Kid's teacher came to work with COVID. Took out about 60% of two classrooms. Kid came down with it Thursday, is mostly doing better now. I started feeling like shit Saturday, tested positive Sunday morning, have been feeling super not-great ever since.

This is the first time I've tested positive for COVID. Of course, so have half the families in 3rd and 4th grade so that's nice.

not gonna lie. Considering how badly it fucked me up the first time I'm a little terrified. I feel worse this time around. I had good days and bad days last time over the course of maybe a month. This time? "I have successfully taken a shower, now it's time for a nap." I would say my body devoted about 36 hours Sunday and Monday to fever dreams. Sense of smell went away this morning. My ability to regulate my temperature is slowly coming back, at least. With any luck, three years of evolution have taught those shitty little critters what to do with a human body; this time around it's a bad fuckin' flu rather than "your head is going to explode from earaches."

But fuck, man. The delta between "bikes 30 miles a day" and "walks 6 miles a day, can't really run anymore" is a pretty fuckin' shitty place to be when you're already at "walks six miles a day, can't really run anymore."

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My wife pointed out that childhood trauma is really shitty for your immune system so it's not surprising that I get sick easily, considering I spent 18 years in fight-or-flight. And maybe it's because shapella went through with no drama? And my staking adventure unwound with no drama at all but a great deal of profit? And the fact that if I were still talking to my parents they'd still call me a criminal rather than congratulating me? It made me wonder what the origin of my recurring childhood nightmare of being set on fire by my mother was.

'cuz she used to encourage me to play with matches.

And idolized her brother for "burning down a barn" that he didn't actually burn down.

And she fuckin' luvvvvvvvvvvs fires.

And although my aunt doesn't have much credibility either, the fact that the cousins all agree "your mom put the heater under her sister's covers and turned it on" has more credibility now than my mother's version of the story ("I woke up to smoke because my three-year-old sister solved her cold feet by getting out of bed, picking up the portable heater and stuffing it under her covers").

There's an 18-month period leading up to about my 2nd birthday where (1) my dad decided he couldn't leave me alone with my mother (2) they moved in with friends because she couldn't be left alone (3) he wanted to leave her but figured I'd die but for some reason nobody talked about committing her again. I'd ask him what the fuck was going on but he'd lie.

Maybe when I'm feeling better I'll ask his sister. But I probably won't. There was a lot of family drama about when exactly the spelling of our last name changed. I have seen census records, where she's fucking seven years old, with the whole fucking family spelling their name differently. Fuckers all changed the spelling of their last name in the '50s and fucking forgot or something. Unreliable narrators, the lot of them.

I should be dead nine different ways, across four geneologies, as well as poor, as well as crazy, as well as a criminal. Instead I'm a millionaire with a beautiful wife and an awesome kid. It would be so fuckin' typical if a goddamn Chinese gain-of-function experiment took that all away from me.

So apparently Imgur and Reddit both decided to pick the same week to consign themselves to irrelevance, by banning NSFW content and putting their API behind a paywall respectively. I've been meaning to quit them for a long time, and this will probably be what does it for good.

Nice to know I've got another cozy home on the Internet here, where yelling at the folks in charge still does something.

I'm 'under investigation' because people in IT not only didn't remove my access to two other departments, they retained everything on my new ID. And for no fault of my own, I'm somehow a suspect because whoopin' 0.8 g of ephedrine went missing from a lab I didn't visit in sixteen months, from a safe box I never had access to. Not only the situation is stupid, the fact I'm anxious about the outcome is stupid.

And, gosh, presuming perfect conversion, you could make almost a full gram of free base amphetamine racemate. :V

Anyhow, just finished doing the literal groundwork for the vegetable garden, now I'll need to waterproof what's left of the dismantled gazebo to make a dog-proof fence around it. Potatoes will have to fend for themselves, though. Planted beans in pots and set them all around the house and balconies, will plant chickpea sprouts along the house fence this or next weekend. Depends on weather.

Still on the fence about hydroponic setup. I've done it a couple of times before, and it's about the same workload on 3 m2 as 20 m2, but fuckups get more severe as you scale up. If I went all-out, I may buy a fishtank and use it for nitrogen n'shit, but it'd be another complication.

Doomer prepperism? Hardly. I wanted to do that stuff for a long time, and I have a larger project in plans, where I'd like to replace most stuff that grows in the yard with edible greens. But before that, I need both practice and, really, a lot more patience than I currently have.

I think I have a job! Agreed on salary/benefits, waiting for a formal offer which will probably come on Monday. Excited to be done with this phase of my life, though I’m still going to be passively job searching for the next several decades because I guess that’s what you do. But I’m extremely happy to be getting my foot in the door! And hopefully I can financially stabilize over the next couple months and think further than a week in the future for the first time in my adult life.

Made it across Larkhe La Pass 5160m trek in Nepal! Gave up on the daily meditation halfway through - but had some amazing moments uptop a hill, listening to the sounds of birds and avalanches before that. I feel my hiking got much faster and stronger, got closer with my travel buddy and saw some truly beautiful views. Can’t wait for the hot shower and private room tomorrow. It’s been a trip of a lifetime.

I have about five days to write two very large, public facing annual reports for the university that is my employer. Amid this I also have to arrange an itinerary for a study tour of North America and Europe that starts in less than two weeks. Amid this another work task has also been handballed to me from a senior executive that I am unable to ignore. I'm feeling the pressure.