Today is not a blanket holiday for my company. We get a couple of "floating holidays," and most of my teammates are taking today off, but a few of us have to work to support our customers, many of which are working today. (I will use my floating holiday next Wednesday as I fly to Montreal for SMOFCon 38While waiting for some reports for which I'm ( Read more... )

I needed to get some perishables (milk and such) that we did not get while at WinCo on Saturday morning. Wanting to avoid crowds as much as I could, I waited until just before the start of the Super Bowl, in the hope that most people would be watching The Big Game. It worked slightly. There were fewer people than I would have expected in Grocery ( Read more... )

We once again did a grocery trip to Reno in the wee hours of Saturday morning. I got up two hours before my usual alarm time, and we managed to get to WinCo (the large 24-hour grocery store in Reno) about 3:30 AM. It was less busy than it had been last weekend when we did this two hours later or so. We were pleased to see that most of the staff ( Read more... )

We had thunderstorms on Thursday night/Friday morning that cleared the air considerably, and it's stayed clear through the weekend.

( Sunrise After the Storm )

With a cooler day and less smoke in the air, Lisa and I ran into Reno to get groceries from WinCo Foods that we missed on our previous trip on account of us balking due to long lines and several things we wanted not being in stock. We, of course, wore our face masks as we've never stopped doing. There may have been a few more people masking up than ( Read more... )

My white Tonopah mask was looking mighty brown after last week's trip, thanks to blowing dust in some of the places we traveled. (I don't wear it everywhere, but will wear it even if nobody is nearby if the wind is blowing dust and pollen about, and I have a feeling I will keep doing that indefinitely, thanks to how this has reduced hay fever.) So ( Read more... )

Today it will have been two weeks since Lisa and I received our second Pfizer vaccine shots. In theory, that means we're free of needing masks in most situations. In practice, because there's no way I can trust that any other maskless person is immunized, I anticipate that we'll be still wearing our masks for a while now. Indeed, given the ( Read more... )

My hair was getting very shaggy on the back and sides, enough to be really annoying. As I'm nearly bald on top now, I had to decide whether I planned on someday auditioning for the Ben Franklin role in the musical 1776 and grow my hair down to my shoulders on the sides. I decided to get a haircut. Nevada allows barbers to serve customers, with ( Read more... )

Yesterday was the first day I used the new DemeTECH N95 mask from the supply we recently bought, because we had to go out on a short trip.

( Mask and Mask Again )

We've been careful about following masking precautions, but getting properly fitting masks, either N95 or surgical-type, has been difficult, particularly if you want to buy anything other than the Chinese-made masks that are of uncertain provenance or effectiveness. Until I read this article from the New York Times, I had assumed that there simply ( Read more... )