POOPS

I had some ice cream this evening and I didn’t have my lactose pills handy. What followed was a gassy experience, ending with two poops. I feel much better now but I question why I continue to have ice cream without my pills.

ANNOYING

So every few weeks, I’ve noticed I lose connection to the Internet in the morning for a few minutes and then it comes back.

It’s not frequent enough to be a major blocker but happens just enough to annoying. At first I contacted my ISP and they said they didn’t see any obvious faults on their end. They were able to tell me though that on a particular day where I reported an outage, their equipment in my building also got reset. They asked if my building had experienced a power outage. It had not. Then they asked me if my building was doing generator testing. I wasn’t sure.

I left it at that for a few days but one morning I had to go run an errand. As I was coming back, I had to use the elevator to go up to my place. While I was waiting for the elevator, the power seemed to be removed from the elevators and all of them stopped working. It was weird because the lights were still on. It was as if there was a selective power outage.

I called the property manager and it turns out my building does generator testing every second Tuesday of the month. This causes all the telecommunications equipment to lose power for a few minutes, along with the elevators. It’s super annoying and there’s nothing my ISP can do.

So every month, I lose my Internet a few minutes in the morning. I’ve learned not to schedule Zoom meetings on the second Tuesday of every month, in the morning. Does this happen to anyone else?

BITCOIN

I got into the Bitcoin market last week when I purchased some shares in a Canadian Bitcoin ETF. I understand cryptocurrencies are volatile and I guess that was proven to me because less than a week later, my investment into Bitcoin is now worth 10% less. The great thing is I only put in about $1K into the ETF, so it’s not like I put all my life savings into the Bitcoin basket.

It’s kinda crazy that single billionaire can make some comments and make a cryptocurrency drop in value significantly. If it can drop significantly, it can probably rise significantly as well.

WEEKEND OVER

My four-day weekend is over and I really don’t want to go back to work. Having four days off was awesome. For the first two days, I did more errands and chores than relaxing. I washed my car for the first time since I bought it. I cleaned my kitchen and my bathroom. I did laundry. I re-potted one of my plants with new, nutrient-rich soil. I took some clothes to get dry-cleaned.

On Saturday and Sunday, I relaxed more and did less cleaning and organizing. I had dinner with my parents and I played lots of video games.

Tomorrow is Monday and it’ll be kinda tough to get back into work-mode again.

TWO WEEKS IN

I am approaching the fourteen day mark since I received my first vaccine dose. By most accounts, my body has now built up whatever immunity I should have received after just a single shot. Some fourteen months after the pandemic started, I now have some fairly good protection against the virus. While I do feel some relief, I haven’t changed a whole lot of my behaviour in terms of safety protocols. I understand I have received only one dose of the AZ vaccine. I need two doses to be considered fully vaccinated and protected. At this point, I am not even sure if my second dose of the vaccine will be AZ. In any case, since I am not fully vaccinated, there’s still a chance I can still get sick. There are documented cases where fully vaccinated people got sick and died. That’s just the reality of how viruses and vaccines work. Not everything is perfect. Until everyone is fully vaccinated (or at least as close to everyone as possible) and positive cases are down to more manageable numbers, it’s important to me to keep doing what I’ve been doing.

I guess the only thing that has changed is the slight sense of relief I’ve experienced that I mentioned before. Both my parents have had their first shot and so have I, so now I feel much more comfortable being around them. I also worry less when I’m indoors. I think I’ve been to a mall twice in the last fourteen months. I feel like I could go to a mall now while wearing a mask and I’d be in a safer situation than say a month ago, when I hadn’t had my first shot.

I’m looking forward to being fully vaccinated by the end of the summer!

FOUR-DAY WEEKEND

I just had a three-day weekend but the people in charge of my team at work have informed us plebes that everyone is getting Thursday and Friday off this week! They are giving us some extra time off because we’ve been all working very hard lately and that hard work has paid off.

It’s a very kind gesture for management to allow us to have some time off and also to shift the schedule around so that the team having two days off doesn’t mean we’re just two days behind schedule for our existing work.

Wednesday is Friday this week!

DEV BADGE

The game I work on allows players to personalize their own accounts in many different ways, one of which is to select badges that other players can see. If you work on the game, developers get a special badge that only we have access to. After a delay of several months, due to reasons that I’m not entirely aware of, I finally got my dev badge on the weekend.

I hear that selecting that badge is a bit of a double-edged sword. You can get lots of attention, both good and bad. Some of my co-workers choose to not display the badge and go anonymous, while others don’t mind.

I’m terrible at the game I work on, so I haven’t played a game yet with my dev badge selected. I’m sorta nervous to take it out for a spin.