Christopher Schmidt

candy

2016-10-31T22:04:36Z

At our old house, we always ran out of candy, so I live in perpetual fear of it.

At this house, we were totally ghost town one year, and we ran out of candy the next.

It looks like tonight is gonna be ghost town again.

And I made Jess not give away any of our candy just in case and now I feel bad because we're going to have like 20 pounds of candy.

Someone at work does a "Candy for the troops" buyback arrangement every year, so I definitely need to make sure to bring (most of) ours in.

Happy Halloween.

Projects

2016-10-07T02:14:33Z

Overall, I have a handful of projects I'm working on.

- Livestream Alerts: Website for generating alerts during Livestreams. Most recent work: Adding support for donations through the Extra Life charity drive. Open source project at https://github.com/google/mirandum
- ytgvoting.com - a quick, me-only (at the moment) voting tool for use in livestreams. No open source code yet, but the intent is to provide something simple to use so that a third party (e.g. a production ops person) can set up polls remotely from the streamer, inspired by some features in Primtetime with YouTube Gaming.
- My own Livestream channel - I'm now taking on a more podcast-style format, with different planned topics and an intent to be covering "recent news" as well as general topics. (for example, tomorrow I want to talk spectrum scarcity -- from spark-gap radio transmissions through spread spectrum and hedy lamarr through to the spectrum battles of now; as well as more weekly topical things like Twitch's recent announcements at TwitchCon.)
- Patreon-related work for channel: I now have a patreon with some supporter-only content every month, and I'm working on building up the size of that community.
- Tutorials about Livestream Alerts: I manage another YT Channel with tutorials about Livestream Alerts that I'm maintaining/attempting to create content for as well.

I guess I have a few projects going on.

sigh, humans

2016-07-13T12:32:31Z

For the last 36 hours, I have been unreasonably upset by the simplest, stupidest things that people do. Why can't people just be more smart and less annoying? God.

Also, Julie actually walked with me to Central to get a donut this morning. On the way, she caught a Bulbasaur (mine got away); on the way back, we both caught a Scyther. (There's one on Lopez Street near the playground in Cambridgeport, if you're interested.)

tweet history

2016-05-15T13:06:20Z

My 2007-2009 tweets are a lot more true to life today than I would have expected a decade. Some things have changed (I no longer think I should go to Burning Man); but many things have stayed the same.

- I still work on open source code.
- I still get upset about the people who treat me as their personal work mule because I try to be supportive/helpful.
- I still sometimes take efforts to step away from the computer, and pride myself on short term goals like "not using it for 24 hours".
- I still freak out and change plans at the last minute when anything gets in my way.
- I still feel bad about going to the fireworks on my own, even though Jess hates crowds and loud noises.

It's interesting to see the things that stay the same, nearly a decade on.

schmidt rules

2016-04-22T10:17:21Z

When I was 8 years old, I got brought to the local library, where sports writer Sam Smith was doing a book signing for his recently released book The Jordan Rules. This was the time of Bulls (and particularly, Jordan) mania: I was a huge Bulls fan, and although the book -- a 333 page non-fiction tome -- seemed massive to me at the time, I was in love with it, and read it repeatedly.

In the front of the book, the inscription that Smith wrote -- in between all of the others in line, to what must have been at the time a somewhat odd-seeming 8 year old presenting this book for a signature -- an inscription that I still haven't forgotten: "Maybe I'll be writing the Schmidt Rules next?"

Until looking it up just now, I had no real memory of what the Jordan Rules were. ("a defensive strategy employed by the Detroit Pistons against Michael Jordan in order to limit his effectiveness on offense" -- Jordan Rules, Wikipedia) Instead, what I always thought was that these were a set of rules that I could make: Like, they'd be writing about the rules that I wrote to bring order to ... whatever.

Recently, I've found myself making a handful of joking references to rules about me within the YouTube Gaming livestreaming community: things like "Chris is always watching", or "Chris should always cheat." And I just realized: it's something like the first time that I can think of when there has been something that I could realistically think of as the Schmidt rules has been written down.

I'll never be the kind of offensive basketball player -- or player of any sport -- that requires a professional team to generate a set of rules against me. Nobody will ever write about the Schmidt Rules. But that doesn't mean that they're not there. And then can be whatever I want them to be.

happy birthday!

