Note Wiring is not really complete– I need some additional organization and cable lengths to make things clean and ideal, but I think this is the core layout.

Signal chain

Polytune 3 Mini -> Keeley OctaPsi -> BSRI Magawa -> (Amp) -> Walrus Julia -> Chase Bliss Billy Strings Wombtone -> Walrus ARP-87 -> Walrus Fundamental Ambient -> (Amp)

(Amp) is mostly the Dr. Z Maz 18 I have a UA Lion ‘68 (pictured) that I’m using sometimes for home recording and also intend to bring to gigs to enable an amp-less setup/backup if needed. I’m also not 100% sure I’ll always run the modulation/time stuff in the effects loop. In fact, I’ve mostly been running entirely into the front of the amp at rehearsals because it’s less hassle. But I think that I prefer this stuff in the loop, so I’m going to be less lazy about using a four cable method going forward.

The Dr. Z amp pedal is not a switcher– it’s a built in boost. To my ears, I don’t get much volume, likely because I have enough crunch set on the amp that I just get more compression, sustain, and gain when I slap that on.

The Walrus Canvas Power 15 is new, as is the pedalboard (Pedaltrain Classic 2, versus the original Pedaltrain I had– the tilt is really nice). Both are great so far.

Why are things arranged this way?

The spatial arrangement of the pedals is intended to make it easy to switch between the four-cable method, getting the dirt before the amp or the UA Lion, then getting the send from the effects loop into the Julia or going from the Lion to the Julia.

I put dirt on the bottom because that’s what I hit the most often. Magawa alone, amp boost alone, or both combined are my most common switches. That’s definitely followed by the octave on, which I use in a few songs to fatten a lead or a part heavy in diads. Typically, I am only using one modulation or time-based effect on at a time, so having them be a bit more distant is no problem. The Fundamental Ambient gets turned on the most, so it’s also in an easy spot at the edge.

What didn’t make the board

I continue to futz with the Slö and Fathom, the other two Walrus reverbs. I owned the Fundamental Ambient first and love everything about it. I’ve never been quite able to worm to the “big brothers” the Slö or Fathom. They may just not be for me. I honestly want to read more about both and look at other people’s settings and see if I can find a way to love them. If not, I’ll probably sell or trade them soon. I think I may want another reverb still– perhaps something more classic, perhaps something built into a delay like the Wampler Ethereal Delay and Reverb I traded (which I may get again, or perhaps try and EarthQuaker Devices Dispatch Master).

The Nano POG got pulled off when I got the OctaPsi, but it’s so damn good at what it does I don’t know if I’m willing to get rid of it yet.

Other uncertainties

I’m not so sure about the ARP-87. I think I liked the Wampler Ethereal Delay more, so like I said in Remainders about a reverb, I may be looking for a different delay, perhaps one with a reverb as well. I’m considering something like the JHS Flight Delay, too. I love the way the Julia sounds in general, but I’m still dialing it to find a setting that really fits with what I play and makes sense for a song. I suspect if I am ever going to get along with chorus, this will be the one, but I’m not quite there yet with it.

I got the Wombtone in my Mystery Box and immediately found a great setting for what I like a phaser to do and what I use it for in the band. Is it markedly better than the BSRI Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter– not for me, I use it in an almost identical fashion and don’t find it that much more meaningful. That said, it can do more and it’s a smaller enclosure, so when by chance I saw someone looking for the BSRI on Reddit I made the trade. I don’t need two phasers around, and BSRI will be at the Baltimore Pedal Show next month so I can always pick up another if I want and support a local builder.

Speaking of BSRI and reverbs, I’m pretty sure I want to look at the Soft Rains and the Smell of the Ground. I loved this pedal last year, and only didn’t get it because I was practically willing to buy everything BSRI had to show. Given my current reverb situation, I think it’s pretty likely I buy one of these next month.

