Life Update

Weekends

About a month ago, I had a free weekend and I went to Boston and watched the basketball game against MIT with Riley, Sky, and Burgs. Riley also showed me the last episode of Heated Rivalry and beat me resoundingly at Connect 4. Then I returned to JP and played Azul with Katie, Chelsea, and Katie's roommates. The following morning, we went to a cafe and played Karma before I unfortunately had to leave earlier than planned to beat the snow.

The following weekend, I went to Connecticut. I met up with Kat, Morgan, and their WAGs at a newish coffee window in Salem. Who knew Salem was trendy enough to have a coffee place now? Then I attempted to change my car's oil while my dad looked on (slightly immobile after taking a fall on the ice; long story) but was deterred by two rusty screws that would not budge. Katherine's dive regional meet was at Conn College so I went with my mom. My parents and I made dumplings and then I returned to Northampton that night to see all the lovely folks who had come from out of town to watch the basketball NEWMAC championship.

The final gameday of the SheBelieves Cup was in New Jersey. My dad's back was unfortunately still too painful for him to sit in stadium seats for six hours, so Annie took his ticket. The Canada vs. Argentina game was not that exciting and ended goalless, but SheBelieves Cup rules dictate that draws go straight to PKs, which offer a strange vibe in which no one knows how much to celebrate when they matter for absolutely nothing at all. Tobin Heath was honored before the US match, so a bunch of former players were there, including a bunch of the 99ers. The US beat Colombia 1-0 and a nice goal was scored on our end of the stadium. We stopped for Thai food on the way home, which was good except for the strange vegetable dumplings that were definitely a bag of frozen peas, corn, and carrots inside of a dumpling wrapper.

It's sort of spring break right now, though I don't actually get any time off, but I took a vacation day and went to Maine for a long weekend. The weather was very nice the first two days and I got to live out what is pretty close my dream schedule of running in the morning, hiking in the afternoon, and working at night. On the day that it poured all day, my mom taught me how to level up my kniting to include triangles instead of just patternless squares. We stopped to eat lunch with my grandparents and uncle on the drive back south, and also stopped at LL Bean, where I was addressed to as "kiddo" and "sir" by two different friendly LL Bean employees.

Work

Let us a have a moment of silence for my faithful MacBook Air whose keyboard and trackpad have ceased to function after six years of service. I have been able to make do with an external keyboard and mouse at work, but this is not a convenient long term solution, particularly for my upcoming airplane travel. We believe that it is suffering from a swollen battery (which apparently can sometimes spontaneously combust or begin to emit toxes gases, but that hasn't happened yet) and I would have to get a new computer before grad school anyway, so I will probably be laying this one to rest as soon as I can muster the courage to part with it.

We were kind of hoping to submit our paper to RE@Next! before spring break so that we could have a bit more relaxing break, but alas we did not finish in time, and the real deadline is this Friday. I'm slightly hopeful that it can be submitted by EOD today but it will definitely be done by Friday. I had been looking forward to having undisturbed time in lab over spring break to make good progress on the development of GitRE, as well as checking its requirements document, fixing the pipeline, making slides for my upcoming presentation, and reading a bunch of papers, but all of these things must wait until this paper gets submitted.

I've also spent a lot of time on Zoom with the people at UMass's Harmony and we can finally run our GitLab pipeline on their servers, which is much faster than Smith's Gritty, although sometimes jobs inexplicably fail for no reason and I have to re-run them between one and seven times before they pass, which does not give me great confidence in the robustness of GitLab's built-in unit tests, but overall this is still a much more reasonable way to run the pipeline than the one we had before.

Call for Songs

I am currently soliciting song recommendations for my marathon playlist. I have taken inspiration from Jessy Parker Humphreys and think it would be nice to have songs sprinkled throughout my playlist that make me think of my cherished friends who suggested them. And hardly anyone ever replies to my newsletter anymore so please send some! Disclaimer: I have final veto power over any bad suggestion.