Entry 798: What Can't DG Complain About?

I used to listen daily to The Adam Carolla Show. I haven't listened in, jeez, probably over a decade now, because it got way too repetitive. This happens to pretty much all podcasts, by they way, in which the hosts' pontifications about their personal lives are central aspects of the show. An individual person only has so many stories and so many jokes and so many stories to set up those so many jokes, and if you listen for long enough, you get to the point where it's like, Do I really need to listen to Adam do his bit on canned cranberry sauce for the one millionth time? And then you hit unsubscribed. This also happened to me with Sarah Silverman's podcast, and it preemptively happened with Dax Shepard's. My sister-in-law told me how good it was, so I was thinking of adding it to my rotation, but then a few months later she said she stopped listening, because he just told the same stories and jokes over and over, so I decided against it.

But one of the bits I used to really like on ACS was "What Can't Adam Complain About?" where Adam's producer would throw out a topic, and he would find something about it he didn't like and then just riff on it for a few minutes. I always thought I would be good at this segment because I'm a world class complainer. It's one of my finer qualities. Although, I get the feeling S doesn't feel that way about it. In fact, she seems to be more annoyed by my constant carping than amused. Fine art always goes over some people's heads.

Here's a sample from my latest list of complaints.

Microsoft Office Licenses
One of my least favorite technology trends is the nearly universal adoption of the software subscription model. You can't just buy software now and have it forever. You have to, in effect, buy it over and over again every year. My personal Microsoft Office subscription lapsed recently, but that's okay, because I found out that at my company, we can use our work license on up to five machines, including personal computers. So, I registered Microsoft Office through work on my laptop, and all was well. 

Until I tried to save something. Turns out Microsoft is so fucking petty, they won't let me save any Office documents to my laptop or personal One Drive account, and the documents that are already saved there are read-only. I have to use my work drive, even when I'm using my laptop. It's not the end of the world, but it is irritating, and it's like why? I'm not renewing, so they're going to punish me by making their product more annoying? If anything, that makes me want to get a Mac. It doesn't seem like the greatest business strategy to me.

The worst part about it is that I like to keep work and personal things separate. But I think that's already a losing battle. I started using my personal phone (the only phone I have) to authenticate certain work credentials a long time ago, and I just discovered it's easier to schedule work meetings through my phone than on my work laptop. The work/personal firewall as already been breached. Also, we get most our revenue at my company by selling software as a service, including subscriptions, so, yeah...

AI
I'm not going to complain about AI, so much as I am AI mania. AI itself is fine, but it's just that, fine. It's not the godlike omnipotence it's being hyped as. Maybe it will get there someday, maybe someday relatively soon, but can we pump the brakes a little until it does? We're now at a point were every company has to put the term AI in their mission statements just to seem relevant; everybody looking for a job has to tout their AI credentials (even if they don't really have any); and seemingly every podcast has to be about what AI holds for the future of whatever field the podcast deals in. I'm now kinda rooting for AI to render human thought completely obsolete within the next few decades, as if it doesn't, we are presently wasting a whole lot of time discussing how it is going to do so. 

Personally, I like using AI as a check on me. We use it at work for code review to identify potential issues and like ten percent of the time it finds something that requires a fix. It's rarely something major, but still it's legitimately helpful. What I don't find AI useful for is how it's being marketed, as a creator whose product I'm supposed to check. For work, I had to take these AI training modules, and they were very pro AI, but also very insistent that AI was only going to augment human labor, not replace it, so they would say things like: You can use AI to draft emails, because that's something AI is very good at doing very quickly! But then it's your job to make sure your message conveys all the information you want and that the tone is appropriate for the intended audience. That's something that requires a human touch! And I was thinking to myself, that "human touch" is what I spend 95% of my time on when writing an email, particularly getting the tone right. The longer I watched, the more I thought to myself that AI sounds a lot like a bad employee whose work you constantly have to monitor.

Of course, it will get better. That's the obvious retort to all this. But how much better and how quickly? And is better actually better? Right now AI tells you things that are obviously incorrect*, and so you know not to believe it. But if it told you things that looked correct, but still weren't, it could be more harmful. Like, if using AI becomes finding the needles that are its errors in a haystack of content, is that better? For me, it's more efficient to build the haystack myself and keep the needles out along a way. (And then an AI can check if I succeeded or not.) But maybe I'm just getting old--this century's version of the guy who looks up things in the encyclopedia because he insists it's faster than googling them. That's definitely a possibility, and I'm mostly okay with it. 

*Case in point, I googled "colleges with presidents and a super bowl winning quarterbacks," and this is the result that the AI gave me. It did get 1-3 correct, which is impressive, but neither Franklin Pierce nor Matt Ryan went to Harvard, and the notion of Mitchell Trubisky winning a Super Bowl is patently absurd to anybody who follows the NFL at all.

 

 

Back to the Future:
As I mentioned in a previous entry, we recently cranked out the Back to the Future trilogy. I like it quite a bit, but something about it rubbed me the wrong way this time around. It's not any of the evident time-travel paradoxes, or the fact that the successful McFlys at the end of the movie live in the same house as the dysfunctional McFlys at the beginning (including Marty's brother, even though he's portrayed as somebody who could afford his own place), or the weirdness of Doc's best friend being a teenage boy. It's none of that. It's the contrived plot point that Marty's Achilles' heel is being called chicken.

