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Not a baby anymore

It’s such a stereotype. But there really is a moment when suddenly they’re not a baby anymore.

You open up your phone to look for particular photo and notice it’s automatically made a memories album of your kid. So you click and watch, and realize you missed the moment, whenever that was. It’s a weird shock that seems so obvious, it’s like you didn’t get to say goodbye to a friend you always knew had to leave.

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Favorite season

My favorite season as a kid was summer (obvi). Then autumn in my 20s, maybe because I actually started experiencing it then. Now it’s spring. You get all of the excitement and anticipation of summer without the humidity and mosquitos. Not sure it will ever be winter, but who knows.

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Why can’t you show AM/PM time on an iPhone?

So apparently you can’t set your iPhone to show AM and PM alongside the 12-hour time. This may not seem like a big deal, but I think it’s a pretty significant accessibility issue.

My grandpa is 100 years old, we just celebrated his birthday in March. He’s doing pretty darn well for his age. The only thing he’s having trouble with is short-term memory. This usually isn’t a big enough problem to cause any major concern at the moment. Although he lives on his own, it’s in an apartment that is equipped for his needs within an assisted living building, and my parents aren’t too far from him.

The thing that is causing problems, pretty major problems, is when he takes a nap and then wakes up and thinks it’s the wrong time of day. This causes him to miss meals because he doesn’t go down to the dining room in time. And when older folks start to regularly miss meals, they get pretty weak pretty fast.

He doesn’t want to cause a fuss, so we don’t know exactly how often this happens. I imagine with other folks, it also might be a bit embarrassing (maybe it is for him as well, I’m not sure). He naps a lot, which is fair enough considering his age, so I suspect it might be more often than we think.

I was talking about this with my mom, asking him if he has a big digital clock in his apartment or something. He does have a clock, but he usually looks at his watch or his phone for the time. I don’t want to suggest that he wear a digital watch, because his watch came from my grandma. So we were looking at our phones, and she pointed out that there’s no AM/PM.

There’s no way of changing it! That seems ludicrous.

I know he could change it to 24-hr time. But I doubt he would do that, because he would probably convince himself that it’s fine and he doesn’t need it. It would be a heck of a lot easier if you could just show AM/PM via the iOS Date & Time settings, as one would expect.

If any Apple folks happen to read this, I’d love if you could take this feedback onboard in some way. Or if you happen to know anyone at Apple, I’d really appreciate if you shared this with them.

In the meantime… I guess we get him a bigger digital clock for his apartment? I’m really not sure.

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The serial (“Oxford”) comma and screen readers

People think that serial / “Oxford” commas should be an optional style thing. But if you’re writing for the web, please use it.

Here’s an example of a sentence without a serial comma:

Please bring Jack, your brother and your uncle to the party

And an example of a sentence with a serial comma:

Please bring Jack, your brother, and your uncle to the party

First point: the second sentence makes it much clearer that Jack isn’t some questionable relative and that you’re meant to bring three people to the party.

Second point, and more the point of this post: the sentence with the serial comma is much more intelligibly read by screen readers, particularly when content is being read quickly.

Use the serial comma!

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NOW v7: More of the same

Updated my Now page, contents below for posterity. View past presents.

Since the last update in April 2022:

In broader, non-personal news, for posterity’s sake: 🌻 the terrible war in Ukraine continues, 💔 Roe v. Wade was repealed, 🐦 Twitter was bought by a megalomaniac and is subsequently imploding (who saw that coming?!?!?!?), 🇧🇷 Brazil finally got rid of their Trump (swiftly followed by a January 6th-esque attack on Brasília), 🇬🇧👑 the UK saw three prime ministers and two monarchs (all before B was 18 months old!).

We continue to see major tragic events being caused or exacerbated by climate change: flooding devastation in Pakistan, heat waves shrank the Po and Rhine rivers in Europe as well as the Mississippi in the US, Europe experienced its hottest summer on record, Category 4 Hurricane Ian left destruction from the Caribbean up through Florida and the Carolinas.

AI technology and use is accelerating rapidly. It really scares me. Worsening problems with misinformation is part of it, but honestly, deepfaked sexual content and its implications (made-to-order revenge porn, teens using AI to generate idealized images that are even more divorced from reality than IRL porn, etc.) scares me the most right now.

