When I moved back to the USA from living overseas for 7 years, I was really lost. It was a shocking cultural transition that I was not prepared for. It took me a long time to "become American" again. I lived with my sister, who had just bought a house before the market crashed. My rent helped her out, but it was a 1-bed 1-bath house, so I lived in the back yard in the "barn". Which I renovated into a nice little loft space. (But no bathroom.) I quickly burned through my savings. 10 years of savings for Hungary was about a year's salary for a secretary here in Seattle. That went fast. I couldn't get a job because I had no recent US experience. I was "at sea", as they say. My sister and I wound up getting a dog. A black lab, shepherd, husky mix about 5 months old. The owner had a sudden job change and needed the dog to go to someone who was going to be around (she was moving to Arizona for a traveling sales job). After some initial confusion about our roles, my sister became "Auntie" and I became "Dad" to our girl, Layna. From Day 1 she listened to me. I never ordered her around. I just talked to her like you would to another person. And she understood. She came everywhere with me, even when I got a job, she was welcome at my series of dog-friendly workplaces. As I built my new life in America, went through jobs and relationships, it was always Layna and I together. She was my partner and my friend throughout the most significant changes I had ever gone through in my life. She was much more of a "person" than a dog. When I'd go to the coffee shop, I'd tell her to wait outside. And no matter how long I was inside, she'd still be waiting in the same spot for me when I came out. She was brilliant with kids, cats, and other dogs. Never got in a single fight. Never bit anyone. Had that Labrador "soft mouth" and would gently take food; not snatch it. When we would go someplace, like a house party, I'd walk her around the edge of the yard and tell her this was as far as she could go. She would understand and self-regulate, and stay in the yard, no matter the distractions that passed on the sidewalk, etc. Her sweet eyes told people that she wasn't dangerous - despite being a big black 70-pound dog - and kids immediately took to her. She was just as good with my wife, too. Completely voice-controlled, we only used a leash when other people were worried. She was my daily companion for 15 years and 3 months, and died on June 14th. Surrounded by friends and family, on her favorite bed, in her favorite spot in the back yard under our Douglas Fir tree. My wife and I have never known each other without Layna, and our lives have changed now. We are sad, but we also knew she lived a very long and very happy life, and she told us when it was time to go, and we let her go. I'm sad. https://imgur.com/a/rYerefY (That would've been a photo of her, but I can't be fucked to figure out what stupid stunts I need to do to make it show up. So click it. She was beautiful.)
Condolences, amigo. I'm there with you. Lost one of my childhood dogs a few months ago. My wife's family made the call to put down her childhood dog, in about an hour from now. We both cried a lot yesterday when we heard the news, and more to come soon, I'm sure. Fuck 2020. Fuck it so hard.
Lockdown during a pandemic is a whole lot nicer when your pile in the car with your wife and dog and go to some deserted bit of wilderness and just walk together. Of course we can still do that, the two of us. But "getting the dog out for some exercise" was too compelling to ignore, while "we should take a walk" often gets sidetracked by other things.
Good to know. I just used the only link imgur gave me. I know I'm not cool if I use imgur, and I should use something else, but fuck all of fucking everything and fuck that too. Thanks for helping people see my girl... I miss her, and don't give a fuck about much else right now.
Looks like I'm first? Give me dry Martini with a straw, extra silly. My cardiac ablation is next week, and recovery should take about six weeks. Ideally, I'll be under observation for one or two days and released home to recuperate. It's also when cardiologist will give me the final details about weaning off some of the meds. Pretty stoked about that. am_Unition - shout-out, as promised. It's been two weeks of on-and-off storms, nine severe weather warnings, and humidity sometimes isn't above 80%. Parts of the country went from hydrological drought to high risk of flooding almost overnight. I've been caught in a storm that transformed streets into streams and saw lots of scud clouds dragging low to the ground while taking shelter at a bus stop. The whole thing passed overhead in twenty minutes. Speaking of which, I seminar'd on computational physics with my peers at the meteorological institute, and they told me afterwards we might have a tornado hotspot developing in southern Poland. There's a lowering between the Carpathians and Sudety mountain ranges, which makes it easier for storms to move northward while adjacent elevation makes leeward masses of air rotate. Since CAPE seldom exceeds 2000-2500 J/kg, any helicity is unwelcome news (the non-exact intuition is that it's easier to spin-up small than a massive storm). Mechanism-wise, it's pretty similar to one going on in eastern Colorado: The phenomenon isn't new, but it's likely to get worse around here. Frankly, I'm not too worried about tornadoes and such. It's the flooding, which we're notoriously incapable of handling, that concerns me. We have presidential elections this Sunday, and I hope it'll finally begin the process of taking the rule away from PiS. Rafał Trzaskowski seemed like the best candidate for the last few years, and it's a pretty close call in the polls. (EDIT: Whoops, made a typo in his name) I've got the green light from the chemistry department to do my degree on reduced semester quota, which roughly means the senior year will take me four real-time semesters. In autumn, I will only be taking one course, though it's a big one: inorganic chemistry - 6 straight hours of lab and 2 hours of lecture/instruction per week. Do I need that? Not the paper, but my work can absolutely benefit from going through this stuff thoroughly, having instructors and other students around helps a heap. Also, in my neck of the woods, the line between chemistry and physics is sometimes nonexistent, at least unless you feel like being an obnoxious pedant, so there's that. Plus I'd lie if I said it's not fun. I went back to reading some books from the high school canon. Unsurprisingly, The Trilogy turned out to be a lot more enjoyable if you don't have to rush through 700 pages of archaic Polish prose per volume per week because a frustrated teacher screeched so. There's a lot to appreciate I missed earlier, and it was honestly a joy to revisit. Translations exist, but that's about all I can say for them. Parts I read at random seemed dry and a tad too literal, though IMO that's still better than if the translator decided to make it all 'ye olde' for the hell of it. What'd you recommend from your country's canon?
