a string of three :tada: emojis
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i had the foresight to mow the backyard just before it started raining yesterday. it's going to rain here every day through next saturday, which i am not generally excited about (i hope i can still get in a few nice ideal temperature long outdoor runs before things completely turn for good) but i appreciate such a concrete local (portland!) manifestation of the end of summer being so well-timed to the autumnal equinox. i'm grateful that this summer my ideal rhythm of trying to run a half marathon every saturday or sunday was not disrupted by foot pain as it was last summer (turns out diligently stretching and foam rolling was what i needed to do, which is annoying because i fucking hate this kind of upkeep but which is also better than getting my mind into a place of "you're going to run for the next two hours" and then on the third mile the sole of my foot is burning with fiery pain so it's like do i just give up or try to suffer through it and hope the endorphins eventually silence it enough so i can keep going, both of which suck!). we didn't have friends over to the backyard enough this summer (i'm thankful for the first covid summer, when having a backyard was such a godsend) and that is something to be more mindful of next year.
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on friday, i not only fixed all the bugs that came up in QA of the feature i've been working on (knocks on wood so the hubris of this statement doesn't lead to the revelation of more bugs) and made headway into a maddening investigation into how annoying the browser Safari is about handling certain kinds of HTML element behaviors, but also, in the course of my standard practice of volunteering to do the grunt work of deploying code for a senior engineer (both because i am a team player who believes in paying my dues and also because just practically i want his genius brain to be able to focus on the really hard shit that i'm not good enough at yet and not get distracted by chores), helped identify the source of an issue in his PR that was preventing the tests from passing and the code from being released but was not actually indicative of anything wrong with the code itself but instead how the code interacted with the test environment (the most annoying kind of "bug") and to do that i tried a clever but (i thought) probably futile thing to get tests that were failing in the deployment environment but passing locally to fail locally in the same way that surprisingly worked and i figured out the solution and he responded with a grateful GitHub comment that included a string of three :tada: emojis. i'm especially thankful because usually it is other people who are helping to rescue me when i am in this kind of test purgatory and it felt nice to be on the other side of it.
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we're going to the movies this afternoon to watch howl's moving castle, one of deborah's favorite movies that i have never seen all of because i inevitably fall asleep when we watch it at home, which i partially blame on constantly consuming large amounts of marijuana and partially blame on couch blankets (i am generally more likely to stay awake through a movie in the summer than the winter) and partially blame on the balm of focusing on one thing and not looking at my phone for two hours straight and the effect of that on my cortisol levels (skull emoji) and partially blame on the encroachment of age and genetic inheritance (my dad is also a chronic couch movie sleeper). going to the movies instead of watching at home is not a silver bullet for me staying awake through the running time of a film, even a film that i ultimately (once i have actually managed to actually see it all the way through) really really like (hi dune part 1, hi tenet, hi the green knight), but i'm hopeful that i'll experience the whole thing today.