Later spring and pandemic

Here is some music to listen to while you read. This is the band Lankum. I have mentioned them here before. I love them very much. On the 12th of March they were doing a show very close to here (Vienna VA) and I was so excited to go and see them. I listened to Lankum music all week in preparation. I was going to bring Kiernan who also loves them. It was going to be his first all ages show.

On the 12th of March the schools closed and I decided not to go out to the places where the people were.

It probably would have been fine ...

maybe not

The plants did so well with the heat mats and light.

I rediscovered a strange Greek mythology thing that I used to watch when I was a kid with my sister and inflicted it in part on my children.

For work we transitioned entirely to work from home. Usually I run the robots and make plates or tubes and I can't do that from home. I am almost at 1 year as a government contractor now. I have been really unsure about how things are going. I still struggle with the Khatera and Jasen (my old managers) in my head. When I got fired it felt like a confirmation of all the worries I had about what I am capable of. Khatera at least felt that I was completely incompetent. This was her reason for firing me. Incompetence is hard to shake for me. I spend so much time feeling like I am screwing up and making the wrong choices or dropping the ball or even just making people mad at me that I can't tell what of those fears are reasonable. Its hard for me to tell if my concerns about the things I don't know are looming too large or if they are justified. Being in this new job has been great for not getting yelled at or manipulated but its not great for reassuring me that I am competent because it is all new. I can't be competent at a new thing until I learn it. My one year review happened on our last day of work at work (instead of at home).

My boss is not super emotive (or emotive at all most of the time) and I generally relate to people on a very emotionally driven basis. I walk into a room and sniff the air like a dog looking for conflict or happiness and I thrive in any place that is happy. My current work is not happy. My current work is not unhappy. It is just work. The people are normal reasonable not abusive bully's. They are interesting and friendly but don't hang out. It is much better than my last year at Qiagen. All of that being said, I cannot read my boss very well at all. So I have been worried about my 1 year review. I was told that this was an important time to stand up for myself and toot my own horn. I suck at both of those things (see above). It worried me that I could not just do my work and let that be that. Self advocacy is a thing I have been trying to work on. Its why I eventually went to HR when things got bad last year. I keep trying to think of it in terms of modeling for the kids. I was told that all of us should be aiming for a 3 out of 5 rating and that 4's were very hard to get and 5's impossible. So I filled out my self evaluation with threes and tooted my own horn to the best of my abilities and waited for the review. My boss came in and agreed with all my threes and I felt relieved and said "Where do I sign?" and he said "You have to read my comments first.". I didn't want to read it or at least not till I was in private. I didn't want to have witness to my blushes of shame or joy. I don't like having much of any strong emotional reaction in front of people who I don't know and trust. But he said read it and he's the boss and so I read it.

It was so unexpectedly complimentary that I lost my breath. It agreed with all my horn tooting but also there were paragraphs about how I was doing a great job and contributing to the team and offering helpful insights for troubleshooting and QC and how I had boosted the labs productivity and got along with everyone. He was apparently not into the shared emotional experience either and we both looked not at each other and he told me he thought I was doing a great job. It was very awkward and such a huge relief.

He said that while I was home he wanted me to learn how to do coding for the lab and work on protocols and to send him updates about things I wanted to work on.

I went home over the moon with ideas about learning 3D printing form our 3D printing expert (Matt) and learning Tecan scripting form Spencer and about seeing my family more.

Here I am leaving work on that last day. I got my own cherry blossoms. I was very tired from still being sick but happy and drained.

Now we are home

Every morning at 9 we all meet at the table with our laptops (sometimes David stays in the office with his desktop) and we do our work. The kids have distance learning from the school now. Its less fun than the program we designed for ourselves but we are still doing classics.

For music last week we made a trash bag bagpipe off of an instructables plan that Geoff sent.

It would have worked better with a smaller bag but it was very funny all the same.

 It stared to get warm. This year, 3 years after putting them out, my local bee houses finally got populated. I am so happy to see these tiny dark solitary bees zooming in and out. Super pollinators for the win! Please read this about local bees.

We have been trying to take a walk every day. One day we walked over to 'hidden park' and saw that it was all taped off.

My strange two colored vinca are doing their strange two colored thing again. These are so cool.

In preparation for my 3D printing adventure we changed the filament and leveled the deck and printed out a calibration cube.

The state got shut down at the end of March.

I cooked.

One of the things we miss about normal life is going out to eat so I have been trying to make at least one special meal a week. We've had a Greek food week and an Indian food week and a Japanese food week. So far so good. 

I printed out a part for work from a file on the internet.

