1 In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. 2 (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 And everyone went to their own town to register.
4 So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. 5 He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. 6 While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, 7 and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.
8 And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. 11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. 12 This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
13 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,
14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”
16 So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. 17 When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, 18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. 19 But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. 20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.
This one is a little geeky but stick with me. Have you noticed how sometimes when you type in the address bar, it changes the UI a little bit and then performs a search on whatever you typed? For example, if you start with “amazon” and a space, it says “Search amazon.com”. Did you know that you can customize this? This post assumes you’re using the new Microsoft Edge browser (it’s fantastic, highly recommended) or Chrome. Let’s use my website as an example.
Search for the word “test” using the search box on the right side of this page. Notice how the resulting URL in the address bar is “https://www.studio711.com/?s=test”. Copy that URL.
Click the three ellipses in the top right of the browser window and click Settings. In Edge, search for the “address bar and search” setting and then click “Manage search engines”. Chrome is similar but I think you can search directly for “Manage search engines”.
On that page you can define your own search shortcut. So add a new one and call it studio711 and use that as the keyword too. For the URL, give it the URL that you copied from step 1 but replace “test” with “%s”. So you end up with “https://www.studio711.com/?s=%s”.
Close out of the settings, click the address bar and type “studio711 hot dogs”. Press enter. Now you’ve just searched my website for posts about hot dogs.
You can do this for any website that has your search string in the URL. I use it for all kinds of stuff at work like looking up bug numbers or live site incidents. At home I use it for quickly looking up Bible verses. I have defined a search engine called “ehv” (for Evangelical Heritage Version) with a URL like this “https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?version=EHV&search=%s”. I have another one for the NIV translation.
Once I learned about this, it took me a little while to grasp it’s power and also to remember to use it, but now I’m hooked!
On Monday I mentioned that I couldn’t find a good graph showing the increased number of deaths in 2020 (from any cause) in the US. This post is a quick update to say that I’ve found better data. This ourworldindata website shows the number of deaths per week and compares it to previous years. You can also choose other countries and read about where they get their data sources. Note that their data isn’t fresh enough to show a lot of impact from the current spike that we’re going through.
Hopefully you’re not burnt out on Christmas music yet because this post has a bunch of it! Elijah has been learning Silent Night and I’ve recorded 3 songs as well. Two of these videos will be popping up on our church Facebook page leading up to Christmas as well. I put out a call for people to submit videos of themselves playing Christmas music and we got a good response. There are some amazing musicians in our congregation! The first video will launch today at 4pm and then continue daily up to Christmas.
Friday was an exciting day: the FDA approved the use of the Pfizer vaccine and since then, the CDC has also recommended it! Health care workers have been bearing a heavy load this year, but they will be rewarded with the first vaccines and a dramatic increase to their safety while they do their jobs. My family and I are probably still looking at waiting until at least next summer before we get it. This New York Times calculator gives a rough idea of what part of the line we’re in and as expected, we’re pretty much at the end of the line.
Globally, it’s hard to imagine how long it will take to distribute this. In the US it’s maybe a bit easier to estimate but the numbers are sobering when you think about the current death rate. I’ve seen a couple charts like this one that show the number of deaths per day over the last ~10 years, but I’ve only see them for other countries. From what I’ve seen, it takes the US a year or two to collect the final statistics, but using data from 1999-2018 and provisional numbers from 2019 and 2020 is still interesting. If you take the maximum number of monthly US deaths from 1999-2018 and compare them with this year, you can see the impact of COVID. April was 37% (+86,000 deaths) higher than the previous max, May was 18% higher (+42,000) and June was 11% higher (+24,000). The data only goes through June, but given the peak in July and the one that we’re going through now, I expect it to continue to be ugly. There are some other small factors that contribute to the increase like increasing population, but if you look at the trends, these numbers are extreme outliers and they’re in the same ballpark as the COVID death totals we’re seeing. [UPDATE: I found better data. See this follow up post.]
