Health
Nothing happened this week except dealing with my health. I came back from the wedding late Sunday night with a mild headache but fully prepared to just take a light day until I woke up with a terrible fever.
The fever lasted 4 days and oscillated between 99 and 102. By day 5, I was so fatigued, I napped for 6 hours, went out to meet a friend for an hour (cabin fever!), and immediately came back home to pass out again.
It was a bad week.
All the lying down also made my body HURT. I took an hour to really slowly and methodically do a stretch routine that ordinarily takes me 10ish minutes on Thursday morning, and it really helped.
Life
There was some good stuff.
- Mum came by with lots of food.
- Friends checked in and regularly asked for updates on temperature and status, which I appreciated (even if they called and interrupted me from sleep haha)
- Two different friends came by braving fear of contagion (and sick person smells) and put me to bed. Shout out especially to A who stayed over with me that first night when my fever peaked at 102.6 and I was a tired mess. It’s hard to sleep when you’ve already slept for 12 hours that day, and these heroes helped deal with that.
What do you do, when you’re sick and unable to brain at all? I used to drown in narrative but for the first time in I don’t know how long, narrative felt too heavy. I mostly got a lot of shopping for the house done. I knew what I wanted, it was just the administrative task of add to cart, coordinate pick up, etc.
I came home from the wedding to a house that felt empty and immediately fell sick. The only thing that really bought me solace was how much the babies crowded around me during this time. I had declared the master bedroom a cat-free zone, but... I was suffering and it felt like dealing with my allergies would be preferable to feeling empty and alone (and having to hear them cry outside my door). I’m going to regret this. I tried shutting them out again for an hour today and they absolutely lost it. But that’s a problem for later Tanvi. This week Tanvi is glad she had 4 hot water bottles instead of one to help with the chills.
I was just about well enough to make it to IndieWebClub 9, and Unmana discussing Chikkamma Tours at Atta Galatta.
Media Diet
Around the web
- I succumbed and got a subscription to Gergely Orosz’s Pragmatic Engineer newsletter. I have been doing a lot of work that could be considered “AI Engineering” over the last few months, so it made sense - esp if I’m going further down the stack.
- I discovered Seema Hegde’s weeknotes (via) - this one is special to me because Sirsi - the district Seema lives in - is also where my grandma grew up. I spent some time with family there earlier this year and it’s nice to be able to experience the slow life and landscape from a different (yet same) point of view. I’ll admit, I was getting a little cynical, associating all of these beautiful places with bigotry because that’s what I’ve been dealing with/seeing. But reading Seema’s blog reminded me that there’s more.
- Akila responded to my weeknote from two weeks ago with “????”. I know some of my audience is technical but not a lot, and I always assumed y’all just skip the “work” section from these things. I think maybe that’s what I would do if I was reading the weeknights of someone working in a very theoretical academic field? But Akila is very curious, and she captures the feeling of outgroup that happens from not knowing the right words super well. I feel this way all the time even in technical groups (if people are talking about machine learning model tuning, or about infrastructure details, or) and I think one’s response to that feeling determines their eventual ability to integrate the unknown thing into their lives.