Morning Pages: April 3rd, 2020

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the D.C. metro region has been in a state of lockdown. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.

I found this uber-cute baby video that I just had to share:

On the plus side, now I get to embed HTML5 video into my blog (instead of relying on YouTube)! I don't think this should present too much difference in storage costs, given how I'm cutting and pasting gifs from Reddit. So I get to download Reddit videos and paste the ones I like here! It's like my own little personal Instagram.

Also it's Friday, TGIF!

Today I feel strangely calm. I've been sick for the past four weeks or so, and yesterday was particularly bad. I moved my bed so that I can prop myself up against the wall and type on my lap while in bed, but I don't think that's a productive arrangement (laptop keeps slipping and I have to crane my neck in order to see the screen and I need to increase screen brightness), so I ended up moving my laptop back to my office area and just setting my standing desk to high and doing pushups when I need to get some exercise.

I'm still a bit worried about the amount of exercise I've been getting. I'm not getting enough. It's hard to exercise really if you're sick, and I think I've been sick since the first week of March or so. I have a really hard time getting better after I'm sick and so where I am wheezing three or four weeks later. I'm pretty pissed off because I can think of better uses of my time than recuperating at home, but I can't do them because it'll exacerbate the sickness. So recuperation it is.

I'm also worried about my software project. I need to keep working on some aspects of it to prevent them from going dark, but it's hard to do so while I'm spending my time learning about DevOps the entire day. I'm not sure whether I'll be able to just stop reading the book and just learn the material I need to start, because I fear I'll lose my ability to read books cover to cover (which in my mind also translates to shipping a software project end to end). Maybe it's OCD, maybe it's ADHD, maybe it's just me being crazy, but I've had bad experiences where I read three books and never finished any of them and resulted in a depressive state due to impostor syndrome. We'll see what happens today.

Not locking my phone up is a big mistake. I spent 8 hours and 30 minutes on my phone yesterday, which means I've spent more time on my phone this week than last week.

I should have purchased the 64GB of RAM a month ago, before all this happened and before Amazon delayed the shipment in favor of (gasp!) life-saving medical supplies and grocery essentials. I don't fault them at all, it's absolutely the right thing to do. It's just annoying, and I'm afraid of further delays as workers get sick and have to work slower due to taking extra precautions. Totally understand on that last point too, my decontamination procedures are around 4-5x slower than normally unpacking my groceries.

Just checked the price for 64GB laptop RAM kits. Amazon is $131, Newegg is $270 minimum. Yeah I'll stop complaining :sweat_smile: