Listen to the Rain

Laila is out at the grandparents for an entire week--first at sashagee's parents, then at my parents. This will be the longest she's been away from us and the house already is so quiet. It doesn't help that sashagee isn't feeling super well so she's back in the room taking a nap. That means dinner is up to me. I'm not sure what she was planning, but there's thawed chicken in the fridge and I know how to make stir-fry so that's probably what I'm going to do. We've had pasta a few times this week and I need to clear it out with some rice.

Work is instituting a DEI curriculum for this year. While they've encouraged an equity element in continuing education for years, this is the first year it's been an explicit part of our evaluation and...well, you can tell it's the first year. They've already changed the requirements half a dozen times, we had a division meeting last week and over half of it was taken up by people asking questions about what the exact requirements were, how many items from list B are needed, if you can combine this item with that item into the requirement or does only one count for it...the list goes on and on and on. And then the other list of requirements is just "hours of content consumed" and you can just say "Trust me bro, I did it" as surety. Onm the other hand, this is probably pretty average in terms of new program rollout at a large organization, because at least they have a stated goal that has remained consistent the entire time. Anyone complaining about government dysfunction specifically has never worked for a large organization.

I have a lot of plans this weekend, what with the baby gone. Tomorrow I'm going to a learning in the park with Mishkan in the morning and then tom.hen.12 invited me to a board game meetup in the afternoon. Sunday the anime kids are having an art/crafting meeting and I'm planning to go to either work on my review of Dawntrail (this month's game) or work on some CDDA modding stuff. It'll be a nice weekend, slightly active, before going back to work.

And speaking of work, dinner won't make itself.

This is related to the latest management obsession. The messaging was confusing, the standards were unclear, and the goal was obscure, so I decided I was going to ignore all of the nonsense about "making it your own" and "putting it in your own words" and I memorized the entire thing and recited it in the meeting.

They said I was the only person who used 100% of the keywords they were looking for and, unlike the others, they asked me no follow-up questions.

Sometimes the dumb brute-force approach pays off.

The latest senior management work obsession--I've written about a few others here and there--is about a specific mission and vision statement, and it's unclear what we have to do about it. I went to a meeting about it yesterday and it was mostly just a chat-and-practice session, but one person said that it was important to use some of the keywords and apply it to your job. But the person organizing the meeting said that we had to memorize them verbatim, so who knows exactly what the actual requirement is. Hopefully they'll be some more clarity on this unifying statement that's supposed to bring the entire department together.

On the other hand, one of the people I was sitting with was in my division and asked me when I was going to get a promotion. I said hopefully soon and he said that everything thinks I do good work, so ב״ה it'll happen! Just need a chance to actually do more--one of the problem of being extremely good at my job and the go-to person for my job is that if I leave, the job doesn't get done.

The second thing isn't directly related to my job, but to its location--they're giving us an option for a cheaper membership in the luxury spa in the hotel downstairs. Twenty percent lower monthly dues, ninety percent lower initiation fee, twenty percent off spa treatments, fifteen percent off food at the hotel...it does all sound nice, but the question is, will I use it at all? And if I don't, can I give these discounts to sashagee, who's liable to be more interested in the spa treatments than me? I mean, people already think I'm ten years younger than I am, I don't need a lot of spa therapy to maintain my youth (though some of the services do sound extremely relaxing). To justify a membership I'd have to go regularly and with being in the office only twice a week I doubt I'm going to do that. On the other hand, maybe going together with sashagee would be fun. That might be something to do for the weekend after next, when Laila will be at the grandparents'.

I got a 10% raise out of nowhere yesterday!

My boss asked me to submit my timecard early, which was very odd--she's never done that before, but I thought she might be going on vacation and didn't think much of it. And then I got an email from my old boss (now boss's boss) congratulating me on my new raise given based on my hard work, proven track record, etc.

I suspect that being a man with a baby also has something to do with it, since the assumption is that men with families need that money to support them. In my case though that's actually true since sashagee is still too sick to work even if she wanted to, which she doesn't until Laila goes to school. So I'll gladly take that money and put it to good use.