Glad to hear that you've got everything right on the horizon and ready to operate :). I wonder if you'd fare considerably worse here in the 'states; Houston has drastically scaled back on transplants, as intensive care units are basically gonna be full either today or tomorrow. Texas is one of the new top three hotspots for covid in America. Anyway, I've been enjoying a respite from constant thunderstorm assault. Here's to hoping your elections go smoothly, and the outcome is a step in the right direction. Cheers.
I've got my fingers crossed for ya, bro. You're gonna come out stronger.
Going through my phone and clearing out texts, came across this beauty the night before we all went into lockdown here in NZ. Got me feeling kinda strange that lockdown came and went, 2 months flew by. I'm not a hugely patriotic person but that "Kia kaha" at the end did make me a little teary. I've finished The Last of Us Part 2. It's good, the gameplay is excellent as expected. I just found the story to be so fucking dark. I know it's post-apocalyptic and all but damn, it was harrowing. Maybe I'm just getting too old, but I found it difficult to enjoy the game when I was just feeling so bad for every character involved. It was honestly a depressing bloody time.. 9/10.
The lesser used full sentence is - Kia kaha, kia maia, kia manawa. "Be strong, be brave, be steadfast". I'll be the first to admit we have a long ways to go as far as NZ race relations are concerned. Maori make up a ridiculously high percentage of our prison population and life is far more likely to be difficult if you're Maori. But the language is taught in most schools, the culture and history is becoming well known throughout. There's a good amount of care taken to ensure it is involved in a child's life at the very least.
I wish that people who come into the shop would wear a mask. Masks are mandated by the county but no one seems to give a fuck. I'd say about 30% of people aren't wearing one. I could refuse service but I don't really want to fuck my money over by alienating customers. I'm super frustrated. I found a nice pair of swings in a free pile by my house. I mounted them under my kids stilt house today, they are perfect.
I wish law enforcement would start ticketing people over mask delinquency. I wonder whether they'd be more inclined if Cheeto Mussolini hadn't roped masks into his stupid culture wars.
All we gotta do is make one of Cheeto Mussolini's best friends a COVID mask-maker. Have him talk to Mr Cheeto about how his business is hurting, and he really needs Amurrikans to buy Amurrikan-made masks - and a LOT of them - or his business is going to fail. Bam. Next day, Cheeto in an orange mask. No question.
I live in one of the most liberal cities in the U.S. Trump got 17% of the vote in the county, the city is left of the county in general. I live in the most racially diverse part of town presumably putting it left of the city (I'm not sure that's exactly true when the general populace is this liberal. I'm finding the narrative that first it's men, and second conservatives, who are not wearing their mask tiresome. it seems like it's a straight 30% across race, sex and creed. That jibes with my world view. People are fucked up pretty evenly across all the divides, I wish they weren't, I don't want to kill my mom for a few dollars or a cup of coffee.
I didn’t mean to imply it’s Republicans or men. Plenty of women are not doing masks and plenty of democratic voters aren’t doing them either (though I’d argue that people voting for Joe Biden in the primary aren’t exactly liberals). I find that In my in my area it’s mostly older people 50+ that don’t want to wear them and a few young invincibles. I just saw a post from the toxic waste pool that is next door where a 30yo Karen was screaming about masks and people had to remind here that we aren’t her friends. Clearly she wouldn’t fit the conservative male stereotype. Some of it probably is just people out for a walk who didn’t plan or remember but you can’t exactly give them 50cent masks with a 2.50$ coffee. Still my point is that while non mask wearing is not limited to conservatives that group isn’t big into masks in general and they see masks as an infringement on civil rights. That group is also in general pro police. If police start enforcing mask laws these people will also see the police as an oppressive force and join in on the police reform bandwagon which is not something that police unions want.
