Various notes on my life this week:<\/p>\n
Over the weekend, I finally went to the bike store and bought a bright! yellow! bike jacket! (The exclamation marks are to give some indication of just how very bright this jacket is.) This is a big improvement over my former habit of biking home in the dark while wearing a black jacket, a black backpack, black pants, and navy shoes. (And a blue reflective helmet, and white reflective pants-leg ties, and reflectors and lights on the bike, so I wasn't totally invisible, just mostly.) It's theoretically waterproof, too, though I don't plan on biking in the rain if I can help it. I also got some adhesive reflective strips, and have put one of them on my backpack. Also bought a bike seat to replace my old one (the cover of which was torn); more about that some other time.<\/p>\n
Yesterday morning, my cable modem suddenly stopped working, and all attempts to resuscitate it failed. Spent a while on the phone arranging a service visit for this morning; but then half an hour after I got off the phone, the modem suddenly started working again all by itself. Odd. Cancelled the service visit, and got to work at home as originally planned. Yay.<\/p>\n
Later yesterday, I finally went to Sears and bought a treadmill, after months of thinking about doing so. The primary factors influencing my choice of treadmill were (a) price ($400; note that some websites say that anything under $1500 counts as a \"budget treadmill\"), and (b) the fact that there's a space on the console that's exactly the right size to hold my PowerBook. (More on that anon.) Thanks to Kam for helping me assemble the treadmill!<\/p>\n
Also yesterday I paid my property taxes. I'm not yet used to having this big end-of-year expense; next year I'll try to remember to budget for that in advance.<\/p>\n
Was up late last night watching old West Wing<\/cite> episodes (we're halfway through season 4), and then couldn't get to sleep for a while, for no reason I could figure out. (No need to offer cures for insomnia; it's an old companion of mine, and I know the things to try, it's just that it's been a while since I had trouble falling asleep.) Then woke up several times during the night.<\/p>\n So I was already off-kilter when I started the day today, and it turned out to be a day of startlements and suddenness. Found out indirectly, for example, that they'll be moving me to a different building at work sometime in the next couple weeks; I'm not looking forward to having to share an office or cube. I plan to move the desk out from the wall and sit behind it; I get very tense when I try to work while sitting with my back to a big open space with people in it. Also, change bad. :)<\/p>\n Been reading Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark<\/cite> in interstices between other stuff. Good so far, though I'm not loving it as much as I think everyone else did. I probably shouldn't have started it so soon after reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time<\/cite>, though they're certainly very different books in all sorts of ways. While reading both books, I've been struck by how many quasi-autistic traits I and many other geeks have (see above comment re \"change bad,\" for example, and how easily I'm startled\/flustered by unexpected social situations), but also by the many autistic traits not associated with geekdom. . . . The most interesting aspect of Speed of Dark<\/cite> to me so far is the (fairly central) question of whether \"disabled\" people should be \"cured\" if\/when it becomes feasible to do so; it reminds me of the debate in the deaf community over cochlear implants<\/a>.<\/p>\n Tonight after our editorial meeting I put the PowerBook on the treadmill and walked 1.4 miles in 45 minutes while I read four submissions. Productive. According to the machine, I theoretically burned 211 calories while doing this, which I suppose just about makes up for the piece of chocolate I had beforehand. Oh, well. I'll probably make more strenuous use of the treadmill eventually; still learning how to interact with it for best results. One unfortunate thing is that the floor creaked ominously while I was using it (it's on the second floor); I'm not sure whether to be worried about that or not. Perhaps I'll buy a soft pad to put under the treadmill to cushion the impact or something.<\/p>\n . . . Oh--I keep neglecting to mention that timestamps of my entries are not necessarily accurate these days. As may be obvious by now, I wrote a bunch of \"items\" entries over the weekend, and scheduled them to post at future times, to try and keep them from being quite as overwhelming as last time. I probably should've scheduled them further apart, though.<\/p>\n Okay, I think that's all for tonight.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Various notes on my life this week: Over the weekend, I finally went to the bike store and bought a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journaling","category-life-updates"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3248","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=3248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}