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Today started about 8ish with me making breakfast of scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese and crisp bacon. Susie’s fav. I made myself toast with Orange Marmalade, my fav, but I do not have a low sugar version, so this is a once in a great while treat.

Susie was up in time to talk to her sister’s family and mother for Christmas. We then found all the presents and opened them. All the gifts this year were well thought out and useful. Thanks!

I made Christmas dinner while Susie watched a musical. Mariah came over, and we put on masks, and she helped me make dinner. We had an early-ish dinner of ham, mashed potatoes, steamed carrots, and that green bean-soup-onion topping side.

We watched Wonder Women 1984 while having dinner. I will not say anything about the movie as others will want to watch it today. The Doctor Who special is New Years’ this year.

Susie was feeling better today. I am tired as I have slept poorly these couple of days. Mostly staying up too late reading or talking.

Scrooge is playing now, out third movie today! I also received a book for Christmas, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by a fav author from the Smith family and I started. I find these books hard to put down.

Susie is watching James Bond movies. One of the channels is running them without commercials.

The day is already fading, and like all Christmas, it disappears fast. I have not much to say other than…

Merry Christmas from here in lockdown in Oregon!

2,835 people died this Christmas day in the USA from Covid-19. The terrible surge in deaths and new cases in Oregon is now on the way down.

Silent Night, played by John Nilsen, is the music for Christmas.

 

Everyone is resting. I am in the living room sitting in front of the TV playing a DVD of a fire burning in a fireplace while jazzy carols play. It is Christmas Eve 2020. The Belgium Beer has made me a bit tired, and I have a slight headache for it too, I believe.

Dinner was just crackers and sausages and cheese. We watched the movie Frozen and Frozen 2. I had just seen Frozen a few days ago and wanted to watch them again.

Work started with me working from home at 6ish. I also was making No-Knead bread that I let to rise all-night. I then took out the dutch oven baking dish and oiled it, and sprinkled it with cornmeal. I know that later the bread was stuck, so I did not do enough oil or cornmeal. The cornmeal seemed to use absorb the oil and fall down the sides. Not sure what to do next time but use lots of oil.

I stirred the mixture once in the bowl and then poured it into the dutch oven backing dish and then let it rise for another two hours. You then make it at 450 for 45 minutes with the cover on. You remove the cover for 5-10 more minutes. Then pop it out of the dish (or, in my case, beat it loose) and let cool.

The bread was good, and the crackle real good. The extra salt was not noticeable. I put in 1/4 teaspoon too much salt.

Work was a few emails, but mostly it was quiet and waiting for our big go-live this Sunday. I was done about 3ish.

I slipped out for laundry supplies at Safeway.

I took a nap and then got a call from Wayne Weld-Martin that he had goodies for us. He delivered them, and I added the chips to our plans for tonight.

We had, as I said above, goodies for dinner. I cut up everything and delivered them to Susie. Corwin and I helped ourselves.

I put on the DVD of the fire in the fireplace with Christmas music and fell asleep in the chair after Susie decided she was tired and went to rest. We removed Susie’s bandages today from her Tuesday Mohs surgery. She has little pain today.

Not a bad Christmas Eve for 2020.

Today Christmas Eve, we lost another 2,835 people in the USA to the virus.

I picked our friend John Nilsen’s First Noel for our song today.

Today was to be the break after Susie’s Mohs surgery yesterday. I woke about 5ish and thought I can sleep in a bit. I have a meeting that I have to do at nine that needs me, but I can sleep to 730ish.

Susie was ill. At 6ish she needed help and I had to help her walk and do some caregiving things. It was a difficult start. I also got Susie some Tylenol and ice packs for her face and back. So no sleeping-in today.

Susie rested until late morning. I managed my morning meetings and getting Susie breakfast and me my lunch. It was a bit chaotic, but all was well by 1ish.

I put on the animated movie Snow White, the original, on Disney+ for Susie. I fell asleep in the chair. Susie thought it funny to look over at her caregiver asleep in the chair. I just closed my eyes and before I know it Snow White is saved by Prince Charming!

Once I got going again, I headed out to Wholefoods. I wanted some snacks for Christmas Eve and I forgot milk and eggs last time (I remembered this time). I picked up some beers for the holiday: Duvel and Pilsner Urquell. I brought a case of Duvel back from Belgium years ago; it is a fav. I also was told years ago that the official glass for Urquell was often stolen and so you have to give a shoe to the bartender in some bars in Europe to order it. This prevents you from leaving with the expensive glass. I suspect it is a story told to Americans–but I always think about the story when I have a Urquell.

Wholefoods had 50% off of the price of Oregon Blue Cheese from the Rogue Creamery. In 2019 the world said that these folks made the best cheese in the world. We will celebrate Christmas Eve with a bit of their best. I bought the gouda imported from Holland. This is to remember Amsterdam. We spent last Christmas there. Then some locally made sausages and we are ready for the holiday evening!