2016-03-20T00:45:54Z

at the end of a long shitty week of work drama and debacle, I had both a lovely pre-birthday livestream -- with more than 150 visitors stopping by to say hello -- and a lovely birthday party, with more than 30 people coming over, from old friends like volantwish and pezstar to newer coworkers like those from my Nokia days.

Thank you all so much for making this a special day. In a lot of ways, it turns out that turning 0x20 (32, as represented in hexadecimal) was just a reminder of what it was like to be 20 in decimal.

Thank you to everyone.

oh jeez being sick sucks

2016-02-14T01:29:54Z

I am so sick, and it so sucks.

It's not really sick. It's just an upper respiratory thing I can't shake. (And really, I've probably been suffering from it all week; I was sleeping 2-3 hours longer than usual, unable to focus, etc.) But it just keeps ramping up and getting worse and worse.

Thursday, I was coughing -- more like allergies than anything else -- but not feeling crappy. Jess was like "You're sick! You should stay home!" and I was like "I'm not even sick!"

Friday, I was feeling crappy, but didn't actually start coughing until I was on my way out the door to work. I was still thinking this was somehow allergies or something. Spent all day coughing unproductively, doing a number on my throat. I messaged Jess around noon and said "You're right, I'm sick." Still stayed at work, which I feel bad about in hindsight because at least one of my coworkers will probably end up sick, which wasn't really my intent :/ When we got home last night, Jess was like "You're probably wishing for sweet merciful death. Go to bed."

This morning I woke up, and said "Last night, you said I was wishing for sweet merciful death. I wasn't then, but I am now."

Today's been a nap/take meds/grump type of day. It's not great.

Plus side: 3 day weekend, so at least I'll probably be better by the time work rolls back around.

It's wintery.

2016-02-05T14:00:00Z

I object.

Instead, I've sat at home for the past hour dicking around on the internet. But I really should go to work one of these days.

Quiet

2016-01-11T04:19:51Z

It is rare that our house is actually quiet when I'm home. (Well, super rare, I guess: our fridge is pretty noisy.) But even if you discount that, it's very rare that I have much in the way of alone time when nothing else is going on.

Living in such a small apartment with 3 other people -- even people who are relatively self-supporting -- just leaves so little psychic space for anything else.

I dream of an office for myself; a small studio for photography and video; a sunroom of some kind; I dream of large bathrooms, I dream of high ceilings.

It's not what I get, but maybe someday.

Until then, I just sometimes sit back and just enjoy the quiet times. Like now.

obtusity

2016-01-09T14:07:43Z

Being intentionally obtuse when someone is genuinely asking for help bugs the crap out of me.

Or maybe... I don't know. As I write this out, I can see how some people would consider they're being helpful, and I probably use this technique at times. But this morning, I saw someone asking a question in the UAV Legal News and Discussion group: "I have done x, y and z as I believe the law requires. What next?" and someone saying "What law?"

Dude. You know what law. You've been in this group for years. The law in question is the June 2014 Interpretation of the SPecial Rule for Model Aircraft, originally included in the FMRA of 2012. You describe it as "recommendation", which is not actually true, and you know better.

Yes, it's being challenged in court. Yes, it's questionable that the FAA passed it at all, as it is a promulgation of rules as prohibited by Congress, but don't just play pretend: describe why *you* think that it's not law, or explain what you would do in answer to the person's question. Don't just sit there and pretend you don't know *exactly* what he's talking about, because you do. I know you do, you know you do, and this poor fool who came to this group to ask a question just wants some freakin' help.

So I guess it's not about being obtuse, in this case, it's just about being a bit of a dick. So, rule #1: don't be a dick.

go el capitan go

2016-01-08T23:03:27Z

I am currently upgrading my work laptop to El Capitan. Hopefully this doesn't break anything fundamental with my computer. I did have to clear up 20G of space on my hard drive in order to do it. Which is a bit difficult when I only have 128G to begin with. But I did it.

Go little computer go! I want to go home, gosh darn it!

Happy New Year!

2016-01-04T15:00:38Z

I have never really done resolutions well, but some things I'd like to try to do in the near future, which I haven't been doing well.

- Keep better track of finances.

This isn't even a "Change our spending habits" yet, just a "Okay, really, keep track." I tend to do this for about two weeks and then get bored; this isn't a functional approach. Before we can change our spending, we need to know what we're spending, so this is a goal for the next 3 months with a longer term goal of coming up with a sustainable plan.

- Do a load of laundry each day.