What else am I considering? I think I want some more dirt options. The Magawa sounds and works great. The OctaPsi is untameable, like any Muff style pedal should be. But I still have interest in adding more textures and subtly. I think I’m most interested in a Browne Amplification Protein, the Boss OD-3, the Boss BD-2 or maybe instead a Boss Angry Driver JB-2, or possibly a Wampler Tumnus. The Benson Deep Sea Diver is also really interesting for another version of just “blow things up” in one pedal. I have tried hard not to gas over the Walrus Qi Etherealizer, because as much as I absolute adore Yvette Young, I can’t play even a little bit like her so I can’t “trust” the demos of what that pedal would do in my hands. But that being said, some of the sounds are absolutely crazy. I really like the idea of being able to create spacey pads of sound on guitar that are not just walls of fuzz. I also keep eyeing the EarthQuaker Devices Swiss Things. I do a fair amount of tap dancing sometimes to go from clean + Fundamental Ambient -> Magawa and amp boost on. It’d be kind of neat to have dirt in a loop so that I could set up any of my stacking how I need and one switch get to where I’m going. Plus, with the UA Lion, my Dr. Z amp, and the Valvetech amp, A/B/Y starts to get pretty interesting in terms of options.

Reddit recommended this post to me, with the following image:

As a reminder, this is what’s going on in my office, at the rehearsal studio, and who I am:

Ouch.

From ¹ Om Malik, quoting A Beginner's Guide to Japan :

Nowhere else I’ve been, in fact, are individuals so disengaged from the political domain; my Japanese friends assume they can no more address their leaders than they can a group of look-alike men in suits in a corporate boardroom with the doors locked and the curtains drawn. So they turn their backs on the public sphere, and make fantastic worlds out of their passions, counter-societies out of their hobbies.

This resonates. I think there’s a degree to which I have been turning away from the public sphere and towards my hobbies more and more over time. Some of this is changing where I am in my career. Some of this was moving away from Providence and consciously deciding to be uninvolved in local politics and news. Some of this was the despair of the first, and now second Trump presidency. But overtime, I’ve tried to put more time into things like playing with my band (just over a year now!), playing volleyball (just over 3 years now, with a 7 month break for injuries), my website, etc.

At times, I’ve worried this is unhealthy or immoral. Correction, no past tense– I worry this is unhealthy or immoral.

Other times I wonder if our greatest failures are from people who have turned entirely to the public sphere at the cost of their hobbies. How many bedroom warriors on Twitter, or living room screechers watching Fox News or OAN, or gym rat ragers listening to Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan are unnaturally focused on the public sphere? How many of these people are so preoccupied with politics, and specifically what the government is or isn’t doing, that they’re failing to live their lives?

This form of bizarre populist politics as a hobby is toxic. As the kids these day say, go touch grass. They are so focused on oppressing people whose lives are not actually impacting them at all. I can’t believe that if they turned toward a different set of passions or hobbies and not the “public sphere”, all the manufactured outrage would disappear and the world would be better.

One of the primary critiques, and perhaps the only one that held much water over time, of Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was that it left behind too many Afghanis who were in danger for being our allies. So it makes sense that Trump would remove the protective status from those who made it to the US.

It seems my hypocrisy knows no bounds.

There was a local guitar shop I sold gear to and had repairs done at. They had my email. I regularly checked their website to see what gear was available. I was considering signing up for lessons. I noticed starting in January that they listed way less gear on their site.

Turns out they closed lessons and the retail shop in March and moved to a repair only space. They only wrote about this on Instagram and Facebook, and made no note of this on their own website. They had closing sales, but never contacted people whose email they had from past used gear sales or repairs or announced this on their own domain.

I’m sad to lose a shop (it was just ok… but had promise), but more angry that businesses would communicate purely through Meta properties.

I have spent a fair amount of time “on the side” thinking about authorization rules over the last year. At work, things have gotten sufficiently complex that we are really straining our existing system. At least some of that comes from our choices, a lot of that comes from the domain complexity we have, and some of that comes from Phoenix only having an opinion in the current 1.8 release RC about “how this should be done” leaving us to make our own bad choices.

I’ve largely been insisting on maintaining an RBAC-driven or RBAC-like system. One thing I’ve learned in past versions of our applications is school districts want very fine-grained controls, almost on the level of individuals, and then quickly find out that maintaining permissions for individuals is just an untenable nightmare. But one thing that a school district does and can consistently know is what someone’s job title/role is.

What we’ve come up with are users have roles in an organization ¹. A user can have only one role in an organization, but they can have many of these… role-organization combinations. For example, I can be the principal supervisor of ABC Elementary and XYZ Elementary (two role-orgs) and the department head of Elementary Schools (a third role-org). Intuitively, I think this makes sense and is fairly easy to maintain.

But I have really struggled with language around this stuff. What are these role-organization combinations? Is organization or budget or any of these domain-ish terms correct, or is there a better technical term? Scopes come up often, but we extensively used that term elsewhere– now Phoenix supports scopes directly, so oops– and I found the term scope as having specific, inconsistent, and different definitions in different contexts. One doesn’t really have a role in a scope, but rather, has certain scopes by having a role.