I spent the afternoon doing laundry, dishes, making a small dinner (Chicken Cordon Blu from frozen with canned excellent peaches), and then getting out more cookies, chocolates, and all the other stuff. Susie’s mom, Leta, sent a box of cookies that Susie is into. I have Dondrea’s Christmas collection of goodies to consume.

Susie is back to her normal self this evening.

Moving to the next challenge, I also tried a no-knead recipe for bread from King Arthur Flour Company. I put in a tiny bit extra salt by accident, but I think that will not harm it. I have seen a lot of press on the no-knead bread. I thought it would be good to try it tonight. I will be up at 6ish to do the next steps.

I also started reworking my python chess program today. The original version was just more of a demo program than a usable game. Now I want to have it play a not-stupid game. That will require a bit of restructuring. I also want to use a genetic algorithm to help me find the best weighting factors. I need to save all the values for each move to have something to feed to a genetic process.

For this challenge, I need a few more hours of coding to get it cleaned-up and beyond a demo. I truly enjoy coding AI in Python. I always wanted to do genetic programming too. Maybe not your idea of fun, but for me, it is wonderful to play in AI.

Laundry stopped as, as usual, I ran out of laundry products on the same day I went shopping! I need some Bounce Sheets and the detergent is running low. I will try to slip-out between meetings. I checked my schedule and every last meeting has canceled for tomorrow. Hmmm.

3,401 deaths are reported from Covid-19 in the USA today. One of the worst days on record.

I found this really fun version of There’s a Song in the Air. I hope you like it.

 

 

 

 

Today we got up a bit late and drove to Portland without issue to the dermatology folks to perform the second batch of Mohs surgery on Susie’s cancerous and precancerous skin issues on her back and nose. There is no waiting room in the world of Covid-19, so I drop Susie off and wait in the car in the parking lot.

This is a repeat of last week, and after 2021 starts, we have one more treatment on Susie’s legs. The surgery removes a minimum of skin. The margins are then checked there in the office, and if there is no cancer on the margins, then the surgery is finished, and careful stitches are done. Otherwise, another cut is made to widen the excision, and the margins are rechecked. Susie had a good day as the first excision had clear margins.

I drove Susie home, stopping by Burger King for burgers, Whopper Jr with just cheese for Susie with a shake, and a regular Whopper with cheese for me. Susie was exhausted, and so was I. We slept the afternoon away.

I got up and let Susie rest. I watched the movie Frozen 2 while Susie slept a while until the pain started-up. More Tylenol helped a bit. We did get out some frozen green beans as an ice pack for her. That helped her stop the pain, and she slept some more.

As an aside, while waiting in the car, I got out my Apple computer and worked on my chess program. I changed how the matrix that controls pawns again makes the pawns move more towards the center and the board’s end. I then played a few games against the program.

I had two hours waiting in the car, so I fixed a few issues with the looping control and an uncaught exception. The chess program played long enough without an exception that I got to try a castle. It worked! The program is finally moving some pawns. I did take the computer’s queen. There is a failure in the next move evaluation that undervalues taking a piece for an exchange. I will try to fix that.

The code that actually picks the move is about twenty lines long. I think it plays good chess for so few lines of code. It is using a simple evaluation function.

RISK_FACTOR: Loss of piece value
BOARD_FACTOR: Place on board value
PIECE_FACTOR: Value of pieces for exchange
BOARD_KING: Place on board value for King move
SUPPORT_FACTOR: Value of interlocking support
HOLD_FACTOR: Value of hold attack loss

These values are added together to make a score, and each is multiplied by a weighting factor. The move that has the highest value is selected, ties go to pawns.

To check that the move is not a disaster, a new board is dynamically created, and the move actually played and then checked not to trip the end of the game or other terrible loss, and it is scored. The dynamic board is then thrown away, and the game continues on the original board. The chessboard handling routines are all from the library Python-Chess! So easy!

The factors need to be tuned to make the gameplay better chess. The calculation is so fast that I may build a tree of possible plays and look for a better move over a few moves ahead.

It is relaxing to again be coding Artificial Intelligence. I have missed working on Python and AI.

Returning to the story, I ordered from Nonna Emilia Ristorante Italiano using DoorDash this evening. This is an old school American-Italian style food joint that has been in Beaverton forever. Corwin and I were a year ago with Susie in Amsterdam having dinner. We ordered dinner delivered here at the house and wished each other a happy holiday as we did in Amsterdam in 2019. We would have preferred another trip, but we are happy that all of us made it to tonight.

The food is too much and quite good for American-Italian. Salad, soup, garlic bread, and pasta mains. All good. Susie was not up to it; I will make her something when she is ready.

