Month: November 2018

Whill-CI initial impressions

Posted on by Liz

I took the Whill-CI to do some errands today. Here are my first impressions.

Driving with a joystick is getting easier. I still have the (wrong) impulse to push harder to go faster.

Definitely enjoying the extra speed and the comfortable seating.

The wobbly wheel feeling is still there. It seems to be the way the front wheels sometimes hit a sidewalk crack (one in parallel to the wheels, not the ones perpendicular). Small changes in slope also make a big difference in pulling the front wheels in one direction or the other.

Notching down the speed when going through a doorway or when in line worked OK for me. Opening doors is harder than it is in the TravelScoot, and I’m wider, so there’s less room for error. Definitely appreciated door-opening buttons today (automatic door at Walgreens, door button at Pinhole Coffee)

I am seated lower down than on the travelscoot, and can’t reach most payment systems in shops and cafes.

People look past me more, not even glancing up, like they are embarrassed. They cut in front of me in line automatically and try to push past me in a situation where they could have gone a different way, said excuse me, or expected a standing person to move aside. That’s not new, but it seemed worse today. It may be partly from the height difference.

I feel a bit odd not having something in front of me, curiously vulnerable.

But cool, at the same time, from my extra speed and my casual leaning back posture.

I do miss the unicorn horn and my decorations on the TravelScoot. Thinking now about how to decorate the CI to be a little sillier. Not quite ready to plaster it with random stickers…

Backpack straps work pretty well. It is a little harder to shop and put things in a bag when I don’t have front handlebars to hang a bag on. The under-seat basket is too rattly and loud for everyday use, so I took it off. I may try to get someone to make a canvas one.

I went to the dispensary, where the bouncer complimented my wheels; Walgreens to pick up stuff at the pharmacy; a cafe to have a pastry and coffee and work a bit (pulling up the arms of the chair to sit at the table, as they do so neatly in the promotional videos!), and up a long steep hill to Pinhole to pick up some ground decaf and the butcher shop for fish for tonight and turkey for the holiday. No complaints on the hill so far.

However… I do have a complaint. I did not magically materialize on a yacht and then go for a picnic with an elfin sweater-wearing lady carrying a bottle of wine at the Palace of Fine Arts. Where’s my damn yacht — instead I just got elbowed in the face in line at the drugstore as usual! hahahah! classy!

Tomorrow I’ll try riding the J train (which should be not too crowded), going to a different cafe to work and have lunch with friends. Wednesday I may try the bus. (The bus feels daunting so I want more practice before trying to maneuver in such a tight space where other people can be very tense about it.)

I went about a mile and a half total — the battery went from 97% to 87%.

Messing around with Habitica

Posted on by Liz

I tried Habitica some years ago but did not get into it. This week I gave it another try – now I love it! It’s a to-do list or checklist app where setting tasks and checking them off also levels you up in a weird little role-playing game. After three days I’m a level 3 warrior wearing a very strange purple helmet and attempting to hatch a wolf egg. Yes, I am susceptible to gamification of damn near anything!

I normally keep my to-do list in Remember The Milk, not always well tagged, but with some tasks scheduled, and many more in an enormous backlog sorted by creative or domestic projects. The scheduled tasks often slip. I’ll postpone them for a day or a week. Calling to schedule a dentist appointment has slipped a week for oh…. so many months now. Somehow I never get to that one.

I tried recently to add some new habit formation into RTM, so that I would get up and stretch more often, or meditate for 5 minutes. This hasn’t worked out super well. These small tasks clutter up my main list.

Enter Habitica! It sorts items into habits, dailies, and to-do. Each item can get tagged but also gets a difficulty ranking: trivial, easy, medium, or hard.

It has a column for habits (which you can do several times a day, with a plus or minus for positive or negative rating). Now, stretching, doing tai chi, triaging a few bugs here and there, or scooping the cat box don’t clutter up my more complicated to-do lists. I am ridiculously motivated to glance over the Habits list to see if there’s anything quick I can do to level up my character a tiny bit.

There are also Daily Habits, which I’m approaching more cautiously. I don’t want to overcommit in this area.

The main to-do list is for one-time or rare tasks, and has more scope for complexity. You can add smaller checklist items to make gradual progress on multi-part tasks.

So far, I’m only starting to explore the game mechanics. I’ve joined a party where we battle monsters by doing stuff on our lists. At some point you can use in-game coins (earned by leveling up) to equip your avatar with useful equipment for battle. It’s silly and fun.

The useful stuff so far: I have settled into doing the Habits and Dailies, then forcing myself to face up to the to-do list items. If I want to level up then…. omg…. I have to do one of those things! It’s been working.

