jducoeur

Anyone who knows me knows that I am involved with many, many volunteer organizations -- that's what I do with much of my time.

This past week, I wound up in a conversation in one of them that was pointlessly hurtful to me, and the result is that I'm going to be reducing my involvement in that organization. I don't think anyone was intentionally trying to be harmful, but it was kind of my breaking point.

(We're not going to talk here about which organization, or the details of the incident -- they're not especially relevant, and would likely just derail the more interesting conversation. Suffice it to say, I've written to the leadership of that organization to give them my thoughts on the matter.)

The whole thing led to a lot of soul-searching and introspection, and as is my way, some philosophizing about what's going on there. None of this is unique to the group in question -- I've observed similar in many clubs -- so let's talk about some basics.

This is half-philosophizing, half a necessary diary entry to get my head straight, so it'll be a bit of a wander. Bear with me -- it'll get to the point. Hopefully others will find it useful / interesting.

---

In the heat of the moment, I focused on a few individuals who, being extremely focused on their own problems, made mine much worse. This put me in mind of the concept of Toxic Service.

"Toxic Service" is an idea that I learned from the Order of the Silver Crescent, in the East Kingdom of the SCA. We might well have invented the term, decades ago, but it's hard to be sure.

The Crescent is the Order that recognizes Service to the Kingdom. Its definition doesn't say anything about behavior, and some people take that to imply that behavior is absolutely irrelevant. (As opposed to the higher-level Order of the Pelican, where good behavior is an explicit requirement.)

Over the years, we decided that wasn't quite right. The Crescent doesn't demand that you be a role model of politesse, but is concerned with net service -- not just the gross amount of work you're doing, but the overall effect.

And the thing is, your behavior can affect the service of the people around you. "Role model" may not be a requirement, but if you are driving others away from doing service -- because you're too perfectionist or hectoring, or too self-sacrificing to be near, or simply an asshole -- that becomes Toxic Service, and gets subtracted from the work you're doing. While it's not common, it's not rare for someone to be held back from recognition because of this.

---

After some reflection, though, I realized that thinking of this as Toxic Service was off-base. This wasn't a problem of one or two badly-behaved people; instead this showed itself as a more pervasive cultural problem.

In retrospect, it shouldn't be surprising: the organization is overloaded and under-resourced (as are many volunteer organizations these days), with the result that lots of people are burnt out and crabby. Everybody knows it, but it's rare for people inside the organization to talk about it.

Which put me in mind of the Missing Stair Problem.

For those who aren't familiar with it, a "missing stair" is a person inside an organization who is dangerous: most often a sexual predator, although other forms happen.

What makes this person a missing stair is that they are charismatic and/or productive, so nobody particularly wants to confront them or talk about their bad behavior publicly. Instead, they become the topic of whisper networks, so that all the experienced members know to steer around them.

Which is kind of okay -- except that new members sometimes don't hear those whispers until it's too late, and wind up badly hurt. Hence "missing stair": easy to avoid habitually if you know about it, but extremely dangerous if you don't. The fact that there is a problem that nobody talks about publicly makes the problem much worse.

---

On further thought, though, I realized that the missing-stair analogy was poorly suited to the problem at hand as well. Not only is that metaphor also focused on individual bad apples, it's much more serious. A collectively-grumpy culture is harmful to the organization, and might be emotionally somewhat harmful to the members, but nobody's likely to get sexually assaulted.

So instead, let's shift the metaphor a bit, and think of this problem as Missing Banisters.

It's not just one stair that is super-dangerous: it's that the entire staircase is just a bit less safe than it should be. Going down it is slower and scarier than it should be, more emotionally draining, and it doesn't matter how long you've been going down, it still kind of sucks, because it isn't supportive.

And that gets to the heart of the matter. In a Missing Banisters situation, everybody is more isolated than they should be. Everyone is doing their best, but they are tending to feel overwhelmed, and many wind up resenting anything that sounds like it could possibly be a demand on their time. It drains the camaraderie and joy.

That lack of mutual support can be downright deadly to a volunteer organization, because it steadily erodes the volunteer capacity of the organization, in several different ways.

• First, it leads to individual burnout. Many folks -- often including the high-achievers and leadership -- keep plugging away out of a dreary sense of guilt, accomplishing a lot until they just plain snap, and have to leave for their own health.
• Second, it hurts recruitment. Volunteers can smell this sort of unhealthy environment, when the existing members are already over-tired, and tend to be sensible enough to stay far, far away.
• Third -- subtlest but actually most important -- it reduces the capacity of the active members. Folks running volunteer orgs tend to think of each person as having a set amount they can do, but that's over-simplified. If the environment is isolating and combative, the emotional labor needed to get anything done increases, and that person just can't accomplish as much as they would in a more-supportive environment.

It's an easy trap to fall into. It tends not to be due to one event or one person -- rather, it's usually a long process of things going a little wrong. Folks wind up nitpicking, over-interpreting, and getting defensive, and that gradually becomes a pattern of habit that others pick up on. Since nobody calls it out and tries to turn it around, it slowly worsens.

It's a spectrum, of course, not a simple "toxic vs healthy". And it goes the other way as well: if you can create an environment that is positive, people tend to stick around, it's easier to recruit, and members tend to be much more productive because of that mutual support. It's easier to do things with more company, and folks tend to fill in each others' gaps so that they focus on their strengths.

That doesn't mean a Pollyanna-ish denial that there are problems, mind (there are always problems), but it does mean that everyone needs to engage productively and positively, acknowledging those problems and working together to find and enact the best solutions.

Which in turn means that the first step is noticing and acknowledging the missing banisters, and working together to build them.

Of course, that isn't easy. I've been involved with clubs that have turned around toxic cultures, but it's required a ton of hard work, cooperation, and sometimes some very scary gambles on radical change. There's no guarantee of success -- heaven knows, I've been in enough clubs that have simply crumbled. But you don't have any chance if you don't seriously try.

---

Anyway, that's my current thinking. I'm hoping that the organization that triggered this line of thought can turn things around. (I'm not entirely stepping away, just reducing my own exposure for my own health.)

Hopefully folks find these ideas (and terms) at least somewhat useful.

Thoughts? Please, no speculation about the specifics, but ideas about how to recognize problems in the cultures of volunteer organizations, discuss them productively, and turn things around are quite welcome.

