Covid-19 and Me

This has been a strange year.

I had a lot of planned travel: visit my daughter in Italy, cruise the southern Caribbean with my brother, bring my wife to her first GenCon, travel to Japan for four days at a JAXA installation, attend the wedding of a nephew in Georgia.

The novel coronavirus known as COVID-19 hit Italy like a ton of bricks and, before our trip, our daughter was sent back home to us. My brother was struck by a car and thrown 72 feet, which would have put a damper on our cruise plans even without the pandemic. GenCon was cancelled for this year. It is unlikely that NASA will be in the position to permit international travel for anything that's not mission critical this year. It has been a mess.

I love to travel. That's what I do with my vacation time. I'm not a fan of the staycation. Yet, there's no place to go right now. Come this fall, my wife will be back at work so we can't go anywhere then, either. If the federal government doesn't relax their leave policies, I may end up going to work for my last day this year sometime in November.

Like many people, I am taking care of little things around the house. Mika gets lots of extra walks. My daily commute is twenty feet from my bedroom to my office. Every day feels like every other day. I have to actively remind myself whether it's a weekend or not, because the differences are subtle.

I am one of the few very lucky people who can work from home. It feels like cheating.

Empty Nest

There are a lot of things that happened to our family this past year. In short, our son got placed into an Intermediate Care Facility (group home) and our daughter has gone off to college. My wife and I have become empty nesters.

Our son and daughter have both adjusted very well to their new environments. And moving out is, for them, a milestone achievement. The other side of that coin, how circumstances changed for us parents, is no less profound. The change on our lives has been no less dramatic than what our children are experiencing.

First, our son moved out.

It was our goal to transition him from living at home to living at a group home during the school year, to mitigate the things that would be different for him. We were able to do that, and he did well. Almost too good, to be honest. Then, over the summer he picked up some negative behaviors for which we sought additional help. Now that he's back in school (he graduated, but can continue with schooling to help bolster his occupational skills) he is behaving better. Not perfect mind you, and not the way he was before, but better.

A few months later, it was our daughter's turn.

Our daughter, too, took to leaving home better than we thought she would. She has made new friends, stayed in touch with her old friends, is doing well academically, and has gotten involved in campus life. She didn't join the clubs that I thought she would, and she didn't pursue her old high school activities in college. Instead, she joined the hall council and is involved in student government. This is a girl who struggled through school until her senior year. I'm sure she's facing some struggles, but she is tackling them herself.

So what has this meant for us?

Well, for the first time since we've become parents I can do what I want to do after dinner. I don't have to toilet and bathe my son. It wasn't the work. It was the inflexibility that really was a drag on me. The fact that, for the hour after dinner, I had no agency. My next hour was spoken for, regardless of my feelings. It was weird to get up from the dinner table, bus my dishes, then go off on my own to do something that I wanted to do.

When our daughter left, there were tears. Those tears started a couple weeks before she left and continued for a couple weeks after. But there were tears. Because it was different. My son lives a few minutes away, and my wife visits him about six days a week (myself, about twice a week). With our daughter, weeks and soon months will pass between visits. Also, when we visit our son he is, largely, the same as he was before. Our daughter will never be the same kid that we dropped off at college.

I knew what moving away, to college or elsewhere, would be like. I've made that journey. What I didn't realize was that I would be taking no less a journey now, myself.

Last Winter's Project this Winter Instead

So here's the deal. My project for last winter was going to be a new gaming machine for myself. My old computer was on its last legs and was a pre-built. Upgrading it wasn't much use and I had an old but venerable Antec 900 case and Rosewill 850 W power supply in the basement. A pair of old 500 Gb hard drives logically linked together make a fine backup solution.

Part of this upgrade was a new monitor with frequency synchronization (to minimize tearing during horizontal sweeps). That meant with Nvidia's G-Sync or AMD's FreeSync.

