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We’ve both gotten our Covid vaccine boosters, and the kid’s had both initial shots now that a dosage has been approved for his age range. No side effects to speak of for either of them, and while I had a day of brain fog, I think that’s just as likely to be because the shoulder I usually sleep on was sore and I couldn’t freaking get to sleep that night.

It’s been interesting to compare the process for each visit, though.

The initial roll-out back in April and May was a long but very efficient queue run by a local health provider, directing patients through the halls of their office to whichever of a dozen rooms was up next.

For the kid’s shots, we went with another local health group that’s been running clinics at local schools after hours for the last few weeks. It was similar, but a lot of the directing was being done by volunteers, and the people administering the shots weren’t staff nurses but drawn from firefighters and the like. They set up check-in tables and partitions and chairs in some of the classrooms, and they made an effort to put the kids at ease. They even had a service dog available for anyone who wanted to hug a dog during their shot. The timing wasn’t as well-arranged, though, and both times we got sent to someone who was still waiting for the next batch of loaded syringes.

For the boosters, we just made appointments at the local CVS pharmacy. It was like getting a flu shot, plus adding the record to the Covid vaccine card.

(Amusing: Between my first and second pass through the scheduler, the CVS website dropped the eligibility question. California had already approved boosters for all adults, but CVS must have had the change ready to go as soon as the CDC’s approval came through. Of course I still had to enter all the same insurance information both times.)

So we’re all up to date on the best biological protection against Covid available!

Just in time to find out whether and how much Omicron can get around it. *sigh*

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I’m not ready to give up on the flexibility of WordPress for my main blog yet, but holy crap are these pages heavy. Even with compression. There’s no reason it should take 450K (before compression) and 20 requests to display a 500-word post.

And I don’t even do ads, popups, social sharing buttons or anything else like that.

By contrast, my Les Mis blog, where I post about once a year, is currently generated by Eleventy using a custom minimal theme that only takes around 10K of HTML, 3K CSS, and a third request for the icon. And another 40K for the header font, which I recently set up locally so it no longer has to call out to Google Fonts.

One domain, just four requests, and only 50K for the first hit and 10K for each subsequent page.

Never mind the Gemini version of the blog which is around 2-5K per page and a single request per page!

Compression cuts down on those 500Kb WordPress pages — all the text and code compresses really well so only around 200K bandwidth is needed. But it’s still got multiple JavaScript and CSS requests going on.

I was able to cut it down significantly by switching to a lighter theme and turning on the minimize/combine feature in WP-Optimize so it’s making fewer script calls. But it’s still way bigger than the minimalist setup I have with 11ty.

Some of it is images, though. I still have my latest Flickr posts in the sidebar, and I’m using Jetpack’s related posts feature which includes thumbnails. I could cut out a big chunk by removing those, but I kind of still like the idea of having them in there.

I think I need to take a look at how much extra stuff I really want on this site and rip some of it out. Eventually I’d like to replace all the JetPack features because they just seem to keep adding more scripts. Plus I want an entirely local stats package instead of one that’s offloaded to a third party even if they’re less awful than, say, Google or Facebook.

On the other hand, I want to keep Gravatar on the comments sections (on the older posts where people actually commented) because that’s actually useful to readers as an aid for following a conversation better. But that’s all on top of the base page size.

Originally posted at Wandering.shop

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I could not believe how many kids were out trick-or-treating in our neighborhood this year. Or how many households were handing out candy. There were more kids even than a normal Halloween, through fewer houses active than usual.

We weren’t even sure of our plans as late as Sunday afternoon. We’d carved pumpkins on Saturday, we’d put the skeleton in the big hole in the floor (not that anyone but us could see it), but we weren’t sure whether we’d be taking the kid trick-or-treating, or whether anyone would be knocking on our door.

Toward the end of the afternoon we set up a table on the front lawn with our jack-o-lanterns and two trays of goodies (one candy, one party favors as an allergy-friendly alternative). We put on masks as a precaution, and took turns taking the kid trick-or-treating.

We ran out of candy.

We ran out of toys.

There were so many groups of kids, some as big as a dozen, and they kept coming for several hours after sunset.

I figure it’s probably a reaction to last year’s locked-down holiday.

Covid-19 hasn’t gone away. The pandemic isn’t anywhere near over. But cases in Los Angeles County have been trending downward from a peak way back in August, and our area has around 80% vaccination coverage among those 12 and up. Schools have gone back to in-person instruction, with masks indoors, distancing guidelines, and quarantine rules for students and staff who are exposed. The elementary schools even brought back their Halloween parade, though they split it by age group and only allowed staff and students onsite to reduce crowding.

The coronavirus isn’t gone. It’s still a constant presence. But for the moment, it feels more manageable than this time last year. At least here.

So people handed out candy, and kids went trick-or-treating, and parents went along with them. Maybe a third were wearing masks.

But we’re getting tested later this week, just in case. Outdoors or not, it was still a crowd.

Update: We didn’t catch Covid from trick-or-treating! (or from the plumbers for that matter)

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We went with a Pokemon theme again for this year’s Jack-O’Lanterns. Katie did the Vulpix and the Squirtle, while J. started the Chandelure, I continued it, and Katie finished it.

Having found a carvable teal artificial pumpkin, and decided on Pokemon, Squirtle seemed the perfect choice!

Also on Pixelfed

Edited to add: Believe it or not, that’s not daylight, it’s the streetlight. They recently put in new white LED lighting in the neighborhood.