12/15 J in severe pain, brought to a hospital here in Newburgh in an ambulance. Spent the day in the ER. Meaningless beeps from machines nobody cares to turn off. That’s not to say they don’t have excellent processes here, which they do. A command center with patients on stretchers between the battle stations. Routine, calmness and fatigue of the staff.

It appears remarkable to me that, whatever may have happened to J, there would have been a path to deal with it. Including a helicopter to a more capable hospital. But that may just be me being naive.

We are in that territory where you say it’s going to be alright even though you don’t know if it’s going to be alright. Where you put your hand on her forehead because she told you it’s what she likes and it helps a little, while you look around in the ER to see if there’s anyone you could ask for something, you’re clearly panicked, but you don’t know the processes and you assume everyone is doing as much as they can and within the assigned priorities and you just look around for help knowing that you already have all the help that’s available.

J hums christmas songs to bear the pain.

After some imaging, an intravenous drug is what makes the pain vanish and beckons paradise. There is nothing else to be done.

12/14 In a random social situation, it is more likely than not that I will not function. Wonder why it would have taken me decades to just accept that and not try to act against it.

12/13 I want to practice everything all at once.

12/12 I guess I’ll start looking into requesting a mail ballot for Germany. Several funny things: It seems you can make the request either on a form which you print, scan or photograph and submit via email, or without a form, simply in an email in which you provide the necessary information.

In Berlin there’s also an online service for requesting a mail ballot. If you go to that page, it says in a pretty minuscule font that this service is no longer available. Without a date. I am pretty certain that this page has been there since the election of the European Parliament earlier this dyear, and that the service is NOT YET available for the German Parliament election, which is still more than two months out.

So I guess I’ll fill in the form, print it, sign it, and scan it back in.

Or maybe I should wait a little with that. Because the form doesn’t say in any way what election it’s for. And by the time they’ll actually print the mail ballots, the form may get have gotten misplaced somewhere.

12/11 Piano recordings, including all the usual errors: forgot to arm the track for recording, and played 20 minutes of wonderful music, only to find it is gone forever.

12/10 That moment when what you called growth becomes so ordinary that it can no longer be called growth, just grinding.

12/9 Manhunt for the shooter from last week ended. Eyes glued to the news. There is so much ritual in this, so many instincts served.

12/8 Mounted a curtain runner to the ceiling in J’s girl cave. Four-hour job. Not easy because the stud scanner gave no consistent readings through the plaster ceiling at all. Turned out better and more solid than anticipated.

12/7 I should add that after having been a few hours into the problem, waking up at 4am, endlessly pacing up and down, realizing that this was gonna be a hard but fun one, it occurred to me that I should probably ask ChatGPT to do it for me – not because I wanted it to, but out of honesty and facing reality. I had already asked it to explain the algorithm to me, and it had done the best job of it that I could find anywhere, including Google and Wikipedia. And when I asked it to build the solution it responded without missing a beat, cranking out the code. It didn’t come close to being correct though. A pretty naive approach to begin with. And when I told it what was wrong, it eagerly acknowledged my correction and cranked out another solution that was only worse.

12/6 Most intense programming day in years. So exhausted, so proud of the solution, even though, once you finally realize what you need to do, it isn’t all that complex anymore, and just about every halfway decent programmer should be able to do it.