Mission accomplished.

FT has a good writeup.

NYT’s is an embarrassment. Their word games are the only thing keeping me a subscriber.

Congratulations to my fellow citizens! Now the real work begins.

Flying for the first time since July, to Chicago.

To vote. In the Serbian parliamentary elections. Lily Lynch has a good writeup of why these are really really really really important.

There are no absentee ballots in Serbia: if you are away from home you either have to haul your behind back, or register to vote abroad. The number of Serbs in Denver being too small to open a polling place there — not that there would be one even if there were more of us, as the soon-to-be former Serbian kakistocracy has been doing its best to suppress the diaspora vote — we did a nick-of-time registration to the one place they had to open up. ⊕ [Note: But no, it was in fact more complicated than that. We first naively registered to vote in Denver, well ahead of the registration deadline, thinking that the powers that be would, in case there wasn’t a polling place there, re-route us to the closes city automatically like we heard they did in years past. Then we learned that there was no law requiring them to do so. Fearing shenanigans, my wife and I sent a second registration, for Chicago, skipping Denver altogether. And a good thing we did, because my father-in-law, visiting from Serbia, never submitted the re-registration my wife dutifully prepared for him, and learned that his request to vote in Denver was denied, end of story. This all happened a few weeks ago. For those whose jobs, finances and/or child care responsibilities don’t allow for last-minute plane tickets: tough luck. Draw your own conclusions about what the implications are for Serbian democracy. ]

Another cute way to take away people’s right to vote was to have the polling places open at the same time as they are in Serbia. Which is to say, they opened at midnight central, and will close at 1pm. Or maybe 2pm, since today was the end of daylight savings torture in most of the world. I am guessing here, because the official certificate of registration to the Chicago consulate my wife and I received never specified the time. In prior elections, this was 8am to 8pm local time, so those used to voting that way are in for a surprise if they show up in the late afternoon.

Only, this obvious ploy to rig the vote was publicized so heavily that it made people who otherwise may not have voted so pissed off that they registered and started queuing well before midnight. I keep getting videos of long lines in DC, Chicago, etc.

Anyway, it was a 6am flight in — the one I am on now — and a 9pm flight back, with a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago in between. First class for both of us, thanks to the free upgrade from status I earned at my previous job and hope never to have again. The night before, we were privileged to a) witness a Nuggets nail-biter (against the Pelicans, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the season but oh well), and b) participate in the 4th quarter timeout show, wherein the Nuggets mascot Rocky threw a half-court shot behind his back and right into the net, earning us $200 (!?) most of which we will donate. ⊕ [Note: I would like to think that this was the turning point in the match. The Nuggets were 19 points behind at the start of the quarter. Some of the home crowd was booing. Then Rocky made the shot, the energy changed, and they came back to win in overtime. If you have access to the video via the NBA app you can see for yourself and check if my intuition is correct. ] Which is a long-winded way to say: helluva weekend.

Meaningful innovation in men’s shoes doesn’t come around often, but what Sketchers has done with their hands-free Swift Fit is a miracle — and one you can get for $35 at Costco. Dads everywhere salute you.

As heard at the NIH IRB retreat, which I sadly had to miss:

“For the incredible gift of looking at the most chaotic study designs and effortlessly deciphering their hidden meaning, this goes to Milos Miljkovic!”

Not into sharing accolades here, but I’m super-proud of this one.

A few days ago I wrote about a decade-old medical experience with parallels to modern tech. Today I have a recent story from home with parallels to medicine.

We have an indor fountain in our fancy new home, ⊕ [Note: The story of how we ended up in a house some two levels of fancifullness above our needs and wants deserves a separate post, maybe a whole series of posts. ] a thin slab of rock over which water runs in a smooth sheeth.

Problem one: when the water tank is full the fountain is nearly silent. In the dry Colorado air, it is full for a day or two at most, after which it becomes an increasingly annoying drip-drip-dripapalooza.