With our family, we go through about a load of laundry each day. Our washer is very small, so for example, I can only wash three towels at a time. This means I tend to fall behind on laundry and catch up on one giant laundry weekend... but then the folding/putting away is a horror, and everyone is down to wearing that Pair of Pants that Doesn't Really Fit But I Keep It Anyway, which is ick. So I want to do a load of laundry each day.

- Go back to walking to and from work.

I used to walk to and from work. I've gotten lazy, and started not doing that - in part because I've felt short on time with family, so I've been trying to be at home earlier by taking the T. But I think that this is a mistake: I'm cutting out the time that I previously used to recover my mental energy after work during the walk, and instead I'm coming home still in a mindset of work. I'd like to change this.

- Establish a better structure for spending time.

Right now, I'm spending a lot of time not being very productive, both at home and at work. I'd like to get more done, which means committing to spending less time goofing around, and thinking more about how my day is structured. This is especially important at work, where I've been somewhat unproductive for a few weeks. I've taken a vacation from work for the past two weeks, so now it's time to come back, renewed, refreshed, and take a good solid look at improving my work habits and home time management habits.

feeling emo

2015-12-07T04:34:01Z

I'm feeling more than a bit out of sorts; I've been failing to achieve much recently, it feels like, so I'm down on myself as a result. There are a lot of things that I want to accomplish, and I"m not accomplishing them. In some cases, this means that they're not actually happening; in others, it means that *other* people are doing them -- and if there's one thing I like less than not getting around to something, it's other people getting around to it in a different way that pisses me off. :p

Holiday party at Google was fine, but frankly, I don't think I'll go in the future; the office is just too big to make it fun for me. It's impossible to find most of the people you want to see.

I put together a list of the games that I have played on my newish YouTube channel so far:

Game List

There's a bunch of them.

(I'm still sort of thinking what I want as a web presence other than the YT channel itself.)

why

2015-11-30T01:08:00Z

why is it that people who claim the left is "obviously wrong" on anthropomorphic global warming seem to mostly be just repeating logical fallacies over and over?

Look, only 97% of studies agree that anthropomorphic global warming is a thing. I assume some of those other 3% claim that global warming isn't a thing at all. If these studies are so right, why won't you just cite them and be done with it?

Anyway, after arguing back and forth 6 times on Facebook, I just started quoting the Logical Fallacy Referee. http://imgur.com/a/QDbyt#0

So far, I'm on 4/32 in one Facebook thread! And I've learned about a funny name for a logical fallacy:

- Appeal to the Stone
- Ad hominem attack
- Argument from silence
- Not really a logical fallacy, but Echo Chamber effect

I also pulled out the Historical Fallacy card, though it's only tangentially related; a Reptition Fallacy is really close to happening; I think it would be fair to call an Illegal Proof Reversal if I really wanted to; A No True Scotsman foul is almost certainly in play; and the whole conversation is basically an illegal use of Ergo Decedo.

So really, we're at 9/32, and they just keep racking them up.

Why? Just find the study that supports your point and link it! I'd do it *for you* if I could freakin' find the thing! This is the banner you are waving. This is the flag you are flying. If you're going to do it, do it with data! There's enough out there to support any position, just find it and use it!

streaming again tonight

2015-11-23T13:40:58Z

If you're interested in catching one of my gaming livestreams: I'll be streaming again tonight from 9:15PM Eastern, at https://gaming.youtube.com/watch?v=Psv2vSBhzyo .

I'm thinking this is going to be a regular thing: Monday nights at 9:15PM EST.

this job sounds like it pays bank...

2015-11-17T12:39:48Z

So about a month ago, in a mostly unrelated thread, I ended up writing a description of my job up on reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/3mvfy4/important_information_regarding_3rd_party/cx2pyqw?context=3

As a result of that description, someone gave me "reddit gold"; a donation that gives you some additional reddit features, and can be gifted anonymously.

Today -- probably because the thread got linked from somewhere -- someone commented on the thread:

"this job sounds like it pays bank and yet u give this mofo gold"

My wife and I both laughed hard enough at this comment that we independently decided to give the person in question reddit gold in return... and only realized after the fact that we had both done it.

Non-captive Audience Storytelling

2015-11-15T13:38:18Z

On Thursday, I spent most of my therapy session talking about what I get out of broadcasting a gaming livestream on YouTube gaming.

