Idk if y'all remember a whole six days ago but there was a bit of a coup attempt in these beautiful United States. Good times were had by all as I understand it. Well that was a bit of a motivator for me to get the fuck out. I've been talking with veen and Devac for a while about EuroPubHealth which is run by Erasmus, some fancy European agreement about studying and education and stuff. At some point I had started the application but hadn't finished since I wasn't sure I wanted to fully apply this year. Moving alone is stressful. Moving to another continent with no social base in the middle of a pandemic to begin studying is monumental. Plus saving money is great. I haven't done research I'm not sure how working abroad on a student visa works. Or how employable I'll be with little to no knowledge of the language. So I'll have a lot of games to play. But also getting the fuck out sounds nice right about now. So I finished that application. I'm damn near done another one. Which leaves just two more to go on my year of reach schools and seeing what sticks. The two completed applications both said they'll be back with a decision by March. It's going to be a fun (read: stressful for some reason because it was a last-minute decision to apply) waiting game to play.

Also since it's all reach schools and I'm not expecting to get in anywhere and wholly unprepared y'all are the only ones that know so feel extra special.

Beyond that nothing exciting. Covid still exists. Cases still rolling in. Continuing to function at my job at whatever low level I manage. Continuing to convince people I'm better than I am and know more than I do thanks to my ability to research effectively. It's a wild time.

Been busy as all hell the past two months. We're really understaffed at my preschool, and I'm running myself pretty ragged. They just cut our hours down to 30 hours a week, which I am actually pretty grateful for at the moment. I don't have to go in until 11:30 every day now, which finally gives me some time to work on things before I am completely exhausted at the end of the day. I've made it my goal to make some new music every day, and so far I've managed to keep up with that goal for the last two weeks or so. If you want to listen, you can check it out here. Pretty much all just ambient stuff, I've been going back to recording live on tape and slowing things down. I'm considering taking about an hour's worth of the best tracks here at the end of the month and printing a limited run of like 25 tapes.

I also did some music for a friend's short movie recently, which just came out this weekend:

And last, here's something I'm really proud of that I made for the preschoolers when we were talking about robots:

It's a light/touch sensitive synthesizer thingamajig! LDRs for the eyes, and custom-made PCB touchplates on the sides. The kids had a blast exploring this.

Hope all the Hubskiers are having a good start to 2020 2.0!

So I didn't get myself totally lost, hurt, and killed this past Sunday. Which was nice. Clear weather, ski touring at Mount Rainier somewhat deep into the mountains. Clouds cleared up per weather forecast, and then...came back with full force, which wasn't in any of the three forecasts I had referenced before heading out. Total whiteout conditions with about 3,000 vertical feet to descend and ~4 miles back to the car. NOT GOOD. This is the kind of thing that does get people killed yearly on that mountain. Fortunately I had a great GPX track to follow, though it took two hours longer with maybe 50ft of visibility made it back safe.

But the sensations were otherwordly. I could not tell up from down, left from right. At one point I thought I was following the "fall line" but ended up totally stopped and facing back upslope on my skis. Whenever I would stop I nearly fell over due to vertigo sensations and being so disoriented that without the GPX track things would have been very, very bad...but that's why you do the prep work ahead of time to either know your route well, or be able to get down no matter. It was ultimately a confidence booster, albeit a bit of a scary one.

It's been a rotten couple of months, rife with personal failure everywhere I looked. My research is moving at a snail's pace. The social life is somehow more pathetic than back when the only person I casually spent time with was my dormmate.

Aside from TAing, the thing closest to giving me any fulfillment these days, I've effectively taken myself off everything. Team conferences and coursework get 'brain on autopilot' treatment (nobody noticed), my thesis stuff is on pause for literature review (nobody objected, and it's true anyway), and I'm gonna use this break to see if SSRIs will do anything in this setting beyond their current 'vision is kinda blurry, and I yawn all the fucking time'. Though, really, I don't think it's a chemical problem.

We have an employee. She has given me a ration of shit about HIPAA before - as in "we must shred everything and block all computers and enforce a ten foot rule or we will be SUED OUT OF EXISTENCE" and no amount of "I have designed HIPAA-compliant healthcare facilities for 10,000 employees before" discussion will shut her up. Every patient she sees generates a chart. That chart must be in our system to comply with the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act - the "P" is not "privacy" it's "patients deserve to be able to get their documents out of your system and into someone else's because it's their health goddamn it." We discovered that the fog of war around COVID had allowed her to not do (checks notes) 550 charts. All sorts of sympathy, all sorts of workarounds, all sorts of offers to help, she could not do enough charts to get ahead of the ones she generated with new patients. Then she decided to go "fix up a rental" across country over christmas and new years. She didn't ask, she told. I watched that woman's IP address on her work computer sit in the f'n French Quarter a block from the celebrations for six days. So we told her she needed to knock down 80 charts a week or we'd can her ass and she wouldn't get any new patients until she did.

She knocked 80 down in two days.

So now we're at "you're clearly motivated by intimidation where empathy and understanding don't work so you've got until you're done with your charts to figure out how you can be a team player without us holding a gun to your head 'cuz this is not even vaguely how we want to run a business."

