shannon_a

I visited the doctor's office today, just to get brought in as a new patient with my primary-care-physician (and to get my blood-pressure med reupped).

As I checked in, the receptionist somewhat apologetically told me that she had to ask me if I was coughing or had any other symptoms that could be from Coronavirus.

Which ... I don't even know how that could be useful, because out of a thousand people who answered that question in the positive, it's very likely that a thousand wouldn't have coronavirus.

(We've had one case in Hawaii, a tourist on Maui, then Oahu two and a half weeks ago.)

The receptionists upstairs at the family practice part of the hospital were wearing masks, which they definitely weren't when I saw them a month ago for Kimberly's first doctor visit.

And in two and a half weeks, I'm supposed to be traveling, to Buenos Aires for the tenth Rebooting the Web of Trust conference.

And I know coronavirus is affecting our attendees there.

As I told C. today, I suspect that traveling through five(!) airports on my way to Buenos Aires, four of them international, does increase my chance of contracting the coronavirus: from zero to infinitesimal.

I'm not going to let that infinitesimal difference derail my support of the design workshop.

There's a lot of FUD going on.

Frankly, I suspect it's going to become a pandemic, because the rest of the world likely doesn't have the willpower to tightly contain the virus like China has tried to.

Which means that what we really need is a vaccine, and not in 18 months.

And life goes on in this time of cholera ...

One of the problems I'd foreseen in moving to Hawaii was getting my daily exercise. Too often I've had errands to run when I got done with my daily work, and then it was evening, and somehow I missed out on doing any walking or swimming.

Back in Berkeley, I'd walk to the UPS store or the library or CVS or Taco Bell, and that'd get me 20 minutes of walking at least, but not here.

Especially not when it's cool and raining.

So my solution arrived today: a USB dance pad. I used to play Dance Dance Revolution on Kimberly's PS2, but that ended when she started hanging out downstairs more ... and I didn't want to dance in our Art Room upstairs, where I'd be dancing on the floor right above her.

But here I knew I'd have an isolated office downstairs.

I just couldn't figure out how to place the PS2 and another screen in my office, without wasting a bunch of room.

But it turns out there are now USB dance pads and some dance/rhythm games for the Mac. So after a largely gray and busy week last week in which I didn't get any exercise after Monday, I ordered a pad for my desktop computer, and it arrived today.

Stepmania is a great game that evolved from DDR play, and I played it in DDR mode some today (though there are apparently other ways, I just haven't figured them out yet with the game's abyssal documentation). And I also bought and tried Crypt of the Necrodancer, a step-based roguelike. I'm not sold on it yet, but I'll try it some more. (And I only paid $3!)

Today was one of those days when my daylight got eaten up: after work Kimberly and I went to the UPS Store (for some notarized stuff for Skotos), then the doctors, then Walmart, then Taco Bell, then Costco, and it was dark within half-an-hour or so of my getting home.

So it was a great time to have that dance pad.

(Though I probably would have raced out for a twilight walk if I didn't have the dance pad to play with.)

Meanwhile, Work on homifying our house has somewhat stalled out.

We have maybe 75% of our furniture, and the remaining stuff is low priority enough that we're not going to look into it until our Berkeley house sells and we refill our coffers.

We still have plenty of boxes about, but they mostly require shelves.

But I've still got a few boxes here and there that I can unpack, and I have paintings and a few other things that I can hang.

In many ways we're still on the sharp end of the move, because even with our new house (slightly) settling, I'm still working to finish up my full-time work with Skotos, and I've got a lot to finish up for both Skotos and RPGnet in the next five weeks or so.

And as I noted, I've got a week away planned in March, for the Buenos Aires trip.

And we're still regularly talking with our realtor about the Berkeley house, and occasional problems there.

Theoretically things cool down in April, when my Skotos work is hopefully done and our Berkeley house is hopefully sold, and the Buenos Aires trip is hopefully done.

And I start doing contract technical writing.

But then Kimberly and I are heading back to the Bay Area for a bit at the end of April ...

So, busy times