(Content warning for a bit of whining, but I really need to get this written down and out of my head.)

Most of my friends know that I've been horribly toasty for at least a year now. But most are sort of playing blind men to my elephant, only seeing a bit of it. So for the sake of diarizing, and to think it through in my own head, let's enumerate all of my current responsibilities, by category.

Dayjob

First and by no means least, there's Work-work. I've been working for Slack/Salesforce for something like 2.5 years now. It's not terrible, mind -- by the standards of giant multinationals, Salesforce isn't a bad employer, and Slack built up a wonderful culture.

But still, it's fairly intense, taking up nearly all of my attention from 8:30am - 6pm most days, in a busy and complicated environment. It's less "hard", more "brain-burning", simply from all of the balls I need to keep in the air there.

And the sad reality is, it's reminded me that I've been a small-company guy all my life, and this isn't that. I like to know everyone at the company, up to and including the CEO, and have my hands completely around the product that I'm working on. That's really not possible here, and that's quietly frustrating. It's really not the sort of place where I tend to excel.

Querki

Remember Querki? Querki is my little company -- I'm still the CEO, President and sole real programmer.

The company is still toddling along -- I build nice stable software, and the thing's been running more or less continuously for a dozen years now. But the software stack is ridiculously out of date in many ways, in desperate need of a hundred upgrades just to get to the point where I can actively develop it again. (Starting with the trick of pulling out the tablecloth of the obsolete containerization system that it currently runs in and replacing that with Docker. That bit's hard: it's the sort of Ops work that I'm not as good at as I am programming per se.)

I really miss working on Querki, but this annoying-but-necessary upgrade project stands in the way of doing so. That needs a pile of serious time.

Professional Organizations

I'm on the Typelevel Steering Committee. Typelevel is one of the major sub-communities of the Scala world (Scala being my programming language of choice), dedicated to high-quality functional programming and being decent people; the Steering Committee are kinda-sorta the board of directors of that, trying to herd the cats (as it were) in vaguely the same direction and keep the community healthy.

I'm actually on the Board of the NE Scala conference, a delightful hybrid of a technical conference and a fan-con; I chaired it last year, and still seem to be the nearest thing to a leader we currently have. I desperately need to find somebody interested in chairing the next one, and we really should reincorporate the bloody thing as a 501(c)3.

In airy theory, I'm in charge of BASE, the Boston Area Scala Enthusiasts Meetup. That was floundering even before the pandemic, and I've had no luck getting it restarted since 2020. Which is sad: I'm fairly sure the people are there, but getting folks to communicate is hard.

SCA

The SCA is still my home base -- where I met most of my friends, and the organization I still spend the most time on, for all that it's not nearly as much as I used to.

I have one official job there, as Chatelaine of Carolingia -- basically the welcome wagon for the Barony. That one, I was slightly voluntold into: I had stepped up as "drop dead deputy" for the previous Chatelaine, since somebody had to do so, and discovered that I'd been appointed to the main job only two weeks after it happened. (In the middle of East Kingdom Court, no less.) I enjoy working with new folks -- I've done so for almost as long as I've been in the club -- but having it as a Job makes it a bit more Work, a bit less Fun, and it comes with some real responsibilities.

Less officially, I'm Ace of the Low Company of Gamesters and Gamblers (basically, I co-run the gaming guild), and help out in various other capacities like Dance.

Arisia

Arisia is one of the local science fiction conventions -- I've attended nearly every year since it was founded (about 35 years ago), and have gotten gradually more involved since then.

Most obviously, I'm in the middle of standing up an official Arisia Discord server. (I wound up in charge mainly because I made the argument that we needed one.) That project is running behind -- I'd hoped to have it open to the public last month, so I need to get my ass in gear there.

I've also been the Press Liaison -- basically the person responsible for working with the fan press and making sure they behave -- for something like ten years now. I'd really like to hand off that job, but have had no luck so far.

And of course, there are the fun bits: running the annual Arisia Renaissance Ball and serving on panels. Those require some real effort, but they're highlights of my year.

Intercon

Intercon is the local LARP convention, which I've been participating in since 1988. My responsibilities there are decently light at this point -- I'm part of the Proposal Committee, which is mainly just a matter of reviewing game proposals and making suggestions to help them succeed. Not usually a big deal, although it got pretty freaking intense for a while, a month or two ago, when we had to process enormous numbers of proposals at high speed.

I'm also writing a new game for the upcoming Intercon. By my standards it's super-light -- it'll total dozens of pages of writing instead of the hundreds that most of my games have entailed. But it still needs to get done, and soon.

Family

Of course, there's also Real Life.

My mother is in her mid-80s, and really no longer independent -- she's now in an adult living facility. Fortunately, my aunt and uncle have been doing much of the heavy lifting (with her medical care and bills, respectively), so I'm not by any means her sole caregiver. But I seem to be her main social connection to the world (she's a serious introvert), so I'm trying to visit every other weekend; in practice, that winds up taking about a quarter of my free days.

Conclusions

So yeah -- it's a lot.

The hell of it is, nearly all of the above are fun individually. With the exception of Carolingian Chatelaine, I volunteered for all of this -- I care about these communities, and enjoy the work. But put it all together, and it's completely insane: overwhelming to the point where I'm dropping balls left and right. And that sense of overwhelm and failure makes it hard to enjoy the tasks.

And of course, that's just counting responsibilities, and doesn't include the Just Plain Fun things I'm doing and that I'd like to be doing more of, which include:

• Scottish Country Dance, especially the new Gender Free SCD right near my house.
• Contra Dance, especially BIDA (also within walking distance).
• Going to more SCA events.
• Doing more gaming with friends.
• Socializing in general -- it's weird to feel a bit lonely and isolated when I'm in so many communities, but it's not a minor thing.

So the big project for next year is going to be figuring out how to trim things back, so more of it is Fun and less is Work. That's likely to be hard and dispiriting -- some of those activities are effectively moribund, and I may have to just let them die, which is very depressing -- but it's necessary for my sanity.

(CW for diet, weight loss, health and that sort of thing.)

It occurs to me that it's been six months or so, and I should give an update about what it's been like.

The headline is that it's working more or less as expected. It's not a miracle weight-loss drug that sends me right down to my perfect weight forever, but it's been a net positive for my health so far.

