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Current Mood: tired

Entry tags:

cat fu,
sleep

Shake shake shake, shake your booty

Around 3 AM we were awakened by an earthquake. Not a big one, but just one sharp jolt - so it felt close. Turns out it was around Berkeley and only a 4.3. The bad news: I did not get back to sleep before my 5 AM alarm. The good news: Miss Bea was unsettled and wanted pets and scritches. She stayed by my side for an hour, much longer than she normally deigns to pay attention to me.

Entry tags:

travel

Birds and Bits

I've posted the birdwatching report from my New Zealand trip on my Alpennia blog (https://alpennia.com/blog/new-zealand-birding). The non-bird parts to come.

Today's rhythm was thrown off by the need to check in at 11:30 on my potential jury duty service. Which also meant that when I went online to set up an optometry appointment, I didn't think I could commit to the "earliest possible" slot next Tuesday, with the next options starting in late October. And then when I checked in and found I was excused from jury duty, that next Tuesday slot had been snapped up.

It became clear to me on the NZ trip that I really needed to update my vision prescriptions, though in part this was because I was doing a lot more close-distance reading than usual and it became clear that one of my eyes has drifted more than the other. Then coincidentally, yesterday I got a note from Kaiser saying that my current glasses prescription was about to expire (it's been two years) and I should make an appointment.

But anyway, since I didn't want to go off on the bike this morning because of the check-in, I wrote up my birding notes. And now I'm thinking that since my routine is already off, I could just go off script entirely for the rest of the day. (Yes, yes, I have a fixed routine in retirement. What can I say?) Maybe I'll do something wild and crazy like pick rose hips. I have three or four bushes that have a lot of hips--enough to do something interesting with, anyway--and it might be fun to try some comparisons.

Current Mood: relaxed

Entry tags:

(no subject)

This week's Resolution Recipe: Chocolate Cheesecake.
( Read more... )

Entry tags:

travel

Back from New Zealand

I deliberately left my laptop at home during my 2-week trip to New Zealand to ensure I wouldn't slip into "working," but that means I'll never catch up on dreamwidth posts. I hope to do a "trip report" on my Alpennia.com blog (since that's the easiest place to post pictures), but given that I never posted a trip report for last year's post-Worldcon travels, we'll see what actually happens.

TLDR: I had marvellous fun, spent two weeks hanging with my BFF, enjoyed seeing a part of the world I'd never been before, had amazingly good weather for all but the last day, and fell in love with tree ferns. (Alas, no way I could grow them at my house even if I had the space.)

Current Mood: creative

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Thursday the wife and I drove to the other side of the City for dinner and a movie. We went to our usual place when visiting this theater - a family-run Chinese restaurant. Sadly they aren't doing soup dumplings anymore but we still enjoyed some of our usuals: green onion pancake, green beans with chile, and dry-fried chicken wings (which are fabulous). The service is pretty slow but even with commute-hour traffic we had plenty of time.

We saw Spinal Tap II the day before it opened. I'm not quite sure how this indie theater gets to do that but I'm not complaining. The movie wasn't as good as the original, but it was never going to be. The Comicle put it well: it may not go to 11, only 8, but still rocks. We enjoyed it.

I have started brining 5 lbs pork loin to replenish our lonza stores, and am attempting a puff pastry sausage roll tonight for dinner. Mildly ambitious but that's okay for a weekend, and I'm using commercial puff pastry because I am not insane.

Entry tags:

At Least One Underlying Condition [Covid, US, Patreon]

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1882720.html

0.

Hey, Americans! Look sharp, the Trump Administration is trying to play a head game on you about Covid vaccines, and it's apparently working, because I see nobody talking about this in the news or on social media.

There's a lot of complexity and chaos right now about what is available to whom and how to get it. Things are changing fast, especially on the state level. I hope to discuss it in another post, but there's one thing in particular I want to clarify for you.

As you've probably heard, week and a half ago, the FDA changed the authorization for the Covid vaccines, in a way which curtails access. The thing that people are hearing is that for people under 65 years old the Covid vaccines are not authorized with some exceptions.

That's technically correct, but badly misleading. A lot of people hear "not authorized" and stop really listening to the rest of the sentence. They hear "with some exceptions" and assume they're not likely to be one such, and won't qualify to get it, and tune right out.

To be cynical for a moment, you're meant to assume that.

But it turns out you're one of the exceptions. Probably. How can I know that?

The actual language from the FDA authorization just issued ( Read more [2,750 words] )

This post brought to you by the 218 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

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Entry tags:

pols,
tech

Interesting app for Android [tech]

I don't know who needs to know about this, but:

I just discovered the Android app "Periodically". It's described as an "event logger". It's for keeping track of when a recurring thing has happened, and figuring out what the average time is between occurrences. You just keep it updated each time the event happens, and it will do the math for you to figure out the frequency, and even give you a notification when it predicts the event is likely to happen again. If you're tracking more than one thing, it will try to suss out correlations for you.

I mention because twenty five years ago or so, I needed exactly this functionality and could not find any application that would do what I needed, so I wrote a thing for myself, and since then a lot of people I've mentioned it to have wondered where they can get one like it. Mine was Mac/Palm Pilot, so not of much use to most people, especially these days.
Lo, somebody seems to have realized the need for this functionality, and brought it to the market. So I thought I'd mention.

Now, in this day and age, a lot of people, especially in the US, are concerned with security. Especially if they're tracking something to do with their health. This app is not specific to health, so nothing about it immediately reveals that it is storing health information on casual inspection; you could use some sort of other term for whatever health condition it is you are actually tracking. So, for instance, If you were tracking how often your migraines happened, you could call that "new box of cereal".

This app defaults to local-only data storage on your Android device, and the developer claims that it only collects "app activity" for analytics, and shares nothing with third parties. It outputs CSV and has an option to back up to Google Drive.

I haven't tried it myself, but it has a rating of 4.6 stars out of five on the Play Store.

Reviewers on the Play Store note that tracker apps that are specific to the kind of event – such as health- specific loggers – often have needless complexity, and often some weird ideas about graphic design. They praise this app for its clean, elegant look and simple, effective functionality.

In addition to its obvious applicability to episodic health conditions, it strikes me as potentially extremely useful in one of the trickier parts of prepping: figuring out one's burn rate of resources. I think I might trial it to help me figure out how often I should expect to have to buy a fresh bale of toilet paper and how long the big bottle of ibuprofen will last me.