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The human adventure is just beginning

OPM declared it to be an optional telework day so I was able to work from home today. Mostly that consisted of serious thought about database design and table changes, the sort of thinking I could easily do while stretched out on the couch contemplating whatever database details that a man of my infinite powers need to contemplate.

I called my health insurance provider late in the morning to double-check on the deductible for my therapy visit and the representative assured me that I should only have to pay the $25 copay and not the $200-250 that I was quoted. If for some reason I was charged the full cost then I could call and speak to the appeals department to see about being reimbursed for the difference. I still held my breath to see what they’d say at the office, though.

I can’t remember if I mentioned how I went about find a therapist, but if I haven’t I might as well mention it now, and if I have then I won’t care about mentioning it a second time. I had been meaning to find a therapist for a year or two now, but for various reasons (unable to find one that I thought I’d be happy with, unable to find one that works with my insurance, not really feeling as though I needed one at that particular time, etc.) I kept putting it off, but in the last few weeks I saw someone ask on Reddit for therapist recommendations in DC and I figured that with it being a new year I might as well try another search. I also figured that I’d been on my medication for three years now, and that after being on my medication for this long I could probably use some additional help.

I did some searching on Psychology Today and found my psychologist, and because I do my homework I did some searching online to see what I could find about her. Turns out she used to work at LucasFilm(!) and for a while used to write an advice column on a sci-fi website for girls. Her profile picture on the site had her wearing a shirt with the Rebel Alliance logo from Star Wars, so that also helped me feel like she was someone I’d probably enjoy talking to.

I couldn’t make up my mind if I wanted to take Metro there (because of the crappy weather this afternoon) or drive (because otherwise I’d have to take Metro). I ended up deciding to drive and it was almost a bad decision – I parked my car two or three times before I finally found a parking spot that didn’t have some kind of restriction: rush hour parking restrictions, temporary no-parking zones for construction staging, you name it. I almost thought about just parking in one of those spots but knowing my luck I’d return to find my car had been towed. Eventually I found a spot at 13th and O NW which gave me just enough time to walk to the office at 17th and L NW.

My first session went well (and I was only charged the $25 copay, score!). It was about 45 minutes or so but this was mostly an introductory session to get to know me, get to know what I wanted to accomplish, start to build some background history, find out if I had any questions about therapy, stuff like that. I think I’ll get along well with her. Just from what we discussed in today’s meeting I’m learning how I really take it hard when I think someone has reason to be angry with me, and I don’t like to put myself into a position where people might have cause to be upset with me. That sounds strange (after all, who wants to have people upset with them?), but I guess I do things to avoid that possibility of people being upset with me even if it’s not in my own best interest. We also talked about my exercise regimen and how the breathing and mental exercises in yoga are great to help anxiety (I took this and only being charged the $25 copay as reasons to order a burrito yoga mat bag that I’ve had my eye on for a while to make it easier for me to take my stuff to my next yoga class) and talked about some breathing exercise apps to work on my breathing on my own as well. Another good mental exercise for practicing mindfulness is to concentrate on my feet (yes, my feet); just to start to think about how my feet feel under my desk, inside my shoe, inside their socks, and so on.

When we were wrapping up we started to discuss the next session when she said “oh, sorry, I don’t want to be presumptous” since I hadn’t yet said if I wanted to have future sessions with her or if I was comfortable working with her, but I was totally comfortable talking with her and said so, and made another appointment; appointments at first are weekly, mostly to build up some continuity, and then I guess they can taper off to biweekly or some other infrequent schedule. I don’t have any problem with weekly meetings, especially since I left that session feeling pretty good about it, about myself, and about what it may mean for me as sessions continue.

Watched the new Venture Bros. episode over dinner, then watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The film ended with some phrase like “The human adventure is just beginning” which, cheesily, is how I felt after my therapy session.

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Being patient

Went to the gym today after work, did some rowing, cycling, and some weights. Nothing too fancy or spectacular but it’s the first time in about three weeks that I’ve been to the gym. Saw there was a Car2Go parked right outside so I reserved it, got a smoothie from the gym smoothie bar, stopped at the grocery store and picked up a few things, and drove my way home rather than wait for a train.

