{"id":19736,"date":"2023-05-10T15:27:21","date_gmt":"2023-05-10T22:27:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=19736"},"modified":"2023-05-10T15:27:21","modified_gmt":"2023-05-10T22:27:21","slug":"some-life-updates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2023\/05\/10\/some-life-updates\/","title":{"rendered":"Some life updates"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Here are a bunch of assorted updates about what I\u2019ve been up to.<\/p>\r\n<p>(No advice, please.)<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>Got my second Shingrix shot and my second Hepatitis B shot yesterday. Had no ill effects for about 24 hours; then this afternoon I got a headache and some general-body acheyness and started feeling a little chilly. Not bad, just a little. Took Advil and put on a warm bathrobe. If it gets worse, I shall take to my bed.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Kam and I are now caught up on <cite>Ted Lasso<\/cite>. It\u2019s still my favorite current show. It was planned as a three-season show, so it\u2019s now most of the way through its final season; only three episodes left in the series. I was a little worried that they were going to run out of episodes before they could resolve all the remaining unresolved storylines, but (a) the episodes this season are each roughly twice as long as the episodes in s1, and (b) they do seem to be making progress toward resolving various things. I have a couple of One True Pairings who I ship, but I think I\u2019ll be okay with it if those couples don\u2019t end up together.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Yesterday I finally dug up the paperwork that I need to file for COBRA, to continue my health insurance. Hoping to get that done in the next couple days.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Task management update: Each day, my task manager (an app called Things) shows me a long list of all the tasks that I\u2019ve told it I want to do that day. I then change the dates on enough of the tasks to bring my list for that day down to 30 items. Lately, I\u2019ve been getting through between 9 and 15 of those items a day. \u2026On the one hand, most of the items that I\u2019ve been getting through are incremental daily tasks (some of them very small), which means that I\u2019m not getting many of the bigger and more important tasks done\u2014each day, there are about 15-20 tasks that are on my list but that I don\u2019t do. But on the other hand, consistently getting through 9-15 tasks a day is more than I think I\u2019ve ever managed before on a regular basis. \u2026Partly that\u2019s because I\u2019m putting more of my daily tasks on my task list than I used to, so there are more relatively easy things to check off. But regardless of any of that, I feel like I\u2019m making reasonably good progress on various things.<\/li>\r\n  <li>I haven\u2019t yet started looking for a new day job. Maybe next month, maybe in a couple of months. I\u2019m not yet feeling any urgency about this. \u2026I did respond to a recruiter, though, who was looking for someone to fill a possibly interesting-sounding tech writing position. I had assumed that a recruiter who was being coy about what company they were working with would refuse to say the name of the company if asked, but I figured I didn\u2019t have anything to lose in this case, so I asked them the name of the company\u2014and they responded! \u2026And the company in question is Google. Interestingly, it\u2019s a contract tech writing position; I had been under the impression for the past year or so that it was just about impossible for Google teams to get funding for such a position these days, but apparently not. Anyway, I don\u2019t want a contract job, and I don\u2019t want to work for Google again in the near future (I might consider it later), so I\u2019ll say no. But it was interesting to hear about.<\/li>\r\n  <li>I still haven\u2019t decided whether I\u2019m coming to WisCon in person. I think probably not at this point, but still not entirely certain. If I do come, it\u2019ll be a very different experience for me than it\u2019s been in the past\u2014I probably won\u2019t be doing much social interaction, no meals with others (not even outdoors), no unmasked hanging-out, etc. (Last year, WisCon did a great job with COVID mitigations, and this year they\u2019re doing an even better job, addressing a couple more of last year\u2019s risk factors. But they\u2019re of course only requiring masks in convention areas, so I imagine many attendees and other hotel guests will be hanging out unmasked in places like the lobby and the bar, and restaurants, and I\u2019m not comfortable doing any of those things.) I would be able to attend panels, and maybe readings?, and the Otherwise auction, and the GoH speeches, and to chat with friends in masked contexts, and to give and receive hugs. (And given next year\u2019s plan to work on sustainability rather than have a con, it\u2019s possible that this\u2019ll be the last WisCon, though I hope not.) But it might be more stressful for me than I want to deal with.<\/li>\r\n  <li>I\u2019ve been meaning for months to try to fix a tear in one of my bedsheets. I finally went yesterday and got some fusible interfacing, which is what the sheet-repair videos that I watched recommended, and which may or may not be sufficient for my purposes. We\u2019ll see.<\/li>\r\n  <li>I\u2019ve been keeping my hair short, using a trimmer that I bought a few months ago. The first few times I trimmed my hair, I cut it to half an inch long (#4), but the latest time, a few days ago, I went with \u00be\" (#6). I like the look of \u00be\" better. This latest time, I also tried doing a little bit of shorter trimming around the edges (as recommended in one of the videos I watched), which I think worked reasonably well.<\/li>\r\n  <li>I recently acquired several old Pete Seeger albums on CD; I transferred those to my computer and I\u2019ve been listening to them while I sort old papers. It\u2019s nice to hear his voice. (It would\u2019ve been his 104th birthday a week ago.) But some of those old songs are now really inappropriate in a variety of ways. And on some others, he sings a rather different tune than the one I know\u2014which is surprising, given that I would expect that I heard most of them from people who learned them by listening to Seeger. Still, overall I\u2019m enjoying listening to most of the songs.<\/li>\r\n  <li>I\u2019ve been trying some new-to-me food items lately, especially some vegetarian frozen foods. Among the latest: Tattooed Chef brand \u201cCauliflower mac and cheese bowl\u201d\u2014which as noted on the box, \u201ccontains no pasta\u201d; it\u2019s not so much mac-and-cheese as cauliflower-in-cheese-sauce. But pretty tasty. Also got frozen plant-based fish-sticks substitute, which were alas not very fishlike. Also got mochi with oat-milk quasi-ice-cream\u2014not bad, not great.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Yesterday I tried to find Brave Robot ice cream, which is made from Perfect Day\u2019s lab-grown milk proteins. Unfortunately, the closest store to me that their site listed as having it (a Nob Hill) seems to have decided to stop carrying it. I tried calling the second-closest store (a Lucky\u2019s), where a brusque employee who had never heard of it told me they didn\u2019t carry it and I should try Trader Joe\u2019s or Whole Foods (which don\u2019t carry it). So I\u2019ve now contacted the Brave Robot people to ask them if they can update their database of who carries it.<\/li>\r\n  <li>I\u2019ve managed to keep the kitchen counter and table pretty much clear of clutter for about five months now, much to my surprise.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\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":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-updates"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19736","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=19736"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19737,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19736\/revisions\/19737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}