Just let me lie here on the tile

Over a month after the arrival of our (in my case, long-yearned-for) Microclimate Air3 powered respirators, I finally took mine out on its maiden voyage yesterday. (It may result in me going more places than I have been, but it may also mainly result in me feeling safer in the places I do go.)

Yesterday there was a casual in-person meeting at Dayjob where the team properly met the two people who our office's managing editor answers to. Donuts were promised (and turned out to be quality donuts, although I opted not to bring one home with me [since I sure wasn't about to unmask to eat anything there!]. Fun times in needing to be picky about what I spend my sugar intake on). We also had a heat warning, so I was all the more glad/relieved to have a drive to and from the meeting rather than taking transit for the first time in, oh, three years or so.

I'll put most of the rest under a cut, but I do want to note--especially since probably at least one or two of you clicked on the link for the Air3, and the price looks horrifying--that I'm incredibly glad we didn't order ours immediately when they first became available, because at that point the Air3 alone (as opposed to the kit) was more like $1000 USD. The original plan wasn't for scruloose to get one at all, given that initial price and given that they have a respirator setup that works well for them. But then a few weeks later, the price dropped to $549(/$649 for the kit with extra stuff, which is what we opted for, as well as a few extra filters etc. in the name of minimizing future need to deal with shipping), so we got to say "Well, that's still really spendy, but it's also now not completely outrageous to get two." (And then we wound up having to contact the company because of shipping/import charge shenanigans, but those were on the courier's side, not Microclimate's, and the person scruloose dealt with was great, so it's all good.)

I should also note that one of the review videos I watched about this made sure to point out clearly that its price (which initially was a MAJOR jump up from how much the Air2 cost when that was available) was in line with the cost of other NIOSH-certified powered respirators. It's far from cheap, but it's not the gouging attempt it might seem like. (I do wonder what the deal was with the massive price drop so soon after its release, though!)

( And now, the actual experience: )

Eating: This weekend is scruloose's and my anniversary (year 22 is a go!), so last night we ordered Chinese roast duck and crispy pork belly and had half of it, with the rest set for supper tonight. Sous vide reheating works so well. This future is a complete nightmare in so many ways, but we sure do have cool kitchen technology. (Kitchen technology that spies on you, talks to the internet, and/or demands proof of your humanity is excluded from this praise.)

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Reading: Two novels last week: Chuck Tingle's Camp Damascus and Alix E. Harrow's Starling House. I parasocially adore Chuck Tingle as a person, but this was my first time reading any of his work, and it's very possible it'll be my only time, as I just plain didn't click with this one. I had a better time with Starling House (and it too was my first book by its author), but also didn't really bond.

I'm currently about halfway through Adrian Tchaikovsky's Service Model, and can definitely see why it gets compared to Murderbot from some angles, although the vibe is wildly different and I can't say I would've made the comparison myself. (Ginny noted approvingly that anything people dare compare to her beloved Murderbot has a high bar to reach, and she feels it's fair in this case.) But then, whatever the things are that make a book really click/resonate for me, they don't seem to have any connection to the things that make people draw comparisons. Too nebulous, I guess. Anyway, this is an interesting read so far.

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Watching: Murderbot, of course. I liked last week's episode a lot. Besides that, scruloose and I saw ep. 2x02 of Kingdom [disambiguation: the historical Korean zombie show] and, for a change of pace, got back to watching the original Leverage.

Some of you may dimly recall that in the days before covid, there were a few years there where we and Ginny and Kas would go to wildpear -and-family's place and watch TV on Sunday nights. We got through a couple of shows that way, and started in on Leverage, which I'd seen up to about halfway (?) through season 4 and then somehow wandered off from despite loving it, and otherwise only saw a couple of later episodes, including the series finale; Ginny had seen and adored the entire thing, and I think Kas was in the same camp as scruloose and wildpear and her then-partner and hadn't seen it.

We made it to...well, roughly halfway through season 4. wildpear's kidling, Pumpkin, was old enough by then to want in on what we were watching, so they sat in for TV night, just in time for "The Grave Danger Job", which freaked them out really, really badly (fair! That episode is brutal!). My mental timeline here is very fuzzy on how long that was before covid arrived, but it wasn't too big a gap, and all in all, that was the end of our group watch. And I still basically hadn't seen past somewhere in season 4 (plus the finale). I watched the first few episodes of season 1 of Leverage: Redemption when that came out, and with that, too, I wandered off and kept meaning to get back to it.

But last week, scruloose and I took the DVDs off the shelf and got back to it. We have now seen "The Boiler Room Job" (which I'm confident I'd seen before, but I wonder if I'll know for sure when I hit new-to-me episodes?). Hopefully this time I'll actually see it all through properly. In theory, at some point we'll get to have cognitive dissonance over Noah Wyle, which will be funny since Leverage: Redemption was where we first saw him but now my association with him is 95% The Pitt.

After making calls on Monday, scruloose found a heat pump-servicing company that would do the repair etc. under our warranty from the manufacturer. A service tech turned up on Wednesday (!) at the time he said he'd be here (!) and assessed the situation, sourced the required parts locally (all three units needed their coils replaced, which the manufacturer apparently says was a known issue with models from that year that has now been fixed, so this theoretically shouldn't recur), and came back first thing yesterday morning to actually do the repair (and replace a noisy fan in the exterior unit). Labor and parts=all covered. Things seem to be working fine now. *knocks wood* It was a bizarrely good experience.

The cats were unsurprisingly unimpressed about being corralled in the bedroom repeatedly (both to keep them underfoot and to minimize their covid exposure as much as possible, in addition to all the purifiers running and scruloose rigging the airflow so that the bedroom was pressurized and the tech wearing an N95 mask the entire time), but were mostly polite about it and appreciated the treats they got afterwards.

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I just went poking around in the Kobo listings for Adrian Tchaikovsky ebooks, and stumbled over the fact that there's an ebook (Terrible Worlds: Revolutions) collecting his three Terrible Worlds novellas, none of which I've read and one of which is on my wishlist. The collected volume is going for $7.99 Canadian. The individual novellas go for $10.99 each. [EDIT: Regular prices, in all cases.] I don't have a specific way in mind that I think this should be handled, but surely there are better ways to price/label/offer ebooks.

The poking around came after the ebook for Tchaikovsky's Service Model, which Ginny just read and liked, turned up on the on-sale list this morning, so this is also a PSA about that. (At least for the Canadian Kobo site.)