I got a call today to confirm my psychologist appointment for tomorrow. I had thought that this practice was part of my insurance group, but I’m not quite so sure now. When I found the mental health details for my health benefits it said that outpatient visits would be paid 100% after a $25 co-pay, but when I got the confirmation call today they said that my insurance covers it once I reach a $2000 deductible, and that the first visit is $250 and subsequent visits are $200 each. I double-checked the benefit details when I got home and the $2000 deductible applies to inpatient visits, and so I’m not quite sure how an hour-long visit in the office equates to an inpatient admission. It’s not the increased cost that bothers me (although $200 is more than the $25 I was expecting), but I won’t be able to go as often as I was thinking I’d go if it’s $200. I’ll have to call my health insurance group tomorrow to double-check how the charges ought to work.

I’m hoping that tomorrow will have a telework option available; they’re expecting some snow but it’s not supposed to start until later in the morning or some time in the afternoon. While I’ll have to head out tomorrow for one reason or another – either to work in the morning, or to the psychologist in the afternoon – it’ll be easier to make my calls and head out from home rather than from the office. Plus there’s the whole sleeping-in-a-little-later and not-having-to-immediately-get-dressed bonuses that go along with working from home.

Speaking of waking up in the morning, I made some adjustments recently to the sequence of alarms. For a while I was waking up closer to 9 AM and out the door by 9:30ish, getting to work by around 10-10:30. ((We’re on the hook for fixing issues between something like 7 AM and 7 PM, so me working from 10-10:30 to 6-6:30 wasn’t so bad, but then we wanted to be more visible in the office so I now have to be at work by 9:30. Still not so bad – 9:30 is what I started with when I started this job – but for a week or two back in December when we had to be at work by 8 I was pretty unhappy. What can I say, I like my sleep.)) With me getting to work closer to 9-9:30 now and not wanting to oversleep:

  1. Jawbone UP alarm goes off between 7:33 and 7:53 AM
  2. Clock radio goes off at 8:00 AM
  3. Bertie’s cat feeder goes off at 8:10 AM which causes Bertie to leave the bed and gives me less incentive to stay nestled under the covers

After Bertie had his breakfast he returned to my bed where he meowed at me quite a few times until I got up. It was probably his way of urging me to get up and go to the bathroom so he could have a drink from the sink, but a fuzzy alarm clock is still an alarm clock, and it was still pretty cute the way he came back to check on me.

For a while I had an additional alarm set for 8:10 (or was it 8:15) on my phone to make me get out of bed and go to my phone to turn it off, but so far I haven’t needed to reactivate it. There was another one set for 8:30 which was my “time to go” alarm which was my reminder that I should start wrapping things up and head to the bus stop. I turned that one off as well since I didn’t want to have it going off while I might still be in the shower.

Speaking of alarm clocks, I ought to go to bed. First, though, one quick look at OPM’s website for tomorrow… damn and blast, open as usual. Hopefully that’ll change by morning.

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Retail dreams

It’s been probably about 10 years since I stopped working in retail and yet I had a stress dream about it last night where nothing seemed to work, I had no idea what I was doing, and every customer I had wanted to yell at me. That was fun.

I spent the weekend at Mom and Dad’s to visit with them and Anne and Kelly and Teagan. Nice way to spend a weekend, but I’m glad I’m back home now.

I haven’t been doing much this weekend other than working on my quantitative self script to pull in data from the Jawbone API; making some changes to my original process to have more structured code. Got my sleep and meal data pulling in now, still need to update it to pull in my movement activity and possibly set it up to read resting heart rate if I ever get the next version of the Jawbone UP. Then need to make changes to load any Nike+ JSON data I upload, and continue to pull in weather data for each day / each outdoor run, and then work on some views. Once that’s all set then I can go to work on creating a front end to visualize and enter in some data as well.

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Step into my concert hall, baby

I bought a ticket today for a Belle and Sebastian concert in June. I wouldn’t have known they were going to be in town if it weren’t for a tweet I happened to see where someone was wondering why they were scheduled to perform at Echostage and not somewhere like the 9:30 Club that might be a better venue for them. I’ve never been to Echostage so I wouldn’t know.