Anyway, all this is preamble to say that while I haven’t read it yet, I’m glad that Tom MacWright linked to Zanzibar, something I completely missed when it came out in 2019. Like Tom, the distributed nature of Zanzibar is not of particular interest, but I’m hopeful that the features and concepts introduced will provide me with better language when talking about authorization going forward.

I think the solution to tech malaise, fog, or disappointment is to stop using your machines for casual distraction and go make something.

I’ve been working on demo tracks for my band since January, so I’m in new-to-me Ableton 12 every week. And there’s no way I could feel negative about technology when I can be this creative and have this much power.

I didn’t have to learn much to get started, and I’m learning constantly and it’s all easy and fun.

Writing software is fun. Writing blog posts are fun. Messing with my personal webpage is fun.

We don’t actually need a maglev train between DC and Baltimore, and we don’t even really need one along the NEC. It’s really a distraction from the HSR we should pursue. But:

1. Neither are going to happen in my lifetime, especially because of this administration.
2. This NIMBYism makes me want to support maglev.

Here are some of my current rules for email that help keep things tidy server side with Fastmail.

Newsletters

I have a few set of rules meant to capture newsletters. The first:

• If all of the following conditions are true:

  • A header called list-id exists.
  • Anywhere unsubscribe
  • Sender is not a contact

• Then

  • Move to Newsletters

• If all of the following conditions are true:

  • A header called List-Unsubscribe

• Then

  • Move to Newsletters

I then have the Newsletters folder delete all email greater than 31 days old.

Calendar Invites

Because calendar invites show up in my calendar app/apps of choice, having the email is really unhelpful. So:

• If all of the following conditions are true:
  • Anywhere filetype:calendar
• Then
  • Mark read
  • Move to Calendar Invites

I then have the Calendar Invites folder delete all email greater than 31 days old.

Political Email to Trash

I donate to some political causes, but their email is inescapable. Here are some conditions that have helped (note: this works for US Democratic candidates largely. We don’t talk about the other side). The first three grab common software used by Democrats, the next two are just examples of things I add when specific candidates tend to find their way around this:

• If any of the following conditions are true
  • A header called List-Unsubscribe contains actionkit
  • A header called List-Unsubscribe contains dccc
  • A header called List-Unsubscribe contains ngpvan
  • A header called Reply-to contains info@contact.kamalaharris.com
  • A header called Reply-to contains info@contact.joebiden.com

I edited this section to better match how I wrote the other sections, which was to mirror the GUI versus the actual search terms used to make these rules.

Specific Annoying Emails

Sometimes there’s a sender I want to subscribe to that has some specific spammy tendencies. For example, I don’t need my bank to tell me each time it initiates some scheduled transfers I have. I typically find the subject line of those common emails, mark as read and move to trash because I don’t need to get your “We started a Surprise Savings transfer” email four times a month. Similarly, notifications from online shopping I use commonly will get a header-based rule that moves them to Newsletters (I used to have a separate shopping folder, but it’s not worth it).

Sometimes, there’s a pernicious bit of spam. For example, I frequently got emails from a fake account that listed as payments <payments@bills.com> for these weird invoice things. No matter how many times I marked as spam, this particular joy kept getting through. So now it’s a rule that moves that email to spam.

Takeaway

There’s a whole lot of content in email headers (like those List-Unsubscribe fields) that are incredibly useful for automatically sorting your email and making things go away you don’t want to see. I don’t want to unsubscribe to every list I’m on, but I also don’t want my Inbox to be clogged up by non-urgent messages. I have very few folders and generally go Inbox -> Archive and use searching to find my mail. So by organizing a few top level folders for “Email I still basically want to receive, but isn’t really valuable or something I want at my fingertips” coupled with server-side mail rules and auto-delete cleanup makes my personal email relatively quite and pleasant.

My job is not generally to write code, but sometimes that’s the job. I wish I was better at it. I am so susceptible to the puzzles. I got an itch to deliver something I know is needed at 4pm yesterday. Thought I had it 95% licked by 5pm. But then it turns out the very last step has something devilishly complex.

It’s not an issue of understanding the data or what needs to be done. Instead, I’m in a complex area of code we all desperately know needs to be refactored. I now can choose to spend days in a fraught rewrite, abandon this effort for later, or spend hours making tiny tweaks to find the exact right incantation to pile on more technical debt but get it working.

