I have somehow tricked Emory into accepting me to their MPH program on top of the Johns Hopkins MHS. Global epidemiology and epidemiology respectively. Now only waiting for EuroPubHealth (will be notified by March 3) and Georgetown (no notification timeline).
Apartment lease ends at the end of March. I'll be moving in with my parents for a few months before shipping off to wherever I go come late summer/early fall. Parents still don't know I've applied. Waiting to hear back from EuroPubHealth before I tell them I applied so I can have some idea of whether or not I'm staying in these great United States.
Covid cases slowing down sharply which is great. It's allowing me to do a lot of data cleanup which was badly needed.
Thanks! I'm surprised to say the least. Applying was very much so an afterthought. I wasn't planning on going for another year but schools cancelled the GRE this year and I didn't want to take a standardized test so I went for it for only my reach schools as a "what-if" kinda thing.
Wait - so you basically said "well shit if you guys aren't doing standardized testing I might as well shoot the moon" and hit it twice? so far?
This says so very, very much about the GRE. And it reminds me that Jeff Sellingo's new book is out.
I might have done great on them, just didn't want to take them. They're a huge pain and reduce people to numbers. It's how good did you do on this test and that's it. But it wasn't about how we'll I'd have done, it was about having less than no desire to take them and having the opportunity to not take them present itself. But yeah that's pretty much how it went.
You should have seen that coming and been prepared. You really only have yourself to blame there.
Working on my first vertical landscape painting. This one will be a bit more fantastic. My cousin is building a frame for my largest painting, and in exchange I am giving him a fatastical landscape.
I've been busy with a bunch of stuff I'd rather not publicly relate, some good and some we shall see.
When I have been able to steal a moment, I have been teaching myself Swift. Thus far, my impression is that it is ok. It kinda feels like CSS + Javascript + HTML, which I guess makes sense. It's not very intuitive to me, but I haven't found a language aside from Lisp that is. Swift seems rather fussy, tbh. Anyway, I currently have an app that can pull things from a database based on your location. I am now trying to get a handle on in-app navigation.
We are going to Tennessee in a couple of weeks to a mountain cabin.
My son-in-law's training keeps getting postponed because of quarantine. Idiots leaving base causing lock-down delays. They were supposed to be done in February, but now they won't be done until sometime in April. My daughter is due in mid-April and is freaking out that now they won't be moved into their new place out west and she will still be here with us instead and her husband most likely will miss the delivery. I feel bad for her, but she did marry into military. I'm sure traveling west will be a lot of fun with a three year old and new born. I'm thinking that I might take off two weeks to drive them out and be an extra set of hands to help. We'll see what happens over the next couple of months.
Last night my wife and daughter were talking about all of this and my grandson snuck downstairs while they were occupied. He came over and sat on the couch with me while I was watching a documentary from PBS about Fiddler on the Roof. He just sat there and watched with me. It was so nice. He watched about forty minutes before his eyes drooped and his head slumped. All was right with the world from my view.
Good health to you all. Life is good.
A player in my D&D group wants to run a oneshot which may or may not become a campaign. Another player and I decided to weave our backstories together, and the DM came up with the idea to run a prologue, so now we're doing asynchronous D&D in a Whatsapp group chat and I love it.
I made coconut butterscotch scones this week and they were amazing. I've tried chocolate peppermint scones but they never wow me.
Climbing went well, I'm still sore. I'll probably go swimming tomorrow, they have quite limited opening hours and are mostly just open during working hours but I'll be able to fit it in before lunch. I'm hoping it's basically empty. I really miss swimming, and just being in water.
I'm feeling quite stressed about uni work and just having a bit of a mental slump. I'm really a person who gets stressed from being very scheduled and I've had something to do every evening since Sunday so I'm just feeling really rushed and like I get no time for catching my breath. I don't think I actually have that much to do - at least not an impossible amount - but I still feel like I'm not quite keeping up with it. It's natural to have slumps now and then I think and hopefully I'll get out of this one soon. Some more time for doing the things I like ,a bit more exercise and getting my apartment tidied up and I think I'll be on my way.
Both my home and the shop lost power for more than a day. We have lights and a radio, more than enough canned and dried food and a camp stove.
A big power line is down near the shop. The street has been closed off for more than 48 hours. No one knows if it's still live or not. Pretty crazy to have a big ass power line down on an important thoroughfare for this long but there were over five thousand lines down last I checked. The shop is pretty slow with the street being shut down.
- A big power line is down near the shop. The street has been closed off for more than 48 hours. No one knows if it's still live or not.
Probably not but assume it is as if your life depended on it. Also, it could be dead now but become live without warning. Do you have pictures?
