10th July 2022 - Life ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ So it has been a while since I wrote something on my phlog. Life can get in the way or moments of desire to write disappear before something can be produced. The Good ~~~~~~~~ A beaver camp and a scout camp. Got to learn why I prefer the older ones. The beavers struggled to fall asleep until 0430 and then woke up at 0520. Yes you read that right. On the otherhand, the scouts were quiet enough by 2330 and had to be woken up at 0800. Ideal! Both camps were great fun for different reasons and seemed successful. Khruangbin concert. I went to see Khruangbin in Birmingham. It was simply fantastic. Khruangbin are a 3 piece band who play a fairly unique sound which is essentially 'world music' inspired chill out rock. They were fabulous and had an amazing light set up. They are worth catching live. There were moments where they started playing one of their songs then descended into a montage of classic rock tunes or even 90s house music. It was brilliant and showed just how talented they are as artists. Dog sitting. I had the pleasure of looking after my parent's dogs over night. My parents were attending a 40th Anniversary of the Falklands War event at the National Memorial Arboretum. It was nice looking after them. First cricket match. I went to my first cricket match finally. When I saw it was a whole �10 then I thought why not. It was to see the Birmingham Bears against the Hampshire Hawks at Edgbaston. It was a lovely way to spend a summer evening to be honest. The action in T20 is just enough to keep you interested without being overwhelming. Sadly the bears lost rather quickly. I might even be tempted to buy a season ticket for next year's T20 and The Hundred matches. Nagoya basho started today! We have grounds for some interesting sumo. Key info is 2 ozeki being at risk of kadoban (yet again), whether anyone will start an ozeki run and whether Terunofuji's knees will last another basho. Yesterday was tanabata where people write their wishes down. The rikishi's wishes tend to be shared. It was rather telling that Terunofuki's was "Please let me get through the 15 days safely." I managed to write some scout training compliance checks as scripts. What used to take about an hour using Excel macros and a fair bit of manual processing now takes 15 minutes. I still have to manually download the reports from the Scouts record system and have to manually send the emails for each district with their compliance data. However, the filtering of data, creating reports and sticking them together district specific zip files is all automated via python. It was a fun challege to solve and makes my life easier as the digital support bod. Next steps are to automatically send e-mails to those in the reports. The Bad ~~~~~~~ See beaver camp lack of sleep! My grandparents are having to move for the first time in 71 years. Sadly my Grandad has been struggle greatly since having multiple strokes earlier this year and then my Grandma has been stuggling too. Both got covid in June which knocked them for 10. That seemed to help them finally decide to go into a home. Thankfully the home is still local. I think it will be a good move for my Grandma for when my Grandad hopefully dies. Sounds harsh but he has no quality of life now. He hasn't for a while and openly wants to go. His is a case where euthanasia should be an option really. That or letting him go with covid would have been in his best interests. On my last visit, I had the surreal experience of celebrating his having a poo for the first time in several weeks. Poor sod. Work communcication. I was in the office last Monday and was told over lunch about some new thing I was meant to be working on. Turns out I was meant to have been briefed the week before and starting on that new task right away. Always great when these things are communicated on time. Task wise, it is a good one so I am not too annoyed. The task is to re-investigate the architecture for the hardware of a jet engine control system in some 3 months so we can discuss joint development with some other companies. Nice to be asked but not nice to find out late. Usual nonsense really. Also it meant I had to start another 3 days of PI planning after having done some days previously. The Ugly ~~~~~~~~ I woke up last Friday with a sore throat. Did a test, no covid. Yesterday I woke up and felt like crap. Definitely covid. I suppose it had to happen after 2 years of not getting it. The Saturday evening was terrible. I was in full fever mode. I couldn't wear my glasses, was confused, struggled to stand, going hot and cold, aching and tingling. I was tingling so much it was terrible. Sort of getting goosebumps permanently. Today, I just have the hot/cold thing which is better. Lungs are heavy but not choking which I am thankful of. I also still have taste and smell. Hopefully things sort out soon.