As previously mentioned, I found withdrawal from Ozempic to be startlingly hard for even a couple of days, so I've been following my schedule pretty religiously: every Monday morning, without fail. I'm still pondering how I want to play Pennsic. (Where refrigeration is a bit complicated, so I can't just casually grab the injector pen and go the way I do with most vacations.)

Over time, the effects have evened out. The initial "meh, I don't really need food" has died off as I've gotten used to it. But it still has the key effect: it's just rather easier to not overdo it. It's not that I'm not eating, or even that I don't occasionally over-indulge. Rather, it's just a bit easier to portion-control, it's a bit easier to eat a little healthier, it's easier to cut off the over-indulgences earlier.

Put it together and it's not like I'm only eating half what I was before. But I probably am eating 80% as much, slightly better balanced, and that's not a minor detail.

The weight hasn't melted off, but I seem to have stabilized around 10-15 pounds down from where I was to begin with. That's less weight loss than I was hoping, but again -- not nothing. I'm probably around the same weight I was 15 years ago: kinda fat, but not as fat.

More importantly, my health has improved markedly. I was mildly diabetic to begin with; now I'm at the lower edge of the borderline range, for the first time in something like 15 years. (About 1.0 down in my A1C levels.) That's a very big deal. My cardio health feels better, stairs don't bother me so much, I'm a little more able to dance again -- in general, it's good. Fingers crossed, the lost weight will help prevent the stress fracture I got in my foot at ESCape two years ago.

No obvious negatives: I haven't yet had any serious nausea, and the constipation went away before long. The weekly shot is a mild nuisance, but less so than most of my daily meds once I got the hang of how to use the injector. Knock on wood, my doctor's pharmacy still seems to be sourcing it without difficulty. (Unlike CVS, who I am steadily moving away from entirely due to their ongoing institutional incompetence.)

The only possible side-effect I've noticed is a worrying reflux issue. That's not entirely new (I've had heartburn issues my entire adult life), but this is a new and concerningly persistent laryngeal reflux that has me a bit nervous -- even a heavy Omeprazole regimen isn't entirely stopping it. Now, that may be entirely unrelated to the Ozempic -- I had a previous bout last year, before starting the Ozempic, and the thing that both rounds really have in common is that they were post-Covid, so that might actually be the trigger. But I'm keeping an eye on it, and trying to get more yogurt and stuff into my life, to improve my gut flora.

Most important: I'm still on a minimum Ozempic dose, and it's been quite beneficial. I might eventually raise it, to knock off another 10 pounds and actually get out of the diabetic range entirely, but I'm in no rush -- this is a game of adjusting the long-term, not a crash diet.

So yeah -- the stuff still seems to be the perfect capitalist-age medicine: very useful, works as advertised, but you have to keep paying them tons of money every month. Use with caution -- I do recommend starting slow if you can do so -- and there's clearly a lot of YMMV. But it doesn't seem to be snake oil, and knock on wood, it's done me considerable benefit so far.

This is the last night of my work onsite trip. So let's do something I do too rarely: sit down and diarize a bit.

This is going to be long and fairly unedited, but focusing on what I thought were the high points; hopefully it won't be interminable.

---

The context here is that I work for Slack, as a member of the Platform Team, specifically the "3p Integrations Core" sub-team, still mostly known as Troops. (Which was the small startup I had been working at, that got acquired something like 18 months ago.) At some point, I should talk a bit about what I do. But for purposes of this rambling entry, the important concepts are the Platform Team (something like a hundred people), the Troops Engineers (eight of us), and the Platform Integrations Team (Troops plus two other small teams).

In this age of being heavily remote (all-remote in the case of Troops), the Platform team has made the sensible decision that we should all get together in-person a couple of times a year, for a bit of communication and a lot of team-building.

(tl;dr -- this is actually a good deal of fun. I approve of doing this a few times a year.)

Hence, we were all summoned to Salesforce Tower in SF for the week. (Did you know that Salesforce owns Slack? I did not know that before we were acquired. Yes, Salesforce owns Slack.)

---

Monday was, y'know, mainly about the flying. But time zones are funny things, so despite taking off from Boston at 11am, I nonetheless landed in SF before 2pm. So there was a lot of time to kill.

I wound up staying at the Galleria Park Hotel, a nice older hotel that has been kept up generally well. My room is a tad small; OTOH, they provide bathrobes and umbrellas (the latter an absolute lifesaver this week -- see below), and every evening, when I walk into the hotel after work, they shove a complementary martini into my hand, so I have no complaints. For the Bostonians: the general vibe reminds me a good deal of the Park Plaza -- older, a bit idiosyncratic, but nice.

(Note that we weren't all staying at the same place: instead of having a hotel dictated to us, we're told to go into Concur (hack, ptui) and choose from the recommended list. I chose the Galleria Park; most of Troops landed on the Omni instead.)

In the early evening, my immediate team had a quick Slack chat: several of us had gotten in by then, all of us were jet-lagged, and looking for an early dinner. My teammate Frank, whose wife comes from Georgia (the country, not the state), had been extolling the virtues of Georgian food, so other-teammate Thor found the restaurant Georgian Cheese Boat, and half-a-dozen of us went there.

Mini-review: that's quite tasty! I haven't tried the cuisine before, but there were lots of high points, from an excellent lamb stew to good kebabs to the eponymous cheese boats. (Basically low bread bowls full of melted cheese, into which you stir an egg and a bit of butter.)

A high point was the Khinkali: vaguely mushroom-shaped dumplings with a thick doughy "stem" that you use to hold it while you eat the stuff-filled "cap". (Fortunately, Frank had clued us into the fact that it's a novice mistake to try to eat the stem, which is just a big wodge of solid dough and not cooked to the point of being good to eat.)

The restaurant was about half a mile from our hotels; I walked with everyone back to the Omni, and then decided I wanted some exercise, so I set myself a mission. I didn't have room for dessert immediately (see: Ozempic), but I wanted a cookie to have in my room to eat later. So I set out down to the Ferry Marketplace on the theory that a tourist area like that would surely have something like Insomia Cookies still open at 8pm.

