Tablesaw!

I found the mobile-friendly new-entry page again. I didn't think this would be possible without it.

One grandparent-in-law is in town, with the other arriving tomorrow, so we should be getting visitors.

Going to commit to microblogging here for a bit. I need to write more, with lower stakes. And Dreamwidth holdouts, these here are the lowest stakes there are. Mastodon is close, but it still seems like broadcasting.

I've gotten worse at expressing my thoughts, so I'm trying to write down more dumb thoughts. Work my way up to thoughtful.

Packing up grandparents-in-law's House this weekend. Dust allergies suck.

Psyche and I hoped that this weekend would be a relaxing one of sleeping in, resting, eating good food, and maybe putting together a bookcase or two. That is not what is happening.

On Friday morning, Psyche got a call that her step-grandfather had died. We knew he'd gone to the hospital the day before and we assumed that it was related, but that turned out not to be the case. He had gone to the ER, because of elevated white blood cells, but after several tests, everything seemed to be fine and he was sent home. He spent the morning in high spirits, and collapsed quietly from something sudden.

Part of moving to Santa Maria was to be closer to Psyche's family, but we didn't expect to be called for something so dire so soon. When we arrived, we relieved one of her aunts to take care of some more business, and Psyche and I were there when the undertakers arrived to remove the body, and we spent most of the day there with her grandmother. Today, more aunts and Psyche's mother arrived.

Eventually we got the chance to show many of them around the house. This is earlier than we'd expected. We are still sans couches and other entertainment furniture, but we did get to show everyone around, and they loved to our tiny pets. It also gave them a space to gather and discuss things away from Psyche's grandmother, which I think was a welcome break.

Right now, I think we're all trying to keep Psyche's grandmother socially occupied so the home doesn't feel empty, but I imagine it's worse at night as more people leave. We'll see how things go in the coming weeks.

With a desk, Wi-Fi, and a bed, I guess it's safe to say that I'm moved into my new house.

Sorry if this is news to you (whether because you didn't know I was moving or you didn't know I was updating this blog).

I've moved outside of L.A. for the first time since college, into a new larger house on the Central Coast of California. It's making me feel isolated, but moreso it's putting into stark relief an isolation I've been feeling since the pandemic. It's rough thinking about being so far away from my friends in the city, but I was already seeing them in person only rarely. It's making me think consciously about creating new social ties, and strengthening old ones.

Hopefully a few things stick. Maybe blogging will be one of them.

I just came back from a memorial for another lost friend, which is something that tends to remind me that blogs exist. and I should type into them. But frankly, I don't want to make this an aperiodic record of the grief of my life, and frankly there's enough going on to talk about first.

I was laid off with less than a week's notice and no severance back in February. We had enough savings to last the stretch between Psyche's job and unemployment, but I'm glad I have a new position starting in June. It's going to be more full-stack web development at a healthcare startup, so the transition should be easy.

I've been playing Tears of the Kingdom since it came out. I've been moving slowly on my own game, though I've stepped in to play lots of Psyche's game. I'm really enjoying being back in this careful game design. I've played a lot of Genshin Impact since finishing Breath of the Wild, and it's easier to forget how much more subtle the design of the Zelda games are.

I started reading The Book of the New Sun on the plane while traveling to the aforementioned memorial, and I made it pretty far into The Shadow of the Torturer already. The first few chapters had a really gentle prose voice that I enjoyed. Of course, the reason I picked it up is because it's going to be the next subject of the podcast Homestuck Made This World, so I know there's going to be some . . . shenanigans; and I think they are starting to manifest more strongly. I'm hoping I stay in the groove as the novels continue.

Pretty boring month, right?

OK, so let's see what's been happening.

Well, I voted in the Democratic Primary on Super Tuesday. That was three weeks ago; it's the same month. I don't even have time to get into that whole mess.

On March 5, I was already starting to get anxious about what I was hearing about COVID-19. I work in a coworking space, and while I had my own office (shared with one other person), I spent a lot of time in the community kitchen, and I was starting to feel uncomfortable. I told my boss I was going to work from home starting the next day. I work at a small startup, where a few people already work remotely, but my CTO and I have tended to work closely in person. At the time, I had planned to work from home on Friday and Monday, then return for the staff meeting on Tuesday on site, to make further decisions there.

