unsplash-logoJason Abdilla I read a piece today about how prolonged stress can lead to persistent fatigue in a person who might be at a loss as to an obvious cause, and I'm thinking that that is what's going on with me now. The worst comes at the end of what seems like a terribly long working day, which is frequently one where I felt like I came up short in results.
unsplash-logoClark Van Der Beken I like saying “I’m entering my seventh decade” today. It’s completely factual, because of the way we count things starting with one, and at the same time it sounds more weighty. The first decade was childhood and grade school. The second decade was high school and college in Illinois. The third decade was graduate school in Massachusetts, teaching in New York, and marriage. The fourth decade was research in Pittsburgh and then a break away to engineering in New Jersey and a start in writing.
Here is a time capsule from the Covid-19 plague year for future readers who might be interested in what it was like around these times. The cold rain has come back, comfort to those who worry about drought, but making it difficult to go outside to take in a little bit of exercise. Spring has been as slow to come as it has been every year, and since it doesn’t snow here we don’t have the receeding line of old drifts to tell us how much progress we’ve made since the beginning of January.
unsplash-logoEugene Triguba Last week we picked up our fifth car this month, a white Nissan Versa. It’s a little snug but will be fine just for getting around. We have this because car number four, a Nissan Altima, is in the body shop to repair a scrape it acquired a few hours before we bought it. The seller agreed that the repair would be done at their expense without our having to argue about it, and we’re hoping it will turn out fine.
January This was the best two minutes of my life pic.twitter.com/wYY6gjYA22 — triv🥀 nsfr (@bedroomflicker) January 8, 2019 I don't think its a sin to sing off-key but it's probably a corporal work of mercy to sing in tune, and for some, to keep silent. — ❉ Linus Brickle (@LinusQuickle) January 13, 2019 What your users see when you don't label unfamiliar icons. #ux #design pic.twitter.com/DXrGiqg464 — Doug Collins 👏 🚿 (@DougCollinsUX) January 14, 2019 February it's Saturday, time to once again post the nutritional information for one cubic light year of ham pic.
© Creative Commons Zero (CC0) Free photo ID 82985451 © creativecommonsstockphotos | Dreamstime.com The disturbing thing that happens as you age, I find, is that you begin to notice your mind working subtly differently from the way it used to. From an early age I have set great store by my thinking organ, through all the years of school and the years working in technical professions, and taking care not to mess it up with chemicals or risky activities.
© Melinda Nagy Free photo ID 582639 | Dreamstime.com The sudden violent death of someone in our extended family has brought back some thoughts of a philosophical nature to the surface for me. As near as I can tell, our circumstances did not match up closely: he was living in the East, I on the West coast, he was killed in the kind of rough urban neighborhood I rarely come into close contact with, and while have a workaday routine like hundreds of thousands of tech workers in the Bay Area, he earned money piecemeal buying and selling electronics to individuals in person.
© publicdomainstockphotos Free photo ID 84930337 | Dreamstime.com This is the third year I engaged in the discipline of writing and posting a poem on the Yahoo groups Scifaiku list I’ve been a member of for a dozen years or so. In past years I maintained a scifaiku writing timetable. One year, I wrote a new poem every single day for the entire year to see how much of a challenge that would be for me.
© creativecommonsstockphotos ID 95931871 | Dreamstime.com Moving from one part of the the San Francisco Bay Area to another seems like it should be a pretty minor change, but it’s actually been the biggest thing that happened with me in the last six months. Originally we chose to live in San Mateo because of its location halfway between the tech centers of San Francisco and Silicon Valley. It’s about forty-five minutes to an hour by train or by car, going north or south respectively, to reach a high concentration of tech companies.
© Alexey Kondratev ID 8616636 | Dreamstime.com By this time four weeks from now we will have moved to a new place in Alameda. The preparations for taking possession of this condo are well on their way thanks to a whirlwind two weeks of activity. They tell us it’s a slow season for people hunting for a home because of the holidays and the rise in interest rates, so we haven’t had to compete with other people for the same properties.