Aaron's Status

6:06 am

Don’t expect this to be any shorter than usual.

Links

We visited my parents yesterday and while I was talking to my dad about his experience having an MRI, I was reminded of this incredible video called The Insane Engineering of the MRI Machine. That, then, triggered a memory of another video by the same channel about amazing new airport x-ray technology. Both are worth watching!

Also this week, my favorite activist sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow collided with my favorite journalist podcast producer PJ Vogt, which resulted in a wide-ranging essay from Cory about how US fiat currency actually works and why the national deficit is, in fact, important. It’s a great read.

So busy

Hardly a dull moment around here lately. They say being an adult means saying “next month, things will slow down” over and over until you die. I think it’s partly because plans don’t come into focus until a few weeks out, so it’s easy to look a month or two into the future on your calendar and think “ah, so much free time,” but by the time you get there, you’ve packed it all with events.

Anyway, we saw my parents yesterday, which implies over three hours of driving. It was very nice to see them and catch up on everything. We got home by almost dinner time, relaxed a bit, ate some food, and then got back in the car again.

Our town organized a Halloween house decorating contest, so I had taken some time to plan a driving route past most of the participating houses. It was a lot of fun to see what people came up with. Definitely some better than others, but one strong take-away is that we are harsh critics of Halloween decorations!

There were two or three clear front-runners and I think we were closely aligned on the top two. Perhaps in a coming year we might participate. I didn’t even know it was happening until yesterday!

Today is the kid’s climbing class, which means we’ll get a couple of hours of climbing in as well. I think my knee is up to the task again, though still not 100% healed. I’m not sure what I want to do today; I have a V5 boulder project and three remaining 5.11 topline projects. All of them are hard.

Almost immediately after climbing, we have a Halloween party to attend, which means coming home, cleaning up, getting costumed, and heading back out. I think I’ll be pretty exhausted by tonight.

Costume malfunction

We went to a very casual Halloween party last weekend, which was our first time out with the costumes, and as I got into the car to leave my custom-made folding trowel case snapped right off my belt!

The rivets I used were simply too small to keep the material bound under the tension of my whole body pulling against them. I was bummed not to be able to wear it, but when I got home I stepped up by one rivet size and put them through washers, which should absolutely hold it together now.

It also occurred to me that I might instead use another snap at the bottom of the belt loop so that I can easily put it on without taking half of my belt off, for things like sitting in the car, but I’ll hold on that for now and see how it goes today.

At least these Halloween parties are with other parents, which means they start at 1:30pm and are done by dinner time. I only have so much party left in me these days.