I remembered this from the first time I saw the movies, way back when, but I didn't remember the back story, and then when we watched them this time around, I realize there is no back story. They just invented it out of thin air. In Part II, Griff Tannen calls Marty chicken, and he reacts to it as if it's an established part of the canon that he has a pathological aversion to this, but it's not. It's not even alluded to in the first movie. Then, future Marty gets fired from his job after getting goaded into a shady scheme by getting called chicken, and future Jennifer tells their kids, something to the effect of, "You know your father's one weakness is being called chicken." And it's like, Oh, okay, I guess this is a thing that the audience is supposed to know now.

It's pretty weak character development, to be honest, and I don't see why it's necessary to the story. Surely, the movie makers could have come up with a different way to make Marty's future go south. Also, in the scene in which he doesn't get baited into racing Flea ("Needles"), and thus avoids his life-altering accident, why does he gun it backwards and do a half-donut, instead of not moving at all, or just going forward at the speed limit in a safe manner? What Marty does actually seems more dangerous to me than racing forward.

Anyway, this has been "What Can't DG Complain About?"

Until next time... 

Entry 797: You Complete Me

Some good things happening here in my world right now and some bad things. The Seahawks won the Super Bowl in dominating fashion, and I've very much enjoyed basking in the success of my favorite professional sports team (tied with the Mariners). Every night since Sunday, before I've gone to sleep, I've watched some sort of highlight or game video on YouTube from the Seahawks' championship season. Last night, I watched the final quarter of the NFC Championship Game against the Rams. There are no points scored in it, but it's a great watch nevertheless. It's basically only two series. The Rams go on a long time-consuming drive that ends inside the Seattle ten-yard line, when the "Dark Side" D gets a beautiful, fortuitous fourth-down stop. And then the Seahawks take over and effectively run out the clock, getting clutch first down after clutch first down. It's a joy to watch, even though I know what's going to happen. In fact, it's a joy largely because I know what is going to happening. That I know that this is what propels them to the Lombardi Trophy is what makes it fun. Had they lost the game or been defeated in the Super Bowl, I wouldn't be watching at all.

In other good news, the snow is finally starting to melt here. There is still a ton of it, and it's still annoying, but the streets are a little bit wider, and I can see large pockets of green on my lawn.

But there is bad news also: Our president is still a megalomaniac, who is making life worse for pretty much everybody, including many who voted for him, and his abhorrent policies concerning immigration enforcement have put us on the verge of another prolonged government shutdown. As with the first one, just a few months ago, I think the Democrats are correct on the issue but wrong on the tactics. Dems don't want to fund ICE without reforms, which I totally understand and completely cosign, so they are refusing to allow the funding for DHS to go through, since ICE is a part of DHS. The problem is that DHS has like 20 agencies under its milieu, including essential services like FEMA and TSA, and these are currently not being funded. What's more is that, as I understand it, ICE got a special carve out of funding in that Big Beautiful Bill, so it has the money to operate without restraint for the foreseeable future. So, basically, a shutdown will disrupt the good parts of DHS, while the worst part of it carries on unfettered. Maybe I'm missing something, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Anyway...

It's a four day weekend for both our children. This is a bit annoying, given how much school they missed due to the snow, but at least DCPS did something for which I've been advocating for years. They scrapped some administration days and turned them into a school days. We don't have parent-teacher conferences now, but I'd rather that be the case than have to tack on a days of school the week after "graduation" (this is Lil' S2's last year in elementary school) when a lot of kids will already be at camp or on vacation. It does beg the question: Why doesn't the district build these flex days into the schedule from the get-go, instead of adding them on the fly, being that we get at least one heavy snowfall pretty much every year? I still don't know the answer to that. But I at least give DCPS a half star for making a smart adjustment.

Actually, there is some drama at Lil' S2's school right now. A contingent of teachers are unhappy with the administration--they don't feel supported and empowered--and they have rallied some parents to advocate on their behalf. There is a letter to the chancellor going around on the message boards that a bunch of parents are signing. I think S might have signed it (or is going to sign it), mainly because her friend asked her to. Personally, I'm staying out of it. In four months, we will be done with this school, and so I don't feel super invested in the matter. I also don't want to just support the teachers reflexively (I'm admittedly still bitter about their reluctance to return during Covid lockdowns, even after getting moved to the front of the line for vaccines, even after it became clear that children weren't great vectors for the disease), and I'm not sure if it really is "the teachers" or just "a few teachers." One of the parents in a group chat I'm in is also a teacher at the school, and she posted something in defense of the administration, which definitely gave me pause about the whole thing. Basically, I would want to do some research and get all the facts and opinions before signing onto anything, and that seems like entirely too much work to me considering I won't have any kids at the school by the time I'm done. As long as teachers at the school don't start striking, I'm just gonna ride this one out.

Abruptly changing topics, it was Valentine's Day yesterday, and last night was one of those increasingly rare weekend evenings in which both of our kids are home and don't have any friends over, so we decided to have family movie night and settled on the 1996 romantic comedy Jerry Maguire. And by "settled on," I mean S and I decided that that's what we wanted to watch and cajoled the boys into watching it with us. Lil' S1 lasted about 15 minutes ("I didn't even want to watch it in the first place."); Lil' S2 made it about an hour ("This is boring. There's hardly any football in it."). So, we turned it off and watched a couple episodes of Modern Family instead.