The former requires proprietary hardware in the monitor. That drives up the price of those monitors (by a couple hundred dollars) and reduces the number and variety of available monitors. So, while Nvidia refused to support the more open standard (which only requires software) and stuck with their proprietary solution, I became more interested in an AMD system.

Last winter, however, AMD didn't make a graphics card that could perform at the level of an Nvidia 1070 or better. So I waited, and waited, and waited. Finally, this past summer AMD released the Vega series of cards that did compare with Nvidia's offerings, albeit with a greater power thirst.

These new cards, however, were quickly snapped up by cryptocurrency miners - instantly driving their prices up hundreds of dollars over their MSRP. I waited some more.

This past fall, Nvidia announced the 1080Ti card and, for several hours after, the price for the Vega cards fell to their intended cost! I snagged a Vega 56 for $399. A couple hours after I did, they shot back up to $600.

AMD also released their new CPUs this past summer. Again, competing successfully with Intel. I went for the sweet spot below the cutting edge and picked up a Ryzen 1700.

I also disassembled my Antec case, cleaned it up, and replaced all the stock fans with LED ones. I also went with an RGB-lit motherboard, CPU cooler (Wraith cooler that came with the CPU), side fan, keyboard, and mouse. Paired that with a 34-inch ultrawide monitor (Freesync) and the end result doesn't look half bad.

So I don't really have a project, yet, for this winter but I finally finished last year's project.

Item	Model
CPU	AMD Ryzen 7 1700
MB	GIGABYTE GA-AB350-Gaming 3
RAM	G.SKILL Flare X Series 16GB DDR4 3200
Drive	Samsung 850 EVO 1TB 2.5-Inch SATA III SSD
GPU	AMD Vega 56
Monitor	LG 34UC79G-B 34-Inch 21:9 Curved
Keyboard	Logitech G910 Orion Spark
Mouse	Logitech G703 Wireless

Summer Trips

This year we took two trips, about a week each.

Our first trip was our summer vacation. This year, we went to Arizona to see Sedona and the Grand Canyon from its south rim. Our first stop after landing and getting lunch at Mika's Greek was the Desert Botanical Garden. It was hot and dry out, but it was beautiful. The next day, before heading to Sedona, we visited the Musical Instrument Museum. That was very interesting and we could have easily spent more time there, but we needed to grab lunch and head north to Sedona.

The view from our room's terrace was gorgeous. The next morning we took a Jeep tour up into the rocks and bummed around the town in the afternoon.

On our way further north to the Grand Canyon, we followed Oak Creek to Flagstaff before joining the highway.

The Grand Canyon was also quite beautiful. I found a nice parking spot, so we didn't dare move our car while we were there. Shuttle busses took us back to the Visitor Center, the scenic overlooks, and other destinations nearby. We enjoyed an astronomy night where one could see millions of stars and the Milky Way with the unaided eye. Using telescopes, we looked at both Jupiter and Saturn (and several of their nearby moons). Sarah saw her first shooting star that evening.

There was also some wildlife to be seen. Hummingbirds to condors. Foxes, coyotes, and elk. Even a small field mouse that joined Hope and I on a moonlit porch swing.

After the drive back to Phoenix, we spent a final day at a resort getting a sunburn and relaxing before our flight home.

https://goo.gl/photos/xoF31jg8DF5BTrSJ8

Second Blood

Why is it my job to dispose of dead things found in the yard?

There's always some level of confusion on my part when these things happen.

Sarah found a snake in the yard.
Neat. She saw a snake!
Not saw. Found. It's dead.
You know it's dead?
Yes. Because, well, it's half a snake, really. And it doesn't have a head anymore.

So it fell to me to dig a little hole someplace discreet, then bury the snake remains. There were two parts, really, and no head. I assume that it was Mika's play thing until it fell apart.

In addition to snapping up house flies, ridding our property of wayward squirrels, and scaring off amorous geese our dog can add to her job jar the task of keeping the yard snake-free.