it was made, and that its core audience loves it so much, and I hope to see it again soon, to look at it in light of the various commentaries about it I\u2019ve read and heard.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Have now read all of Joanna Russ\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/spreadsheets\/d\/1xzi-7IJ-ef8R-lFK8HkJZ6nrXocJ5bvcS707p2kdb0Y\/edit?usp=sharing\">published short fiction<\/a>, approximately in publication order. A lot of great stuff there. Oh, but it turns out that the ISFDB (which was my source for most of that list) may be missing some other published fiction, according to another <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/spreadsheets\/d\/1slM5FQMlGCZsjED9_bueU-GbF70-Fsu-bZltyheNdhs\/edit#gid=0\">bibliography<\/a>; I\u2019ve contacted the creator of that latter page to try to find out more.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Also finished reading Emily Wilson\u2019s translation of <cite>The Odyssey<\/cite>. I found it interesting and worth reading (I had previously only read retellings-for-kids versions of the story), but didn\u2019t love it. Odysseus is not a very sympathetic character.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Have been teaching my niece Avery to juggle.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Have been playing the new iOS game <cite>Alto\u2019s Odyssey<\/cite>, sequel to the excellent <cite>Alto\u2019s Adventure<\/cite>. Lovely graphics, of course, and some nice new gameplay elements, but I\u2019m finding it a little more frustrating than the first game, somehow. But still worth playing.<\/li>\r\n  <li>This coming week will include the thirteenth anniversary of my father\u2019s death. So far, I\u2019ve been pretty much okay (as compared to past years in which I\u2019ve found myself tense and irritable in the couple of weeks before the anniversary), but am going to try to take things easy this week.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Probably unrelatedly, I\u2019ve felt kind of scattered\/unfocused for several weeks now. Having a hard time getting things done. Hoping to get past that soon. We\u2019ll see.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Next weekend is FOGcon. I have various things I need to do to prepare for that; I should try to get moving on that this evening.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,58,29,44,28,5,27,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-games","category-life-updates","category-movies","category-short-stories","category-socializing","category-speculative-fiction","category-television"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17032"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17039,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17032\/revisions\/17039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}