S and I are intent on finishing it, though. We both forgot how good it is. It's nearly a ten of ten on the rewatchability scale. Every character in it is almost perfectly crafted and acted. Jerry and Dorothy couldn't be more charming as the leads; the little kid Ray is just as adorable as you remember ("The human head weighs eight pounds."); Rod and his wife are super likeable and funny; Jay Mohr is great as the movie's only real villain; and Bonnie Hunt is brilliant as Dorothy's sister (real appreciated her performance this time around). We still have about 40 minutes left in the movie, and hopefully we get a quiet time to finish it tonight--preferably before 8p. If it's any later, there is a real risk of S falling asleep during it, and then it will be like that one Valentine's day, many years ago, when S was pregnant and went to bed at like 7:30, so I celebrated alone by eating a heart-sharped piece of cake, drinking sparkling cider, and binge watching Friday Night Lights. Oh well, Valentine's Day proper is already over, and it's fake holiday, anyway.

Until next time... 

Entry 796: A Running Diary Of My Weekend

Friday 

4:00p: I'm frantically trying to finish work and hop on the stationary bike. I'm itching for a good workout, and if I don't start soon, things are going to get tricky. S was away for work all week, and I can see on the Find My app that she's landed and is in a car on the way home. If I'm already in the middle of my workout when she gets here then everything will be fine. If I haven't started it yet, then I'm going to have to talk (or more likely listen) to her for a sufficient amount of time, so as to not seem like an uncaring spouse, and that's going to push back my workout, and then the kids are going to come home, and then we're gonna have to do dinner, and so on and so forth.

4:15p: Lil' S2 calls, and he wants some friends to come over after school. It's fine with me, but I have to clear it with S first, so I call her, and she says it's okay, but she doesn't want them to walk home because of the icy conditions. I call Lil' S2 back and tell him that it's fine with us, but he has to clear it with his friend's mother because it's her turn to drive. (We have a carpool for when they can't walk.) 

4:20p: I remember that I forgot to cook something for dinner, and if I don't get something started, the kids are going to bother me about getting carryout, and it's always incredibly annoying to get them carryout on Friday because traffic is so bad and last time we did delivery it was like $60 for the two of them, so I don't want to do that, nor do I want to fight about it, so I gotta have an established alternative. I throw some chicken in the pressure cooker and rice in the rice cooker and go to put on my workout clothes.

4:25p: S comes home. I didn't make it. What's worse is that I have a bunch of missed calls on my phone from Lil' S2 and a bunch of texts from his friends' mom. She didn't have room in the car for everybody who was coming over because her son neglected to tell her that he had not only Lil' S2 with him but two other kids as well. So, unable to get a hold of me, Lil' S2 and his friends started walking home, and S is not happy when she hears this, and she leaves to pick them up, even though she literally just walked through the door after traveling for the last 15 hours. I offer to pick them up instead, but I do so halfheartedly (for one thing, I'm in a t-shirt and shorts; for another, I don't really mind them walking), and I'm pretty sure S picks up on that.

4:27p: I shut myself off in the guest room where our stationary bike is, put in my earbuds, crank up the volume (my iPhone now warns me that it might be too loud), and start pedaling. I don't think S will be annoyed with me for going AWOL for an hour or so. I was alone with the kids for a week--and it was not an easy week!--so I think I have some relationship capital built up in my favor.

5:30p: S isn't annoyed at all, and she tells me all about her trip. I pretend to be very interested, and she pretends to not know that I'm actually only mildly interested. That's a happy marriage in action right there.

6:30p: I eat chicken and rice casserole for dinner.

7:30p: I watch two episodes of Modern Family with S and the boys. Lil' S1 takes so long to get ready to watch the show for some reason. We're all waiting for him, and I yell that if he takes any longer, we're going to be watching Ancient Family instead. It's a solid 6 of a joke.

8:30p: Lil' S2 has gotten into Rubik's cubing again, so he has me time him on his solves. His fastest is 45 seconds, which is legit impressive. The thing is, he uses the same algorithm I do, but I struggle to get below two minutes.

10:30p: I listen to a podcast and solve a crossword contest puzzle with a meta theme. I crack the meta very quickly and submit my answer. If I'm correct (and I'm confident I am; it's one of those things where you know it when you get it), and my name is selected at random, then I will win some sweet crossword puzzle merch. I've gotten the right answer in this contest probably 20 times over the past few years and never won it. One of these days...

11:45p: I get in bed to sleep, but S is in the middle of the mattress, so I have to try to push her over without her waking up. I'm somewhat successful. I get her to move a few inches and decide not to push it (or her) any further, even though I'm still kinda cramped.

Saturday

8:45a: I wake up and Lil' S1 is making pancakes. Although I typically don't eat breakfast, I make an exception because it's a family thing, and pancakes are delicious. It's a good decision on my part. The mix of butter and maple syrup on a warm fluffy pancake, washed down with some coffee, is an almost unbeatable breakfast combination.