As with the last update, it feels a bit dark right now. But there have been some brighter points. Scientists seem to have made a breakthrough with ☢️ fusion technology. 🏳️‍🌈 Conversion therapy was officially banned in Canada. In Europe, ☀️ solar and wind power overtook gas for the first time. Both sides of the civil war in Ethiopia have signed a disarmament plan. Germany returned 22 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, as did The National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian, and the RISD Museum (you listening, British Museum?). In terms of US politics, the midterms weren’t as hard-right-heavy as had been expected. (Probably because the majority of American citizens aren’t nuts and think that abortion should be legal in most cases? IDK, call it a hunch.)

***

In more personal news: It looks like I’ve made progress on most of the things I’ve wanted to do, which is a nice feeling.

We’re still in Brooklyn, and loving our neighborhood. But honestly, it’s probably too expensive for us long-term, and our apartment is definitely too small. So sad, because we love it in every other regard. Do we find a slightly larger apartment in a slightly less ideal location in this neighborhood? Do we find a much larger apartment in a different Brooklyn neighborhood? Do we try Queens? Do we look at a suburb? I really don’t know. Meanwhile, if you know of any 3 bed places coming available, give me a shout. We’d really like to stay where we are.

I’ve been working at SuperHi for a little over seven months now. Early on I was feeling very impostor-y, but I feel a lot more settled in now and have been loving it. My team is great, our projects are exciting, I’m learning so much. In particular, I’ve come up with a system for accessibility auditing that I’m really happy with. I’m hoping to write about that soon.

The day-to-day home routine has just been getting better over time, as long as you ignore the frequent days when it gets thrown off completely by daycare colds… Anyways, it’s pretty much the same as before, only I’m trying to get up a little earlier in order to do at least 15 minutes of exercise per day. I’ve been doing this routine plus some abs stuff, but I really need to branch out a bit. I’ve started running 💨 to daycare pickup which is a super new thing for me, I’ve never been a runner because of my knee. But it isn’t a long distance and it gets my heart rate up, which is good. I’ll keep doing it until the knee thing seems unbearable.

I have been meeting up with people more often, which does wonders for my mental health. Finally went to visit SJB and get the boys together, what a gorgeous house. And the daycare moms meet up for drinks 🍷 about once a month, they can tip it back. RIP Lizzie King’s, hopefully you’ll find a new home. Haven’t found a choir yet… but I’ve only recently felt like it might be a sensible thing to do, both because of Covid and because of time constraints.

Speaking of Covid 🦠, it feels like it’s… gone? Not gone, but we’ve reached some sort of uneasy equilibrium. To be honest, it may be less of an equilibrium and more of a shifting of priorities. Flu, RSV, and just general cold season is so unbelievably bad right now. B got RSV very early in the season, which was awful at the time (Sam was just getting over Covid but still testing positive, so I had to take B to the hospital alone). But looking back, I’m sort of thankful he got it back then? At least we had OTC meds and the hospital wasn’t too busy. There has been zero infant ibuprofen or acetaminophen on the shelves for weeks now, I check basically every store I pass. And hospitals have been packed.

Spring 🌷 can’t come fast enough. I said to Sam the other day that spring is going to come quick, and he gave me a very skeptical look. I think he may be right, but maybe not… time seems to be moving so fast.

B has changed SO MUCH over the past 9 months. First words (“hello” 👋, “ALL DONE” 🙅, “apple” 🍎, “ball” 🔵, “Stu”), animal noises (snake 🐍, lion 🦁, cow 🐮), pointing to body parts (belly button, nose 👃, eye 👁️, ear 👂, feet 🦶), walking then almost immediately running, lots of soccer ⚽️, absolute obsessions (and meltdowns) over anything hand-held with wheels 🛞, so many teeth 🦷. He still loves being startled, and cuddly things. He just started saying “please” (“eeethzzzz”), on command only. On the whole, he’s pretty “easy”. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop…

Nah!

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Winter cherry tree

Went to an HTML Energy gathering last weekend, got to see some great old faces and meet lovely new ones. I tried to hand-draw a leafless cherry tree ASCII-style but got the grid wrong. Here’s a re-attempt.

A teensy, tiny bit of snow stuck to the ground overnight and there was a light dusting when we woke up. First of the season.