F1 2021, Co-Op, S02, R05, Canada

Wow, it's been two weeks since I've published anything here! Time really does fly. With all the changes happening, maybe I should provide an update:

Kat had her Ph.D. defense toward the end of last month. Her parents and sister (and their SOs) and her grandma made the trip, and my parents did too. That made...11 people here for a couple days. Lots and lots of meals out. Lots and lots of money spent. We all had a good time, though.

She also had her commencement (i.e. walk) date two weeks after that, on the first Friday of the month. Her mom showed up for that. More meals out, more money spent, and one nasty trip back to the house after the occasion through one of the harder rains I've seen in this state (and the first one I had to walk through). Only one graduate made a scene about the IU grad student strike.

Meanwhile, she'd already accepted an offer on a job at the University of Houston. I think she accepted it back in March or so. Which means we're moving. Which means we have to pack all our shit up. Which is thrilling. We've been putting it off, mostly, because of family visits and because who wants to live in a bare townhouse for a month or two? But now we're down to the last couple weeks or so, and the U-Haul box order showed up yesterday...so my hope is that I can get motivated enough to pack up the books and lots of other non-essentials this weekend.

With our families visiting in April, they both brought us some boxes of our stuff. My pile was far larger, and I didn't have the heart to tell Kat that it was probably only 1/4 of my stuff (or thereabouts). Kat's includes some kitchen wares (I think that belonged to her grandma before she moved in with Kat's mom), yearbooks and some dance/baton stuff from her childhood (including two VHS tapes of performances from '95 and '01). I got a bunch of books and some old VHS tapes of my own, as well as my baseball card collection, coin collection and my old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So I've had a fair amount of time taken up by going through my own stuff and finding items I don't care for.

I also spent some time and money tracking down a VCR--which are getting expensive, let me tell you--so I could check the contents of the tapes and "rip" Kat's tapes to digital format. Lots of work, that all was. But kind of nice to hear the old whirring of a VCR (which I called a "VHS player" once maybe 5-10 years ago and have been careful not to do again, although I can't forget making that mistake and it occurs to me every time I see a tape at Half Price Books or Goodwill). 

Small note for my own posterity: I still had a copy of one of Grandpa DeRooy's Sonics tapes (WCF against the Jazz in '96, Game 7). The tape still played just fine and the game was still good, but the tape also contained the ending of a broadcast of Inn of the Sixth Happiness. I just thought that was funny.

Anyway, this also means that we need a new place to live. We spent a bit of time looking for places around Madison, WI, as far back as last fall, because we thought that's where we were headed. Nowadays we're more aware of the destination, of course, but the market is rough for us poor people. Buying a house that we'll only be living in for maybe two or three years seems like a risky proposition, especially given the possibility that the housing bubble bursts while we're there. 

So we're looking for rentals, but I want a third bedroom (so we can have separate offices and/or I can have a man-cave of sorts, and I want a garage that we can park in and that I can do some carpentry in (instead of wheeling out my collapsible workbench to the patio along with whatever tools I need every time). Long story short, there are a ton of places going on the market because we're into summer, but they're all getting snatched up before we even have a chance to see them (Kat's going to fly out there for a day or two).

On my front, my employer told me they wouldn't allow me to keep my job if I wasn't within an hour of the building. Which makes sense, since I've had to go in to the office all of six times since we got sent home at the end of March 2020. Two of those occasions were to stuff envelopes, something that anyone could do, including the company that prints the letters we end up stuffing. The other four times was to have an in-office day, where I did the same thing I do at home but with the added benefit of 40 minutes of drive time and increased exposure to COVID, gas costs, more noise, etc.

I've been applying for remote jobs, including a few within Cook, all of which I've heard nothing about (except for GE, who was at least nice enough to tell me they weren't choosing me--way to go GE!). But as the last couple weeks wind down, it looks like I might need to either take an in-person job somewhere or will have to at least wait until we've moved to get something new.

You didn't come here to read that, surely! So let's move on to Canada.

Well now! That's a first pole position. At a short track, the gap back to me was huge (.65ish here is more like a second at the longer tracks). After 20 years of friendship, I'm starting to think I'll never figure out the secret of his speed around here.

The race was a bigtime disappointment for him, I'm sure, but 5th wasn't a bad day by any means. Further back, I managed to hold onto my single point grid position.

The real cause of Brett's problems was, I'm sure, the rain that we had most of the way. He didn't have any time to pull out a lead of much size, didn't manage to do it anyway (race pace has always been more of a problem than the single-lap variety for Brett). But he was able to lock in the fast lap of the race before it got wet, so that counts for a lot.

Laps run during the transition to light rain is a real problem, as the AI adapts seamlessly as the brake distances and cornering speeds change, but Brett and I (and most humans, I'm sure) take a moment to adapt. That moment is something we don't really have in a race situation. Anyway...Brett managed to run fifth with me sixth most of the second half of the race, with most of the rest of the field slowly tightening the noose. At the end I appear to have thrown away a couple places, and I evidently had a time penalty that cost me a couple more.