Life. Don't talk to me about life...

[ornoth]

Enough stuff has happened in the past two months that it’s time for another aggregated life update.

Health issues remain inconclusive. After surgery in December, I had another attack of abdominal pain around New Years, which prompted another visit to the GP and a followup CT scan. That detected nothing, so I’m back to eating a regular diet and taking a wait-and-see attitude. Meanwhile, I’ve taken the lull in proceedings to catch up on dental and eye stuff, get a new pair of glasses, and a haircut.

Watched the Super Bowl, since the Patriots were in it, and it proved to be a remarkably exciting finish. Whatever. I would rather the Revs have won.

Last month I observed the one-year anniversary of my kyūdō First Shot training. I also started learning hitote, which is a more involved form involving two shots and repeated kneeling down and getting up. It’s nice to have something new to think about and work on.

In January I made a long-overdue four-day visit to Pittsburgh, which was extended by two days due to Boston’s first huge blizzard disabling air travel. Pittsburgh wasn’t very eventful, but it was a nice visit.

Since then, Boston has been pounded by huge snowstorms one after another, causing daily gridlock, forcing the transit system to shut down for days at a time, and setting numerous all-time records for snowfall, wind, and cold temperatures. A sampler:

• For the entire winter up to January 23rd, Boston only had 5.5 inches of snow. In the next three weeks, it would receive an additional 90.2 inches (over 7.5 feet)!
• February broke the record for Boston’s snowiest month ever, and did it by the 15th of the month!
• By the end of the month, Boston had received five and a half feet of snow, beating the old record by 50 percent.
• Boston set the 4th snowiest 30-day period anywhere in American National Weather Service records.
• It snowed on 20 out of 28 days in February.
• Boston set its all-time record for greatest snow depth.
• This has been Boston’s 2nd snowiest winter on record. We’re less than two inches away from setting a new record (9 feet of snowfall), and we typically get about 8 inches of snow in March.
• An avalanche off the roof of a skating rink hit four people, burying one. Two of them had to be hospitalized.
• Boston cyclists built a 40-foot-long “underground” snow tunnel for commuting.
• In many cases, cars were so deeply buried that owners had to put cardboard signs on them warn snow removers not to plow there.
• An MBTA ferry and a Coast Guard icebreaker both got stuck in the sea ice in Massachusetts Bay.
• Blocks of sea ice more than 7 feet thick came ashore on Cape Cod.
• During one of our blizzards, Mt. Washington recorded the highest wind gust it has experienced in seven years.
• February was 12.7 degrees below normal temperature.
• It was the 2nd coldest February on record
• For the whole month of February, we only had one day where we reached the day’s average high temperature.
• At 15 days, we fell one day short of setting the record for consecutive days below freezing.
• At 43 days, this was the longest consecutive time that Boston has ever stayed below 40 degrees, beating the old record by 8 days.

I could go on at length, but it’s an experience that honestly is best forgotten. I will say that it has unambiguously strengthened my commitment to moving to a warmer climate.

Out of utter frustration with the weather, I set up and started using the indoor cycling trainer, which I didn’t use at all last winter. As a result, I’ve already earned $66 as a paid cyclist, thanks to my company’s health benefit…

And I’ve now been working at Buildium for 100 days. The money is happy, the atmosphere is friendly, and we’ve added yet another old Sapient (and Business Innovation) coworker. I’ve been doing a lot of Javascript, Knockout, and Angular work, which is enjoyable (mostly).

Thanks to the snow, I worked from home several days, and enjoyed an empty office when I made the trek in. I’ve made three satisfying lunch expeditions for Thai from Lanta (formerly Rock Sugar). Our company recently announced our first acquisition, and it looks like the two businesses complement each other well. And I hope to hear news about improvements to our office space.

While there, I’ve enjoyed rebuilding my foosball skills, and have been alpha testing a new version of my foosball ranking site. I’ve optimized the UI for mobile devices, made it more interactive by porting it to the Angular Javascript framework, and made it behave more like a single-page application by burying all the data requests in behind-the-scenes JSON AJAX requests. After talking it up to my coworkers, I’m excited to open it up to general use! I’ve even played with the Web Speech API and hope to incorporate speech recognition into it soon.

Otherwise I think things are quiet. Like that thrice-damned groundhog, I’ve been holed-up, waiting for the mountains of snow to recede before venturing back out into the world.