Someone recently mentioned that stem cells were used to produce vaccines and it felt like a gut punch. I’ve been so excited for the development of the vaccines that I hadn’t even considered that. Thankfully that wasn’t totally correct. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were created without the use of stem cells.
On the home front not much has changed. We were hunkered down for Thanksgiving and we’ll do the same for Christmas. Hospitalization rates are almost back up to where they were at the end of March and the numbers are still going up. The isolation gets old but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and we’re not giving up now.
Tyla and I have been plowing through the episodes of Bill Gates and Rashida Jones Ask Big Questions. There’s so much good content in each episode and it’s really helpful to hear smart people talking about tough issues.
Pastor is putting out a series of videos covering the psalms and one of the most recent was Psalm 34. It’s full of reminders to take refuge in the Lord and put our trust in him:
The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears. From all their distress he delivers them. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted. He saves those whose spirits have been crushed. Many are the troubles of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him from them all.
Every year we add a new ornament to the tree to commemorate something big from the year like a family vacation. But what kind of ornament would we get from 2020? We thought about one of the funny ones like “Our First Pandemic“, but we wanted to remember the good stuff about the year. This called for a custom ornament. To the CNC machine!
This year’s ornament has two photos that we snapped on random family adventures. The top one is Rasar State Park which we loved because it was beautiful and we could carve out our own piece of riverfront without anyone else around. The bottom picture is from a rainy hike at Saint Edward Park. We did a lot of rain hikes because we knew nobody else would be crazy enough to hike in that weather! The ornament also has the outline of two cats near the top for the new additions to our household.
The current situation isn’t great: since I wrote last, cases have continued to rise. Increased restrictions don’t seem to be bringing the numbers down. The daily confirmed case counts are higher than they’ve ever been around here, but it’s hard to compare the various peaks since we’re always increasing the number of tests being performed. The death count is probably a better way to compare, but it is a lagging indicator. It takes people a while to die once they get it and then reporting takes more time. The chart below (source) shows where it’s at now, but it feels like we’re going to hit close to the peak from March. Hopefully it’s not worse than that. It will be hard to tell because the reporting is going to be wonky during Thanksgiving week because of people traveling, the day off, etc.
Despite the increasing death count, there has been some very encouraging news about vaccine trials and we could be a few weeks away from it being approved for emergency use. In the first world, the rollout could easily take a year and it will take much longer than that to cover the globe. Given that we aren’t frontline medical workers or in a high risk group, I expect it will be next summer-ish before my family gets it, but we’ll be lined up and ready to go when our turn comes. It’s easy for me to get bogged down dreading all the misinformation that’s going to spread causing more deaths because some people won’t get the vaccine, but I’m trying to stay positive. It’s incredible that we can even have the discussion about vaccines already, and I’m thankful for all the rules and regulations that are in place to produce a safe and effective treatment. What a bonus that there are a few vaccines that all look promising. I keep thinking about going through this 20 years ago. How would we have even gotten information about the vaccines? And yet today I searched around for info on the vaccine and was immediately presented with CDC pages including this page for individuals and a deeper page targeted at health care professionals. The road ahead won’t be easy, but it’s the way out of this mess. Stick that needle in me so I can safely leave my home and figure out what our new normal looks like.
Continuing the positive internet news, the seemingly unlikely duo of Bill Gates and Rashida Jones launched a podcast. I’m not all the way through the episodes they’ve released so far, but I’m really enjoying it. Rashida Jones asks the questions we’re all thinking, Bill Gates has devoted his life to global eradication of diseases, and they bring in additional experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci. The episodes aren’t all focused on COVID, but the series starts off in that subject area.
On the home front, we had a very different Thanksgiving, but as with all things this year, we looked for new opportunities to make special memories. We made all our favorite foods, baked Christmas cookies and got started with Christmas decorations. We had already planned to do Thanksgiving with just the three of us many weeks ago, but that decision was reinforced by a strong request from health officials to not celebrate outside of your household. On top of that, Elijah has a cold and got a COVID test on Tuesday (a negative result came back within 24 hours) so with all that piled on, we were thankful that we already had plans to stay in our bubble. Christmas will be the same way.