The problem is I’m a dog with a bone. I thought about it most of the night. I will end up working on it at least a little this weekend. As a quick win, totally worth it. As an all encompassing energy suck— probably not.

Yesterday, after putting away my laundry, Elsa asked me “Did the stain come out?”

I replied, “What stain?” She sighed.

“Last weekend, when I wore your shirt, you were upset because I got some grease on it and you were worried the stain would it come out. Sometimes I wish I had your brain.” She knew I had completely forgotten about the stain and didn’t even check on it.

Then she saw my far off stare. She realized I was already thinking about something else. She said, “Wait, what’s wrong what are you thinking about?”

And I said, “This thing at work I was convinced I understood, but turns out that there’s something hard there I didn’t realize.”

She smiled and said, “I take it back. You can keep your brain.”

I own almost no individual stocks anymore. But I have a little bit of Apple stock, worth about $5,000 that I’ve had in one of my retirement accounts for a long time. I’ve often thought of selling just to get things simpler, but it always performed well and it was such a small portion of my portfolio it didn’t seem worth it.

I came close last week, but reminded myself that my whole investment philosophy (pretty close to straight Boglehead), is that I don’t know anything everyone else who is investing doesn’t know. And without special information, the trick is pretty much hold and stay the course. If you miss just a few of the best days trying to time the market, you can really harm yourself.

So I thought, sure, I have every reason to think these tariffs are real, the recession is coming, the dollar is weak, Apple’s China market is dead, and things will be bad. But everyone knows that, and everyone sold on that. I don’t know anything new, so I’d just be selling low.

Today, it turns out Apple products will pretty much be entirely exempted from the tariffs. I still think they’ve got no more Chinese market and we’re gonna hit a recession. But I bet I’ll be happy on Monday I didn’t sell all that stock at the bottom.

In the end, it won’t matter. But the unpredictable circumstances just reinforce my belief I know nothing and a recession is inevitable.

I have once again

Read the news

And decided to bury myself back in my code

And now it’s late

And I’m starving.

I’ve owned a MacBook Air for the first time in over a decade since the end of January. I bought an M3 refurbished just before the M4 Airs came out. I needed a laptop for recording my band’s demo. I haven’t had a personal laptop in a while, relying on an iPad on the go and a Mac Mini on my desk (I have a job-issued MacBook Pro, but that lives fully separate from anything personal).

This is my short review.

The M-Series chips really shine, as this MacBook Air is plenty performant for anything I’ve thrown at it, including absolutely fan-less operation of Ableton Live 12, which I’m using routinely with 10-20 tracks, effects/EQs etcs on each of them.

The MacBook Air form factor is remarkable as ever. The 13" is incredibly light and incredibly portable. The keyboard is totally fine, track pad is perfect. I continue to love having Magsafe back. I dislike both Thunderbolt/USB-C ports being on the same side– two is probably enough, but would be better with one on each side of the laptop. Three would be nice, but I haven’t had any occasion where that was necessary.

The most unfortunate thing about the MacBook Air is I’ve spent the last decade using MacBook Pros. And the display on the MacBook Air is noticeably worse. So much so I almost returned the Air– I just have to keep reminding myself what this computer is for. The size, weight, and performance are all perfect for my personal machine, but that screen, especially if it was my only computer or display, is just not what I want.

Still, a refurbished or even slightly on sale MacBook Air feels like a pretty unbeatable value.

Framework laptops are a great idea. I’ve used Linux plenty before and would use it again. Mike Rockwell’s review is a good read, but I was surprised by this:

It doesn’t feel like Apple makes products that are designed for people like me anymore. People who like to tinker and have control over their hardware. People who like to upgrade components in old systems and re-use machines for new projects. People who believe that a computer’s life should span well beyond the manufacturer’s willingness to provide software support.

I’ve owned a Mac of some kind since 2009, and I can’t think of them ever being the right choice for someone who has these needs/requirements. Maybe in an earlier time period, and certainly back when big desktop tower Mac Pros were the norm. But it’s been what, almost 15 years since that was meaningfully the case?

Did Apple change, or did Mike’s requirements change?

This reminds me of all the “software is so much worse” griping and pining for eras like Snow Leopard (once again).

I still find that all the software in my life is more stable and works better while I do more stuff than ever before.

Just goes to show you that we’re not all experiencing the same reality.

The intent for practice today was to do some additional tracking for one of our upcoming demos.