1:00p: Lil' S1 has some friends come to play D&D and socialize in the way nerdy 8th graders socialize. Lil' S2, S, and I watch Back to the Future Part III to finish up the trilogy. It still holds up for the most part. The very end is kinda corny. I wish they would have handled it differently, but whatever. I ask Lil' S2 to rank the three films, and he says II, I, III. That's probably what I would have said as a child also. The future scenes in II are cool when you're a kid. As an adult, however, I think II is the worst of them. It goes I, a massive gap, III, a little gap, II. 

3:30p: Needing to do something physical and to charge our EV, I decide to clear a path in our driveway to the charger. I didn't do it before, which was a mistake, as now there is about six feet of solid, inches-thick ice that needs to be excavated before our car can get close enough to be reached by the charging cable. I have to use two shovels to do the job-- a long gardening spade with a triangular head to cut through the ice and a big flat snow shovel to scoop it up. It's very satisfying work--one of those jobs where initially you think there is no way you are ever going to get through it, but you just start chipping away (literally, in this case) and get lost in your thoughts (S needed my phone, so I wasn't listening to a podcast, as I usually would), and then you look up, and think to yourself Goddamn, I'm like halfway done already! The cold is absolutely brutal, with the whipping winds it feels like it's subzero, but I keep warm by bundling up. I do two things that are huge in this regard: 1) Wear a scarf and wrap it tightly from the bottom of my neck to my eyes, so that almost my entire face is covered; 2) Put one of those hard-warmers with the little pellets that you shake up in my pocket and grab it from time-to-time. Even with two pairs of gloves on, it's my hands that tend to get unbearably cold, so the hand-warmer was crucial.

4:00p: S needs my phone because she's switching us to a much cheaper plan. She gets her and Lil' S1's phones switched successfully and is very proud of herself for doing so, which I know because she mentions about five times how proud of herself she is. Hey, I get it. Navigating all that customer service stuff totally sucks. The only problem is that we can't switch Lil' S2's watch to the new plan because they don't offer standalone service for watches. You have to tie it to a phone, which we don't want to do. This also means we can't switch my phone yet, as all the passwords and stuff for our old account are on my phone. The solution is probably to break down and get Lil' S2 a phone. I guess we just embrace the dark side.

7:00p: Both the boys go to friends' houses for sleepovers, giving S and I a night to ourselves. We turn on a fire and enjoy some kid-free time, by which I mean we sit next to each other on the sofa while she watches something on her iPad, and I listen to a podcast and play NYT games.

10:00p: Remembering that the Super Bowl is tomorrow and that I'm going to be done with football for a while once it ends (especially if the Seahawks lose), I decide to watch a Super Bowl from my childhood. I settle on Super Bowl XXII, Washington 42, Denver 10. It's not a very close game, but it's a fun one, and you only really need to watch the second quarter. Washington fell behind early 10-0 after the first quarter, and then rattled off five straight touchdowns to take a 35-10 lead into halftime. It's pretty remarkable to watch. It's one of the greatest "flip the script" games of all time.

Sunday

8:30a: I wake up and spend most the morning doing chores--laundry, trash, and the like. I want to do a workout this afternoon, and this evening I'll be watching the Super Bowl, of course, so I gotta get all the boring stuff out of the way first. Plus, S took the boys "volunteering" (dropping off meals to elderly people), so I don't want to look like a slacker.

1:00p: Everybody returns home, and S is grumbling because the kids were bickering a bit while doing their volunteering. It sounds like pretty standard sibling stuff to me. They both want to make cookies for the Super Bowl tonight, but Lil' S2 refuses to work with Lil' S1, so they're each making their own batch. It's one of those things where Lil' S1 is actually a very good baker, and Lil' S2 doesn't like his older brother having that over him (even though it's only over him in his own mind), so he wants to prove that he can bake cookies on his own, even though he can't yet. It leads to a pretty funny exchange, with Lil' S2 looking at his iPad and Lil' S1 looking over his shoulder.

Lil' S1: Are you just googling "cookie dough"? I have a sugar cookie recipe you can use in my cookbook.
Lil' S2: I don't want sugar cookies. I want cookie dough.
Lil' S1: What do you mean you want cookie dough? All cookies are made from cookie dough, even sugar cookies.
Lil' S2: Yeah, but I don't want sugar cookies. I want chocolate chip cookies.
Lil' S1: Okay, then google "chocolate chip cookie recipes." You can't just google "cookie dough." [Turning to S and I and chuckling.] He was just googling "cooking dough."
Lil' S2: Just go away! I don't need your help! I can do it myself!

2:30p: Another funny quote from Lil' S1 involving food: "No thanks, I'll make it myself. I watch a lot of grilled cheese sandwich videos." 

4:00p: We are going to a friend's house for the Super Bowl tonight, and it's not a Seahawk-centric thing. It's just a normal, nonpartisan Super Bowl party. A lot of hardcore fans don't like going to parties with non-fans, because there are so many distractions around, but I actually prefer it specifically because of the distractions. It reminds me that sports fandom is supposed to be fun and social and that it actually doesn't matter to my life who wins. I do, however, download the Peacock app on my phone and log in with my sister-in-law's credentials. This way I'll always have access to the game. We usually leave this party at halftime, because the Super Bowl is on too late on the East Coast (why not a 4:25p start time like regular season games?), but the hosts like to do this raffle thing with all the kids during halftime, and so by the time we actually get home, the game is well into the third quarter. When it's two teams I don't care about, this is fine, but with the Seahawks, I might want to have S drive and watch in the car.