We had a steak dinner yesterday to celebrate, but the truth is we already had the steak and I had planned to make it. The raise just provided a retroactive excuse. It sure was delicious, though!

It's been a bit hard to find time to read or write lately.

sashagee is still sick, which means the main responsibility for basically everything falls on me. She can watch Laila while I'm at work (most of the time) and feed her (most of the time), but basically every other household task--cooking, cleaning, shopping, taking garbage out, errands, etc.--I have to do. On a good day, she can do a few chores and sit out on the couch with me while I work. On a bad day, she'll take two naps and go to bed early just like Laila does. And apparently hypothydroidism comes with memory problems, so I still have to keep track of all the chores just to make sure that nothing gets forgotten.

She went to an endocrinologist, but he told her it was probably related to her pregnancy, gave her some thyroid medicine when she got emotional on the phone, and then when she called back and told her that the tiny medicine dose was making her feel better in the morning but it wore off after lunch, told her it was probably allergies and all but accused her of pill-seeking. She's going to her doctor to get a new endocrinologist referral on Friday.

Tomorrow, after over two years of work from home every single day, we finally return to the office. While the New Jersey office is still closed due to higher plague there, starting tomorrow I begin my new schedule of Monday through Wednesday in the office, Thursday and Friday at home. For me, the Plague Years have finally ended. No more matcha in the morning, chill cooking lunch myself, and watching little baby Laila crawl around every day while I'm at work. But I still get to do it two days a week, and to be honest, I didn't really want to work from home every single day. My ideal would be three days home, two days in the office, but three days in is still nice. I like the train ride downtown, I like walking on the riverwalk in the summer at lunchtime, and I like being able to head anywhere else in the city after work, though obviously there's going to be a lot less of that now that I have a family at home. And I'm happy that they're giving us two power cords so we can keep one in each location.

Our home is in a bit of disarray, since with sashagee's illness and the amount of money we've spent on her and Laila, we're probably going to be here a few years longer than we originally expected, and that means we're redecorating. All the walls have paint swatches on them, but the actual painting can't commence until sashagee has had some better days so she can help. We're going to replace the vanity in the back bathroom, get rid of one of the couches I've had forever, we've already put rugs down, and installed a baby gate. There'll be a lot of changes as Laila grows up.

Final Fantasy XIV released patch 6.1 today, on the last Tuesday I work from home (hence my Endwalker story review), and I've got it open in the background and not participating in any of the new stuff, because I have to work. I do get to read aaron.hosek's commentary as he blind progs the new fights, though.

I hope everyone is doing well! I'm going to try to be more consistent with updates in the future, but with my schedule now it's hard to find time to sit down to write. I should at least be able to read more now that I'll have reading time on the train!

Not really, but we've all been moved completely from the new new database to the old database. The new new database is just far too slow to actually get our work done so we need the speed more than we needed any other features. I knew this would happen.

They're supposedly working on upgrades to the new database, but I give it a 50/50 chance they decide to come up with a new new new database--the third in five years--to finally fix this problem once and for all!

...yeah, it's not going to happen.



Re: the subject, I really need to show sashagee the Strongbad emails. The song's pretty catchy too.

In the last division meeting, the division manager said that they never wanted to come into the office five days a week ever again.

Neither do I, so hopefully I won't have to for as long as I work at the AMA.

The bills have started to come in from my appendectomy, and because this is America I'm getting several different bills from different places. That's normal and I wouldn't usually make a post about it, but the contents of the bill is worth remembering for how stark the difference between pre- and post-insurance pricing. These are the bills I've gotten so far:

• Anesthesiologists pre-insurance: $2750
  ---Anesthesiologists post-insurance: $57.72
  
• Diagnostic Radiologists pre-insurance: $455
  ---Diagnostic Radiologists post-insurance: $170.07
  
• Physician pre-insurance: $458
  ---Physician post-insurance: $23.96
  
• Labs pre-insurance: $481
  ---Labs post-insurance: $5.43

Total cost pre-insurance: $4144
Total cost post-insurance: $257.48

Something something greatest healthcare in the world...if you can pay for it. I'm very lucky that the AMA's insurance plan always pays for everything--it never denies any claim, because the nice thing about working for an organization run by doctors is that they think that a doctor should be the one deciding on appropriate care, not some insurance claims agent who has a vested interest in making money for the company. But you shouldn't have to work for a group of doctors to get the same benefits.

