sciatrix

...I reflect that I am wearing a traffic cone orange shirt over a red sports bra, bright blue knee length shorts, royal plum crew socks, and neon green and white sneakers.

I am frequently one of the more interestingly dressed people at the gym because I tend to leave the crew socks I wear under my boots to the gym and just change my pants, but I am in rare form tonight. If only I had some sort of neon fuschia and violent green gym hat. With bobbles.

I returned from Galveston with a nasty head cold that has only gotten worse in the intervening hours, so today I am home sick and rolling around on the couch, slow blinking through the glasses I somehow managed to gouge scratches in over the left eye and trying to work out how to think through about two inches of mucous. I am resolutely taking my Dayquil, which historically does bad things to my brain-to-words filter, so... look forward to me watching the beginning of The Good Doctor and liveblogging shit as it occurs to me, I guess. I was doing a lot of DWing on phone yesterday--my colleage D helpfully drove all the way back from Galveston to Austin with Tribble and his husky baby Arya in the back seat--and I think as long as I route everything through my mobile-friendly theme, it's okay.

Also, I remain completely in love with posting and replying via email. That is magical. It is the most useful thing for mobile, I swear to god, because if the browser dies your email draft remains saved.

Sick-person solidarity to staranise, who I hear is also battling the cold monsters, and a more general joy-in-others'-joy to siderea whose upcoming move sounds like a great change for the better.

I'm on my way back from SICB now and energized by both some really impressive science and also the release of a real scary catastrophe that feels... very, very narrowly averted.

So remember when I mentioned grousing because we had to buy a car last month when our old one got totalled? Yeah, this one got into an accident when a dude stepped out and decided dive stationarily along the two leftmost lanes of traffic on the highway frontage. I found that out when T called me literally as I landed on the end of my first flight to Tampa and tearfully told me what had happened, and have been panicking ever since.

That was the first time either of us has bought a used car, and we didn't realize we needed to notify our insurance with our VIN number rather than waiting on the plates. And of course we were hit on day 31 of buying the damn thing, so USAA could reasonably have denied us any coverage at all for the accident. Which was... heart-stopping to be fearing all weekend.

They chose to allow us to backdate our coverage to the day after we purchased the car instead, so we will be covered for it. I can't really put how terrified I've been and how relieved I feel now into words. It's really humbling. The run of shitty luck is (depressingly) par for the course for us; over the course of my PhD I have used renters' insurance, car insurance for car, car insurance for injury, health insurance, homeowner's insurance, flood insurance, and pet insurance for assorted $1000+ claims, which is about... half my salary for any given month. But the extension of grace is not so par for the course, either for me generally (although USAA is predictably wonderful, they are not available for everyone) or for people at large.

I'm humbled today. That's all.

Meme blogging will begin tomorrow and run an extra week or so to make up for the conference-induced absence, I think.

*facepalm*