One of those days...

It is 12:12 AM and I'm sitting in the living room. I went to bed at about 7 last night because I suddenly felt extremely tired and bad.

By the time I got into bed and was ready to rest, I was FREEZING. We have a sheet, a blanket we use when it's a little chilly, and a quilt we usually turn down but will use it when it's truly cold out. I was wrapped up in all three, had on my sleep cap, and I was still shivering. 

I slept four hours, restlessly. Every time I woke up, it was like I was fighting a battle that was a mixture between Ready Player One's egg hunt on the OASIS, paper.io 2, speaking Spanish, whatever is going on in Andor right now, and fighting whatever I was trying to fight off. 

James came to bed around midnight, and I had stopped being chilly. I got up to use the restroom and could tell that my body was on fire. James took my temperature and it was only 101.4, so that's good. 

I decided to get up for a while and sit on the couch until I'm sleepy again (I'm very tired, but not in the sleep zone).

This is one of those times that if I had insurance, I'd probably head off to the quick care clinic tomorrow. Instead, I have an appointment coming up later this week with my primary care physician for my annual physical and I'll just talk to her about it.

The biggest problem here is that I've never been a hypochondriac, but now that I've had cancer growing in my body once (and I got so so lucky with that; truly, I hesitate to tell anyone in the real world that I "had" cancer; it doesn't feel respectful enough of people who have the kinds of cancer that require protracted and devastating treatment), when I feel suddenly very bad, my brain does go there.

When we had insurance, I definitely realized how fortunate we were. I knew then and I'm really feeling it now that peace of mind is only for the moneyed and the rest of us have to hope for the best and try not to go bankrupt. 

Having worked din property management, I understand that medical debt doesn't haunt people like consumer debt, but it's still not great to know that you have thousands of dollars outstanding, and so you have to made decisions about whether you can stay in your apartment for two more months, or whether you want the collection agency to stop bothering you.

For now, I'm going to enjoy my ginger ale, do some word puzzles, and then try to go back to sleep. Wish me luck!

Do I know Spanish?

In August, I'll have been using Duolingo for 3 years.

James will hit 4 years at the end of this month. He started studying Spanish in June 2021. I decided to go with French at first, just because that's what I studied in high school and college and I figured having some momentum from the get-go would keep me motivated.

We planned a trip to Montreal, which we took in spring 2023, and after we got home from that, I switched over to Spanish, too.

Living in Texas (and, really, anywhere in the US), this is a much more practical language. I wish I'd studied it in high school rather than French, but I think French seemed so much more romantic.

In terms of practicality, ASL would have been the most useful to me, but I shudder to think how it would have been taught, especially given how I was taught French in high school. I had to take remedial French for a semester in college, because I was functionally starting fresh. Sigh.

Now that I've been studying Spanish in Duolingo for a couple of years, I've attained a score that indicates I should be able to have basic conversations in Spanish.. but I don't feel like that's the case at all.

We're planning to visit Mexico next year, and I've started listening to an immersion Spanish podcast to see if I can gain some confidence in this regard.

What I think is happening is this: I am really good at taking tests. I can usually do pretty well in challenges and stuff, but that doesn't always translate to learning with me. I have surpassed James's "XP" within the game, and I'm further along than he is. But I'm 100% sure that he's better at actually speaking Spanish than I am.

This is a part of my personality that I wish I could turn off. I'm trying to stay focused and learn to learn, but sometimes the "gamification" here is counterproductive to why I'm actually on the app: to learn a language.

AI isn't good at human stuff like storytelling, art, or... admitting it doesn't know

I avoid using AI, but for some reason there's now always an AI summary at the top of Google search results. If you want not to have that, you can add a curse word in your search, and AI will not deign to respond.

Although it wastes so much energy and water to process AI stuff, I did try something this morning that made me roll my eyes.

Someone posted a video of search queries that were nonsense, and how AI attempted to answer them. So I typed something and got this response:

Dude... just say, "I have literally no idea. I've never heard of this and I have access to all of the information in the world.

I'm not anti-AI. I think it's great in applications that help people have more access to things, like helping blind people figure out which can is peach slices and which can is cannellini beans; taking a first run at captions for Deaf and hard-of-hearing; looking at medical imaging in conjunction with an experienced radiologist, etc. 

