Enough technology

Life in Enoughsville continues to give us plenty to be thankful for. Maybe this is a particular week to be thankful for manufacturing and technology.  OfSnough has had multiple stories related to his fancy exercise watch. He visited the dentist this week, and noted that he's comfortable enough there that his heart rate (62-ish) was lower there than while he sleeps -- although admittedly, he's not a world-champion sleeper the way his wife is.  

A month or so ago, while Gosling was in town, her exercise watch tried to friend my exercise watch, only to discover that I'd boxed mine up and put it in the closet after my half-marathon in September.  Her watch *did* friend OfSnough's, only to discover to her chagrin that he'd bumped her from #1 to #2 in the "steps walked" category in her social groupings.  She has vowed to surpass him, but to no avail.  My guy has pointed out that there's really no way she can win; either she has fewer steps than he does [a situation which persists, despite her incredible activity], or she can brag to her friends that she walked more steps than her 68-year-old father with bad knees (and one week, with Covid).  He's headed for 100,000 steps this week. Hard to keep up with that man!

Guinness (Gosling's dog) faced another technology challenge, and "faced" is exactly the right word: how to extricate yogurt without besmearing the face.

B-child responded, noting that adding extra technology components is no guarantee of success.

Prewash explained that she faces the challenge head on.  

In other tech-ish news, Nelson called me the other night.  He told me he'd spent about an hour chatting with Inkling, and then they realized he should call me, too, and joked that I'd chat for 5 minutes before hanging up.   Well, hah!  Shows them!   Nelson and I talked for a whole 12 minutes before I decided that was quite enough time on the phone, thank you.   This ought to hold me for about two weeks, I guess.

We've been front-row observers of big tech/machinery right outside our windows.   These construction workers are fascinating to watch, although a bit less so to hear and feel.   They have been digging holes in the ground, placing concrete boxes the size of someone's bathroom inside the holes, connecting the boxes with large, green pipes, filling in with gravel, stone, and dirt, and then tamping it all down.

It is the tamping that is the most . . . sensational . . . of these operations, if we think of "sensational" as affecting many senses.  Because we live in a city row house, all is connected (like the song that goes, "the thigh bone's connected to the hip bone").  The lot they're working on is connected to the street; the street is connected to our sidewalk; the sidewalk is connected to our concrete/brick porch, and the porch is connected to the house, and the house shakes and rumbles and tinkles and jitters all day long.  Sometimes the rumbling continues well into the evening, too -- the picture above was from a night in which I got a free "magic fingers" bed until about, oh, 10:30.  It does look like the project is progressing along, though, so our days of vibrating walls and floors are dwindling.  

The construction crew were not hard at work on Thursday, so my grandkids didn't get to see the diggers and tampers when they came over.  We had fun throwing a deflated football to a football-crazed dog, and then we engaged in collaborative art projects using old (but somehow still functional) markers.  

A different kind of tech art is a trophy emoji, like this one:  🏆, which Inkling's boss sent to her, because she's been doing such a good job of holding down the fort -- or the store -- on her own these past weeks.

What else?  We got our free covid tests delivered today (https://www.covidtests.gov/).  The site was surprisingly easy to use: it basically asks, "What's your address?" and then says, "okay, we'll mail you four tests!", and then they did.  The deaths due to Covid-19 in our area are still as high as they've ever been (roughly 50 per week), but the number of new people testing positive has dropped by half from a week ago.  

And on Monday, I start teaching in person again, with N95 or KN95 masks "strongly encouraged" and some kind of mask mandatory.  In one of this lovely paradoxes, meeting in person (not via technology) will help me better teach my students how to use technology -- specifically a typesetting language called "LaTeX", pronounced "La-Tech" because that thing that looks like an X is homage to the greek letter Chi (X).   I love LaTeX so much.  So, so much.

And that's the tech news from our family, which continues to be rich in our techventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.