10:30p: Seahawks win the Super Bowl 29-13. Hell yeah!

 Until next time... 

 

Entry 795: Life On Hoth

I think I have to take the L with my prediction that last weekend's snowstorm would be "no big deal." I was correct that the snowfall wasn't all that much (about a half foot); I was correct that the snowplows were out in short order*; I was correct that there were no widespread power outages; and I was correct that people would still have access to food and medicine. What I did not foresee was how much the prolonged cold snap would prevent the city from getting back to normal. After the snow fell, we got several hours of sleet that along with the incredibly cold temperatures--I don't think it has gotten above 30 degrees (272.039 kelvin, if you prefer SI units) since the storm hit--turned what was initially a soft powder into a brick-like substance. We're not buried in snow; we're penned in by giant blocks of ice. It's great for building snow forts. It's terrible for making snowballs or, you know, living life.  

*Although people complain about how bad DC is at clearing the streets, I've found it to be exact opposite. We had snowplows come down our street so many times that by the end of it they didn't even have their plows down because there was nothing left to plow. Although, I'm sure it doesn't hurt that we live in the same neighborhood as the mayor. 

So, now, it's a huge headache to get anywhere. For starters, if you didn't already dig your car out when the snow was somewhat soft, you're just stuck now, unless you have access to a pickax, because you can't dig this stuff with a normal shovel. Then, although the roads are mostly clear, they are very narrow pathways between huge berms of ices. You know how when you drive through residential neighborhoods in the city (I'm specifically thinking of Ballard/Phinney Ridge in Seattle), you often have to stop and let cars through coming in the other direction because, even though the streets are technically two-way, there's not enough room for two drivers to fit through with cars parked are both sides of the street? That's how it is right now for most the roads in DC, even some major arterials, and it makes auto travel super slow. And then when you get to where you're going, you have to find a parking space, which was already difficult in this city before half the available slots become repositories for all the snow removed from the other half. Even going to the grocery store late morning on a weekday, when it's usually empty, is a major hassle.

 

And car travel is the best form of transportation. The buses have to go on the same crowded streets as the cars, and they are even bigger, and the metro is only a good option if you happen to live right by a station. If you even live just a few blocks away, then you have to walk, and walking in these conditions ranges from very inconvenient to downright unsafe. You have to bundle up to a ridiculous degree if you are going to be outside for an extended period of time,* and your pedestrian choices are either the middle of the narrow streets next to cars that could hit a patch of ice at any moment, or on top of the slippery uneven frozen snow. My neighborhood is filled will old people who struggle to walk on normal terrain. They are, in effect, trapped in their homes right now.

*Lil' S2 was outside shoveling people's walkways for so long that his feet got a little frostbitten. At least, I think that's what happened. Two of his toes had sores on them and were discolored, but it's possible that they were blisters and that the dye from the fabric of his boots leached onto his skin. Whatever the case, we haven't let him play outside again yet, which he doesn't love. On the plus side, he made like $40.  

School has reopened but did not do so until Thursday and with a delayed start. We didn't have a single full day of school this week. There was much tittle-tattle on the parent chat groups about whether or not school should have reopened, whether or not remote school is an option, and whether or not the city is doing enough to clear the snow. My feelings are yes, no, and yes. School being open right now is the least worst option. This ice world we find ourselves in isn't even starting to thaw until late next week, at the earliest, so waiting until conditions get markedly better will mean many snow days. The district is required by law to offer 180 school days a year, so any time we miss now will have to be made up in the summer, which will be more disruptive.

As for remote learning: hard pass. We found out during COVID that it is almost completely useless, especially for elementary students, and it doesn't address a major concern during snow days, which is that parents often have to work and cannot do so if they also have to supervise their young children who are at home with them. The daycare aspect of school is not some luxury for entitled parents, as it is sometimes portrayed, it is a necessary function of society that we pay for in taxes. I do not in any way want to normalize remote school, even as an alternative to snow days. Honestly, I would rather have my kids run around the neighborhood in the snow with their friends than have them sit at a computer all day pretending to learn. It's healthier for them and easier on me.* 

*Although probably nobody gets frostbitten while remote learning. 

As for the city clearing snow, as I alluded to above, the city seems to be doing pretty much all they can. The problem is that there is simple no place for the snow to go until it melts. When you push it off the street to the side of the street, you take away all the street parking; when you push it off the side of street to the sidewalk, people have nowhere walk; when you push it off the sidewalk into people's yards you block their entryways. You can only pile it so high in the relatively small amount of square-footage that nobody will need to access for the next few weeks.

Also, I'm not in a mood to criticize the city because we had a water main burst on our street yesterday,* and DC Water responded relatively quickly and turned it off, and then a crew came out and worked on it for at least ten hours in the freezing (literally) cold until it was fixed. We went over to the sister-in-law's for the night, so that we could have access to running water (they had to shut it off for our entire street). S and Lil' S2 stayed the night there (Lil' S1 slept over at a friend's house), but I came back around 10 pm, and the water crew was still out. I had to put some white noise on to muffle the noise of construction when I went to sleep after midnight. But I woke up this morning, and they were gone, and we had water. Staying out to the wee hours of the morning in temperatures in the teens to make sure people's water is restored ASAP. That is something to commend. 

