little dog is heartworm free, so she got to run her first two practice fast CATs on saturday afternoon. the weather was perfect, and she was only a jerk for a little while when i tried to catch her the first time. photo below of the car ride home.

i slipped and fell onto my elbow last night running after the dogs, so i took the day off to rest and ice it. feeling a lot better now and the swelling has gone down.

Long time reader, first time commenter.

Its going fairly well for me, had a nice chat with family the other day. Ive lost about half of the weight I want to (slow and steady in a healthy way). And I think the friendly banter with a friend is getting rather friendly so will see where that goes.

Still great, waiting on my third date with the chef girl on Friday. Can’t wait for it.

I’m doing okay. Last week was filled with a lot of little frustrations, but I got through it. I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow and, barring any weirdness with my labs, I’ll be starting HRT! :D I’m nervous, but also very excited!

Edit: Insert that video of Linus Torvalds giving NVIDIA the middle finger, but replace NVIDIA with Regence.

This week is rough. We’re in midterms and everyone around is just in pain. Physical. Mental. I’ve been putting in 12 hour days trying to send feedback (I’m in the un-grading camp, which can be pain with a lot of students) prepare lectures, cover every imaginable student related problem, and it’s overwhelming.

It’s here where I really see where my class falls. Did I effectively get information across in a meaningful way? Yes. Are there a few students who are beyond helping? Always, and that pains me. You can do everything from outreach, to contacting student help offices, and they still miss assignments and stay on their phone during class. It’s 20-30k a year. Gone. And it hurts me that I can’t do more for them. The students who care are amazing and do incredible work. But knowing how much is at stake here, debt, knowledge, future, and how lucky they all are to have this opportunity…totally wasted. Hits hard every semester.

So far so good! Hope everyone has a good week!

I’m looking for someone to do coworking with over screen share. Maybe do some rubber ducking but mostly to just feel more motivated. So if you feel like that would help you too just msg me.

2023 has been a hard year and I’m having trouble picking up my life again now that my situation has stabilized.

That’s all thanks to the help of friends and strangers. They’ve been giving and giving. It feels like a privilege to know that people have so much good in them, on a direct personal level. I wish more people could have that experience.

Well let’s see. During the course of last week, what at first felt like a harmless though persistent cold grew into an acute inflammation of pretty much everything from my ears down to my bronchia. But I have antibiotics now and the doctor and I have had an interesting chat about the state of Switzerland’s various healthcare systems, so there’s that.

There was a prolonged internet outage at the place the kids were scheduled to stay (they alternate between their father’s house, our nearby apartment and in one case a student flat-share), which may or may not have helped them decide that they want to spend the weekend with us at our house which is further away from them (but has rock-solid fiber internet), which was nice. I enjoy this quality family time and am very happy that they feel at home in this house, even though ‘feeling at home’ in their case means they spend most of their time in their room surfing social media or watching TV. We still get to spend enough time together that I’m thankful for a couple of days low on teenage drama afterwards.

It’s spring weather here and we’re enjoying the sun until the inevitable return of winter sometime in March. I’m looking forward to when my ears stop hurting in a couple of days so I can go outside again and get myself some freshly made vitamin D.

My third date with the chef girl went super well, we ended up doing some pretty sexual stuff but she started her period the day before so our action was limited in that respect, still had a great time before and after we started doing that stuff though. Her guniea pigs were so cute and fluffy, though I was pissed on by one of them lol.

Got my fourth date at my house and we’re gonna go all the way for the first time (for me) on Wednesday, pretty excited.

I got a comfy new cushion for my office chair. Doing my best to not fart on it too much since it’s new and all.

The handegg team from my city won! I don’t watch much football, but it actually was a decent, nailbiter of a game. Watched it with my friends online, so that was fun.

On Friday, I was a little peeved with my HR/Payroll person. They switched some tax withholding stuff around for some of us, which isn’t a huge deal, but only because I and affected coworkers noticed it now. Like it was working fine as it was. There really was no reason to change things, especially like this. Oh well, I think I got it fixed. Should be good going forward.

Related, but separate, I reached out to my contacts at a place where I’ve been tentatively hired. The processing is taking forever. Partly because of my laziness, but mostly because I need a security clearance and that takes forever; several months now. I’ve been getting a little antsy since I hadn’t heard anything in over a month. Was my stuff still being processed? Did I not get my clearance and they just didn’t tell me? Was the offer still valid? One contact didn’t respond at all which didn’t help. But the other did and he said everything has been submitted to the proper department for review, and that he hoped to hear something back this week. Even though it was just a status update and technically nothing has changed, it was still a relief to hear that.

Later this week I’m going to go visit my parents and help them move. Then after that it’s my birthday. For that, my brother and I are going on a trip to San Diego for like 3-4 days. Haven’t been there since I was a kid, so excited to see what it’s like as an adult. Should be a good time.

A few weeks ago, I bought a new external HDD for backups and whatnot. Since I already have a few, I needed to move shit around and between drives so that I have at least some redundancy.

This also required some formatting native Linux filesystems (mix between btrfs and ext4) because I can’t use NTFS as a reliable backup for my Linux shit. I mean, I can, but it’s slow and none of the shit I’m backing up needs to be readable by a Windows machine.

Still, I keep one NTFS drive for backed up Windows images in case I need to return my laptop for whatever reason.

Yeah, so cut to today. Going through my drives because I’m having a hardware issue (battery) and might need to send it back in. I’m sure you know the rest of this. Blah blah, lost the Windows images, blah blah.

Apparently Windows is tied to hardware keys, so reinstalling it with their Media Creation Tool should work fine because the license key is already there. But now I’m going to be seesawing between OS backups and restores for the next day just to make a new backup of Windows.

Honestly, this probably needed to happen. It’s reminded to to do a full image backup of my current system, which I’d forgotten to do (it’s not super necessary, since I tend to often reinstall a fresh system anyway, but still).

Oh, also I’m having chest pains again, which is fun. (I’ve been checked and my heart and lungs are okay. Had this same issue a couple of weeks ago. Turned out to be either muscular or anxiety or both. One probably made the other worse.)

Went to see my parents last week. Dad had a sniffle the first day and I suggested we leave but my wife didn’t want to drive 8 hours back home so we agreed to “be careful” and he stayed mostly away from us and wore a mask when we were in the car. Cue to 4 days later and my wife feels tired and has allergy symptoms driving home (tbf, the pine pollen down south is nuts and it’s one of her primary allergens). I slept in the guest bedroom when we got home / spent my time on the other side of the house in case it wasn’t just allergies. Tuesday morning…she tests for Covid “just to see” and is positive. I’m typing this from a hotel room, still feeling well, tested negative. Will test again today regardless.

Oh, and Remdesivir? $1680 for a single prescription. Fuck me; no wonder they have so much money for TV ads.

The timing of everything sucks so much lately 😭

My week is going fairly ok. The spring weather started showing up a little which is nice.