I mentioned this to someone and they were like "Wait, are you making a joke?" and I was like no, seriously! I did! What is it about running a livestream with a half dozen or a dozen people watching that I find more entertaining? Why is this something that matters to me? What am I getting out of this that I am not getting out of other aspects of my life?

The answer is probably complicated, as with all questions that are brought up in therapy, but one of the things that came to the top of my mind: I get to tell stories to a non-captive audience who hasn't heard all of my stories.

I love telling stories. (Well, really, I mostly probably love to hear myself talk, but they're largely overlapping.) I have a fair number of stories. In fact, I have enough stories that I often forget which story I'm telling halfway through a story and start telling another story. I have enough stories that in order to remember the stories, I am now creating an anecdote tracking spreadsheet to remind myself of the stories. (While writing this paragraph, I remembered two more of my stories: the Botswanan prostitute in South Africa, and the German one in Berlin. These are brief enough that they are often told together, though sometimes I go from the Botswanan prostitute to the South African casino to the cheetah in Kruger National Park.)

But in most environments, telling stories has a social cost: I have to determine whether people are interested in my story, and I have a hard time figuring out when to shut up and listen, or how to notice that people aren't interested. For example: I can literally talk about copyright and Content ID for hours; I did it for 1.5 hours with a small engaged audience just a few days ago, and I think the people involved learned something. But having the same conversation in a different audience would have worked poorly; most people don't give two craps about copyright. (Writing that sentence, I thought of another anecdote to add to the anecdote tracker.) And figuring out how to shut up before people get cranky is hard for me, and always has been; at my previous job, it was actually a significant problem for me in the work environment.

So, what's a guy to do in the case where he can't accurately figure out how to tell stories to a captive audience without boring them to tears? The answer is simple: Make the cost of leaving the conversation socially trivial: In streaming video game playing -- especially on YouTube -- *there is no obligation to stay*. No one has to watch me; if they want to, they can, but otherwise, they can close their browser, and I will never know.

Yet even when I'm playing ancient games that most of my audience has never heard of -- whether it's wandering through the Great Underground Empire in Zork, collecting the Oracles in Commander Keen, or destroying Robotnik in Sonic -- I still maintain an audience, who talks with me and enjoys my stories.

This is not actually a lot different from what creates the "vlogging" movement: these are people who have stories to tell, and didn't have another audience, and chose to tell these stories to the internet -- where sometimes, people really enjoy their stories! This is not much different than LiveJournal was for many of us for many years. (It is a difference from IRC channels: because most people didn't have personal IRC channels for themselves, you had a somewhat captive audience; monopolizing them is generally inappropriate.)

With broadcasting game play, I have:

- A source of interesting content built in no matter what.
- A somewhat engaged, non-captive audience
- The ability to tell my stories to people who haven't heard them before.

And that's cool.

reading LJ

2015-11-12T13:13:59Z

I just realized that I haven't read LJ since the 5th.

Crap. This means that I've been spending too much time on other things, and forgetting to check LJ.

Need to fix this. In the meantime, have a meaningless update to indicate I realize I haven't been managing my time correctly!

oops, i forgot to post

2015-11-05T12:46:45Z

It's Fall weather out right now (53 degrees) but the high for today is 73.

Jess seems to find this some variety of confusing; I simply find it "weather".

Yesterday, I fixed something that was breaking live-streaming for many users in Russia, I think. I like it when a reddit complaint leads to a straightforward bugfix I can actually implement; it makes me feel less like a "hero" (which is good short term and bad long term) and more like I'm just doing my job.

Unfortunately, live-streaming isn't really my job.

I wonder if there's any companies that just have software development strike teams that just go around fixing high-touch user complaints. I guess there's only a handful of companies big enough to make that worthwhile, but it might be cool to have a general purpose strike team of a half dozen people to do things like that. I guess the biggest problem is the learning curve for any particular problem: it's taken more more than 12 months of listening to complaints every day to get to the point where a non-trivial chunk of them are actionable.

I still like the idea, even if it's impractical.

extra life

2015-11-04T03:01:41Z

I will be participating in the Extra Life charity gaming event this Saturday, November 8th.

This event was originally a 24 hour marathon, and I'm interested in the spirit of that, but I am concerned about:

- My longevity for such an event
- The impact on my family if I am to do such a thing.

So while I would like to stream gaming for 24 hours, I am not 100% convinced I will.

However, in honor of that effort, I have started off my campaign with a $24 donation -- one for every hour I'd like to stream -- on my profile at Extra Life.