We eventually got there, but started with two long jams that were both great. I wish we had recorded them, which I think approximately every time we play.

I’m either going to have to get a couple of small diaphragm condensers setup for room mics all the time or get some more stands and cables and stuff and just close mic everything with bleed and always hit record.

About four months ago, I wrote about four issues that are completely unambiguous in today’s politics. The US has totally failed on all four, and have introduced some other areas of failure:

• Respecting the sovereignty of other nations and the sanctity of borders.
• Ensure that people, businesses, and other governments can trust your government to keep its promises and contracts.
• Follow the law, and if the law is ambiguous, challenge the law, and if the courts reject your interpretation, respect that interpretation, and if you so choose, seek to change the law.

There are so many other bullet points I could write. But I’m just sitting here, eating my lunch at my desk, super sad.

I had a sinking feeling when I saw The Product Engineer opened with, “You don’t need Product Managers.”

But then the post ended with bullets about a Product Engineer, and it describes what I’ve been doing for the last decade:

As a starting framework, a Product Engineer:

• Has a deep knowledge of how the product is built. If the product is not yet built, they can scribble how it should work on a whiteboard.
• Able to explain to anyone with the motivation to understand how each product feature works. They are likely more knowledgeable regarding certain feature sets in larger products, but their understanding of the complete product is vast.
• Actively use the product and report bugs when they happen upon them.

…

A Product Engineer:

• Uses the product every day and reports bugs aggressively when they find them.
• Intimately knows how the products work and can explain any feature or inner workings to anyone. When they find a gap in their knowledge, they fill it.
• Have a deep understanding of how users perceive their features and how their changes would affect their perception. They can wear the customer mindset.
• Remember the debates around the most complex decisions and why we chose this path.
• Have living breathing code in the product — right now.
• Can effectively argue with anyone on the team regarding the product. Will defer to their team members when the argument is sound, but they will continue to argue until there is product clarity.
• Communicates well in every direction because they’ve developed professional relationships in all those directions.
• Are aggressively curious and willing to learn anything relevant to the design and development of the product, especially when it’s outside of their area of expertise.

So, if you wondered what I do– that’s it, exactly.

Amazing how all the AI amounts to just doing a search for “gay” and finding Enola Gay or “trans” and finding transgenic, and yet, members of the Fascist Party in Congress still thinks Musk and his crew have big beautiful brains and amazing AI. Don’t worry though, our resident “database kernel developer” has already overheated their computer working with 60,000 rows of super secret data from… usaspending.gov.

This would also be so fucking hilarious and sad if it wasn’t actually leading to the destruction of my country, the rules-based world order, and threatening directly the lives of so many people who were already vulnerable.

I was having some trouble today recording anything using my new Keeley Octa Psi on the fuzz side. It’s just hard to make a Muff cut with anything but lead sounds. But then I realized there was a part of one of our songs that we wanted to add some musical feedback.

I charged that sucker up, activated max feedback, shook the hell out of my hand and guitar to get some vibrato and slide action, and added some haunting reverb in post.

Now I can’t hear the song without it.

I’ll have to learn how to replicate it live without taking away from the other part I should be playing at the same time.

I thought the latest ‘Severance’ was an interesting affair, giving backstory to a character seemingly on the road to redemption. No series has wall to wall action episodes and given it’s going to run for another season or two I can’t see why so many hated it.

I agree with Ben.

(This post is spoiler free)

I think last night’s episode, (Sweet Vitriol, season 2, episode 8) was actually quite good. I think the criticism comes from its placement in the season (it’s a big tonal shift from what’s been happening) and from the fact that we’re watching episodes drop weekly. The weekly release schedule is great for Severance– there is for sure a conversation about this show. So much so, I feel like I have to watch it as soon as possible or I risk being spoiled. But some times quality television, like Sweet Vitriol, is just not well-constructed for appointment, edge-of-your-seat viewing. Sweet Vitriol evokes a very specific mood and feeling, and it’s not necessarily what you expect tuning into this season of Severance each week.

I had never heard of Gandhi’s List of Seven Social Sins until Robert posted them:

1. Politics without principles.
2. Wealth without work.
3. Pleasure without conscience.
4. Knowledge without character.
5. Commerce without morality.
6. Science without humanity.
7. Worship without sacrifice.

Apparently, while popularized by Gandhi, they were actually written by Anglican priest, Frederick Donaldson.

Seems like a pretty great list to me, and rather… relevant in these times.

