Well tried to test me out of quarantine, failed at that.
Just bad that I already had planned a lot of work stuff for next week. Now I have to invest more time to cancel all that again.
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I just enrolled in grad school for master’s degree #2. Barring any sudden, unforseen expenses (like, y’know, having a fourth kid) , this will be the first degree that won’t require loans of any kind. So grown up! Now back to my toys before classes start in 3 weeks.
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What are you going to be mastering?
3 hours commute from and to?! Maaan, I thought one of the supposed perks of living out of London is that you don’t have to commute like this? 
My worst ever commute was going from Southgate in far north London to Lewisham in far South London!
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Fortunately ‘only’ 1.5 hours each way.
Remote work ftw.
The longest commute I ever had was the project where my partner took me to work most of the way in the morning ~25min and 40 minutes or so with public transport to get home. But I was listening to ear-books and playing pokemongo on the way home. As a bonus, as the tram passed through the inner city shopping district I often ran a few errands on the way home…
With my current project, if I had to go to the office it would also be around 1.5 hours but I told them from the start that if they request that I am out.
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This is for a Masters of Education in Learning and Technology. I figured that if I am constantly running trainings on how to use our digital tools, I probably should both formally get educated on it, and make them pay me for it.
My existing MFA in Poetry and Fiction Writing came before my alternative teaching license, and effectively doesn’t count on the pay scale, so when this one’s done it’ll mean a significantly higher income once I hit retirement. It’s public school teaching, though, so ‘significant’ is relative.
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My day started early but fine: I don’t usually share my reddit surfing here but this was so cute and maybe it can brighten someone else’s day: https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/souuve/dad_mics_up_4_year_old_while_snowboarding/
And yet from there it was all downhill. The coffee machine that should have been turned on in the morning by our smart home thingy was still cold when I wanted my first espresso.
Then I took one look at the news and it was even more terrible than usual. Like “Don’t Look Up” terrible. Maybe I should turn off the (new) dark mode on the news, they read so much worse on a black background. Normally, I can compartmentalize the news better than that.
Next, I picked the top unassigned ticket from the fresh sprint we started yesterday. It is probably too large a chunk for me to do on my own. But apparently I am giving off such an air of self-confidence in this project that nobody bothered to stop me, meh 
During the Daily Scrum one of my incredibly nice (they all are, no irony here) colleagues took it upon himself to make a thoughtless comment about women working part-time and equality. I felt vaguely insulted by the insinuations but I regret to report that my answer to that was neither sharp nor witty but making me think lots of thoughts later instead of concentrating on work.
The only positive thing was the antigen test I took after lunch because it remains negative. We both got a “red level” warning from the Corona App after vacation–lots of low risk incidents add up to one big risk–who knew? So we saw nobody since returning and test on alternating days at home. No symptoms, I am reasonably sure nothing was caught during skiing. I am faster than that virus!
Reading it after writing it down, it’s all just ridiculous tidbits. But sometimes I have these days that just feel … off. It’s one of those. I think I need to watch that kid snowboarding a few more times. Please send cute cat pics!
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Minor things when they occur in insolation, but when they mass up it can easily flatten you. I think we’ve all been there at one stage or another!
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How about an adult porcupine delightedly eating a tiny pumpkin, with noises?
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I’m just… Tired, today. I slept well, and don’t feel sick at all, I’m just… Sleepy. Off. It’s weird.
I was planning on seeing Spider-Man tonight (theaters opened back up on Monday), but I don’t think I’d have fun (me not having fun at a Spider-Man movie is a sure sign that I’m not feeling like myself, let me tell ya), so I’m just gonna skip it and chill with my dear wife.
The movie’ll still be there next week (I checked).
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I gave a presentation at a small symposium yesterday.
It was small… like, maybe a dozen people in attendance, and maybe another dozen (if that) over Zoom? And my talk was pretty silly (trying to explain the popularity of Wordle through a moral/ethical connection to Levinas’s concept of “the face” and its ability to connect us as moral creatures), and very short (6 minutes).
It was… a joy. Like, 6 minutes of pure happiness for me. I love (and hate) public speaking… I’m always a nervous wreck, but as soon as I’m up there and talking I just never want to stop.
I stuck around for the 3 presentations after me, asked some questions in an effort to help people feel like their presentations were interesting and paid attention to (they talked about various perspectives on “The Other” through Medieval literature), and then had to go to work.
For some reason, work yesterday was harder as a result of how great giving a talk was.
sigh
Can’t win for losing. Anyway. It’s going to be a rough day today at work… but then tonight we’re playing the next adventure in our Star Trek Adventures RPG. Our heroes are currently on the NX-Atlantis, stuck in a time-space wormhole, trying to figure out why everyone is at each other’s throats before the ship is crushed like a sparrow egg between man’s thighs. They realized that everyone on the ship is human (well, except for one alien who is masquerading as human), and their current plan involves pumping knockout gas for humans into the lifesupport systems.
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I was unable to attend but would be keen to hear the presentation if it was recorded and made available.
I don’t know if this will work, but you can try!
Password: *h#5dDQ!
(My talk is the first after the professor introduces us… around 10:02, I think)
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I get to run the last meeting of this school year in which I need to motivate adults to do their jobs. It’s a frustrating and often fruitless exercise, and I will take running a classroom of teenagers any day.
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Things are a little tense in the office. A lot of things, some Covid cases, a person quit by phone, but it’s all mostly over my head as I hunker down and type all day with my headphones on.
Sometimes a spark hits me though, like today when the admin boss comes over to berate me for a mistake in a run-of-the-mill letter I translated. I shouldn’t be making mistakes like this, the Japanese letter says Hongoh, you don’t write the name “Honguh”, a mistake like that can be passed on down the line to cause errors in… etc.
I apologised, asked for the physical document bundle back, check, and sure enough, in the Japanese text I translated it is written Hongoh, but I ignored that because the authors of these letters often get things wrong, and I used the source document as the reference, where it is Honguh, who is almost certainly not Japanese.
sigh
At least he acknowledged his error and apologised.
But things are a little tense in the office right now.
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Well my car only needed a new tyre Hoorah
The restaurant we were going to withe friends on Friday is closed due to COVID not hurrah but hurrah
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Tired. That puzzle makes me go to bed late.
In any case we had a debate yesterday when we should go get our next haircuts–hair is too long already. We had thought we would wait out the Omicron wave. But with the announcements that almost all measures will drop on March 20 (yay freedom 
) and that even mask wearing may be dropped in places… we decided to go while mask wearing was still a thing…
Obviously, I will not stop with the my mask anytime soon… but I am sure a lot of people will immediately stop using masks. Meh.
edit: just to clarify, to my best knowledge masks will remain for a while yet but there have been hints that even masks are up for debate. Recent covid politics here had some unwelcome “oopsie we did that without warning you ahead of time”-surprises
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