There ensued what turned into a stubborn five-miles trek up the Embarcadero through Pier 27, then back down to Mission and along that, finding absolutely nothing of the sort. The Embarcadro and Financial Districts are dead after 6pm, to a degree that I find astonishing even by the standards of Boston's comparable district. So while it was great exercise, it was rather frustrating.

(The irony, and lesson in "no shit, just ask freaking directions", was discovering the next day that, two blocks from my hotel in the other direction, is... an Insomnia Cookies. Sigh.)

---

Tuesday was the first day of the onsite proper, starting with a surprisingly good catered breakfast for all of Platform, some assorted welcoming and speechification, lunch, and presentations on various topics. Since it was work stuff it's mostly proprietary, and wouldn't be interesting to y'all anyway.

For dinner, the entire Platform team went out to ChinaLive. I suspect that if you eat downstairs off the menu, it lives up to its stellar billing. As it was, it was… fine.

The problem is, we weren't doing a sit-down dinner: instead, we had a single big room upstairs, designed as a wander-around-and-mingle cocktail party with passed appetizery things. They were the sorts of items I like (potstickers, char siu pork buns, etc), and good enough, but nothing better than that – I've had far better interpretations of each item. Similarly, the cocktails at the open bar were perfectly competent, but not even remotely innovative or interesting, and the selection was tiny.

Combine that with the fact that it was brutally loud (see "100 people at a cocktail party"), and most of us in the Troops team fled as soon as we could politely do so.

So we walked back to the Omni, I dropped everyone else off, and decided that for tonight's exercise I should do the opposite of last night. Since I'd already explored the Embarcadero thoroughly, I would instead walk up California Street in the other direction. (This is where the SF locals go, "oh, dear".)

The thing is, "up California Street" turns out to be a very literal description. You walk up an extremely steep hill, get to the top – and find yourself confronted with another extremely steep hill in front of you. Repeat half a dozen times.

By the time I got to the Mark Hopkins International and decided that this time really, truly seemed to be the top, I finally went onto my phone, looked it up, discovered that I had just climbed Nob Hill the hard way, and was now about 300 feet higher than I had started.

So yeah – good, but somewhat unintentional, exercise.

—---

Wednesday was smaller-teams day. After another surprising good breakfast (I will credit Salesforce Tower: their catering staff know what they are doing), we broke out into more manageable groups. Troops was grouped with the "3p data" and "Built by Slack" teams (the latter having flown in all the way from India) for some presentations to help us get to know each others' projects better. And then it was time for the inevitable Mandatory Team-Building Fun.

I will confess, I was dreading this bit. Last May's version was fun but dangerous: a cocktail-making class that led to my first hangover since college. This time, we had been told that we were going to be taking an improv class, and a lot of us were not looking forward to that.

As it happens, I needn't have worried. The class was with Leela Improv, and was surprisingly fun. They emphasized upfront that "funny" was not the goal here – they were trying to teach folks to loosen up, turn off the inner critic, be spontaneous and just play for an hour or two.

So for example, there was the game "Whoosh, Bing, Pow". (Similar to this description, with slightly different details.) That's a good enough warmup that I may well steal it for LARP purposes. Or "I am a tree", which consists of people posing as various things and riffing off of the person before you. And a whole bunch of "Yes, and" exercises. Ephraim, from the 3p-data team, wound up working with me in describing a fictional trip to Disneyland, while three other folks got to play the slideshow of the events we were describing. At the end, all twenty of us formed a giant flying dragon, which then fought, ate, and pooped out my teammate Neil.

All in all, kind of weirdly fun – a more effective exercise in getting folks out of their mental ruts than I would have expected.

Dinner was an interesting challenge, in a couple of respects. Will, the Troops lead, had been assigned the task of finding somewhere to go for dinner. But he had a more modest budget than the night before, and the combined group had a lot of vegetarians. (Because India.) So he'd been tearing his hair out, eventually landing on wildseed, a vegan restaurant. Some folks were skeptical (Frank, our confirmed carnivore, especially so), but I was intrigued.

Also challenging was the weather. One of the folks at the front desk of the hotel informed me that we were in the middle of a "pineapple express", where weather coming in from both Hawaii and the northwest hits at once, resulting in wind and rain. Everyone agreed that the weather was horrible.

I, OTOH, looked at it, said "pshaw – compared to a proper Nor'easter this isn't so bad", and resolved to walk. (Yes, I like to walk, and was using this trip as an excuse to do a lot of it.) So I took one of the hotel umbrellas, and set out.

It was, in fact, no-kidding wet, and my shoes were pretty well soaked through by the time I got to the restaurant. (2.1 miles from the hotel.) And it turned out that the route to get there was via Union Street – which isn't quite as steep and tall as California Street, but only a bit less. (The folks who Uber'ed there described the drive as a terrifying experience.)

So everyone thought I was a bit nuts, but it was again great exercise, and I'd left myself enough time that I didn't need to rush, so it was actually kind of fun – I just had to repeat "I am not sugar, I do not melt" to myself every now and then.

The meal itself was arguably the high point of my trip – summary: wildseed is great, and you should go. It's the sort of place that clearly committed to being no-compromises great food, vegan or not, and the set menu that Will had chosen was fabulous. Highlights included wild mushroom zeppoli, light and flavorful, on an herb aioli. Jackfruit "sausage" pizza with calabrian chiles and horseradish to give it serious zing. Mushroom risotto with garlic confit and coconut parmesan. (I don't even know what that last one is, but it was good.) And a gluten-free pan chocolate chip cookie to finish it off.

On top of that, the cocktail menu was everything the previous night's hadn't been, full of creativity. I had something called "The Nutty Professor", the usual sort of nut-forward cocktail that is usually cloyingly sweet, but this was built on top of good nocino, with an amaro and an aperitivo providing balance and just a hint of bitterness, so you got nutty flavor instead of a face full of sugar. (Heck, they even had an amaro on the menu that I don't own – most bars can't claim that good a selection.)

So yeah – if you get a chance, go there. If it was local, wildseed would probably be on my favorite-restaurants list.

(And no, even I wasn't foolish enough to walk back 2.1 miles though that rain: it would have been courting blisters on my feet, and a non-trivial chance of slipping and hurting myself on that hill, given my no-longer-sober state, so I shared an Uber back to within a dozen blocks of my hotel.)