On Sunday, March 8, I saw my parents, sister, and nieces in person, for what may be the last time in a while. My oldest niece had a basketball game, and I watched with the family. Afterward, we went to Olive Garden, where we we had an alcove to ourselves and washed our hands. Later that day, I got an email from work, the CEO and CTO had decided that the whole company would be working from home. It felt good to get a head start on social distancing.

On Monday, March 9, I had tickets to see House of Games with David Mamet in person. I was pretty anxious about going, it would probably be a crowded space, but it wasn't a thing I really wanted to miss. A mishap with our cars meant that I ultimately couldn't make it, which was a bit of a relief.

My five-year wedding anniversary was on Saturday, March 14, and we'd planned a small weekend trip to Catalina. If you don't know, Catalina is a small island 26 miles off the coast of Los Angeles, easy to see when the air is clear. But it's a little isolated, the only way on or off the island is via ferry. And in the week leading up to the trip, I was increasingly anxious. Psyche wanted to go, practicing social distancing and cleaning/sanitizing as we go. I wanted to cancel, increasingly convinced that I had been exposed, and worried that symptoms would manifest while we were on the island, cutting off access to the ferry and stranding us away from our well-stocked home.

Psyche won out. She finds it easier to relax while out of the house and was more confident in our ability to stay responsibly isolated. And a somewhat rainy weekend meant the village was pretty empty, making it easy to give everyone a wide berth. On Saturday, we did a golf-cart rental to drive around the island for an hour taking in the views looking toward Long Beach. We spent a lot of time making plans for the next time we go and can do things that require closer quarters, like the mini submarine for reef viewing.

In the last week, restrictions have gotten progressively tighter, and we've avoided going out. We ordered delivery on Tuesday, which was a wonderful moment of normalcy, even if we had to tell the delivery person to leave the bag outside the door, and wait for him to leave. On a trip to our post-office box to pick up some delivered supplies, I grabbed In-N-Out on the way home (they've had a sock-day policy since before the pandemic). The PO service is going through some changes too. They're an essential business, so the can (and according to service agreements, must) stay open to receive mail, but they have contingency plans for progressively worse scenarios. I signed up for a "virtual mailbox" service, where they email pictures of all mail and packages, so we can avoid trips to pick them up unless they are critical.

We also went to Psyche's office to pick up some supplies as she's working from home now too, and on the way back, we tried to find a place along the way home to get out and breathe. But as you may have heard Angelenos who had been told that social distancing in nature was okay all headed out at the same time to many of the same places, defeating the purpose. At a usually quiet beach, we saw a small crowd of people (and possibly the remnants of a classic car show that had decided not cancel?), and as we drove along the coast, most of the vista points had a few dozen people. We did eventually find a spot with only a handful, where we could stay several yards away from the others, and the views were incredible. The rain, combined with reduced car use has kept the air cleaner than I think I've ever seen, and from Rancho Palos Verdes, I could not only see downtown Los Angeles, I could pick out individual buildings.

Today, we made a trip out to bolster our grocery supplies, particularly our fresh vegetables. We went to a local Japanese market, because there have generally been reports that businesses run by and geared towards Asian Americans have been hit with the extra damage of racism. They still seemed well stocked, but most of the stores around here seem to be doing well. Regardless, it was quiet, and it was easy to keep distance from other patrons.

For dinner, we made minestrone, and paired it with bread that Psyche baked yesterday. Both were delicious.

Some other things I've been doing:

( Movies, TV, Music, Puzzles )

Phew. What's next?

Last weekend, I attended the Doctor Who convention Gallifrey One for the sixth year. It was loads of fun, and I'd love to write all about it, but it's a big topic, and I've been bad at updating, so I'm going to post this blog the moment I'm done with my tea, regardless of what I left out. Maybe I'll make another post with more info, maybe not!