I’m considering adding “rewards” that i can buy with in-game coins, things I like doing but that eat up a lot of time or are actively unhealthy. For example, I could make “Play one day in Stardew Valley” cost a significant amount. “Mess around with Pokemon” might cost less. Making my game playing depend on progress in ANOTHER GAME that is basically real life has a certain appeal! “Zone out reading Twitter for infinity time instead of going to sleep” would take all my coins and flush them right down the toilet.

habitica avatar

A bowl of smoky air

Posted on by Liz

We are the place where the smoke gathers as it tries to pour out of the Bay but can’t. The wind has been blowing from the east and northeast for a while, so even he brief west wind didn’t help, as the air that blew into town from the ocean was just more smoke from earlier in the week.

air quality chart

It is sobering to think of all the people in the Camp Fire area, and the people between there and here, breathing this toxic soup. I have inhalers, air filters in the house, and a good mask. I’ve barely been outside all week. My chest hurts and eyes are burning. It has got to be doing damage to people.

In the respirators, everyone looks a little like the people in Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

liz-mask.jpg

New cyborgian exo-wheels

Posted on by Liz

Still loving my TravelScoot over here but I am excitedly waiting for delivery of a Whill-Ci powerchair.

It seems relatively lightweight, enough so that in a pinch, I could take it apart and with help get it into the trunk of a cab. We’ll see how I do on the bus.

For everyday around my neighborhood, I hope it will increase the range I’m comfortable going, and that I will still be able to maneuver in small space. I used to go without too much worry to, say, 24th street (1 mile) or to Noisebridge (more like a mile and a half). The last couple of years that seems harder to me, and I tend to take the bus instead. Either I just have more trouble sitting upright that long without back support on the scooter, or, the jolting of pavement is too much, or both. Hoping the CI will help with that.

I tried it out at the Abilities Expo and liked it.

liz-whill-ci

My fears are: What if it just isn’t that comfy for city trips of a mile or two? What if it is harder for me to deal with on the bus or on crowded buses? It will be harder for me to decide to take a cab by myself, without someone with me who is willing to take it apart and shovel it into a cab.

And last but not least I am afraid it is going to “talk” to me or beep annoyingly. I cannot think of any situation where I want my chair to beep or talk. So, I forgot to ask but I’m hoping the phone app will let me disable or mute that. If not I’ll be investigating how to make it stop by taking it apart.

It’s an expensive experiment. I’ll report back on how it is in daily use!

Four Brothers in Blue

Posted on by Liz

From a recommendation from my dad, I’m reading an actual paper book, Four Brothers in Blue, which is mostly letters from four brothers who were all in the Union army in the U.S. Civil War. They were in different regiments and wrote letters home & to each other. This was strung together many years later by one of the brothers with details (boringly) filled in.

The letters are mostly about details of the misery of soldier life: being cold, losing all your stuff or throwing it away on a long march while carrying 100 pounds on your back in 90 degree heat, needing more socks, mud, blisters, asthma, what it’s like to wake up with lice crawling all over you, eating disgusting food, and how the entire army has diarrhea as well as lice. Somehow, I always like reading this sort of book as it makes any physical pain I’m in less significant as I try to imagine having to walk several miles to gather hay and firewood to button into my lice-filled poncho in the freezing night, for warmth, as i attempt to sleep “on the soft side of the planks”.

Early on in the book and the war, the brothers are fans of McClellan, calling him “Little Mac” and reporting excitedly if he passed close by them on parade. He kept the army morale high, even if they did think he should have followed up quicker after Lee’s defeat at Antietam. They were disappointed that this hero wasn’t taller. One brother even sneaked up to McClellan’s horse, Dan Webster, snipped off a piece of the horse’s mane as a souvenir, and sent it to their mom. I guess this horse must have had a McClellan saddle.

The letters written back to them from their mother and father are missing but you can tell they were being sent little care packages of bandages and medicine by their mom, and stern advice about knapsacks from their dad. All the brothers explain repeatedly to their dad that his knapsacks sucked because they were heavy and the straps too narrow, and they can’t carry all that stuff because they have giant ammo pouches and 50 pounds worth of guns. They stick closest to their “rubber blanket” which I imagine to be a bit like a ridiculously heavy yoga mat, and anything made of wool though the blankets are the 2nd thing to go after the knapsacks. Ponchos sound the easiest to carry. So, now I know some survival tips, in case I’m accidentally transported back in time to 1861 as an able bodied 20 year old man. How useful!

Secrets of married life

Posted on by Liz

It is very strange and mostly nice how everyone responded to our getting married! So glad that we ran off secretly so as to keep all that minimal.

Meanwhile, last night we read some very terrible poetry by that lawyer poet mayor of SF, which led us to try and find songs to sing his horrible sonnets to as we obsessed over the meter, and a particular poem about Andreé’s Pigeon which led us to get extremely obsessed with S. A. Andrée’s disastrous Arctic Balloon Expedition of 1897. Tonight after dinner and some excellent pastries and explaining everything about how our day went to each other, I showed off my complex bugzilla queries and Danny is explaining his AMAZING command line email system and fixing a bug in it while also showing me his Beeminder logs.

We are also planning our Vallejo honeymoon cruise since we miss marina life and would enjoy hanging out with the radioactive waste of old nuclear submarines and derelict buildings that are slowly gentrifying into breweries.