As you might recall, my son Isaac was born a couple of years ago. This was obviously an occasion for joy and family happiness (and an end to regular sleep) — but beyond that, it was the beginning of a capitalist glut, a massive influx of new Stuff. So, uh, I figured I'd write about that in case any of my readers ever have a kid and want to know about various baby support items.

In general, we had a few constraints:

• our house is relatively small (~1200sqft) and has little storage
• when we were making most of these decisions, my …

Hello dear readers! Like most of you (and as I've written about before), I've been stuck working from home for the last year and a half, out of the little converted covered porch on my house. For the last six months or so, I've been doing so with my butt firmly planted on an HON Basyx pleather-upholstered office chair that I rescued from my office when we moved out. This chair is, uh, not in the best condition¹:

This chair actually originally belonged to Curse, a now-defunct company that made some kind of WoW fansite. They used to be …

Hello hypothetical readers; sorry for my absence, but I've spent the last weeks pretty well busy – as I foreshadowed in May, I have a son now!

It's been quite an adjustment. Isaac was born on August 7, 2020 after a very long¹ labor, but he's happy and healthy now. I got 3 weeks off of work, which I spent with my wife doing intensive child care. Let me tell you, I have a whole new respect for single parents. Caring for an infant with just the two of us (since none of our families or friends can visit or …

PSA for folks in the Bay Area: The University of California Botanical Garden has re-opened for limited, outdoor-only visits. Seems like a nice (and reasonably) safe place to go during the pandemic. It's July, so not much is in bloom, but it's still beautiful.

Hey, so, it's been a while since I posted. I guess I just wanted to post and update. Let's see… what has happened since February 2020....

Family

Yeah, so, we're having a baby. If you didn't see that on other social media already. He's¹ due at the end of July².

Lockdown

As you and everyone else knows, the world has been in lockdown since March due to the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19. My company sent us all on mandatory work-from-home on March 12th and I haven't been across the bridge into San Francisco since. Working from home …

After more than 10 years of avoiding it, I've finally rejoined the ranks of the private-car-owning bourgeois. $SPOUSE and I spent the past few weeks doing research and reading reviews, spent Saturday and Sunday test-driving a bunch of vehicles, and ended up buying a brand new Cosmic Blue¹ 2020 Honda Insight yesterday afternoon.