—---

Finally, today (Thursday) was relatively quiet. Closing ceremonies were pretty brief, just the presentation of the "Platinum Platypus Awards" (the Platypus is the mascot of the Platform team), after which I spent a few hours actually, y'know, working.

But since I had the evening to myself (I'm flying home tomorrow), I contacted my sister (who is local), and we decided to try doing dinner at hed verythai, a whopping half-block from my hotel.

It says something about a restaurant when you walk into a restaurant that's invisible down a back alley, at 6:15 on a rainy Thursday evening, and the place is already full. Fortunately, another party was finishing off, so the three of us had to wait less than ten minutes.

If you like Thai food, this gets a high recommendation. The style is sort of bento-box: you choose one of the set meals, each focused on a particular protein, and get served around five small bowls centered around that.

So for example, I went for the Pork Belly (because mmm, pork belly). Besides that central main (relatively thin, well-cooked sliced with an intensely savory dipping sauce), there was a papaya salad with a hard-to-describe but strong back-burn spice, a coconut-based soup (also with some kick), a side of eggplant and three different rices.

The only caveat was that service was slow: they were explicitly short-handed, and slammed with customers. But we weren't in a tearing hurry, and the food was well worth the leisurely pace.

So if you are in this area, and are looking for very good Thai food (with some real kick), check out hed verythai: it also goes on the "I wish this place was near to us" list.

—---

And tomorrow morning I head home. It's been a generally good time – not perfect, but any work trip that turns out three restaurants that I quite like is a good trip. (I'm bemused that the world-class Chinese was the only one that didn't impress me.)

(CW for discussions of weight, health, medicine, side-effects, that sort of thing.)

No surprise to those who know me, I've fought my weight basically my entire life. For most of that time, it wasn't too a big a deal -- I haven't been the weight I would prefer since college, but I've generally been in decent health. (While I'm by no means an athlete, I do make sure to get moderate exercise regularly, and I'm on my feet all day every day.)

That said, it's slowly been sliding over time. I was borderline diabetic for a lot of years; that became not-quite-so-borderline a while ago. Still a mild case, but it's not a line I was looking to cross.

I was generally keeping things reasonably steady -- but then, at the beginning of the year, we both caught Covid. And while it's hard for me to call the after-effects "long covid" -- they're nowhere near as serious as what many people have been dealing with -- it's pretty clear that my self-control has gone to hell, and the timing is suspiciously correlated.

Specifically, my willpower when it comes to food fell to zero. While I've only gained a few pounds this year, they've all been in my jowls and waist; I've gone up by two belt sizes, and the last thing I want is for that diabetes to get worse. So it was time for serious action.

After a two-month runaround from CVS (who kept saying "please try again in a few days" and eventually threw up their hands and refused to even try to fill the prescription), I went to the pharmacy attached to my doctor's office, and they managed to score me some Ozempic. I've been on the lowest dose for two weeks now, and it's been fascinating.

I confess, while I had looked into the side-effects, I hadn't really understood what semaglutide does. Broadly speaking, it slows the clearing of food from your stomach. What you eat is just there longer, making it less fun to eat too much. I get full much faster, and stay that way much longer, than I am used to.

(Far as I can tell, it's kind of the drug-induced version of bariatric surgery. Instead of preventing you from overeating by making your stomach smaller, it does so by bottling your stomach up a bit.)

Anyway -- the results are kind of startling. My doctor is titrating me up slowly from a minimal dose, so I had figured this month would be basically "Are the side-effects too bad?" before moving up to a dose that actually does something. But it's nothing of the sort: by about four days into it, I was already feeling the effects pretty strongly, and it's already affecting my habits.

I should be clear about one thing: this is not a miracle drug. It doesn't let you eat everything you want, and the pounds magically melt off. Quite the opposite: this is basically a permanent, drug-enforced diet. I found, pretty quickly, that eating as much as I've been doing is just plain unpleasant: a meal of the size I would have casually eaten two weeks ago leaves me feeling bloated (really, I can't even finish it), and the idea of eating much dessert afterwards is just kind of ghastly.

For a lifelong gourmand, that's a little sad: I'm quickly finding that I need to get much more picky about what I eat, since I can't eat so much -- I can't just have everything I would like. But that's not an awful thing, just a serious change of mindset, needing to consciously pick my battles. For example, tonight was Indian food, and I left the garlic naan off the order. I always order garlic naan; I'm quite fond of it. But I need to prioritize, and focus on the foods I enjoy more and have a bit more nutritional value.

Semaglutide famously comes with a host of possible side-effects, especially nausea. So far, I've been fortunate there (knock on wood) -- just the tiniest hint of queasiness some of the time, but nothing that rises beyond "mild discomfort".

The one side-effect I have had to deal with is constipation, which is seriously New and Different for me: it's a problem I've really never had to deal with. So I've teaching myself to push the fruit and veg even harder (Kate has been good for my eating habits in that respect, but there's a lot of room for improvement). And heaven help me, I've started discovering the joys of Metamucil -- yay for feeling just that little bit older.

Also, my metabolism is ferociously confused. I've been running pretty draggy for the past week, and while some of that is due to the cold I'm fighting off, and work stress making my sleep less-than-ideal, I think some of it is my metabolism sitting in the corner and pouting about being put through this sudden reduction in intake. I figure I'll get past that in due course.

We'll see where we go from here. Given that it's already affecting me strongly, my doctor and I have agreed that we're going to go slow on titrating it: I see no compelling reason to scale up to higher doses until and unless things seem to be stalling out on the lowest-possible-dose that I'm taking now. I think I've lost a couple of pounds so far -- nothing dramatic -- but slow-and-steady is fine by me, so long as we gradually make progress.

Fingers crossed, we'll see where all this goes next...

Continuing from the last, it seems like the right time to talk about Architecture. Our trip was bookended by trips to spectacular churches (for a slightly expansive definition of "church"), so let's talk about both of them, with a couple of topical digressions related to them.

---

On the one hand, early in our trip to Spain we took the train out to Toledo.

(A recurring refrain here: when in Spain, take the train. The trains are great, and make our American expectations look pretty pathetic by comparison. They're clean, modern, fast, run on time, and even have pretty comfortable seats. Toledo is an easy half hour or so from Madrid, and runs frequently.)