If you would like to support Boston Children's Hospital, and awesome video game playing, please feel free to support me; and check me out on Saturday at Chris Plays Games on YouTube Gaming.

i beat it.

2015-11-03T05:39:19Z

After something like 3.5 hours of playtime on the Pyramid of Shadows in Commander Keen 4: Secret of the Oracles, I finally defeated the level tonight.

You can watch the final, successful attempt, here: https://gaming.youtube.com/watch?t=5395&v=iXkfDzAlIf0

teeth.

2015-10-31T01:07:36Z

When I was 18 or 19, in one of my last dental appointments while still living at home, I got an x-ray done, and the dentist told me that all four of my wisdom teeth were impacted, and would eventually have to come out. At the time I had just finished up with a ton of orthodontia a year or so before, and it didn't seem like a huge priority at the time. I was just about to go back for my second year of college, if I remember correctly, having spent the summer traveling, and figured I'd do it later.

For the past 12 or so years, I have ended up avoiding routine and necessary dental care.

There are a lot of reasons for this, of course. 10 years ago, I didn't have dental insurance (I was self employed); since then, I have had a variety of insurance plans, but -- like most dental insurance plans -- they do not have an upper limit, and never covered everything I needed to get done.

I did actually go to the dentist a few times in there -- usually when something was wrong, though once when Jess set up the appointment and had me go.

During all this time, I have had intermittent mouth pain -- sometimes where my wisdom teeth are, sometimes not; sometimes for longer periods of time, sometimes just for a day or two, followed by it going away. I've always known my teeth are in bad shape, but I've just never done anything about it.

I did actually get bad enough that I did do something at one point: I had enough pain from it that I wasn't able to sleep at night for a couple weeks, and I finally made an appointment and went in to a dentist.

They were able to quickly identify the primary problem area -- an upper wisdom tooth that was heavily inflamed/infected -- and pull it out the same day. I made a follow up appointment and came back the next week, and they took out the other one. The first one was done without me even knowing that was what was going on, and the second one, I at least knew, but there was very little communication.

At the end of the second visit, they printed out a list of everything they wanted to do from that point forward: cavities, root canals, crowns that I needed -- one that needed fixing, and one tooth that needed a new root canal -- and a bunch of deep scaling cleanings in my mouth to fight back on a ton of long-running buildup. The total at the end of the proposal: $7000. (Note that at this point, I had already burned through my dental insurance for the year.) When I asked "Okay, I see what you have here, but I don't really have this kind of money right now: what do we need to do *right now* vs. at some point later?" The answer was "We need to do all of it right now."

So I just didn't go back.

About 3 months later, the crown that I did have on a rear molar cracked; I could feel it at the time, but still wasn't willing to go back; I just couldn't afford it at the time (or at least, didn't feel I could). Ever since then, I have been unable to chew on the left side of my mouth without getting food stuck in there, so I've been basically using only one side for eating for the past 3 years.

So, earlier this year, I finally am in a position where it was time to fix this. I need the dental care, and I can afford it. The dental insurance I have is decent, and I can pay the rest out of pocket; I need to get my mouth fixed.

So I've been doing that. Slowly but surely, I've been doing that. I got two deep cavities filled; one that the dentist hoped was going to just be a cavity ended up being a root canal. (Of course, I told him before he went in it was going to be a root canal, but he told me he thought it would be fine. I was right. He was wrong.)

So, the root canal got *mostly* done... except that because it's way in the back of my mouth (and apparently I have a small mouth? Who knew!) and they didn't have any of the right size files, they couldn't actually finish it up. So I had to schedule to come back in two weeks.

During those two weeks, something happened to my lower right wisdom tooth -- I don't know if it was related to the root canal, or just happened at the same time -- but by the time I got back in on my followup, I had to say "I'm having a ton of pain over there, I assume this is just because of what's left of the root?"

Nope. Turns out, it was just my wisdom tooth, acting up. And after looking at the x-ray, they said "There's no way that the dentist is going to be able to put a crown on this with the wisdom tooth pushing into it: you need to get that done first."

So, I called the oral surgeon that my dentist recommended. "Hi, I need a wisdom tooth consult." "Great, we'll see you at 9:30 tomorrow." Well, that's handy; especially since I really am suffering at this point (I was unable to sleep that night from pain).