Also, if you're not familiar with American health insurance, a lot of physicians work at hospitals but aren't directly employed by those hospitals, so they bill separately. Furthermore, insurance companies are notorious for denying these claims even if they explicitly authorized treatment at the hospital, because obviously getting anesthesia has nothing to do with anything else that happened that day Same here with the diagnostic radiology, which was a separate charge from the surgery or the anesthesia.

I'm glad that I don't have to pay thousands of dollars for my surgery, but it's because I'm lucky with my employment. Everyone should be that lucky.

The subject line is a stretch, but it'll be memorable if I ever have to find this in the future.

There are two things of import that happened lately. The first is that I went through a racial equity training at work hosted by the Racial Equity Institute and strongly encouraged by management. I was pretty dubious of its worth going in, since implicit bias training doesn't work, but though they did touch on that in the beginning that's not actually what the class was about. It was simply informative about the way systems are set up to put white people on top, and how whiteness is implicitly cast as the default and everyone else is in some way a deviance from that. I already knew most of the information they presented about restrictive covenants, the racial wealth gap, and so on, but by their own admission many of my co-workers in the training did not, so hopefully opened their eyes to something that a lot of them had never had to think about before. I'm not sure it really needed sixteen hours--two full working days--of time, but it wasn't the pointless waste of time that I initially expected.

The only thing I really took issue with was their claim that the concept of race began when the white planter class needed to pit workers against each other in order to maintain economic dominance. It's all nice and progressive, but the first racist laws in recorded history were actually the Limpieza de Sangre laws in 15th century Spain targeting Jews and Muslims, and the concept of race is ancient--the Book of Gates in the time of Seti I in 1275 BCE depicts the four races of humanity: the Libyans, the Nubians, the Syrians, and the Egyptians. Inconvenient for their narrative, but history is rarely neat.

The other major thing I did recently is that I ordered a new phone! I've had my iPhone 7 since the day it released, and since it had 256 gb I stopped doing yearly upgrades because I finally had enough space for everything. Well, I filled the whole phone up and now the battery is such that it goes from 100% to 20% while playing music on a 20-minute walk, so when the iPhone 12 came out this year I decided it was finally time to upgrade. It came on Friday with my information all set up on it, I moved my SIM information (or whatever) over and then copied the rest of my phone's data...which I should have done on Saturday, because I have gigs and gigs and gigs of music and I was up until almost 4 a.m.! sashagee wandered in at one point because I hadn't come to bed and found me not playing games, not reading anything, just staring at the progress bar, willing it to move faster. It eventually completed without issue and the next morning I started trying to get used to how it worked.

I miss the button. Now everything is done with swiping, but with different degrees of swiping, so I'm constantly swiping too much and closing my program instead of going to the app switcher. I need to find some kind of guide to all the functions I've missed, because I had my perfect phone and didn't pay attention to any new capabilities. My phone's at 55% and I haven't charged it since Friday night, though, so that's already a huge improvement over my old phone! I feel like I went from a stone tablet to a Star Trek data slate.

FaceID doesn't work with a mask, though, so the future isn't quite here yet.

It's been delicious fall weather for the last couple of days in Chicago, coming right after a week of 30°+ (35° counting humidity) days. It feels amazing and I've had the windows open almost round-the-clock. There's a cool breeze blowing onto my legs right now, as I sit with my new laptop desk that work sent me, and while it'll get warmer later today and be back up to 33° on Monday, I'm going to enjoy this weather while it lasts.

sashagee does not have the plague! She got her test results back on Monday, and immediately her work went from "two negative COVID tests or quarantine for two weeks" to "well I guess you can come back immediately." And because she didn't have coronavirus, they're trying to make her use her ordinary sick days instead of the special plague sick days, meaning she'd be out of a week of sick days after being ordered to stay away. Sounds like a great way to ensure that the plague spreads because people come to work sick, but that's food service for you--the entire industry would collapse without the massive exploitation of workers that fuels it. So if you're going out to...hmm, a particularly widespread chain of coffeeshops, let's say...be aware that a worker there might have coronavirus but be at work because they're incentivized to be there. Which, again, food service, massive exploitation of workers.