Now, let's set the stage here. Toledo is a lovely town, but you talk about it as a tourist, you're mostly talking about old Toledo, which is a magnificent example of a well-fortified medieval city. Part of what makes it so well-fortified is that it is elevated. So, so elevated.

Many of the tourists took the easy way, calling a cab or taking a bus, but Kate and I are walkers. So we valiantly climbed all the way up -- which is I-don't-know how many feet of elevation, but it's a mile or two of Pretty Freaking Steep. And the old city itself is, to say the least, hilly: if you go, be prepared to spend a good deal of time walking up and down and up and down.

That said, it's a beautiful maze of history, nestled amongst all the tourist trappery. There are a bunch of historical sites, and the one that sucked us in for a couple of hours was the Catedral Primada -- Toledo Cathedral.

---

It's a Cathedral, so you expect it to be pretty large, and it is very much that. We rented the audioguide tablets, which was a fine investment, and it probably took us two hours to explore the place.

What's most fun about it is the sheer variety of architecture. Period cathedrals typically weren't completed in a decade, or even a lifetime; in practice, this one shows elements from its medieval roots, alongside sections that are High Baroque.

While I am not generally a fan of the Baroque, those late additions are probably the most spectacular part of the whole thing. They punched a hole in the ceiling, adding a new window, surrounding that hole with sculpted whimsical angels loitering around the gap, and the resulting light illuminates a gloriously over-the-top altarpiece known as El Transparente. It's extravagant in that very Baroque way, but really quite beautiful.

Beyond that, the place is full of lovely nooks and crannies: lots of little chapels, as well as a Chapterhouse with a huge Renaissance mural lining the entire place.

---

The postscript to our adventure in Toledo was that I accidentally told Google to take us to the bus station, instead of the train station that I intended. This led to the horrifying but hilarious discovery, far too late, that there are escalators all the way up the side of the old city on that side. (Imagine Porter Station's big brother.) It's a longer walk from the train station, but escalators!

So overall:

• Toledo is well worth a visit (I haven't even scratched the dozen other things to see there).
• You must do the Cathedral if you're in Toledo; I recommend the audio guided tour, and allow enough time to poke around it.
• If you like walking but don't look forward to All the Stairs, walk around to the far side and take the escalators.

---

Okay, so on to Barcelona. At the other end of our trip, we are now there for five days.

Barcelona is, to a large degree, the City of Gaudi, the century-ago architect whose distinctive work defines much of the town. We saw two of his best-known constructions, Park Guell and the Sagrada Familia.

---

Everyone told me that you have to go see Park Guell, and I can kind of see why. It's a monumental and lovely folly: an attempt to build a moderately high-end village, marrying practicality and artistic beauty, about a century ago.

Suffice it to say, it failed commercially; the displays inside it talk a little about why, including the lack of public transit to somewhere quite so out of the way. So the city bought it, turned it into a park, and you can now visit, for a fee. (Reservations strongly recommended; far as I can tell, it usually isn't possible to get in day-of.)

If we hadn't done Toledo, I would be talking about how remarkably hilly Park Guell is -- again, a lot of stairs and ramps are involved, and I don't recommend it to those who don't like a bit of a hike. (One of the attractions, the Hill of Three Crosses, is the highest point, and we were feeling the effort by the time we got there.) But compared to Toledo, it was relatively straightforward.

Some parts of it are really quite gorgeous -- in particular, the officially "monumental" section in the middle. There's an enormous, open, elevated oval space in the middle, big enough for a bullfight, half surrounded by tiled benches (the tiling done in an intentionally whimsical style, pottery shards continually shifting artistic style as you wander along the benches). That's nice -- but underneath it, far more impressive, is a huge expanse of columns holding it up, in what almost feels like a huge shaded ballroom, open on three sides, with sea scenes along the top.

That drove home the two characteristics of Gaudi's work: he loved curves, and he loved nature. He was brilliant at fusing those two impulses in many ways.

All that said, Park Guell suffered from (as noted in my earlier outline) Too Many Tourists. They limit the number of entry tickets (thank heavens), but the result is still awfully crowded. And while there are many cool things in the park, it's sufficiently out of the way, and those things are scattered around such a large area (this was supposed to be a housing development, after all), that I'm on the fence about whether it was worth the outing,

---

But that brings us to today's trip, to the Sagrada Familia. That also had Too Many Tourists, but this time I don't care, because it is truly one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.

The Sagrada was Gaudi's primary life's work: he spent over 40 years on it, knowing that he was merely going to be able to get it started. Nearly a century after his death, it is still under extremely active construction, and is getting within shooting distance of being finished in the next decade or so. (The original target was 2026, the centenary of Gaudi's accidental death, but then Pandemic happened.)

It isn't a cathedral -- indeed, they worked on it for over a century before it was even consecrated -- but it's cathedral scale, both in size and time. Like Toledo, it's a colossal undertaking, spanning generations of hard work, and it shows.

Gaudi was wise enough to realize that he had to build a long-lasting team, and give them freedom to work, so he designed the bold strokes of the cathedral -- its general shape and architectural intent -- but left all the artistic touches to his successors. The result is a building that, despite being over a century old, feels profoundly modern in a host of ways, from the intensely brutal modern artistic style on the Passion entrance (Gaudi himself oversaw the Nativity entrance, full of animals and plants) to the intensely colorful but abstract stained glass surrounding the interior.

Everything was designed with intent -- our tour guide (it's worth getting the English tour) explained details like the fact that the central Jesus tower is "only" going to be 172 meters high, because Barcelona's highest hill is 178 meters, and man should not build anything greater than God. The building is surrounded by twelve towers for the apostles, four for the gospels, plus one each for Mary and the last-to-by-completed Jesus.

The inside is much more open than the Toledo Cathedral, intentionally -- Gaudi rejected standard Gothic arches, instead pioneering enormous, split catenary arches that allowed him to push the ceiling way up. This leaves room for things like an 800-person choir a couple of stories up, and space for 6000 people inside.

We did take one of the tower tours, and that was the only bit that wasn't a win for me, mainly because I'm mildly acrophobic and OMG even the lower towers are Very High Up. Each one has an elevator to get you up to the top, from which you can see the city (through fairly small windows), but then it's 400 very narrow stairs down, the last 150 or so in a super-tight spiral staircase with no railing in the middle, leaving me close to a panic attack. Kate enjoyed it, and suspect many others would as well, but it's not compatible with fear of heights.