Gally is kind of a big deal in the Doctor Who fan world, but it's always been a little weird for Psyche and me, because it's also a local convention. On Twitter, I'm following people preparing a week in advance for intercontinental flights to spend a week in Los Angeles on vacation, but for me it's just half of my commute. In fact, for the first few years, we didn't even take Friday off to attend all three days of events.

This is also the first year that I was a part of the programming. A feature for the last few years has been a block of TARDIS talks. They're structured like academic talks, though that refers more to the approach to a topic than the occupation of the presenter. At some point the organizers described as something like a chance to talk about your favorite Doctor Who subject for fifteen minutes uninterrupted, and I took that to heart. For almost two years now, I've been obsessed with the connections between the ancient story of the Trojan War (which most people know about), the medieval story of Troilus and Cressida (which most people don't know about), and the Doctor Who story "The Myth Makers" (which pretty much no Who fans have actually seen because the BBC lost all the tapes). It's a superstorm of niche obsessions, and I finally had a chance to unleash it on the unsuspecting world (at least, the world that decided to skip the interview with Tosin Cole.

I'm hoping to put it online in some form, but the version I ended up with was mostly notes, so I need to reconstruct it. I'm thinking of putting it together as a video on YouTube, because I did some PowerPoint humor that I don't really want to give up on. Maybe set a goal to have that done by the end of the month.

The big guest was Christopher Eccleston, who was the Doctor in the first season of the rebooted show. I have big feelings about his performance, and it was really great to see him talking about his life, his art, masculinity, and vulnerability. We'd hoped to get an autograph, but the convention was overwhelmed, and we ultimately didn't want to give up most of our day to see him. But it seemed like he had a good time, so hopefully we'll get a chance to see him again.

And that's the honey-thick end of this mug of tea. Have a good night!

March is almost over, so, of course, it's time to talk about things I did in February!

To show my commitment to this arbitrary resolution, I went to see a movie alone after work on February 28, mostly selecting the movie by its convenience to my schedule. I knew nothing about Greta going into this movie except the director and the stars.

( Greta )

Sheesh, it's been a year.

Not going to go into too many details right now, because I've wanted to post this specific thing for a while now, but hopefully it'll get the ball rolling (like I was hoping it would for at least three weeks).

My 2019 resolution was to watch one new movie and read one book every month. Throughout 2018, I felt that these were things that I enjoyed, but that were often getting pushed to the side when it came to finding time for things. I set a low bar (one per month) because I'm not trying to rearrange my media input, I just want to get back into building a habit of both.

In January, I saw two new movies: Roma and Stan and Ollie.

( Roma )

( Stan and Ollie )

OK. Books now.

I saw Maxine Waters on Saturday, and started a writeup on Sunday, and I came back to finish it on Wednesday, and it all seems so quaint.

It was going to be matter-of-fact and informational, but I can't even deal with that now.

On Friday, I was feeling super stressed about politics, and getting out into the community and hearing my new Congressperson talk frankly about the appalling nature of the current administration, including calls for investigation and impeachment, was heartening.

I was really hoping for that feeling to last for at least a workweek, but nope.

Anyway, the Town Hall was held in Inglewood, representing the core of Waters' district demographic: mostly Black, with some Latino. There were less than a handful of pro-Trump protestors, who got loud and then quickly left, presumably after they got the shot they felt they needed for their YouTube video. The session was mostly informational, with an extremely limited Q&A at the end.

Key points were healthcare, housing, and the incompetence of the administration. Most of the healthcare stuff I knew, but I hadn't been aware of all of the ways federal funding affected local efforts to combat the housing shortage in Los Angeles. Waters also brought a member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board to discuss the paper's recent series Our Dishonest President, and she spent time detailing the unqualifications of several administration members and cabinet appointees, including racism, sexism, inexperience, and foreign influence.

I know that Waters has been getting national attention for having a consistent anti-Trump message since the primaries, as I've been seeing her in tweets and comments from friends far away from the district. In her closing speech, she seemed not only cognizant of the issues facing young Americans of color, but excited to help amplify those concerns.