Living in exile

Two temperature readings again with pictures. Butter I ordered finally arrived. The day was spent almost completing an R tutorial using R Markdown and learnr. It takes time to set up an interactive tutorial. I prefer not using video because I noticed that in the past few days, internet access is getting noticeably slower. Everyone should start preparing for the eventuality that the upper limit of bandwidth (if it exists) is going to be breached. In the tutorial, I set up the basics, loops, simulations, and three applications for context. It is a substantial investment because you could recycle older material but you need to repackage if you want to deliver in a different media.

Today, I cooked beef adobo using the frozen beef I ordered online. What is strange about the beef is that it is too tender even before cooking. The beef did not have the resistance I was looking for. Somehow it has the taste of beef, the surface texture of pork, and the tenderness of chicken (not chicken, but crocodile). I tasted the fat and it has the beefy juices. Somehow I really do not know how this beef was constructed. It reminds me of the mid-range beef steak served at the university's Western Restaurant (no joke). The beef came to us as sealed 150 g flat sliced steak but I chopped all of them into cubes.

Breakfast and lunch: The very spicy Samyang instant noodles which is not scarce at all, leftover rice, and beef adobo. Dinner: Skipped. Snacks: I sat down and gulped down two Pringles bottles. In two sittings, of course, not a slob. Slept like a baby though.

Today, I also had a one hour telephone call with our vice-dean to go over some points I have raised in a proposal. It is really hard to be in middle management. We are partially in a wait-and-see mode but there are some efforts to eventually plan for the worst case. We have not gone through every point but it is hard to move under a top-down structure. That is why each one of us should pitch proposals, ideas, and low-level simple solutions to get through (and documenting them). Crowdsourcing solutions and discussing the viability of these solutions should be the default approach.

We also binge-watched the sixth season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and the final season of The Good Place. If you have not watched these shows, try to catch them. The final episode of The Good Place reminded me of the feeling I got 3 months into my job at the university.

Not much really happened. I got suggestions from a couple of colleagues about how to get fresh produce. I will try that after I am approximately sure that my 10 kg of potatoes will not arrive. We had some slight rain and a dense fog. The mountains are covered in white at some point. The guard delivering stuff to self-quarantined folks delivered the wrong package to us. I am glad that I was able to recognize it.

But there was a moment in the day where I was just stunned by what I read. It is an entry from Anna Weinstein called “Your nonprofit doesn't care about (and that's good)”. I let you look this entry up as it is quite timely. It somehow justifies the resignation letter (to exit the committee I am in) that I have already signed and sealed as a PDF two months ago, but have yet to be delivered.

That's it. I leave you with some good lines from the entry I just described:

“But I've come to believe that allowing something unsustainable to fall apart is actually incredibly generous. It's generous to your teammates, who may feel that they too should be expected to perform heroic acts of overtime as a regular feature of their jobs. It's generous to your organization, which may have no opportunity of understanding what is truly required for success. It's generous to yourself, since boundaries and self-care are essential for your continued happiness as a working person.”