Is it icing in Oregon? That's what has the lines down? I follow Shalane Flanegan (retired champion marathoner) on Instagram, and she said their power is out and has been for a bit. She's in Oregon somewhere.
I've lived colder and snowier places but I've never lived anywhere that gets ice like Oregon does.
My biggest worry about the line near the shop is that they've lost track of it. This is the biggest outage the state and city have ever faced and they are going to lose track of some stuff. A friend of mine on the street is a city worker that does infrastructure and I know he'll sort it out before too long if it needs sorting.
I don't have a pic but it isn't hard to find down lines. Downed cable lines are a dime a dozen, the cable companies do unforgivably shoddy work. Two sub stations blew, many transformers blew and a ton of lines are down.
I work for a utility, and they probably have a record that it's down. Maybe not, but losing track of a line outage would be unheard of.
My personal anecdote is we had some intense wind rip through our footprint back a couple years ago. Some big lines were down which also blacked out at least one substation. It took hours to even get crews to answer the phone because they were so busy with other restorations. Once they got the big lines fixed and restored that substation, the load on it was zero because every little line coming out of it was also down. It's a rural area so it got little attention in news, but the area just got smashed.
From what I see in Oregon, you have much the same thing but in higher population areas and over a bigger geographic area.
Neurology says I do not have classically presenting epilepsy. Just idiopathic seizure like episodes.
But im also getting a brain MRI for thoroughness so maybe that will at least let us rule out a brain tumor or structural deformity.
I miss being a contributing member of society really badly. Hosting Friday night dinners for the quaranteam, something people I care about can look forward to helps a bit.
I wish I had a use for my problem solving and analytical skills that are right now essentially wasted on super fine tuning my PCs and finding scifi/fantasy series I haven't read yet.
Value your health. Value your hale and hearty bodies. Care for your meat wagon to the best of your ability.
I'm doing all I can and I'm losing ground all the time.
I'm really hoping this will be my last year teaching preschool. I'm stretched way too goddamn thin at this center I'm at. I'm at school 8-5 every day, teaching 15 kids, 4 of whom are on the Autism spectrum and qualify for services (but aren't receiving them due to COVID). We stay in one room all day, and maybe if it's sunny and over 40° we go outside for a max of 30 minutes a day. It's fucking depressing, and I have no power to change things because almost all aspects of the day are determined by corporate. It's incredibly frustrating knowing what small changes would make a huge difference for these kids and being unable to actually implement them.
After years of having a vague notion of wanting to teach music at some point, I finally looked into what goes into getting licensed in various places, and it turns out VT has a pretty solid alternative peer review based licensing program. I'm making it my goal to put together a teaching portfolio and pass the Praxis teaching tests by the summer so I can get licensed for the upcoming school year and get the fuck out of CT, and out of the "childcare solutions" racket.
There is a long running parent cooperative in my neighborhood. They used to have meetings at my coffee shop. I have rarely met a group of people who were as petty, backstabbing and bitchy as these people were.
We found a preschool in the neighborhood that with 5-6 kids taught by a lady with a masters in education that was reasonably priced. It was great. I like paying for things with money, I hate sweat equity situations. I don't mind trading coffee for services but It'd be hard to pay for pre-school like that.
My daughter did preschool at the local YMCA. The program was excellent, as were the teachers. The administration was awful. Once we learned how poorly the teachers were being compensated, my wife and her friend organized a parent revolt. After about a month the administration gave them a raise of a couple of something like 20%. They could have given them more.
That said, the preschool director and our favorite teacher moved on once opportunities arose. We should straight up double the pay for all educators in the US as a start. It is very important and taxing work, and the consequence of quality couldn't be higher.
I won't have any TAing next semester and will be picking up intro Latin and Classical Greek courses. It's not much, two hours per week each, but it's something I've been turning over in my mind for a while. I did some Latin almost a decade ago, Greek is almost entirely new. Suffices to say it's exciting.
Sold my RPG books, save for Cyberpunk 2020 stuff (Night City guide is a goldmine for story prompts) and core rulebook to Warhammer Fantasy (1st edition!). Aside from the fact I can almost recite them backward from memory at this point, there's no real chance I'm gonna find another group. Frankly, I don't have it in me to keep trying. Didn't have a good game in over a year. Got a decent buck out of them, had my fun, let them serve new people.
Finally started picking up the pace on my reading. Though I like to put more emphasis on quality than quantity, it's nice to finally eliminate some of it. I think it's what I really lacked recently: sense of accomplishing something, anything really.
Meds are fucky. It's not fog or weird body sensations, those went mostly away pretty quickly and/or get dealt with. I basically freeze for hours, thinking and almost not noticing the passage of time. It's like falling into the flow or slipstream against my will. Can't decide if it's good or bad. Just is.