*I assume the leak was related to the cold, but I don't know for sure. 

Anyway, people being critical of the government, arguing about remote learning and whether or not schools should be open, anxiety about leaving the house, news of law enforcement officers in Minnesota senselessly killing citizens--I feel a bit like I'm going through COVID lockdowns again. Maybe I should Zoom my friends and we can rewatch Tiger King together.

Until next time... 

Entry 794: Winter Is Coming

The big news here in the DC area, and along much of the Eastern Seaboard, is the winter storm forecasted to strike very early tomorrow morning and wreak havoc on all of us who call the region home. It's really hard to get an accurate assessment of the situation. In large part that's because it hasn't happened yet, and nobody knows with certainty what's going to happen, until it actually happens. In large part, it's because the short-term incentives of pretty much everybody involved are to act as if we are on the verge of a snowy apocalypse. The weather services don't want to be accused of insufficiently alerting the public to the possibility, or understating the potential damage, of a major storm; the media knows sensationalizing the weather is a great way to get cheap clicks; and for the general public, it's something exciting to talk about and something you feel compelled to prepare for. You don't want to be the family who's eating creamed eels and wadded beef because you didn't get to the grocery store in time.*

*I went to our local supermarket yesterday, and parts of it looked like photos of Soviet-era groceries, just huge swaths of empty shelving. But, here's the thing, there was still a ton of food for sale. Like, maybe you couldn't get exactly what you wanted--they were all out of strawberries and grapes and only had the super expensive artisanal yogurt left--but if you needed sustenance, it was available for purchase. Capitalism, baby!

But there is probably a long-term downside to treating every kinds rough weather event as if it's a biblical torrent. Collectively, we become a boy-who-cried-wolf society, where we are ill-prepared for the true disasters. So, that's why I'm going to make a very boring prediction: This storm is going to be no big deal. We are going to get half a foot* of snow tomorrow morning/afternoon, and it will be over by the evening. Things will be closed on Monday (DCPS already has a pre-planned staff day, so kids have it off anyway), but the snow plows will get out, the roads will be cleared, and the city will be moving again by Tuesday. Schools might not reopen, because they are annoyingly cautious about, well, pretty much everything, but they will be Wednesday, and then that'll be that. There are not going to be widespread power outages; old people won't be freezing in their homes; and diabetics won't be deprived of insulin because medical supply trucks can't get into the city. It's just going to be a couple of normal snow days, where parents bundle their kids in whatever snow-appropriate attire they can rummage up (always with mismatched gloves), and everybody goes outside and plays and sleds and frolics for 45 minutes, before returning inside to get warm and drink hot chocolate. The worst part is going to be looking at the banks of dirty snow on the side of the road for the next few weeks. That's my prediction.

*The Weather Channel, which is advertising an "Historic Winter Storm," is saying 5" to 8" of snow anticipated. I assure that is not historic. I was in DC in winter of 2003-2004, when we got, like, two feet of snow, and the city almost completely shut down for over a week. I actually did run out of food and had to trudge several miles to the closest open corner store for some hugely marked up canned goods. Now to be fair, the storm is supposed to be worse in surround areas than in DC proper. But, to be fair in the other direction, there's nothing stopping media from noting this in their coverage.

Of course, I could be wrong about all of this--maybe the storm really will wreak destruction and mayhem--but that's true about everything everybody says. It could always be wrong. That's baked into the cake of all human analysis.

In other news, a weird thing happened the other day, where Lil' S2 and a bunch of his friends walked to Target after school, as they sometimes do, and some random guy told them to "stay safe" and paid for all their snacks for them. Details are very murky because they are being retold by nine- and ten-year-olds--the description of the man is that he had kinda blond curly hair and was maybe Black, maybe white, and maybe mixed--but here's my best guess as to what happened. While walking to Target, Lil' S2 got too close to the road, and some guy honked at him from his car. He happened to be going to Target also, and when he saw the same kids he just honked at in line, he paid for all their snacks on a whim and told them to stay safe -- kinda a life-lesson, imparted wisdom, gesture-y type of thing. If that's the case, it's a little strange, but completely harmless. In fact, I'm a thousand times more frightened by the fact that Lil' S2 was close to the street than I am by some rando paying for their snacks -- and I let him know as much. One thing I am not chill about at all is pedestrian safety with respect to my children. Every time I drive down the major street that bounds our neighborhood, and I see how fast people drive and how distracted they are and how distracted walkers often are,* it sends a shiver up my spine.

*There is one crosswalk in particular that is kinda at a weird angle whereby the pedestrian has to really look backwards over their left shoulder to see if a car is turning right into their area, and they almost never do. In theory, they shouldn't have to--it's their right-of-way--but that's putting way more faith in other people's driving abilities than I have or that I want my loved ones to have. 

As soon as a parent got wind of this incident (one of the moms asked how her son still had money after getting snacks), it spread on the text chains like Crying Jordan. I found that I was somewhat in the minority, in that most parents were super creeped out by the fact that an adult thought it was appropriate to buy things for children he didn't know, regardless of his intention. To be clear, I was a little creeped, but not super creeped out. It went so far as to consider asking the store to view their security footage, but I don't think anybody actually did that. Instead, it was determined that all of our children would be indefinitely forbidden from going to Target after school, which I think is the correct decision.