It's fucking tiresome.

One of our patients is a DEI consultant. We had to fire an African-American first-year student for being a racist bitch to one of our midwives. Then we decided to pay this DEI consultant $5k to give us a DEI course. His take-away was "do the work" even though I specifically asked him for action items. After all this, I said "okay well you're telling us that we're doing the right thing through our diverse hiring practices and since you're a member of one of the communities you say is most in need of inclusion, how did we reach you, exactly? Because we need to do more of that obviously." He hemmed and hawed and then said "because you had an African-American midwife on your website." Not "student" - "midwife." "And she is well known in the community." She has 10k Instagram followers and doesn't know how to do a goddamn IV. Never mind that we flat-out told him that the principle reason we were bringing him in was bullshit around this racist woman we had to can - and never mind that his "other favorite midwife" is the woman she was racist towards. So I asked him "it sounds like you're telling me the best way to reach minorities is to performatively feature excess minorities on my website." He laughed but didn't answer.

It's fucking tiresome.

Friend of my wife's is also a midwife. Has an assistant whose husband dropped dead in the middle of the night from a heart attack, having only had a mild case of COVID. So I took a pulse-ox, sent it to my doctor and said "I just want a damn EKG." Skeptically, they let me take an EKG, which came back telling them that for all intents and purposes I'm recovering from a heart attack. So now the office that wouldn't give me a COVID test and fought me for two weeks over an antibody test has me getting a chest X-ray, a sleep study, a lung functional test, an echocardiogram and gawd knows what the fuck else. Which, of course, I get to coordinate. What they're going to do, of course, is notice I've gained fifteen pounds and sent me back to the nutritionist who made me gain 20. When I told my PCP that the endocrinologist she referred me to refused to see me, she shrugged.

It's fucking tiresome.

Yes, the world is mad, clawing cold and broken ice, you'd be mad too!

A haiku for these times we find ourselves in. I hope everyone is doing okay, I've been away too long and I wish I had a good reason. There's been some introspection sure, but truly my life is just stuck. We move house soon, out of my adolescent space and into a world of mortgage and homeowners associations... A decade late, a life lived backwards, like Benjamin Button. Change is vital, what can be learned?

Gah, I hate animals. So much effort, they're always underfoot; for what? Over the summer our oldest dog (Australian Shepard, Black Lab, mutt mix; yes we did genetic test, bc wife) stopped walking and pooping. He would start to whine and whimper so I would try to ease a towel under him, he would try to bite me for doing it, then use the towel like a sling to carry him outside so he could pee, but he wouldn't. Then I would carry him back in and then he would let loose. He couldn't get up on his feet, but he would army crawl around and get himself stuck behind things or in corners. Then he would whine and cry and bark to be saved. Rinse and repeat for several weeks. The vets said his liver and kidneys seemed to be working fine. They could only suggest doing super expensive x-rays and stuff to see if he had brain cancer. If he did, then best to put down. If he didn't, they couldn't explain why he was acting that way. That was not quality life for him. We decided to have him put down. It was an agonizing decision. Best guess was he was at least 9 when we got him, had him for 8 years, so he may have just been on his way out anyway, but still.

Now "our" cat is sick. Ten years ago my brother-in-law wanted to move to Boston, but his apartment didn't allow pets. He asked if we could keep his cat for a year or two and we stupidly agreed. Ten years we have had her. BIL moved back after a year, but got another apartment that didn't allow pets, then got married and his spouse hates cats. So, ten years we have had her. Two years ago she started getting weird rashes that would scab over and not go away. Vet thought she might be allergic to chicken. Seriously? Chicken? Do you know how hard it is to find cat food without any chicken product in it at all? So we paid through the nose for food, but it didn't change anything. Well, except that she would refuse to eat it after a while forcing us to hunt for another brand. After a year I gave up on that. In the meantime they suggested that she might have a form of eczema. So they put her on steroids. She has been on steroids for a year and half now, still no improvement. Then a few months ago they said she may have a thyroid issue. So now she is on thyroid meds. Still no improvement. She has always had super long nails, and we would get them trimmed every time we took her to see the vet. Last time was end of October. Last week we noticed that they were longer and fatter than usual. Brought her in this week to get them cut and for another check-up. Now they say she has breast cancer. C'mon! And they gave us a ration of crap for not bringing her in sooner since there was no skin improvement with the thyroid medication. Now they want to know if we are going to be committed enough to come in every two weeks for treatment (whatever that entails) or do we want to just put her down since we can't provide her with a good quality of life. For a cat that isn't even ours!

In the mean time, Christmas weekend, my wife found a puppy that she thought looked just like our other dog (American Bulldog, Boxer, Jindo mix; again genetic test because wife) and would be good to keep him company while we worked. And with me working from home (still) I would be able to potty train her (the new dog, not my wife). The more I look at her, the more I am convinced that she is a Jack Russell Terrier. A freaking small dog (my stated requirement from day one was that any dog we got had to be over 50lbs). And she has taken an interest in digging under our fence, so I have to stand there and watch her when I let the dogs out to play and potty. Grrr. NO. MORE. PETS!