I’m amazed by how unbothered our friendly neighbourhood cat is by the cold. It can apparently just sit out here without freezing its paws off.

The weather has turned really cold – it’s been between –5°C and –10°C for several days now.

I’m pleased that I don’t have to commute in this weather. Not because the cold is so bad, but because the temperature differences are. I have to get dressed for the weather outside, and then walk for 10 minutes before I get on the train, which is hot in comparison. And then I have to either swelter, or peel off my layers and find a place for them on a crowded train.

Now I can just enjoy the snowy views – which are much nicer here in the suburbs than in the city, where all the snow melts or is pounded into slush by tens of thousands of feet.

First Sunday in Advent. The Advent lights and decorations are up.

tretton37 weekend conference, day two. This morning’s activity was a co-op puzzle game/challenge. We got large floor puzzles to assemble, and the finished picture contained clues for the next step. I joined in the puzzle assembly but my head was too tired today for any kind of intellectual challenge.

The final result was a code to a website, and our prize was the revelation that we will have a global conference in May. The global Knowabunga is an annual tradition but we’ve skipped the last two because of covid. Now there is hope that we won’t skip a third one.

Knowabunga conference weekend with tretton37, and in 10 minutes I’m about to hold a talk (about getting started with containers in Azure).

I enjoy this, but I’m not exactly sure why and how. The preparation part is a bit of a slog. Right before the talk I’m always nervous, in particular about taking too little time, or too much. I enjoy it while I’m up there, though. And I also really enjoy people coming up to me afterwards and telling me I did a good job.

The new normal includes taking a rapid covid test before going off on a company conference weekend.

Ingrid has been home sick with a fever and a cough since Thursday. (Not covid.) Spends most of her time sleeping. Doesn’t even have the energy to draw, or to hang out with her friends online. TikTok is about the only thing she can do, and she’s getting tired of it.

At what point does it become silly to take pictures of a cat that isn’t even ours?

On the other hand, if there are more days with cat visits than without, perhaps it sort of is ours, a little bit.

So apparently I’ve managed to get scabies. Slightly itchy patches that then became both more numerous and more itchy with time, to the point where I couldn’t sleep at night.

Scabies spreads with close, extended physical contact, often within the same household. I read somewhere that it’s become more common among teenagers in recent years, with all the sitting close to each other in sofas while watching TV or playing games.

Ingrid is also itchy. Adrian has some patches that may or may not be something. Eric may be unaffected, but the incubation time can be many weeks. So we just treated everyone to be on the safe side.

The main treatment turned out to be a cream that has to be applied on every square millimetre of your body except the scalp, and reapplied whenever you e.g. wash your hands. Apparently a common side effect is a burning sensation. Ingrid got it bad, with a burning feeling over most of her body, but it passed quickly at least, after 5 minutes or so. I just felt some slight burning on my face, but it kept going for hours. Still is, a bit. Possibly because I kept touching my face – because I know I do that all the time.

The other part of treating scabies is decontaminating textiles, so there was a lot of clothes, bedding, and towels to be washed today.

Scabies feels like a dirty disease. Just like head lice, I associate it with bad hygiene. Which is totally irrational, I know! If I can’t get rid of scabies or lice by washing, then cleanliness certainly couldn’t have prevented it either. In fact Google tells me that head lice may actually prefer clean hair to oily hair.