Still alive, still kicking. Sorry for the radio silence, gomen.
So, what happened in the two months? I’ve been feeling tired/fatigued lately, and not in a “oh, you’re just out of shape” sort of way, so I went to the doctor, who was a little alarmed at how loud my heart murmur had gotten since my physical last fall, so I got sent off to get an echocardiogram. That came back with a few things that necessitated a second echocardiogram, only this time more invasive, a transesophageal echocardiogram (where they sedate you, then shove the sensor down your throat so they can get the scan from immediately next to the heart, for higher resolution/fidelity). Long story short: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The murmur is loud because it’s loud, I now have regurgitation on two valves, but neither severe enough to do anything about. And I’m not (really) any closer to knowing why I’ve been so wiped lately.
So, y’know, could be worse, but it did end up eating a bunch of time and mental headspace, and writing anything here ended up falling off the priority list. (I do find it a little amusing that this escapade dovetailed into my first colonoscopy a few weeks later, so a second round of sedation, and a second time getting a camera put inside my body — you could say they got me coming AND going.)
In other news, I took an extra few days off around Labor Day and had a nice wander around northern New Hampshire and the interior of Maine. Even ended up wandering up Mt Washington, something I don’t recall having ever done before, despite growing up in the general region. It’s beautiful out in that neck of the woods, and even with it being Labor Day Weekend, the roads were pretty quiet and pleasant to drive.
For some personal projects, I’ve been fiddling with a few things. I’m taking a stab at building a family tree/genealogy site that uses json-ld and the Person schema from schema.org to create the map of people. The data side is going pretty well, the visualization is where I keep bogging down, dealing with edge cases like where someone might’ve been married, divorced, and widowed, with kids from different partners, and how do you visually represent that in a tree without it turning into a mess. It’s still been a good pastime – if I manage to get it to a more usable state, maybe I’ll toss it online somewhere so others can use it. I’ve also been experimenting with seeing how hard it’d be to set up AsciiDoc support in Astro.js. Doing a full integration seemed like way too much work for my needs, but I’m getting pretty far as a content loader, using Asciidoctor.js to process the files into embeddable content that Astro can work with.
It’s getting to be my favorite time of the year. A friend of mine joked that I was “Basic” for loving autumn, but hey, I’ll own it. I’ve always loved the transitional seasons (fall and spring) most. They come and go fast in New England, and you can feel the change. That scratches an itch for me, probably the same one that leaves me restless when I stay put for too long.