Life Update

Work

My staff position officially started on July 28th, which essentially means that I now work fewer hours and get paid more but the actual work that I'm doing didn't change much. I moved into the soundproof room as my office for the year which is nice, and I have employee benefits which means that I don't have to convince someone to let me into the gym anymore. I did feel a bit silly attending new employee orientation, particularly during the campus scavenger hunt.

Most of my labmates finished SURF, so it was just Kika (the other graduated person in the lab) and me until the end of July. I have been the only one in lab since she left, which also means that the dreaded pipeline is my responsibility, at least until someone else is back. The pipeline is automatically generated when you merge code into GitLab to ensure code quality, but it causes so many problems and takes hours to run and we have hardware issues with memory which is frustrating and not the type of CS that I like. Alicia and I took a field trip to UMass to learn about alpha testing for their new HPC architecture, Harmony, which hopefully will make it less tedious but won't be available until the fall.

We also wrote up an IRB proposal for a study to run in the fall as part of a special studies, which got approved. The study is bit complicated and a lot more overhead than strictly necessary, but will simultaneously fulfill results needed for two different projects and should get more authentic results than if we did the two studies separately. One of them will hopefully involve the eye tracking system in Bass Hall, which is really cool, but also requires me to use the SDK provided by the company, giving me flashbacks to Imaris (used in bio lab) because the documentation is just a PDF and there is very sparse community discussion about developing with it because the only people doing it must first have access to hardware that costs tens of thousands of dollars, so it's not like there's a copious number of posts on StackOverflow.

Unrelatedly, I gave what I believe to be my last ever tour during Summer Preview weekend. It was a fairly uneventful tour with four families.

Evenings

I joined another book club. This one is at the Lilly Library. I didn't like their book so much this month because it was a graphic novel. This book club is a lot bigger than the other one. I talked less because the group was bigger, but the people were nice. My other book club, at the Forbes Library, also included a slightly bigger and younger crowd as well. I really enjoyed that book discussion this month.

My brother and I took my parents out for dinner for their anniversary because we were all home for the first time in a while. We met at the Cheesecake Factory in West Hartford. We learned about their origin story and my brother and I have also been trying to learn our family tree and are finding out lots of lore. My mom has started actually researching her side of the family and reaching out to people.

Chelsea, Katie, and I are watching the second season of The Ultimatum: Queer Love. The premise of show is so stupid but I nonetheless need to know what happens. We have also gone to Packard's and Iconica for post-work mocktails and I finally got to try the creme brulee cheesecake at Iconica after they continuously didn't have it when I was there.

For my landlord's birthday, she had a bunch of people over and I was invited up to the patio to join them so I ended up eating dinner with a bunch of lesbian Quakers. It was awesome. I've also continued to go swimming with them about once a week at Musante Beach.

I have continued to go on walks on the rail trail and in Look Park most nights. I realized that you can just walk into Look Park during concerts and hear the music from anywhere in the park without having a ticket, so that has slightly leveled up my walking experience on the weekends.

Weekends

When Madelyn and Aerin came to visit, we had lunch at Kathy's house and then walked around Northampton and watched Germany beat France in PKs at Go Berry. Then we all ventured to eastern Massachusetts and paid a visit the most popular Dairy Queen Grill and Chill in the country (or something like that). The following day, we met up with Riley and Sky to see the sights of Carlisle. We visited a farm and inadvertently stumbled upon a blueberry festival. Then we went to Concord for lunch and to go into some shops.

I went home the following weekend to have dinner with our family friends. This also meant that I was home for the weekend of the Euros final, so I watched with my dad. He wore his Aitana Bonmati shirt that he'd originally gotten for the UWCL final, and swore to never wear it again after my team beat his for the second time this year. I finished in 205th place in the world for the fantasy league after an unfortunate quarterfinal perfomance, but I'll take it. I listened to It's Coming Home (or whatever the real title of that song is) on repeat for most of the drive back up to Smith.

My brother and I went to Maine while he was briefly on the east coast. We drove up after I finished work on a Thursday and stayed with our uncle in Waterville. We got breakfast with him in the morning and I discovered the wonders of a breakfast pot pie, and then we continued on to our grandparents' house. We only had about a day and a half of actual hiking in Acadia, but we packed the miles in, summitting most of the mountains on the less-popular western side of Mount Desert Island on the day that we arrived and then hiking 14.2 miles and summitting several more peaks on the eastern side on the second day. The weather was beautiful and it is now blueberry season, so that was delightful. Then all four members of my family were at home at the same time that the dining room table didn't have any assorted projects on it for the first time since probably 2015, so we sat there and had family dinner.

My dad and I went to watch Gotham play the Spirit for NWSL Rivalry Weekend. It was the second Gotham game in a row I've been to that ended in a 0-0 tie which seems a bit unlucky. Geyse got a red card pretty early in the first half at which point the game drastically slowed down, but there were chances again in the last fifteen minutes or so. Plus, I got a free hat, and the two teams splitting points is probably the best outcome for the Thorns anyway.

People are back on campus for preseason, which is strange after the campus being pretty empty all summer. Neither of the soccer GAs are here yet, so this past weekend, Cyd and I were around at practices to do miscellaneous tasks like filling ice baths and marking the sprinkler holes. Being on the field but not playing feels suspiciously like being injured (which I suppose isn't not true, though it isn't the main barrier this time).

Knick the Knee

July 29th was six months (dough!) but other than that there are no major updates. I can now bike without breaking the rehab rules, and I've been ellipticalling regularly with the occasional swim thrown in. I start PT again at the beginning of September, and I'm hoping that if I do a really good job, they'll let me run sooner than nine months.