1. I felt like nobody wanted to hear about the crazy updates with specialty pharmacies and FedEx. Delivery exceptions, phone tag, the run-around with the dose delivered by FedEx on behalf of McKesson. (And by “the run-around,” I mean “I had to drive to the FedEx center in the barrio during a specific 30-minute window during rush hour.”) The dose delivered to CVS sat around, ice packs melting, for almost eight hours because no one at CVS checked-in the specialty medications that were delivered that day.

  2. Despite the fact that this medication does not work particularly well (there are no measurable, quantitative improvements; I just have a vague sense that headaches don’t get quite so bad and that they improve just a little bit faster), I decided to give it another shot (ha! ha! ha!), and I injected myself with a second dose on Thursday.

  3. Almost entirely done with future prediction and writing up what was tried and which code does what.

  4. Next up: making lots of little widgets for a dashboard!

  5. Hiring update: Still looking for a Cat Herder. I am still debating whether or not to bring one of my actual cats to work on the days that we are interviewing for the Cat Herder position. I suppose the first step would be bringing the extra litter box in to the office.

  6. Hiring update 2: I’m developing a partial ordering of how well the applicants, as a whole, for our various open positions follow the directions in the job ad. Potential Cat Herders and Software Developers do better than expected at following the directions. Potential teachers do worse than expected. Let your friends know: If they want to teach for us, if they follow the directions in the job ad, they will already be in the top 10% of our applicant pool. (The directions are not particularly tricky.)

  7. Hiring update 3: A new person started on Friday! On Thursday we learned that the new person uses they/them pronouns. We are all trying very hard to use they/them pronouns when referring to our new colleague, but we don’t always remember. Both during the interview and during the process of preparing for this person to join the team, most of us were unaware that they used they/them pronouns, so we had been talking about them using a set of common third person singular pronouns.

  8. Pronoun aside: You mostly use pronouns when you are talking about someone and not when you are talking to that person. So when we make mistakes, our new colleague isn’t there to notice. But everyone else can judge.

  9. Pronoun aside 2: Wouldn’t it be easier if English were more like Mandarin or Turkish and personal pronouns were not declined for gender? In English, personal pronouns are the only words that are declined for gender. People stopped complaining about singular “you” and the loss of the T-V distinction. We could probably tolerate a further collapse of English pronouns.

  10. Referring to people aside: I’m going to admit that I don’t understand anything at all about why some people care which pronouns are used to refer to them. And because I am from the 1990s (Intellectually, I mean; I’m originally from the 1970s, but I attended a liberal arts college in the 1990s.), I was raised to believe that gender is a social construct and a purely performative aspect of our heteronormative culture. But I have a lot of friends who use names that do not exactly match what is on their birth certificates, so to me it is equivalently polite to refer to all people however they ask to be referred to.

  11. Names aside: Not too long ago I realized that I have two legal names (one on my birth certificate and a different one on the social security card that was issued when I was an infant). At some point I should do something about that beacuse people are way less tolerant these days about names not matching exactly. My passport has my birth-certificate-name, and my drivers license has my social-security-card name. So no matter which name is on something, I have a legit-seeming ID to match it. Which is why I’m not particularly motivated to change it. (Neither of my parents have middle names, so they didn’t really understand how middle names work, which is what led us to this situation.)

  12. Hiring update 4: Another new person starts tomorrow! His first name is the same as that of the new person who started in July. His last name is the same as the first name of the CEO. This means that email autofill is going to lead to potentially awkward situations. Colleagues, if you are reading this blog post, you may want to set up distinct email aliases for these people!

  13. Recently from the bug reports: “Is the answer supposed to be 2, because when I type it in, it does not work.”

  14. You have no idea how much yarn I brought with me to knitting group this morning.