Falling Standards

A summary of how things are going: I have worked from home now for over four years. And yet it was the closing week of April 2020 where I ordered enough tracksuit bottoms to last a week, because I cannot be bothered to dress properly any more. Standards have fallen, people. Also, how come March felt like one thousand years instead of a month and yet April has flown by so quickly?

Slowly trying to thin down my web presence this week by backing up a hosted server I rent that…hasn’t been doing anything of note for at least two years now. I really want to convert this blog to just being served from an S3 bucket, but given that the current set up has been running on Dreamhost for…18 years, well, let’s just say that there’s some inertia there. Also, this blog will be old enough to drink come August (though not in its jurisdiction). That’s absolutely terrifying. It also means that it’s been the same amount of time since I went to UNC. Ah, halcyon days.

Meanwhile, from what is apparently the Cincinnati 2020 reboot of Keeping Up Appearances, let me tell you how I met the ex-mayor of Cincinnati. It’s Friday evening, and I’m celebrating the end of the week with a drink. It’s a slightly larger than usual drink because it was the end of the bottle. There I am, downstairs in the basement watching an episode of The Sweeney whilst also reading the instructions for a GPU-accelerated dense vector search library. Yeah, I know you’re jealous; it’s a wild Friday night and no mistake. Anyway, having finished the bottle of Wild Turkey, of course the doorbell rings. Running up the stairs, slightly drunk, pulling off a sock as I go¹, I open the door and, yes, well there’s the former mayor, coincidentally my neighbour with a package in hand. Now, despite it also being the two-year anniversary of me moving to the area…I have never actually met him before. So he’s introducing himself, and I go to shake his hand.

“Oh no, I don’t think we do that any more”

I snap back, making it very clear I’ve been drinking, apologising and basically expecting a Miranda-like situation where I lose my trousers is coming any moment. On the bright side, I have now met both sets of neighbours! But I can never speak to one set ever again. I guess I’m thankful it’s not the set that I’m helping to take down a tree in the summer?