But overall, an even more amazing experience than Toledo Cathedral, one of the major highlights of the trip. If you like inspirational (or even just plain cool) architecture, and especially if you like poking at architecture that is full of cool details, it's a must-see.

This week is Kate's and my tenth anniversary, which are are spending in Barcelona -- a famously foodie city for a decidedly foodie couple. (We're taking two weeks in Spain, which is why this entry is initially locked, on the usual theory of "Don't tell the world that you're out of town". We did four nights in Madrid, then three in Valencia, and are finishing off with five in Barcelona, leaving the day after our anniversary.)

Tonight's dinner was Teatro, and while tonight isn't technically our anniversary, I'm content to call it our anniversary dinner, because that was just plain spectacular -- maybe one of the five best restaurants we've been to. I gather that it is the sequel to the similar (and famed) restaurant Tickets, which shut down due to the pandemic, and it's a worthy successor.

The gimmick of the place is that everything is a show. It's not that you watch a kitchen, it's that there are seven kitchens, and every seat faces one of them. We don't go to restaurants for their gimmicks, but it did make it fun.

More importantly, the food quality and service were both absolutely top-notch: excellent and quietly attentive respectively. (The definition of really great service is that you never really need to ask for anything -- someone just shows up next to you before you realize you need it.)

Most important, the menu is ferociously innovative, and pretty much everything works: clever and unusual combinations, with carefully-balanced flavors. For example, perhaps my favorite was the Eel and Fois Gras, both chopped into small cubelets, mixed with an excellent eel sauce, and served in somehow-hardened little vessels of sushi seaweed.

We went with the "surprise" menu, basically Chef's Choice -- a quick interview about allergies and dislikes, and then they just start shoving dishes at you at high speed. All were smallish (the only dish of any real size was the lamb tacos, near the end -- two small tacos each, with North African-spiced lamb, tiny bits of cauliflower, a red onion "pico" and a raita-like topping); most dishes were one bite. So it added up slowly, but we were well north of a dozen dishes (ETA: reviewing the receipt, we did 15 courses) before we declared defeat and told them to stop.

It's pricey, of course, but given the amount of food (and booze -- the cocktail menu is every bit as innovative and well-balanced as the food) it was entirely reasonable for a high-end restaurant, about the same as we were used to paying at Tasting Counter.

So anyway -- if you find yourself in Barcelona, and you like high-end food, do it. This one is best-of-the-best...

No, it wasn't that bad -- by the standards of Christmas mishaps, it was relatively minor. But it's worth a diary entry.

Last Thursday, Kate and I flew down to Annapolis, to spend the holidays with her family. Mostly staying with her folks, but everybody going into DC for a show and museum on Saturday, then spending Sunday night at her brother's house in the DC suburbs, back to her folks on Monday, and fly home on Tuesday (today). It all sounded like a pretty good time.

In a fine demonstration of Applied Murphyology, that plan survived until Friday morning, when her father started sneezing and sniffling. To his credit, he quickly tested, and sure enough -- a strong positive line.

(Mind, I don't particularly fault them: they've been decently responsible and careful. But they've been traveling a lot, and that's always a bit dangerous nowadays.)

There was a brief consideration of us jumping over to her brother's house instead, since we'd only been briefly exposed, but reality put the kibosh on that idea: his partner is currently on immunosuppressants (due to a recent flareup of an occasional problem), so even a brief exposure was too high-risk to be worth taking.

I explained Paxlovid to her parents; on Saturday they went and got him a prescription. I was distressed that this required them sitting in Urgent Care for two hours, but Christmas Eve is pretty much the worst case scenario.

---

So it was mostly a quiet week at her folks' condo, although we did manage to salvage some bits and pieces of the plan. Kate and I had been planning on going to the National Museum of African American History and Culture while the rest of the family went to Wicked. (We had seen it on stage before, and didn't care so much.) Since it was just the second day of exposure, we figured that we probably weren't a risk to others yet, so we tested (negative as expected), masked up, and drove into the city.

The museum was more educational than I'd like to admit: there was a lot of the bad early history that I didn't know. But learning is kind of the point of the exercise, and we spent a solid three hours walking through the History floors. (The museum has three subterranean floors that are more or less a tour of the history, starting in the Renaissance and ending with Barack Obama, and two above-ground ones dedicated to culture.)

I recommend the experience. It's very detailed, and pulls no punches. The only downside is traffic management: some of the sections get pretty jammed. Now being now, that felt a little uncomfortable, even on a relatively low-crowd day. (Not so many families at the museum on Christmas Eve.)

---

Sunday, Kate's brother came over briefly, and we did an exchange of hostages, passing along presents and the dinner components that each household had cooked. After he got home, we did a family Zoom call to open the presents together, so it wasn't too different from normal.

We weren't able to eat exactly the same dinner, but we managed to get surprisingly close -- duck on both sides, in our case duck breasts seared on the grill, with a really marvelous smoked port wine sauce made by her brother's partner. It was pretty lovely.

---

By Monday, Kate and I were still feeling okay, but it being Day Four, going to anything indoor and public seemed like a bad idea. So we instead wound up going to a park near her folks' place, with a nice four-mile path through the forests around it.

We noted the gazebo at the entrance, which appears to be dormant; after that, we began observing the lower pavilions scattered throughout.

The walk gradually turned into a biological discussion of the pavilions -- what they eat (animals? people? stuff that falls off the picnic tables?), the observation of the larger, older pavilion in the middle (clearly the silverback), the speciation of the examples we observed (two had chimneys, obviously to better attract prey), speculation about further evolution (Kate argued that, if you hybridized the species, you would wind up with one that had a hibachi in the middle).

Eventual conclusion was that the gazebo is clearly the lone apex predator -- best to pass by while it hibernates in the winter. (The other safe time of year being summer, when you have Sousa bands to fend it off.)

It was a lovely time -- getting to stretch our legs, enjoy a cool (but no longer crazy-cold) day, and generally be silly together was a definite mood-lifter.

---

Today was returning home; continuing the Applied Murphyology theme, of course my throat has started to feel a little scratchy. So there was nothing for it but to do what I was starting to consider anyway: I shaved both cheeks clean, so I can finally get a proper fit on an N95. That was maybe-worthwhile for protecting myself from other people at the various big upcoming events (Arisia, Birka, Intercon, etc); now, it's a strict necessity for protecting others from me.