Problem two: you can’t fill a fountain with plain tap water, unless you want to clog the pipes with sediment. No, you need it to be deionized, at least aquarium-grade, preferably distilled.

Problem three: the only place that will refill a 3 gallon bottle of deinozed water near us is Whole Foods, which during my time in the US went from the third great Wonder of Capitalism (Costco being number one, TJ’s number two) to a soul-sucking dump. I was not about to make twice-weekly trips to Whole Foods a family ritual.

So, we got ourselves a home deionizer that hooked up to our laundy room’s faucet and produced 3 gallons of fountain-ready water — along with around 4 gallons of waist water; it is not a terribly efficient system — in about 45 minutes and at fractions of a penny per gallon. Waste tube goes into the sink, output tube goes into the 3 gallon bottle. What could go wrong?

Well you could leave it unattended for too long is what could go wrong, and it did, I did, within a few weeks of my installing it. One moment you are turning on the laundry room faucet before dinner thinking the length of an evening family meal is just enough for the bottle to fill up, the next you are sitting at your computer finishing up slides for next day’s lecture when you are startled by your wife’s loud, anxious, not really panicked but certainly urgent question from two stories down of why there was water drip-drip-dripping from the recessed light fixture onto the glass cooktop.

Not 10 seconds had passed from the downstairs yelp to my running to the laundry room and turning off the faucet. There wasn’t that much water on the floor, and none at all under the washer and dryer which were mercifully elevated with the tiles underneath clearly visible. However much water went over, and from the timing of everything it could have been up to 4 gallons, must have quickly found its way down under the floor, which was also the kitchen ceiling. But whatever damage there was, it had already happened. There was nothing to do but survey it, right?

Wrong. The process of surveying included climbing onto the kitchen island, as the recessed lights were right above it an inaccesible by ladder. On the island was also a stove. With a glass cooktop. Which I was very careful not to put pressure on getting onto the island, because of course the glass was fragile and not meant to be stomped on. But for one of the two lights, which ended up not being a conduit for the drips, I had to — oh so very gently — lay my knee onto the stove so that I could have a better grasp of the trim. Relieved that there was no water underneath, I quickly turned to the other one, behind me, bending my knee ever so slightly in the process, hearing a gentle click down below.

So that is the story of how our attempt to boycott MacKenzie Scott’s husband led to an $850 cooktop repair bill but — mercifully — no substantial water damage. Squint hard enough and you will also see a story of medical misadventures, chasing one fix with another for a problem of your own making until you make a critical mistake.

Like the time someone had a thyroid ultrasound to screen for cancer — please, don’t ever do this — and found a few thyroid nodules, benign under a microscope, but also a plump lymph node in the neck. That one was also biopsied, the result being some scar tissue and a piece of muscle so it may not have been as plump as the sonographer had thought, which should have provided reassurance but instead only prompted some to ask how we could tell that the person — let’s not call them a patient as there was never anything wrong with them — didn’t truly have lymphoma? I would argue that their probability of having it would be the same as anyone else’s, the suspicious lymph node being a nothingburger, but in the great game of Cover Your Ass someone else decided to scan the patients whole body, leading to a bonanza of incidental findings of the kind you would suspect to see in a 60-year-old smoker, with so many radiographic ghosts in which to stick a needle, maybe miss, maybe cause bleeding or infection.

But hey, at least we did something.

My quarterly Now page update is up. Nothing’s new and everything is, depending on your point of view.

I did it. I used overmorrow in a progress note today.

Doing my part to bring it back.

PSA: there is a word for “the day after tomorrow”. It’s overmorrow, and it’s almost 500 years old. Let’s bring it back!

And “the day before yesterday” is ereyesterday, in case you were wondering.

Remember when I mentioned paying movers was some of the smartest money you could spend. Well, I should have added paying someone to assemble large IKEA furniture, and then I should have followed that advice. Good lord…

Stress-free moves don’t exist. But for less stress, get professional movers from a reputable company, if you can afford it. Yes, packing too. Especially packing.

Yes, we have started the move today, Day 1 of who knows how many.