At times I can feel that the cold is leaving my system but it’s a real fight. Yesterday, I felt better but I really wasn’t ready to face things like the shower, my contact lens, changing, going to laundromat, getting food, all things I needed to do. Today I’m at the laundromat, sick as a dog, muzzle on, sitting in my truck as the wash gets done. By no means of am I feeling particularly good. But once the wash is in the drier around 2 PM, I’ll go Hannaford, get the essentials and head back home. I’m sure I’ll snap out of it soon.

It’s a fucking cold, it’s not cancer or the COVID or the flu. I don’t have a feaver, and for a while I had some issues with my throat being sore and food hard to eat — I puked up banana all over on Christmas Day . I’m coughing occassionally but it’s really been a head cold, you know the kind of stuffiness that gets up in your ear canals and puts pressure on balance and motion. I was feeling somewhat better yesterday, and I had some much energy that I baked bread and cooked up a big bowl of rice was coding late into the night, but I still don’t feel great especially when I got up this morning. A nice long hot shower today helped, I’m by no means full back at this point.

Laundry is gettting done, I’m sitting out in my truck. 🛻 I’m using a lot of hand santizer and wearing the muzzle but I sure am still sick and don’t want to get others sick, but at the same time, I can’t stay home forever, as only bought fruit when I went to store on Christmas Eve, as I figured I’d be back out on Thursday as I headed up to camp. Truth is it’s been a lot colder and grayer then I had expected, and probably woudn’t have been great for camping, especially come Sunday into the New Years. I mean if I felt better, I would still seriously consider a trip out to Brookfield or Long Pond, but it can’t be pouring all the way through New Years. Especially if I’m just recovering from a cold.

But right I am still fairly sick. I managed to get to the grocery store and laundromat but now it’s just a cough. I guess the one upside is it kept me home for Christmas Eve when the roads were very icy and my neighbor slammed into a, tree with his truck. Today is a, stunningly beautiful day in Central NY, much better than Albany but rain is coming tomorrow into all day, Sunday. With the rain wouldn’t have been that great of a trip after all, and I’ve been doing a lot of studying and writing C and C++ programming code and some other languages too.

Getting good at creating Makefiles and using gdb to debug. Honestly, I hate C it reminds me of building a castle by hand, and the libraries are all so hackish how they use pointers and structs and functions that are thirty characters long to essentially overcome C limitations. If C only had classes and templates like C++, lol. Truth is for what I like to do with data and maps, R and the tidyverse really is the best way of doing it. Not saying they’re aren’t good C and C++ libraries out there but they’re often not as good as what R has. I get the benefits of C and it’s good to master it if only to write libraries for R using Rcpp. Plus my journey in exploring C for data science has empowered me with knowledge of two great tools – Duckdb and jq. And I’ve been getting a lot better at shell scripting which is important for work – a lot of work can be automated with shell scripts and GNU tool kit. Plus it’s great to be able to grab the source code of a program you use every day, be able to study the functions and methods and have a good idea on how it works.