This is a small update for a Now post.

I updated my About page to reflect some changes in the last year, both in my life and with how this site is organized.

I have been slowly (once a week) returning to volleyball after over 6 months away due to injury. My shoulder is still not 100%, even after PT, but at this point, I think the only thing that will make it better is using it without overdoing it. I definitely need to add back in the cardio I have been missing.

Ancestral Worm has a solid set of material and we’re working on recording demos to get out on Bandcamp and book some shows. I’ve been doing some gear swapping that will have to show up on the Uses page once things settle down.

I’m headed to Disneyland for the first time since I was under a year old for a work event later this month and then down to Florida for a funeral/memorial for Elsa’s grandma at the end of the month. Nothing is fully finalized, but the next trip after that is likely going to be Portland/Seattle again, this time with Elsa in tow.

The winter weather this year has been brutal on my mental health, so the fact that next week we’re going to be consistently in the 60s during the day exciting me far more than it probably should.

Oh, and of course, I am trying mightily to find the right balance of staying informed and doomscrolling, since it seems Trump and the GOP are finding no roadblocks to destroying our federal government and accelerating the downfall of my home country. I, like many others, feel powerless to stop it, in the face of having hollered for years that this is exactly what was going to happen. I’ve become less and less mad these days and increasingly just sad, and I know that if nihilism fully creeps in everything will get worse.

I added photos to my list of posts “This Month” at the bottom of each page. I’ve really enjoyed my updated design and the emphasis on long posts. But pretty quickly I had the thought that photo posts deserve the same kind of emphasis. A nice consequence of using the same partial for my Archive page and the “This Month” section of the homepage is photos now show up in my archive list as well.

I took a screenshot of February, since as soon as I make this post the change will no longer be apparently, at least until I post a photo this month.

The final day of February is actually a great indication of how I want the site to work– it was a day of short posts, some of which make more sense read sequentially as I had those thoughts. The full day fits without scrolling and is clear. At the same time, you can see the “anchor” posts in February– those times I had more to say or posted some photos that may still be interesting a few days or weeks later.

I think this redesign has been a success.

Some additional technical notes about this change

I used an emoji to indicate that there’s a photo, but I may switch to using an SVG or similar in the future. We’ll see how it grows on me. I think the fact that emoji styles change on different platforms makes them a bad choice, and I’m not sure the look goes with the fixed-width font I use everywhere.

Photo posts have text along with them– but often not titles– so I chose to render:

1

📸:  {{ .Summary | truncate 280 }}

The thought is I don’t want long content, so limit them to the canonical “tweet” length. I may adjust that over time.

I also have precedence– if the photo post has a title, it does not have the emoji right now and just the title shows up. I might change that, I’m not sure. It’d be fairly easy to show the title and photo, but I think this is kind of rare and this new design fits better the expectations of photo posts that are syndicated elsewhere– picture plus short comment, not title + photo + comment. Plus, posts that happen to have photos but are titled are more likely to be true “macro” posts anyway.

My category for pictures is photoblogging, and it’s set using a Micro.blog category filter for any post containing jpeg or jpg. So screenshots, like the png in this post, are not included.

A few weeks ago, someone asked what DOGE was doing to the reputation of USDS and 18F among folks who work in tech. I replied, and then posted this:

One small way 18F and USDS are no longer a place of aspiration. It’s no longer an exciting place to improve basic government functioning that’s earned independence through success.

Ethan Marcotte’s now widely read post about resigning from 18F is just heartbreaking. I especially appreciated this succinct description of what government actually does:

In government, that infrastructure is built by laws, policies, and regulations. But regulations alone do not infrastructure make. Regulations require workers to become infrastructure: those workers who labor to understand new policies, how best to enact them, and then work to make them legible and understandable to the American public — and, yes, to enforce them. Without those federal workers, and their labor, these systems fall apart. And the architects of this assault on the federal workforce are keenly aware of that fact.

The administration is not working on efficiency or effectiveness of government. They are working on crushing it.

I booked my annual checkup 6 months in advance. I asked to be on the waitlist, because generally that gets me in a couple of months early.

Yesterday I get offered a slot for tomorrow, 6 weeks early. So I grab it. Today they call and say that’s a mistake, but someone already took my original appointment.

The earliest they can book me now?

June.

I’m not in dire need of care, but I do have some expiring prescriptions that I’d like to talk to a doctor about and blood work that really should be done annually. This sucks.