Quarantine Day 89. Well, putting together my last journal entry took a lot longer than expected. After that one-day trip, I knew I needed to post something. But after sitting on it for a few days, I really didn’t know what. It wasn’t the worst writer’s block; I just wasn’t satisfied with anything I wrote.
In the end, I thought: hey, I should just put up a bunch of photos. They tell the whole story. No words could really justify how majestic (and challenging) the whole trip was, anyway.
Compared to my last most-photo-rich post, this one was on a different level. And I f’ing love it.
Which brings us to today. Because I’ve spent so much damn time putting together that post, I’ve been neglecting every day of this week.
Given the adventure of the weekend, this week’s been pretty non-eventful. Here were some highlights.
Monday, June 8th
The movies nominated for this movie night were… (1) Good Morning Vietnam, (2) Dr. Strangelove, (3) Weathering with You, (4) The Secret World of Arrietty, and (5) Hackers. With a one-vote margin, Good Morning Vietnam won.
Out of all the movies we’ve watched so far (Solo, Knives Out, JSA: Joint Security Area, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and Chef), this was our first “old” movie — where I’d define “old” as being released before I was born.
Overall, I enjoyed it, but, for a comedy-drama, I think the humor kind of fell flat. Not that it’s the movie or Robin William’s fault — I think both executed fantastically — it’s just… humor from a different time. Basically, I think the plot aged well, the characters were interesting, and it’s still hard to believe Williams’ incredible ability to improvise — but ultimately, it’s still an old movie.
Tuesday, June 9th
In addition to Movie Night, I now have another Game Night. This makes 3: one on Saturday (sometimes Sunday), one on Sunday night, and now one on Tuesday night!
Interestingly, the character of each group could not be more different. Out of these three, my Tuesday group is by far the most sophisticated in terms of what board games to play, prior experience, and enthusiasm for picking up new games (even ones requiring hours to play).
As usual, Christie organized this one, and for this inaugural Game Night, we had her, Pat, her former colleague Sid, and me. We played King of Tokyo, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Coup, and Qwirkle.
The haunt that we did decide to play was #13: Perchance to Dream.
In both haunts, the manual chose Pat to be the antagonist. The outcome? The heroes managed to win this time. 🙂
Wednesday, June 10th
I just wrote that I have 3 game night slash weekly hangouts, but in fact, I have 4. I have one on Wednesday too. I attended this week’s but, but I think this week was conversation only.
I told the group about my hike around Castle Peak, which led to chatter about going on a group hike. Kristen’s never been to Yosemite, so we planned some logistics around going to Half Dome sometime within the next couple months. This’ll be my second time. I’m pretty excited about it — I hope it works out!
Thursday, June 11th
I spent almost this entire day working. On Strava, I wrote “supposed to be a vert day today. took longer than expected to get some code to work.” I started the run at 10:48PM, way later than I wanted.
That said, most of the work was implementing a model based on attention and transformers. Despite working in the field for some time now, I still feel like there’s widening gap between what I know and what I should know. I was glad to spend time trying to fill that gap this day.
Friday, June 12th
Lots of meetings today. No run. Meh. Not particularly memorable.
Saturday, June 13th and Sunday, June 14th
And the same for weekend. Even though I knew I should go run, I didn’t. In the end, I walked to San Pablo Park yesterday (Saturday), sat on a picnic table to read Running With Sherman, took a nap, checked out Eugene Tssui’s Fish House, then went home.
On Strava, I said: “Couldn’t convince myself to run today, despite such nice weather. Compromise was to walk to the park, read, and take an afternoon nap. Often, the hardest part is just getting started. That’s been me lately. Unbelievably unmotivated today to do _anything_ except eat, eat, eat…”