Mind -- I literally haven't seen my cheeks in 40 years, so this took some nerving myself for. But the conclusion was that I can leave the mustache and some beard on my chin, without compromising the seal, so the visual difference is subtler than I had feared. It's the first time since this all started that I've felt like a mask is truly fitted properly.

I put on the mask when we left the house in Annapolis, and didn't put it back on until we got home. In the plane we managed to grab the only two-seat row in the plane, so as not to be sitting next to anybody. So I didn't feel like a complete slimeball flying home, but it's definitely one of the most uncomfortable things I've done recently.

(Waiting for the flight was an adventure unto itself, which deserves its own blog post. Suffice it to say, I do not recommend flying Southwest at the moment -- the flight staff were lovely, but the airline's execs have screwed up the airline's systems to a truly epic degree.)

---

Home now, and with the stress of flying passed, the scratchiness is getting worse. Tomorrow I retest; assuming it's finally positive (which I think is likely), then I get to try to score some Paxlovid myself. Yay -- hopefully that will be less hassle than it was for Kate's father.

Hopefully it'll be a mild case. Kate's father still sounds pretty decent -- just mild cold symptoms -- but there's no way to know how it'll hit me.

The one bright spot is that we didn't have any concrete plans for this week, so nothing is actually being foiled for us. But I'm a bit distressed about the fact that spontaneous shenanigans with friends are now probably out of the question -- I suspect that I'm going to be largely quarantined until at least a week from today, and even that is only if things go quite quickly.

So the rest of the winter break is looking like a staycation of reading comics, drinking tea, and sniffling a lot...

[ETA as I head towards bed: yep, now have a mild fever. Entirely unsurprising, but sigh...]

[ETA2, next day: yep, faint but definite positive test line. I have a video appointment with a doctor scheduled for tomorrow morning, to get the Paxlovid scrip.]

When last we saw our hero, he had attended ESCape and come home with a slightly injured foot. Picking up our story from there...

The symptoms have been changing over the past couple of weeks. The original pain has largely gone away, but my right foot has gotten yet a bit more swollen, and walking is a real problem, because I can't wear a normal shoe without it getting kind of painful.

So, I had a video meeting with a podiatrist this evening, which was very much a "good news / bad news" sort of thing.

I described the timeline and the symptoms. She examined the x-ray very, very carefully, and pointed out where the stress fracture is -- just barely visible, but a slightly light spot where she expected it to be. So yeah, the injury was worse than we originally thought.

The probably-good news is that, from the description of the current pain, she thinks (fingers crossed) that it is probably healing more or less on schedule, and if I haven't made things worse I can probably do Pennsic so long as I'm a bit careful. (When I get a little time, I need to go get a fresh x-ray, to confirm that it's healing as expected.)

The current problem is apparently the swelling itself -- as she described it, once a foot is swollen, it tends to want to stay swollen. So, rather counter-intuitively, the way to deal with the painfully puffy foot is compression socks -- applied periodically, for gradually increasingly periods, to basically squish my foot back into shape. (Plus some special shoes, which she specifically recommends for stress fractures.)

It's going to be touch-and-go, and I'm going to need to not walk my usual ten miles a day at Pennsic. But hopefully everything will improve on schedule, and I'll be able to make it as planned...

Harkening back to the last post: remember the bit about me wandering into a random dispensary on Broadway, the night before our big "we've been acquired" party? It was bright, friendly, well-lit and full of Fun With Pot.

While there, I picked up a bag of three "high-strength" caramels -- 40mg CBD and 20mg THC-O each. (I'm still not clear on the difference between THC-O and delta-THC, which are called out distinctly on these things.) In the name of relaxing, I had tried one of those in the late evening when I got back to my hotel, maybe an hour before bed, and gotten no reaction at all, save being a little tired in the morning -- so much for high-strength, right?

Yesterday, I decided to do a more principled experiment, and took one mid-evening (I think around 5:30 or 6pm) instead of my evening cocktail, so I would be more properly awake and could detect the sensations better.

So, the answer to "why didn't I feel anything the first time around?" is that I was asleep. The caramel last night took somewhere between 2 and 3 hours to take effect -- and then hit me, quite suddenly, like a freight train. (Right before family meeting with my parents, yay.)

The experience wasn't bad, but I'm not sure that it was good. I haven't been that high in many years. Indeed, it felt closer to college memories of tripping than to what I would generally describe as "high". I didn't quite get to the point of full-on visual hallucinations, but I could feel them occasionally fighting to break out: the TV image seeming to be choppy, the people on Zoom seeming just a little wrong -- excessively sharp visuals, body parts just seeming out of proportion.

There was no euphoria per se, but I discovered that I get annoyingly and almost uncontrollably giggly when that high, and can't tell a story to save my life, because my thoughts get very disorganized. (I had to apologize to my parents for my rather disjointed telling of the trip to NYC -- fortunately, they are children of the 60s, and were understanding about "I'm quite a bit higher than I expected to be".)

Most disconcerting was the sensation of time "snapshotting" on me: I kept finding myself doing something, reasonably confident of what had come before but without a sense of continuity. In many cases, I was absolutely certain that I had just been dreaming a moment before, and wasn't sure whether I was still doing so.

I'm mostly better this morning: a bit muzzy-headed, but back down to Earth. My general sense is that I slept restlessly, with dozing/dreams that was vivid but not unusually interesting. I think the high may well have lasted a solid 6-8 hours, which puts the expense of the caramel in perspective.

Overall -- an interesting experience, but not necessarily one that I would recommend or do again. I'll probably continue to experiment with edibles a bit, now that they're increasingly legal, but the moral of the story is that 20mg THC is, for me at least, powerful enough to not be all that much fun. (And nothing about the experience felt relaxing, despite the large amount of CBD.) We'll see if lower doses are worthwhile -- the whole thing has reminded me that the reason I largely swore off of pot (freshman year of college, when it was everywhere) is that it makes me feel somewhat unpleasantly stupid...

ETA: a bit of online poking around indicates that THC-O is three times as potent as conventional THC, and yes -- sometimes hallucinogenic. So starting with 20mg of that was probably inadviseable...