Yesterday afternoon several houses not far from where I live exploded, something
to do with the gas pipes. My grandparents had to evacuate their neighborhood.
Neither of them can drive right now, so they got in their neighbor's car and had
my aunt pick them up elsewhere. A woman interviewed by NPR was at work two towns
over when it happened, and because the buses were shut down she had to walk
several miles to her children so she could bring them to a shelter; she said,
"I'm exhausted, my feet hurt, my blood pressure's high. My kids are
uncomfortable, and my grandkids. But I still have to show up to work." This, I
guess, is the thing that makes me anticapitalist: that no one has any time to
breathe.

I wound up leaving my math class halfway through, shortly before 20h last
night; Spouse E and my sister were trying to get back home from Boston, but they
had gone into the city by train, and the train was shut down, so they got a ride
from my step-dad, but the highway was gridlocked and several exit ramps closed,
and Spouse E was texting me to say we should pack some things and be prepared in
case our neighborhood had to be evacuated too. That never ended up happening.
I'm writing from my assembly language class right now.

* * *

I went to my advisor's office to ascertain his office hours after my classes; I
need to ask him when I can expect to graduate now that I'm a full time student &
figure out what courses I should take next semester. But when I got to his
office I found the entire department faculty had moved out of the building, so I
went around the unending construction on campus to the recently reopened and
renamed building that now houses the computer science department. I've got an
appointment to speak to my advisor on Monday.

Trying to work now that classes are over for the day but I'm kinda lacking
direction. I was assigned to finish up a project another intern was working on
over the summer, but there's still some disagreement to be settled about how it
ought to be done. The project I'd been working on all summer is now essentially
deployed and in use but at my manager's direction I'm looking for other people
on the team whether it will handle everything they need it to.

There's some really simple tickets I could work on, but unfortunately, I might
not have enough time to test them before I have to call it quits for the day, &
the people who would have to approve my work on that are notoriously slow to
merge branches.