She threw out her neck waking up this morning and is going to the doctor instead of work today, though, so when it rains it pours.

( Farmer's Market dinner )

I just finished a project at work where I was literally copying and pasting out of a spreadsheet. After the year-long, million-dollar database revamp that we did earlier this year, this is what it's come to. Now I'm working a project in the old database, custom-build for our use cases where keyboard commands are possible, so I'm flying through records whereas I can do a handful an hour in the new database what with all the clicking and copying and pasting and waiting for loading bars and losing my work from clicking the wrong button and not having any search results saved. It's completely impossible to achieve flow when I'm constantly running into sandpaper-level UX friction. sashagee keeps teasing me about avoiding work and she's half-right, but a lot of it is the equivalent of loading times in a game. A third of my playtime is taken up by loading screens or moving between rooms. I brought this up in beta, of course, just like I brought up all the problems with the last database upgrade, and I was ignored, and the result is that we're just falling back on the old database again, just like we did last time. Eventually they'll stop with the half-measures and pay for a custom-designed program to handle our use-case. Hopefully.

On the other hand, I got another copy-out-of-spreadsheet project to do, so that's on the horizon.

I logged on to work this morning to an email from my boss's boss scheduling a meeting entitled "quick chat." That's the "We need to talk" of the business world, so I spent the morning a bit worried about what was going to happen--they just ordered me a laptop, but did they actually order it for me or were they just covering while they put in the paperwork to let me go? My brain spun up a bunch of terrible scenarios, and I did a bit of meditation before the meeting so I could calm down before going in.

...and then it turned out that I was getting a surprise raise because market analysis had revealed my salary wasn't in line with market rates. So this special dinner is celebratory even though it wasn't originally meant to be.

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you might remember the old series of Farmer's Market Dinners that I wrote about that was a summer tradition. I didn't do it in 2018 or 2019, but I wanted to bring it back for 2020 now that I'm settled into a new place that's closer to the market location. Normally I'd go to the market in person, browse around among the offerings, and then pick some things out and decide what to get based on what I saw, but thanks to coronavirus that's not possible this year--all market offerings are available online, you shop through them, and then reserve a time slot and pick up the food in person. So, that's what I did.

I only ordered a couple hours before the deadline, and since I didn't have much time to decide, what I picked this time didn't require as much cooking effort as it might otherwise would. That'll change in future weeks.

( Food pictures )

Now that Chicago is getting back into Phase 3, my schedule is getting a bit more active again. There's no theatre, obviously, and though restaurants and so on are open I really don't want to go to them. But I've been seeing a small group of friends, one at a time, with a few days in between each event--if any one of us is sick, we should be able to catch it before it spreads. And I'm not in contact with anyone at risk unless I'm wearing a mask--a stylish mask, since I just bought one that says 危 ("danger") on it. At least in Chicago, people are still wearing masks in public. But I'm certainly not going to sit at home, alone, until I get a dose of vaccine administered to me. Even if the Oxford trials have zero problems at all, I'm not in any risk groups, so I probably won't be eligible for anything until late next year at the earliest.

And now, book group! We read The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee. It was very predictable, but still a fun read.

I'm back online now, but at 8:30 a.m. the power went out, and it came back and everything was fine for about ten minutes, and then the internet went out for two-and-a-half hours. I got on the line to the ISP, and they said it was a hub outage and all I could do was wait, so that's what I did. It's not even noon and all my chores for today are already done--I vacuumed and mopped the whole house, I did my laundry, and I cleaned the kitchen. Lunch is waiting for me when I'm ready for it, and now my entire evening is open because everything I had to do then, I've already done. It feels amazing, honestly. I hope that I learn from this and realize that sometimes it's better to accomplish pressing tasks earlier rather than putting them off until later while I play video games or whatever, and by writing down how I feel about it now, I'm doing a bit to bring forth that change in myself.

Will it actually happen? Who knows. But I'll try.

