Journal of the Pandemic Years, May 7th

Been a couple of busy days, but not really anything interesting.

Went for the second bike ride of the year on Sunday, and my roommate decided to
come with. Which was fine, don't get me wrong, but it meant it took twice as
long as it could have... in part because she decided we should stop at one of
the Asian markets we were riding by and see what they had for fresh produce,
which has been in short supply the last few weeks. So... we went and mingled in
a crowded market with a hundred or so people, and bought some peas, beans,
onions, shallots, and ginger.

It was kind of a weird experience; it was the first time I'd been anywhere
crowded in... almost two months? And only the third time I'd been anywhere,
really, in that time. And we were the only non-Asian people there. Most of the
vendors we bought from gave us pretty nice discounts, but I don't know if that
was because they appreciated us not being xenophobic idiots, or if that was
just business as usual. (Posted prices at the produce markets, in my
experience, are frequently just sort of ballpark figures, or sort of an MSRP.)

So... yeah.

I've been reading news a lot lately (as always) and I've been thinking a lot
about how different everything's going to be, if/when things return to
"normal". The pandemic has been a pretty convincing demonstration that a lot of
jobs can be performed from home (as people have been arguing for years), so
that's good. I saw a comment yesterday, on a news story about a clothing
retailer's announcement that they're entering liquidation once their stores are
allowed to reopen, that the era of the shopping mall is probably over; it's
hard to say if that's a good or a bad thing, yet.

Still baking bread, still making a lot of soups and stews, doing far more meal
planning than before the pandemic, and still eating much healthier.

Work continues to be busy. This week I got saddled with a new deploy for some
development project. Apparently some of the higher-ups got, I don't know, wined
and dined, or otherwise bamboozled, by some "cloud" server startup that we're
using on this. Which would be fine, except I'm being forced to deploy some
CentOS VMs under... OpenVZ. Literally everything else we've done has run on
Debian or Ubuntu, on bare metal/Docker or KVM. So this has been a super
frustrating week. I... can't load apparmor. Okay. CentOS doesn't have 80% of
the libraries we need in its packages. Fun. And this whole little adventure
comes in the few brief moments I'm not otherwise occupied keeping the regular,
increasingly overloaded, infrastructure working.

Anyway, that's it for today. Hope your pandemic experience continues as well as
possible, under the circumstances.