Got in, and talked over the wisdom teeth with the oral surgeon. She was straightforward and informative: showed me the x-ray of my mouth (pano x-ray! whee! everyone else was using cheap single shot x-rays), and where the problems were; gave me the standard "things can go wrong" pitch, and talked to me about the various bits that we could take care of. In the end, we decided to take out the two wisdom teeth and the upper molar which had lost its crown 3 years before; the dentist was planning to take that latter one out the next time I saw him, but she figured she could just do it while she was in there, which is nice: it saves me another dentist trip, and it seems like it's also going to get covered under medical, rather than dental, insurance.

"So, when can you do it?" "Well, I'm leaving for a conference tomorrow." "Okay, is there some way that someone else can do it?" "Actually, I had a cancellation for tomorrow morning, so we can just do it then, if you want?"

Perfect.

So, 48 hours after walking out of my root canal finishing up, I had both of my wisdom teeth out. While I'm still in pain at the moment -- mostly in my jaw, rather than in the area the wisdom teeth actually were -- I am no longer to the point of random pains in the middle of the night waking me up; while there's still a bunch more to do -- 2 or 3 major cavities, plus I need to finish up the crown on the recent root canal, and need to get some routine work done as well -- I may actually be in a better position for eating by next week than I have been in years.

Some of this is, of course, my fault: the root canals I've had might have been something I could prevent with better brushing, or more routine maintenance. But the wisdom teeth are something that is just a fact of genetics and or bad luck; there's nothing I could have done to prevent them from being impacted, and I don't think that they would have been any easier to take out at any other time.

I am privileged that I'm able to just go do things like this, and I'm sorry to the many who can't. I'm sorry to those less fortunate, who just suffer like this forever; who lose teeth not because of laziness or fear, but lose teeth because they can't afford any better.

But I'm thankful to my lovely wife for helping me finally get this taken care of; to Dr. Joe Deprimio, who has been a jovial and positive influence on me actually continuing to go back to the appointments, to Commonwealth Oral & Maxillofacial Surgical Associates and Jingye He for accomodating my wisdom teeth removal almost instantly.

Because I think it might actually be on the way to getting better. And that's a pretty cool thing for someone who has lived with intermittent annoyances and pain in his mouth for the past 10 years out of fear and mistrust of dentists.

on the plus side...

2015-10-15T04:37:55Z

I worked out why this feature of our API doesn't work at all the way the documentation says it does.

On the minus side, making it actually do what it says on the tin may ... actually be impossible with the data we currently have? Specifically, the data structure for "subscriptions of mine, sorted by date" is a datasource we have, but it's not clear that "people who subscribed to me, sorted by date" is.

But at least now I know that I'm not holding it wrong: it is just broken.

there's a man, goes by the name of mega man

2015-10-05T02:46:45Z

I beat the original Mega Man today! I did it by super-cheating, but it's a common form of cheating; I also used a walkthrough because trying to determine which enemies weapons work against each other isn't really practical.

I think I actually had up to 5 people watching me at one point.

In total, it took me about 4 hours to beat.

Part 1: https://gaming.youtube.com/watch?v=LrUeAZMyB6I
Part 2: https://gaming.youtube.com/watch?v=mS-FRfocRhw

(Yeah, I've been live-streaming gaming stuff on YouTube off and on for a couple weeks. Tonight, I picked up an audience from a streamer I've been watching for the past 5 weeks or so: she was ending for the night, so I set up while I sat next to Julie while she worked on her homework.)

I'm happy I beat it. Now I need to play some game that's a little bit less desperately evil. :p

mountains again, gandalf; mountains

2015-09-15T11:58:54Z

This weekend, Jess and I went to the Mount Washington Hotel and Resort. Specifically, we stayed in the Bretton Arms. It was a nice chance for me to get away from work, something I desperately needed to do after a long couple weeks of stress.

- The area of the White Mountains Resort is still gorgeous. The view off the back veranda of the main hotel is something I could just sit and enjoy every afternoon for a week, and still be happy.
- Despite this, I am glad that I live in the city. When I first moved to NH, I found the remoteness of the White Mountains to be relaxing. These days, I do not feel the same way; it feels strange to me to be so far out of the way of things.
- A decade ago, I wanted to climb all the trails, drive the winding mountain roads, etc. Now, I just want to sit, have a beer, and enjoy the view.
- For a resort in the White Mountains, they have way too few White beer options.

It was so nice to get away. Of course, this week is already shaping up to be hell on wheels to make up for it, but so it goes.