As I wrap up this check-in, I’m taking comfort from Deuteronomy 31:8:
The Lord himself will go ahead of you. He will be with you. He will not abandon you, and he will not forsake you. Do not be afraid and do not be overwhelmed.
Those words were from Moshes to Joshua and all the Israelites just before they entered Israel. Their situation was so much more stressful and complicated than this lockdown but those same promises apply to us. God is a constant. God is guiding our path. God is here.
I’m not an extreme coupon person, but I do love the low-effort ways to save an extra $10/month. Here are some of my favorites:
Most of our groceries come from Safeway and all of their coupons are available online. But who has the time to click through hundreds of coupons? This calls for automation! I previously blogged about how to make a quick button in your browser to click every coupon in a few seconds. This is probably the single most valuable piece of code I’ve ever written outside of work. It saves hundreds of dollars a year.
For every $100 we spend in groceries, we get $0.10/gallon off of our gas purchases at Safeway. It doesn’t sound like a lot but it does add up, especially with the bonus coupons that give extra gas discounts. To maximize our savings, I only use the gas discounts when filling up the truck because it takes around 20 gallons per fillup while the Escape is about half that.
The gas savings from Safeway expire eventually so I keep an eye on that and if we’re going to lose some before we can use them for gas, I use one of the “use 7 gas rewards for $10 off your next bill” deals. It’s not quite as good as filling up the truck but it’s better than using it on the Escape.
Our bank gives us a better interest rate on our checking account if we meet a few criteria every month and the main one is making 12 debit transactions. We use credit cards for everything just for the cash back so I have to plan out debit purchases. Amazon is a great way to knock these 12 purchases out. I hook up my debit card to my Amazon account and then buy 12 $1 gift cards and send them to myself.
We have splurged on Hello Fresh during the lockdown but it is pretty pricey. We pause it for a few weeks and Hello Fresh sends us a coupon for $10 or $15 off our next two orders. Then we unpause, use the coupons, and pause again.
Similarly, we limit our streaming subscriptions to only what we’re watching. We burned through a bunch of Netflix shows, canceled the service and then switched to Hulu. As we near the end of some Hulu shows, we’ll flip to another service and watch a bunch of shows there. I keep track in of all the shows we want to watch in One Note and Just Watch.
There are a lot of credit card rewards out there but we use two specific ones. The American Express Blue Cash card averages just under 2% cash back for us each year. We use that for almost everything except Amazon purchases which all go through the Amazon Visa card. That gives 5% back on Amazon purchases which is impossible beat.
None of these are going to make us rich, but they add up to a decent chunk of money each year and none of them take much time.
I finished another song in Jon Schmidt’s “Hymns Without Words” book. This time it was “Onward Christian Soldiers.” The title of the hymn can lead to some misunderstanding. The hymn isn’t promoting a militant church body as the world would see it. It reminds us that the battle against the devil is real and requires daily focus. (See Ephesians 6:10-18 and 2 Corinthians 10:3-5.) You can view the full hymn text on hymnary.org.
My sprinkler controller is an Open Sprinkler model and I wrote a program which periodically pulls the logs off it and stores them in a database. I was checking out my yearly irrigation water usage and noticed that I’m generally getting better every year about keeping the yard alive with less water. Obviously this is heavily weather dependent, but generally our summers are exceedingly dry so the main variation is in the start and stop of the watering season.
The y-axis roughly equates to the number of gallons used but this is far from accurate. The year to year comparisons are completely valid though.
I have similar data showing my HVAC (furnace, AC and fan) usage over the years but I’ll save that for another time. I don’t want to pack too much excitement into a single post.
Merry Christmas
THE BIRTH OF JESUS
1 In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. 2 (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 And everyone went to their own town to register.
4 So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. 5 He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. 6 While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, 7 and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.
8 And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. 11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. 12 This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
13 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,
14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”
16 So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. 17 When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, 18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. 19 But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. 20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.