After I finally get onto the work network, there was a message saying that the current work-from-home order is being extended until the end of May. That's fine with me, since I've gotten used to my extremely short commute--and thanks to writing this, I remembered to go cancel my commuter pass for June. I've got two passes saved up that I haven't used, and I have $98 in Ventra credit because apparently Ventra refunded almost my entire March pass instead of just the unused portion, so I'm set for months of riding the L once I actually start doing it again. That'll save me hundreds of dollars, so I won't complain, but I do worry a bit about the health of the L what with all the lost ridership. Just another financial aspect we'll need to worry about as we try to sort through the fallout of the coronavirus.

On Sunday, I had my first class with my Japanese tutor in a month. Over FaceTime, obviously, and I did a bunch of reading in 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ / Socrates in Love, and then since it had been so long since we met, we just talked the whole time (but in Japanese!). We talked a lot about coronavirus, obviously, and I had to look up some vocab and talk a bit circuitously to explain that current infection rates reflect public behavior as of two weeks ago due to the incubation period, and that while the number of cases in Illinois was still climbing, it wasn't climbing as fast--that the rate of increase (増加率 zōkaritsu) was lowering, but not the absolute numbers. We talked about how we're both lucky to be able to work from home, and how we have a lot of friends who are out of work, and how I've reverted back to the me in the past. A few months ago, I was going out all the time, maybe five nights a week, and had almost stopped playing video games. Now, I'm back to watching anime, playing video games, and reading, with the very occasional video chat or in-person seeing of someone else. At least I have a solid foundation I can fall back on, but it's still not great. She's an introvert and lives with her boyfriend, so she's doing pretty well, but living alone is pretty lonely.

Speaking of which, thosesocks invited me out on a walk on Saturday, when the weather turned back to warm, so after lunch I left my home for the first time in a couple days and met her outside. She walked on the sidewalk and I walked on the street, close enough to have a conversation but far enough (and both masked) to keep each other safe. We went to Lickity Split for frozen custard and ate it sitting in the library parking lot while we talked about how we're dealing with things. The answer is "mostly well, but", and I feel like that's a pretty universal experience. I should see if anyone else would like to do something similar.

With my government stimulus money, I ordered a bunch of clothes I've been eyeing for a while. It's always difficult for me to buy clothes, becusae I'm 6'5" and very thin, so anything with the right waist size has legs that are too short, and similar for shirts with sleeves. But I asked the people at MDNT45--the ones behind this post about the cloak-coat I own--about whether they could make these pants with a small waist but a much longer inseam, and they said they'd do it for no extra cost! So I ordered that, I ordered some fitted dress pants and fitted t-shirts from Amazon, and all of them actually fit! I was especially surprised by the pants, since slim-fit 31/36 pants (in inches, waist/inseam American sizing) had the potential to fit terribly, but they were exactly what I was looking for, so I immediately ordered another pair. It's so rare that I find store-bought pants that fit well that I have to seize the chance as soon as I can.

The t-shirts had prominent logos on them, so I took a seam-ripper to them and removed them. Like Cayce Pollard, I am sensitive to #Brands.

That was about the extent of my stimulus usage. I dumped a bunch of it into savings, since I have a mortgage to pay, and invested some of it since the market is down and now is the time, or at least a more advantageous time than a couple months ago. I also ordered takeout after Passover ended, since I wanted to eat bread to celebrate but obviously didn't have any in the house. Tomato bisque and a grilled cheese sandwich, with dark chocolate chip cookies for desert. Delicious.

Alright, now that I can work, I probably should get back to it. I hope everyone had a good weekend!

If I used more references or whimsical tags, I would have titled the tag for the current unpleasantness The Great Contagion, but I've stuck to purely factual tags and I'm not going to change that now. And they're easier to translate.

( Still at home, still surviving )

( And maybe thriving a little )

Alright, that's enough watching an Actraiser longplay and writing this. I had a nice FaceTime call with lisekatevans earlier, and she told me that Black Button Eyes is doing an online-only show called Masque of the Red Coronavirus tomorrow. I've been making constant Masque of the Red Death references this whole time, so of course I'm going to tune into that. It's exactly what we need in these trying times.

And also, sleep. And hopefully no more nightmares.