To be honest, I was never really comfortable with them going to Target. It's right on the border of a part of the city where things get a little shady -- not like City of God shady, but inappropriate for unsupervised fifth graders shady. But they always went in the middle of the day and in a large group and other parents seemed okay with it, so S and I reluctantly agreed to it. Well, now I realize that all the parents thought like me. They were also just going along with it because everybody else was going along with it. So, now it's done, and who knows, maybe this small incident forestalled a much more serious incident that would have occurred if we continued to let them go to Target.

It's a tricky thing, determining how much freedom to give your kids, especially in a big city. I feel pretty safe in our little nook, but there are definitely pockets of DC for which this is not the case, and you can't live your life and avoid all the bad stuff 100% of the time. Part of growing up is learning how to be aware of your surroundings and how to successfully navigate out of potentially dangerous situations. The challenge is that, as a parent, it's not at all obvious how to let your children learn these lessons in an age-appropriate manner. It's a balance, and I think we added a bit too much weight to the "free-range" side of the scale, and now we have to self-correct. If nothing else, it gives me greater piece of mind that they can't go to Target any longer, and that's not something to discount. An anxious worrying parent isn't good for anybody.

Alright, time to go get ready for a birthday party -- our second one in as many weeks. Look at us, social butterflies.

Until next time... 

Entry 793: Well, At Least The Seahawks Won

The Seahawks not only won, they destroyed their arch-rival San Francisco 49ers, 41-6. It was very reminiscent of Super Bowl XLVIII, where they scored within the first 15 seconds and didn't relent until they were up by 35. It was the type of game where if it was between two teams neither of which were "my" team, I probably would have turned it off at halftime due to a lack of drama. But since it was the Seahawks, I watched until the very end (even when it was Drew Lock handing off to Velus Jones) and didn't let my nervous fan guard down until Kenneth Walker scored his second touchdown to make it 34-6.

I'm very glad the 'Hawks won. I needed something to bring my spirits up a bit. The news the past few weeks has gotten me down a bit, and it doesn't look like it's getting better anytime soon. You know what I'm talking about. You've heard all the stories--no need to go into the details here. I don't have much to add, anyway. Instead, I'll talk about other, more fun, things like music.

To that end, I briefly became obsessed with this song "Hail to the King" by the band Avenged Sevenfold. I don't particularly like or dislike the song--it's fine; metal isn't really my thing--but I've been trying to figure out the name of it and who sings it for like six months, and I finally did. I definitely heard it a few times when it first came out like ten years ago, but recently it's been added to my Krav Maga instructor's playlist, so I hear it every time I go to the gym. Not knowing it would bother me so much--Who IS this?--but I would be in the middle of doing a drill, so I couldn't exactly stop and check. Plus, I doubt my instructor would appreciate me trying to look at his phone, anyway. So, then I would make it a point to pick out a few lyrics, so that I could Google them later, but I had a lot of trouble discerning the vocals, and it's really hard to pay attention to a song, when, say, you are doing inside defenses and somebody is throwing punches at your head that you need to deflect. A few times I thought I had something, but I would forget it by the time class was over, or it wouldn't be the actual words, so my searches wouldn't turn up anything useful.

But then, during Wednesday's class, I definitely heard the word "henchmen." It was either "the henchmen come" or "the henchmen call," so I repeated those phrases in my head like a mantra while doing a set of front kicks to a vertical target, and then during a water break I made a note of them in my phone. After class, I Googled it up, and "boom!" I got the result I needed. Finally! I now know the name and artist of a song I don't really care about. I can sleep at night.

Actually, I can't really sleep at night, or at least I couldn't last night, not well. I woke up four or five times throughout the night, including once at 3:30a, and I didn't fall back asleep until about 5:30a. My system was all askew. I ran six miles earlier in the day, which felt great, but also kinda messed me up, and then I had two tall beers later in the evening, and drinking feels more and more like poisoning myself, the older I get, and then I stayed up late and forgot to eat dinner, because I was watching the Seahawks game, so then I polished off, like, three bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios right before I went to bed around 12:30a. So, it's really no wonder I didn't sleep great last night. I brought it on myself.

I had the beers at a friend's 50th birthday party. I probably should have just had one, but I was having fun, and I don't like to think of myself as somebody who can't drink more than one beer anymore, even though that's probably the reality. It was a karaoke party, which was really cool, but it was with a live band, so the set list wasn't huge, and there was no bouncing ball on the lyrics. You just had to figure out where to come in on your own. That made it really tricky. It's also tricky because I have a terrible singing voice, so I have to do songs that are kinda goofy or intentional off-key. My plan was to do the Violent Femmes' "American Music," but they didn't have it, so then I thought about Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta," but they didn't have that either, so I settled on "Ice, Ice Baby." It went fine. I still know all the words and the tempo, but not knowing exactly when to come in made it kinda hard. Also, the vocals were super quiet compared to the instruments, which is not ideal for karaoke... or is it? Maybe that was the plan. Have people come up and have fun singing without embarrassing themselves too much or subjecting other people to their terrible voices, since nobody care really hear them anyway.