Susie was up a bit late, and I made her a late snack of some peanut butter toast with banana slices. The pain is gone tonight. She is so much better. I am off from Nike tomorrow and will do all the house chores that always slip. I will try to get some rest. These things are very stressful for the caregiver too.

3,376 people died from Covid-19 today in the USA.

Today’s song is a departure from hymns, The Dutch National Anthem. A thank you for Amsterdam 2019, and I hope to be back soon.

 

 

Winter began today, today is the shortest day of 2020.

I started at 6ish and thought I had a 7 and rushed the morning to be ready. The early meetings, this being the Christmas week all canceled. We still have a go-live this Sunday, but the rest of Nike is ramping down as most sales are already locked in. Saturday will be a busy day for retail, but the rest of Nike will be mostly on Christmas and New Years’ break.

I had plenty of time, I discovered, to read email and make a small breakfast of coffee, banana, and a bagel with cream cheese.

More status meetings that ran over. I suddenly remembered it was Monday and 8:40, and I needed to rally Susie for her 9AM ride to her hair, nails, toes, etc., an appointment with Zerida again. I just focused on what I am doing for work, and suddenly I am rushing Susie.

Susie was not happy to be rushed, but it was her appointment. We just made it, and she was ready, taking her coffee in a paper cup I gave to her driver.

I had a few more status meetings after that. I also was reading some Python code to add a time-stamp and sequence number to files. Yes, I do a little Python for work too.

Lunch was ordered from Gyro House, open today, but not without some effort. I had, for fun, ordered a lunch delivered to Mom Wild in East Lansing, Michigan. As you can guess, I forgot to set back GrubHub to be local. I could not get Gyro House to deliver to East Lansing, Michigan. I finally saw I had the wrong address. When I returned to my Oregon address, I was able to order!

Lunch was a lamb gyro with soup. I usually give the soup to Susie or Corwin. There was a note written on the food box, “Happy Holidays to you too.” I always send a message when I order. Corwin had the soup for a late lunch.

The afternoon was a bit light, and I took a break. I returned for one more meeting in the afternoon. I was again looking at more Python for Nike.

As it was the shortest day of 2020, the sun appeared to vanish at 4:30. I went out to look for the stars. I witnessed Oregon’s side-ways rain and not the stars.

It is Monday night, time for my Dungeons and Dragon (D&D) group to meet online at 6:30PM using the Roll20 website software. I had five players and myself as Dungeon Master (DM). We were playing using Roll20 before Covid-19 on most Mondays. One player is in Minnesota; we stop at 8:30PM. We have completed quite a lot of the available material over the past couple of years.

Today we continued in the pre-made material you can purchase from Roll20, Dungeon of the Mad Mage. This adventure is more than twenty levels of content and is based on the older rules of about 3.0 Dungeons and Dragon. It has been converted to D&D 5.0, the current Dungeons and Dragons version. Because it is so huge, each encounter’s text is a bit limited, and the maps are utilitarian. It does come with some art to share with the players, and the standard creatures have art. I wish the writers and Roll20 had expanded this content and had better maps; many of the purchased adventures have color maps. The adventure is taking about three game sessions to get to the next level. I skipped some of the easier stuff and have sent the players lower and to tougher encounters. There are about ten more levels of which six we will play, I expect.

Today I had the horrid monster, a beholder, dropped on the players as a present from the Mad Mage. The beholder, called “Just Nasty,” had three minions of undead beholders, Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh. Just Nasty is a type of D&D monster from the original designers and is difficult to beat in combat without taking terrible losses; it has many devasting attacks. By the third round of combat, it had knocked out 1/2 the hit points from two characters with its death and disintegration rays, and the wizard was paralyzed. The players decided to offer an opportunity to negotiate. And eye tyrant, another name for a beholder, offered the treasures of Gold (actually valuable gems as gold is too heavy), Frankincense (magical healing potions), and Myrrh (a scroll of the spell True Resurrection). I hope it was not too corny; it was a tough fight.

We continued playing until 8:30 with a few easier battles. The adventurers have hunted down most of the evil elves, Drow, in the level and exterminated much of the vermin (spiders and undead). We will play next year, skipping the next Monday. I imagine the players in the next session will descend to the next level.

Returning to the story for today, I made grilled cheese and roast beef sandwiches for dinner.

I received a few more Christmas presents from Michigan today, and some more gifts for friends arrived. I ate one cookie.

I think we are just about ready for the holiday!

I learned today (I was trying to speed up Roll20 with a direct connection) that Big Sur OS for my Mac does not have a driver to allow direct connection to Ethernet from a USB converter. It seems that Apple so far has not approved any drivers to make this work again. No more direct connections for my Apple or even a newer Apple–frustrating.

1,841 people in the USA are reported to have passed away today from the infection.

I went with ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL for the longest night of 2020.