I’ve listened to their music for years but never have seen them perform live. They’re coming out with a new album, hence the tour, I suppose.

At first I was thinking that the last concert I attended was Pizza Underground at the Black Cat last March, but there was also a Neko Case concert that I almost forgot that I went to a few months after that when my friend Dave had a spare ticket. I probably go to only one or two concerts a year now so it’s pretty easy for me to keep track of them – then again, it wasn’t like I went to many more concerts per year than that at any time in my past – but while I’d like to go to more concerts I find that most of the time I only go when I know who the band is. Some people I know make a point of seeing lots of live performances, but I can’t really say that I have any interest nowadays in heading out to a venue on my own to stand around and see a band perform that I may or may not enjoy.

I just remembered: Neko Case wasn’t my last concert. I went to see a Last Waltz tribute concert with my family for my Mom’s birthday a few months ago.

Anyway, that goes back to my point. While the Last Waltz performance was good and I enjoyed it I wouldn’t have seen that concert date on a marquee and thought to myself “that looks like fun, I think I’ll go see that.” ((While I was writing this I was thinking that maybe I’d be more interested in seeing concerts if they were at sit-down venues, but the Last Waltz tribute was at a dinner theater and even in that type of venue I still can’t see myself picking a performance at random and deciding to go. It also didn’t help that for much of the performance there were other patrons sitting by me who kept talking, which I found distracting. At least in a general-admission venue you can walk away and try to find somewhere else to listen.))

I don’t buy as much new music as I used to, either. I remember when I’d buy a CD simply based on the cover art, not knowing anything at all except for the name of the band and the title of the album. I actually bought several pretty good albums that way. You’d think that I’d be more likely to go to a concert where if I didn’t enjoy myself at least it only cost me a few dollars and a few hours of my time than to buy a CD that would cost me a few dollars and that I’d have to find a way to get rid of if I didn’t like it. Then again, there’s not really much of a chance of being rudely interrupted by someone obnoxious if I’m sitting at home listening a CD I bought at random, and if that did happen then I’ve got bigger issues than a waste of a few dollars and a CD to dispose of: issues such as “Who are you?” and “How did you get in my apartment??”

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Git-arzan and his jungle version control system

Nothing too exciting today. It snowed some last night, but even though there was only a trace of accumulation the government gave employees the option of telework. I still had my work laptop with me but after working from home on Monday and staying home not feeling well yesterday that I figured I ought to head into the office today.

Something made me remember the git version control software program Tower yesterday and I thought that the extract/transform/load code I’m developing for my quantitative self dashboard ought to be stored in a version control system. What I’ve done so far has pretty much been just a proof-of-concept with me tinkering as I go, but now that I know that what I’m doing actually works I ought to take better care of my code and clean up what I’ve done already. I installed Tower today and discovered that they’re up to version 2 now, and I only had a license for version 1. Luckily I had bought my copy just after June 1 and was able to upgrade to version 2 for free. I’m especially happy because version 2 has a git-flow management system built in, and I had tried to wrap my head around how to incorporate that into my development process and for some reason just couldn’t wrap my head around the process.

When I originally bought Tower I was trying to use it with OS X Server’s built-in git repository, but for various reasons it just felt too cumbersome. I’m not sure but I think I might remember also having some issues with git not working well with Coda? This time I installed git from Homebrew and with the new git-flow functionality I hope it’ll be easier for me to use.

I recently finished reading The Martian and its use of log entries has inspired me to try to write more frequently here. It’s not like every post has to be an essay; just keeping track of what’s happened each day is enough for me. Plus, I kind of have an ulterior motive for writing more often: I’ve been looking into natural language processing and what it involves, and have also in the past looked into how to perform sentiment analysis. While putting together my quantitative self database I realized that since I migrated my old LiveJournal account over here I’ve got 15 years’ worth of writing across over 5400 posts. Looked at migrating tweets from my Twitter account and their metadata as well, and that’d be another 6 years’ worth of writing across 28,000 tweets (minus however many retweets I’ve done as I’m only interested in evaluating my own writing). That ought to be a large enough corpus for tinkering and experimenting.