It feels like I’ve got pneumonia. Two years ago, when I had pneumonia in September, I let it go way too long. It just didn’t occur to me that I could have pneumonia and that my cold wouldn’t get better on its own. I lost a huge amount of body weight, could barely move, etc. Eventually, one night I woke up and couldn’t breath, and made a trip to the ER at 3:00am. This time around, I decided to be more pro-active and hopefully fend of disaster. I went to a walk-in clinic to get checked out. They gave me a prescription for antibiotics, did some imaging, and sent me home. No news on the imaging yet but hopefully the antibiotics will help.
After reading Camp with Mira, she wanted to tie a friendship bracelet. The instructions for the standard stripe-y friendship bracelet are in the back of the book. And so, we made one! I handled the inactive strings and maintained the tension on the bracelet. Mira did all the knot tieing1. It amazed me that she could tie over a hundred knots back-to-back.
Watching her do a geeky-braidy-textile thing made me so proud.
This week, Mira and I read a pair of graphic novels that contrast really strongly for me. Both were great for totally different reasons. Playful and straightforward. Serious and complicated.
We read Camp first and it was great. Awesome art. A well told story about two friends going to camp together and getting a bit too attached. A sort of middle-grades exploration of dependent relationships.
(Also: Oh my goodness, Camp Acorn Lake has a magic-and-science cabin. You can take guitar and/or sleight of hand lessons, wow! Absolute dream camp for me.)
The second graphic novel we read this week blew my mind. It was genuinely satisfying for an adult to read. I enthusiastically told Meg about scenes from it2. It is about a lot of things but I think the focus is the lives of Chinese-American kids. The broad range of lives they lead and the varying expectations. How much is too Chinese? How much is too American? If you don’t fit in to the mold that your parents make, where do you fit in?
Miller, Kayla. Camp. HarperCollins Publishers, 2019.
Wang, Jen. Stargazing. First Second, 2019.
Incredible writing news! Both papers were accepted3! The BISFA and Bridges papers both got warm feedback. The turn around on Bridges is quite fast; I need to get the revisions done this week essentially.
I did a bunch of re-jigging on this website. After pondering the notes-and-blog merger and chickening out on even attempting it, I took some decisive action. I’ve made an archive page which shows everything in chronological order. (This is Idea 3 “Make an all-posts pages?” from Week Notes 47.)
Making an archive page led me to clean up the navigation menu too. It was getting a bit complicated. For the historical record4, it is reproduced here.
Home / Now / Blog / Notes / Reading / Office Camera / Bookmarks / Tags / Archive / RSS Feeds / Top of Page
And now its quite a bit tidier.
Home / Now / Archive / Office Camera / Bookmarks / Tags / RSS / Top of Page
I also picked some emojis which visually clarify the purpose of the various types of pages. So, all the links remain the same, all the feeds will still work, but there will be a place to look up any kind of post whether it is a blog or note.
We got invited to take over the big raspberry patch beside our current plot. It has been unmaintained for many years and grown quite unruly. All last summer, we were heavily sampling the raspberries over the fence. We are going to take it over and try to get it cleaned up.
(This led to a question on /r/allotment/.)
Also, I totally bungled learned a lot from my first attempt at starting things from seeds.
My seedlings absolutely did not start in March and I’m going to retry them without the heating pad.
A friend manages tomatoe seedlings just find in her house, without heating.
I think that my poor tomatoes must have been too weirded out to germinate.
In [24] Hilden proves that $K_{2n}$ is finitely generated, and in [7] Birman finds the presentation with the smallest number of generators and in terms of elements of $B_{2n}$. \[ \{\sigma_1; \ \sigma_2 \sigma_1^2 \sigma_2; \ \sigma_{2i} \sigma_{2i-1} \sigma_{2i+1} \sigma_{2i}, \ 1\leq i \leq n-1\} \]
I’m glad that she tied all the knots. I’ve tried making friendship bracelets in the past but find it repetitive and boring. The technique doesn’t appeal to me; I much prefer loop braids. Though, to be fair, loop braiding produces rather petite bracelets. ↩︎
Spoilers I was blown away by the understated depths of when Christine’s mother silently microwaves some chicken nuggets. The backstory here is that Christine eats over at her friend Moon’s house and asks: “Where’s the pork in my dan dan mian?” Moon’s mom reports that they’re Buddhist vegetarians and that she makes her dan dan mian with mushrooms instead. Moon and Christine love it. When Christine tells her mom about this, the mother silently walks to the freezer, pulls out some chicken nuggets, and wordlessly microwaves them. ↩︎
Really, I should say “the papers were conditionally accepted subject to major revisions.” That just doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as well as: “Woo-hoo! The papers were accepted! Let’s eat pie!” ↩︎
It looks like The Internet Archive has also got it! ↩︎
Published: Apr 20, 2026 @ 19:00.
Last Modified: Apr 17, 2026 @ 21:17.
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