We know the guy whose birthday it was because our kids go (or went, rather) to school together, and it was very much a parent party. The stated time was 6:00p-8:00p, and around 7:50p a bunch of people were like, "Time to go relieve the sitter." The birthday boy said to me, "I feel like I should organize an after party, but also... I'm officially old now!" There was no way we staying out any later. S usually goes to sleep around 9:00p, and I had a football game to watch. Also, although our kids are old enough to not need a sitter anymore, we don't like to leave them home alone too long.

Alright, that's all I got for today. Until next time... 

Entry 792: Chaos

The chaos was threefold this week: in the world, the country, and on the homefront. In the latter it was not even on the same scale as the other two, in terms of importance, but it was especially relevant to me because it was mine, and I'm heavily biased toward things that affect me. I'm (not at all) weird that way.

S went away for work -- just a mini-trip, a few days -- but it happens to be on a weekend in which a bunch of things are coming together at once. It also doesn't help that work is quite busy right now. I've been putting in long hours since I got back from vacation. Today, the moment I woke up, at 7:09, I started doing shit -- getting the kids ready and off to school as work items piled up. By 11:00 I was sufficiently agitated, so I stopped, closed my computer,* threw on some workout clothes, and hit the exercise bike for an hour. It was a great stress relief. What I really wanted to do was run on the treadmill. I started doing that again, once in while, and I love it. I go for an hour and crank out six miles -- not a super fast pace, but running for an hour is still running for an hour. It's the best cardio workout around, as far as I'm concerned. But, alas, the only treadmill available to me is in my sister-in-law's apartment building, and although, it's only about a mile away, I didn't have time to go there (or anywhere), so the basement stationary bike it was.

*Actually, I opened a blank PowerPoint presentation and put it into full-screen mode. If I close my computer, or it goes into sleep mode, it disconnects me from the VPN, which can be bad, depending on what I'm doing. So, I've gotten in the habit of not letting it go into sleep mode, which it will do automatically after 15 minutes of inactivity, and I can't change it, because I don't have administrative permissions for the privacy/security settings. I used to to jiggle the mouse every 14 minutes and 55 seconds, like a chump, and then one of my colleagues told me that if you're in a full-screen PowerPoint presentation, your machine will never go to sleep. Totally changed my work life.

After that, I was able to refocus and get a bunch of work done before I had to pick up Lil' S1 from swim practice on the other side of the city. That actually went okay, but I was annoyed because he usually doesn't have practice on Friday, and then last night I got an email saying that he did have it for some reason. So, I had to get him, and I got some pizzas for dinner also, which you think would be easy, but getting takeout is an ordeal with my kids. They never want the same thing -- Lil' S1 wants Chipotle, Lil' S2 wants Chick-fil-A; Lil' S1 doesn't want Domino's, Lil' S2 only wants Domino's; Lil' S1 doesn't like Thai food, Lil' S2 loves Thai food -- and it drives me crazy. I'm like you're getting takeout! Stop complaining! Then they get mad at me because I won't order from two different places. That's totally on S. She'll get them each their own thing, and now they have this bratty sense of entitlement because of it.

Oh, and after I picked up Lil' S1, I had to take him to the comic book store (in rush-hour traffic) to buy a gift for his friend's birthday party tomorrow. To be fair, he did offer to take the Metro home from swim practice and walk to the comic book store and then walk home, but it would've been a 45-minute train ride, and then over a mile walk in the rain, in the dark, with all his school stuff and swim gear and whatever he bought for his friend, at 6:30 at night. I wasn't going to do that to him or to me -- I would be feeling guilty and worrying the entire time.

Anyway... I'm home and chilling now, decompressing, watching a terrible football game (Indiana absolutely running roughshod over Oregon). This is when I wished I drank. I mean, I do drink but only socially, not by myself. We have plenty of alcohol in the house, but I know that if I actually had a drink, I would be regretting it later. I mean, I just ingested about 25 ounces of pizza. I'm probably already pounding the Pepto tonight, anyway. I'll just crack open a seltzer and pretend it's a beer. That's actually more effective than you might think. Just the ritual of opening a can of something and taking swigs off of it can be very relaxing.

In other news, S and I finished Stranger Things, and I absolutely loved the last few episodes. I stand by everything I said in my previous entry. The show's flaws are myriad, and if anything, it got worse toward the end of the season. Instead of everything everybody says being complicated plot explanations or mediocre one-liners, they introduced a new type of trite dialog: The lengthy, cloying relationship-defining talk or heartfelt soliloquy, always delivered in the most dire of circumstances, when there is not time to spare, except for the perfectly timed five-minute lull in the action.

But I'll be damned if it didn't all come together in the end. The story mostly made sense, and was pretty clever, provided you ignore some pretty major plot holes (spoiler alert*). Those kids in Hawkins pulled it off. They saved the world and it was a joy to watch.

*At the end, right before the upside down gets destroyed or collapses or what have you, when all our heroes are in custody of the military, what happened to them after that? How did they get free? Did Dr. Kay and her vengeful minions just let them go after all they did? I mean, Hopper killed, what, 50 soldiers by himself. Once Eleven was out of the picture, the military was like So, you destroyed a bunch of our equipment, stole our vehicles, and annihilated dozens of our colleagues, but, hey, no harm, no foul?  

Alright, that's all for now. Until next time...