I'm still here. Still alive. No timed post this time.
Tired as hell because my work/life balance has gone to hell in a handbasket. I think over a year of covid has finally started to affect the rest of us. I don't think anybody's head is still in the game anymore.
I've been working too many late nighters and it's really messed with my head. I took a couple of days off (before I started writing this post) to recuperate. Sleeping in felt kind of strange but I probably needed it. I've been taking time to read actual dead tree books when I have some spare time, which I think has helped a great deal.
I haven't had the compute cycles to do much hacking on any of my projects. Just can't keep it together inside my head to make any progress, even though it's conceptually simple. I've been doing some preliminary data collection on a project to read the data coming out of the power meter outside but so far I haven't made much progress. When I can't think of anything else to do I put together one of the many electronics kits that have been piling up in my drawers over the years. It's amazing what a soldering iron that gets hot enough can do.
Through an amazing stroke of luck I managed to get onto the Bay Area vaccination list a couple of weeks ago. One of my co-workers suggested, off-handedly, that I hit up My Turn again late one afternoon (after hitting that site obsessively every hour or so for days on end). Much to my shock there were actually slots open, so I grabbed the closest ones I could and only then rearranged my calendar.
I'm on the Pfizer vaccine run right now, one shot down with one to go in early May. Shot one was accompanied by tiredness (just taking the trash out left me winded) and some minor soreness (it felt like a deep joint ache, but was in fact just very diffuse muscle ache). Thinking about it for a moment, that might explain why I've been sleeping so much lately.
I've no illusions that this is going to make any progress toward putting the world back the way it was in 2019.ev. It's far too late for that, and I think we can all agree that some things are best left in the dustbin of the past. Too much has changed, and the zeitgeist is... hosed.
I never thought that any of the vaccines would be one (or two, depending)-and-done. Flu viruses don't work like that, as anyone who's gotten that year's flu shot can attest to. The rate of genetic drift is too high. I've been working on the hypothesis that covid-19 vaccinations are going to be a yearly thing for many years, possibly twice yearly. I also don't think that going anywhere without a mask is going to be possible in the short or medium term, if only because holier than thou people will start screaming at people who are a) vaccinated, and b) not wearing masks, and I don't feel like putting up with that bullshit.
I'm out of stuff to say right now, but please understand that we're as healthy as we can be right now at home, doing the best we can, and trying to ride it out.
Please be careful out there, folks.