Here is a simulation mode version of the robot filling in my initials on a 96 well plate. I enjoyed this lesson particularly because the book asked me to put MK on the plate and the serendipity of the exercise including my initials delighted me.

This is some of the scripting that I am learning and studying at home.

Plus there has been some important Nerdy Night progress.

We started a family Star Wars marathon and watched all three trilogies. Megan is still a bit young for it I think, but Kiernan was super into it. David and I hadn't seen the last one yet so there was a very satisfying conclusion to the experience.David read the crawls in a super dramatic voice at the start of each film and it was wonderful and silly and made me proud to be where I was with the people I love.

We printed out some Easter eggs and Megan painted them.

I started trying to learn CAD (Computer Aided Design) on a site called TinkerCAD

I tried to design a housing for the valve I printed out before and then I tried to print it out.

Its not perfect and Matt made a beautiful one but its the first thing that I ever designed and made and it worked and I was euphoric all day from the success.

This is a Tie Fighter pancake I made for a Star Wars brunch. See the two moons at the top?

Hahah

It got warm and wonderful to be outside and out walks got easier and more interesting.

Mount Airy is lovely.

We finished up the Easter Eggs.

I went to the grocery store for the first time in weeks and many things were different.

David and I had no masks and about half the people did so I decided to work on that.

I got this super tasty recipe from Krishna and went to the Pakistani grocery too, just to make sure I had the right kind of tea.

I borrowed moms sewing machine and used some bog dress scraps to make some face-masks.

I have two good adult masks done so far. The kids ones were too small so I need to redo those plus make another adult version.

Still yet I hardly know how to sew and they turned out all right.

I started trying to learn to code in Python. I am not a natural at programming. Code academy is very good as far as I can tell but my tolerance for things I'm not naturally good at needs some work.

I am trying to be patient and plug away at it and have made some progress but there are days when I've got nothing to show for it. Megan and I are experiencing the greatest ennui over here.

Kiernan gets his stuff done early in the day and then goes to play. David sits down stoically and learns Python (thanks God he has decided to take the course with me) and Megan and I get up and get down and get up and get down and run around and make crafts and wonder why our work isn't done yet.

Each day we get something done. Some days its fun and some days its frustrating and hard and every day we are so lucky to be home and healthy and with each other. So many people are out of work now and so many kids are struggling with the changes of routine and in lots of cases with food uncertainty. We are still employed and well fed and have an easy to reach a natural space for walks. We have important things to do and fun at our fingertips. We are very very lucky.

Like everyone else on the planet we made whipped coffee.

Its great.

Please try to make it.

Megan particularly likes it and I had to order some decaf instant pretty quickly to avoid a hyper coffee child haunting my dreams.

My sister sent Megan some resurrection eggs for Easter. I wasn't sure how she would take to them but she loved them. Megan is definitely more interested in religion than Kiernan is.

I found a new favorite ice cream flavor.

Megan made a cool Girl Scouts art project (its Girl Scout because her troop leaders dropped off art supplies at everyone's houses and waved through the windows.).

This is a rainbow Appaloosa that makes rainbow tornadoes with her horn.

Also she was super ready for Easter.

David became our person who goes out and now dons his mask and makes trips out to the store once a weekish.

We missed Scearce's Easter egg hunt this year because of the lockdown. So we did lots of prep to have it at home.

We did all the yard work! Then a whole house clean and felt exhausted. Everything looked great and the adults moaned and groaned and slept pretty well.

We had air fryer asparagus.

My figs showed signs of life.

The kids dyed their eggs with Nana.

I got up at 5:30 Easter morning and started cooking a big fancy breakfast and once the sun was up hit the eggs.

These are delicious but more than marginally ugly Danish cinnamon rolls that took forever and that I loved unreservedly until the ants found them.

We even managed Easter baskets despite not going out.

Aunt Lore came over and did a social isolation version of a visit for the holiday.

We ate and talked and drank whipped coffee.

We watched the kids find eggs and then they hid them and we searched.

Mom made a fancy Easter dinner with turkey and potatoes.

After Easter we had another hallmark event. Kiernan had his first  online gaming with a friend. they played World of Warcraft and he stayed up a bit past bedtime.

I joined the Haven WOW guild. I am back to doing things with Haven. They are a small business that I like a lot and I wanted to support them. All activities are online and that's great for both my schedule and my personal preference for interaction.

Megan made this pretty still life for her art class last week.

I am worried about my plants. Its gotten very cold at night again down into the 30's but we had to take the plants out because ants got into them and started nesting.

Cross your fingers I don't lose all the tomatoes and peppers.

If you are feeling isolated we are here. Join us for WOW or email us your goofy project pictures or let me know about your worries.