What it can't do is tell an original story, or make a true comment about the human condition. It steals from creators and produces a less good version of anything that a person could do.

Mal had a good time for a while giving prompts to an AI-generator for images... I hated that because I knew how wasteful it was. But he was able to work through the fun of that and stop after the novelty wore off. He learned how bad AI is at understand what people are actually saying, and how poorly it repackages the stuff it steals from.

I guess you could say that my feelings about AI are like screaming into an onion.

Cool Miners

Mal and two of his homeschool friends have an online "club" called Cool Miners.

Cool Miners cerca 2023

Caleb moved to the Pacific Northwest last year, and Kona lives close enough that we can almost see her house from our house except for one hill and a bunch of trees.

Today, I had an errand to run and Mal was going to go with me, but he ended up being on a call with his fellow Cool Miners, so he elected to stay home.

He just got off of the call, which lasted about three hours. 

It reminded me of when I was about Mal's age and my dad was the president (or some "cabinet" position)  of the local Chamber of Commerce. This was before we could afford call waiting, so my sister and I had a 15 minute limit on phone calls, in case urgent business from the CoC needed to come through. 

I'm glad Mal has made a few groups of close friends here in the homeschool community. We moved when D was about his age, and that middle school time is a difficult one to break into a whole new social scene.

I mentioned our "field trip" yesterday where Mal got to hang out with his one-day-a-week school friends, including a friend he made who no longer goes to the school on Wednesdays, so Mal rarely gets to see them anymore. 

And Mal has his post-church friend who's been meeting him almost every Sunday for the past maybe 3 years. 

It's fun to see my younger kid coming into his own, and figure out who he is outside of us. 

Quick Photography Lesson

Mal and I went to Zilker Botanical Gardens today to tour their annual Woodland Faerie Gardens.

While we were there, I took a picture of him among some of the blooming flowers. It was cute, but I didn't think it did justice to what my eyes were seeing. This is that picture.

It's fine. He's a cutie! But also, it didn't reflect how we were absolutely swallowed by greenery everywhere were walked.

Then I remembered a photo trick I read about last year and used quite a bit on our California trip: Move back and zoom in.

I stepped back about 7 paces and zoomed in. Mal didn't move. Nothing else changed. Just moving back and zooming in, which brings the background closer in the frame.

Here's the second picture.

Oh yes, indeedy, you'd better believe it. 

What's one little drive train among friends, really?

Remember how we had our dishwasher unclogged right before we went to Louisiana? It's clogged again and making the absolute worst metallic-sounding noise. The same guy is coming out to look at it this evening. Maybe. I'm getting "ghost" vibes from them, so we'll see.

Furthermore, one of our cars has been running rough... I guess; I don't drive it, but going by D's description, the mechanic said, "It sounds like it could be the drive train." Perfect. They have the car so I get to take D to work the next few mornings. I'm up, anyway, but I don't usually have to drive in morning traffic so that will be a fun time.

You know how they say that youth is wasted on the young? Well, I guess you could say that money is wasted on the old, but you won't have to worry about that with us! We're spending our retirement savings on near-constant break-downs. 

Everybody's Working... (except for James)

As I mentioned in the last post, it's not officially been a year since James got laid off. (And now it's been a year since I had parathyroid and thyroid surgery!)

Actually, right this moment, everyone else in the house is working at least a little bit!

D's been working retail coming up on 2 years. They work D A LOT for a "part time" employee, and I have all sorts of opinions about that (like that D deserves full benefits, a raise, and hours lumped together instead of 4 hours every day of the week) but it's not my job or my business. I'm just proud of D for sticking it out at as long as they have! I don't think I ever stayed at a job for 2 years until I started working for Terra West as a divorced lady.

I've been doing mystery shops, some in-person research stuff, and online surveys. We couldn't live on it, but it's something to do for "fun" money every now and then.

Even Mal is chipping in! He did one online survey video call thing about a year ago, he did a mystery shop with me a few months ago, and he just got off of a call here he commented on some educational products that are under development. 

I don't think I posted this before, but here's what I got out of the mystery shop he helped me do:

He got $20 and I got a free photo that people pay a minimum of $200 for! Win/win.

In the meantime, the money James earned and saved is getting us through this. I hope he feels a little of the pressure off of him from our input. 

Now I have to go transfer some money into Mal's account to pay for the discussion he just completed!