suppose i accidentally got my shit together

I slept in very late, got up and maybe played a hand of Magic with Quentin in the morning -- I think maybe we've only played one recently, so it might've been today. I picked up the four Bloomburrow Commander precon decks, and he has the two Edge Of Eternities Commander precons, so we've been trying various combinations of those, most recently Peace Offering vs Counter Intelligence. That one was a bad mismatch, because Peace Offering works by giving benefits to an opponent in exchange for something good for yourself, but this is (presumably) much more effective when you have three opponents in a standard four-player Commander game, and doesn't really work at all in a one-on-one match. We sort of suspected that, so it wasn't too annoying, but I think Q would rather have gotten a more satisfying win. :^ )

That afternoon was Fashion Raid Day in pokego, featuring raid battles against eleven of the pokemon who have previously shown up in hats and other outfits during what they used to run as Fashion Week. Pokefriend Holly and I were only interested in one of them (Dragonite), which meant that there was only a 1/11 chance that any given gym would have what we were looking for; they were resetting every half hour, so we did a bunch of walking trying to get to two of them each half hour.

I made it back in time to get ready for Chaos's traditional second-night-of-Passover seder, this year on the fourth night for logistical reasons. It was very nice, and nice to see people. We got home in time to watch Stranger Things S5:E2, which meh. I stayed up too late again, and forgot to post again.

Disruption Week continues, with a visit to the dermatologist for an annual skin check. Everything looks generally fine, so yay. Got some work done in the afternoon, made Salmon Fiocchetti from the TJ's cookbook for dinner, and Quentin showed me Slay The Spire after dinner, a new game he got for his birthday.

Happy New Year! If you are a Fool, anyway, and I am. (Although Wikipedia claims that this idea -- that April Fools Day originated from mocking people who celebrated it as the first day of the year -- is not entirely backed up by the evidence. Ah well, perhaps only Fools believe that story.)

An ok day at work today; we're all still getting used to the new normal, and I have a pretty big backlog, which is annoyingly psychically burdensome, but is more like "ugh" levels than like "gah, total despair" levels. It's also been a weird week in other ways, with the kids' birthdays on Monday, some running around town driving Amy to a dental appointment on Tuesday, lunch with Matt today, just finding it a little hard to get into a rhythm. There's opportunities for things to get better, though, and I'm looking forward to trying to realize those.

A thing that happened in March that I forgot to mention: My uncle (my mom's sister's spouse) Tom died. :^( He'd been in and out of the hospital, and not in very good shape for a while, and was at home in hospice care for his last few days, so it wasn't sudden or shocking, but is still sad. My sister Aunt Jo is going to be in the US for a conference in the LA area at the start of April, and I'm meeting her there to have dinner with our dad, and then we're both going up to the SF area to spend some time with our aunt, a couple of days for me and a couple of weeks for her. There'll be a memorial ("celebration of life"? are those the same thing or subtly different?) at some point, not sure yet when.

Another thing that happened in March is that I've been doing more with "AI" at work; it's been a general push from the company for a while, and I am somewhat eye-rolling about it, but the rest of my immediate team (DevOps) mostly shares my views about it, and we're working together to come up with ways to use it in ways that seem safe and effective. Software Engineer (SWE) type folks are somewhat more free to just turn it loose and see what happens; we can't risk doing that in situations where it has access to our credentials that let us do things like destroy production databases, so we have to be a bit less zealously enthusiastic than those folks. One distinction I've enjoyed recently is using it at build time, when you can ask it how to do things, and help craft scripts andn stuff; vs using it at run time, like having it do things in automated pipelines. We're much more comfortable with the idea of AI-written things in pipelines (which we can review and understand) than we are with just letting it do stuff on the fly. Anyway, I know everyone hates AI in general, but it is in fact a pretty powerful tool (at least when your company is paying for high-end versions of it -- oh, and another advantage of the build-time approach is that we still have the scripts even if (when) the pricing realigns to match the actual costs), if you are in fact competent enough to handle power tools.

[* I wrote this on Feb 28th, but then I found that I'd jotted down some sketchy notes each day from Jan 1st - 14th, and decided that I should post those first, but it was too late at night, and then I failed again to start after all. Here's the post from Feb 28th. *]

Bliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip.

Been a while. It's been cold, with lots of snow. Today was beautiful, though, and I had a nice afternoon doing a pokego event, although walking 13+ km, when I hadn't done much walking for a while, has me pretty sore.

What else has been going on. We've continued to watch Stranger Things, up through the end of Season 4, but haven't yet started Season 5, but probably will, but we're not super enthused about it. I watched the two seasons of Hazbin Hotel, and liked it; it's a little like Steven Universe but with a colossal amount of swearing, sex, and drugs. I guess it's not actually all that much like Steven Universe, other than being an animated musical? (Is it actually "a musical"? There's a song or two each episode, and the songs are pretty great, which is a lot of what I like about it. Is Steven Universe a musical? Maybe not.) Anyway, if it sounds like the kind of thing you would like, I think it's a pretty enjoyable instance of that kind of thing.

Everyone's got a cold; Juniper had it first, and is the most over it, and then Quentin and me and Amy, in approximately that order. Perhaps we'll all be all better by the end of the week.

Probably other stuff too, but that's what happens when I don't write regularly.