Two weeks since I've thought about writing. I've been exhausted. I still am. But I was thinking about funerals and I wanted to write it down.

Funerals--of the everyone arriving in a car, walking through the grass to the gravsite, someone listening to the end of something on the radio. My friend Will's a few years ago was like that. My cousin's husband's, around the same time. My gradnmother's. the year I got married. The kind with a meal in a restaurant's private room afterward. With a funeral parlor. "Sherry and small talk".

The last two memorials I attended were at the same bar, in the same private room. It was just over a year ago I was at the last funeral I was at. It ended with a conga line of several of us, dressed in a variety of death drag--me in Gaiman Sandman. I put spouse in a Lyft with a dubious driver, went on to our more familiar local with my closests, and then made my way home later.

I can't imagine more of the first kind in my future. Except my father. That's what he'd want. Not so my mother. She'd want no viewing (sorry, Mom, you'll get at least a family-only. I will want to say goodbye), no speeches, and absolutely no cemetary. But all the friends, when that starts, now we've come through this (assuming we have--one more friend is COVID-positive this week, but at least three more are vaccinated) will surely be the backroom of a bar, conga line, shots variety.

I still hope mine is a garden party, with one of my besties, rolling up in a Rolls or Bentley, trunk packed with champagne and lobster.

This is a stress valley. i hope the next climb is not too steep.

((waves hi!))

I'm here, been lurking, though not as much as I would have liked.  I am all caught up on everyone's entries, but I admit I didn't read every comment. I'll peruse them as I can.

All is good... well, as good as can be expected as we're coming up on a year of a pandemic. 

Instead of something well-written, here's a trusty listo:

• We played our 100th Coffee Break Concert on Wednesday, Feb 24th. A milestone!
• Also, Matt and I marked 10 years together a week or two ago.
• We got an estimate to get our ugly kitchen redone, and I'm excited about that.
• I'm still not teaching, but I'm selling some courseware which is nice.  Would like to be selling more, but baby steps.
• I have a bunch of dental work that needs to be done. I just got a form letter that says my dentist no longer participates in my dental insurance. She couldn't have made that choice 6 weeks ago when I chose my dental plan for 2021?
• I have had pre-menpausal osteoporosis (osteopenia) since 2010 or so. My doctor told me to get another bone density scan to see how it's progressing, since it had been a while since I got one.  Insurance denied it. Why on earth would insurance deny a bone density scan? Isn't the only reason for a bone density scan is to check to see how far your osteoporosis is progressing?
• Going to see the parents tomorrow.  Mom's mental state is getting worse due to a total lack of stimulation. The home health care workers we hired to come in 3x/week  are fine, but they aren't interesting to my mom, so they basically just do light housekeeping and that's it. They aren't able to engage with my mom... she just doesn't care.  This pandemic couldn't have happened at a worse time dementia-wise. Right before Covid hit, she was interested in hanging out at the senior center a few days per week just to make some friends, play some bingo, and use a few brain cells. So much for that.  By the time the senior center reopens, I worry she'll be too far gone. 
• My dad got his first covid shot (didn't even feel it); his second one is in 3 weeks. Mom has not gotten hers yet.  My brother's whole family has gotten fully vaccinated, and I am absolutely delighted they're immunized; but there is a 10% "huh?" in my brain wondering why his 17 year old daughter already received her two shots yet my 78 year old mother with many comorbidities hasn't gotten her first yet.  I try not to think about this too much. We'll all get them in due time; vaccinating 350 million people ain't easy. 
• I have a crush on Dr. Fauci. 
• SNL has been killin' it in 2021.  I like that they're not afraid to just be surreal.  They do always have to have to the one character who has to explain the joke a bit, but it's a small price to pay.
• Our Saturday night ritual is watching SNL on nbc/hulu, and then watching "Big Questions with The Dead Milkmen" on YouTube.  ("Big Questions" started pre-pandemic when the guys were in the studio recording their latest album. They decided they needed more content for their YouTube channel, so at each week's recording session, one of the guys would come up with a question, and each guy would answer it... and they'd follow it up with Recommendations, where they recommended something they think people would dig (a movie, book, food, cat toy, going for a walk, etc.).  It's absolutely delightful.  Once lockdown started, it became (like all things) a Zoom call.  It's really great. Some of their recommendations have been really wonderful during lockdown.

That's the random news. 

I hope everyone is doing well... I miss you all, and I really hope to get back on the OPW wagon.... which is what I said last time... but... yeah.

xoxo

The Kilobyte's Gambit is a lovely mashup of a chess engine in 1K of JavaScript, plus awesome CGA retro pixel art. I love it.

Kicked my ass immediately, I’m not good at chess. A friend of mine in college used to say, regarding vegetarianism, that he wouldn’t eat anything that could beat him at chess. I found this worrisome.

It also reminds me of this:

Atari 2600 Video Chess! This was chess in 4K of 6502 assembly language, on a machine with only 128 bytes of RAM that was only really capable of displaying three, maybe six objects per line on the screen, and that only with tricky programming. If you look closely, you’ll see that the chess pieces are drawn on alternating lines to get around this limitation. Apparently it played decent chess.

Before we hand the OG Atari developers the tiny-chess-program crown, though, the author of the 1K JavaScript chess engine has also written a 326-byte chess game for DOS, as well as... a 1K chess cartridge for the Atari 2600. Yes, it flickers a lot, but hey.

So many props given. Two summers ago I wrote an AI checkers game of my own, using the minimax algorithm. It wasn't terribly good at checkers and it sure wasn't 1K of JavaScript. To be fair, it was also readable code.

My change included several hexagonal brass coins that were called pennies after the currency revaluation.  They had collectible reverses, including such states as Hawaii and Antigua.  I had purchased water in comically-small one-ounce bottles.  A teenaged beggar asked me for one of them.

Yesterday was our 25th date-iversary.

Also, for the first time, i made cheese as part of a work social event.

The movie Clue and Columbo reruns have ferried me through a lot of grief.

I was  talking to someone about myself. And I said "yes, but I can deal with the corpse without damage to myself" and it's true. I'm not being dramatic or spinning wild yarns about heists and crimespree movies. I'm talking about people dying at home.

I can compartmentalize and I can cope. I may not be great with details but I am good with logistics and I can handle crises.

Even this tired. 

How would you define 'over the top' social distancing and quarantine? 

I've been thinking about this a lot lately and I have answers from kids my age but I'm curious as to what adults think.

Is there a point where quarantine or social distancing is extreme?

Please respond if you see this :)

It's snowing again. There haven't been any trash pickups and there's a scary icefall on the corner of the building, but otherwise, we're fine. Our house is built for it; the city has infrastructure (if a hateful bully of a mayor who can't manage them); we've got good clothes, a kitchen full of food and no special needs.

I miss biking in it but I'm never going to get my fender.

The world is a horror.

Everything is too much. So i broke my "no frivolous spending in February" plan for supplies for a fanciful showgirl headpiece for an online gathering scheduled later this month. I feel pretty conflicted about the spending part, but not at all conflicted about the hours I spent drafting the pattern pieces. I have not been focused like that on anything in what feels like years--and probably is actually close to a year.

I read some costuming blogs; looked at a few vintage hat patterns; looked at some vintage hats. Measured my head and just started drawing on butcher paper and pinning things to the wig head (which is smaller than my head). I changed direction two or three times, but I think I have a plan now. And maybe some overly-ambitious further plans.

But it felt good.