applewood here after a much needed break from the internet. I'm gonna be pretty infrequent on here, not gonna lie. As it turns out, the internet is like one of those mirrors you see in a fun house, twisting reality. If any of you are feeling pretty scared, angry, indignant, etc., I highly recommend you check out. Chances are you're feeling the way you're feeling cause what you're seeing on here and it's important to remember that your environment influences you just as much as you influence it. The internet? Makes for a pretty crumby environment. I picked a heck of a time to try and de-clutter. Vintage toy shops don't want my toys cause they have no money cause the economy is messed up. Comic shops don't want my comics cause they have no money cause the economy is messed up. There used to be two pawn shops within a ten minute drive of where I live and you figured a pawn shop would make bank when the economy is messed up but somehow they're not there anymore either. At this rate, I'm half tempted to say "forget the money" and just dump this stuff at a local charity shop. If I could tell myself fifteen years ago "Hey, collecting is fun, but eventually you'll regret it" I would. At least I learned my lesson before I became a hard core hoarder, huh? Employment is not going good. It was precarious before all of this, but apparently when the economy goes weird "precarious" turns into "surreally unpredictable." So there's that. Got the Evercade, it's mostly cool. Bug hunting and bird watching and iNaturalist is keeping me sane. Staying indoors for long stretches of a time has the exact opposite effect. Stay beautiful everyone. Remember, your thoughts and actions are your prayers come to life, so focus on making all three positive and impactful.
Helped my SO's parents move the other day. They live about 45 minutes drive away, and we're now in an electric car sharing programme and a public transport semi-lockdown so we reserved a car. There's a bunch of Renault Zoe's but there's also a few Model 3's and since I'd only driven a Model S as a test drive, I was eager to try it out. I came to realize that Tesla fundamentally likes technology more than experience, whereas other high end electric cars have the opposite. And while I thought I did so too, and for example really like a bunch of software tricks the car has up its sleeve, the total package just isn't as good as it could be. It relies too much on the mega-ipad to get anything done - to open the fucking passenger seat box you need to dig around menus to find the software button. The steering wheel has two nipples and you're just left to figure out what every interaction does. There's nameless buttons in the software too, and there's no easy way to see your remaining range and power consumption. Or to do anything useful while driving other than what you can do by arousing the steering wheel. In other news - I'm on track to hand in the revised, hopefully-final version of my peer reviewed academic paper in next week. A final proofread and i-dotting and we should be fit for print! It's also mildly hot here. I realized early April that I'd go ravingly mad if I'd had to work from home in my non-AC'ed apartment in the summer, so I got a mobile unit. They're all marked up or sold out now, while I got it at a good discount. Yay foresight!
My union came out with COVID recommendations yesterday. I know about a third of the authors. They're the guys who ask me for health advice. One of them is the guy who screws up my pizza order. Not a one of them has touched biology since high school. It's all so insane. It's like we're the dudes tasked with digging under Chernobyl to drain it and we're doing it naked because we'll get heat stroke except instead of preventing a supercritical nuclear explosion we're preventing Peter Chernin from missing a payment on his yachts. My one consolation is these are one side of a conversation - they are the professional opinion of professionals about the mitigation necessary to prevent the spread of COVID. The other side of the conversation is the underwriters tasked with assessing the risk of COVID development in order to assign the appropriate premium to production insurance. And those guys? They're effectively being asked to write a life insurance policy for a suicide bomber. It's gonna be spendy. So yeah right now I'm looking forward to a career where the guys who play Words With Friends during the safety meetings have come up with the document that outlines how not to catch the plague. In an environment where fucking Kroger can't stay open 24 hours, we're planning 24-hour productions. I mean. What else is there to say.
Hey everyone. I just got back after a week in the UP of Michigan. It was good for my family and it was good for my soul. I fished some meadows that I used to fish with my father and grandfather many years ago. We got a secondary exposure to an active COVID19 case, and the timing could work out in the bad way. I hope not. I'll know soon. I want to go up there again and not come back for a year.
My school is insisting on an on-campus fall semester with recommendations that people socially distance and wear face masks. No enforcement, though, and it isn't clear what faculty could do if they wanted to make stricter rules for their classrooms. Also no real discussion of what is going to happen in lab-type classes that typically come with lots of close human interaction. Two years ago, they changed a policy to require graduate research assistant tuition waivers to be funded from their grant money. This affected a lot of students who were funded through small grants or whose grants forbade their money from being used for tuition funding. And it meant that a particular research consortium on campus restructured how they did grant funding for students which meant that I lost funding for the semester a couple weeks before it started. We got pissed off and talked a bunch and they decided to roll back the policy pending further research. In May, the university silently reinstated a worse version of the policy, and now we have to do this all over again. Hopefully it doesn't immediately affect me as my funding is different now, but friends are very worried.
I just wanted to come back and chuck this link up. https://www.pressreader.com/new-zealand/otago-daily-times/20200530/282192243199623?fbclid=IwAR2720wMnCUR1-6-SuwdOcfBNEsGaMqWavKwflb0asaotlVxRzkjBt9fC0c It's a brief write up of my late grandfather. Kinda put in perspective all he achieved, a solid chunk was during retirement! The piano mentioned in the middle section is now sitting in my lounge - from his mothers house, to his and then to mine. It was a nice read, wanted to share it.
Australia has pretty much successfully shut CV-19 down in every state except one. Now that one state has recorded its highest daily number of new cases in more than two months. All in all, we're doing (very) well by international standards, but it will be nice when Melbourne's bars can reopen completely without the current cap on numbers.