at around 1:30am last night i got my assignment for today: 63 cases, all around the inman square area, with a start time of 12:45pm. i browsed the list of addressed before going to sleep. when i woke up this morning, everything had changed. i now had 88 cases, with a start time of 2:45pm. how can the census assign me more cases yet tell me to start 2 hours later? that didn't make sense. all my cases from last night were there; they just attached an animal 25 cases, all around where i live. i guess they figured by some miracle i'm about to finish all 63 cases, i could come home and work some open addresses from where i live.

there was enough to eat in the house that i didn't need to make a grocery run. my morning project was replacing the sheered off bolt on my rear bike rack. i figured it was going to be difficult to remove, but once i loosened the washer and lockring and nuts, i was able to remove the broken bolt my hand. i replaced it with a spare, the bike rack was back to normal.

i put a chicken bake in the oven and studied my addresses while i waited for my lunch to finish baking. i noticed the same streets were scattered, some in the early afternoon, others in the late afternoon. i ended up pulling out the addresses and reordering them by region, so i wouldn't waste my time by doubling back on an area i'd already visited.

after i finished my lunch, i took a quick shower. i left by 12:30pm, taking the bicycle as it was too far to walk. today was a hot day, but actually kind of comfortable because it was also very dry. up until this point i've been wearing pants for work because i felt it looked more professional, but today was the first time i wore shorts, so that might've also helped with the cooling. never did i get hot enough that i needed to take a break, and by the time i finally took my break around 5:15pm, i hadn't even drank my ice cold water yet.

today was the first day of the new work bonus, which will last for the next 3 weeks. i need to complete 0.75 cases an hour in order to receive the bonus. i'm still not quite sure if completion means interviews or could also mean verifying vacancies or non-existent addresses.

afterwards i went back out and worked for another hour before returning home again for our weekly census conference call at 7pm. i didn't mind it at all, allowed me to stop working an hour early while still getting paid the same. there's always a few people who seem to hog up all the airtime on these conference calls while everybody else is forced to sit around and listen. i had my own question (mostly about the bonus qualification) but decided to ask them privately tomorrow.

by 8pm i still have 47 active cases and 20 inactives. that meant i managed to complete 21 cases. of those 21 cases, i think maybe only 6 were actual interviews, and another handful were proxy interviews, while the rest were wrong addresses. if we count completions as those 21, then i'm in good shape: if completion needs actual interviews, then i'm probably not going to get any bonuses.

highlight of the day was going to an apartment complex where i bumped into the building manager who also happened to be a census supervisor. she knew my supervisor and got a kick out of calling her and telling her that one of her enumerators (me) was actually working her building. i had 7 cases in her building, i did 2 interviews, left 2 notice-of-visit slips, and the rest she served as my proxy, the 3 remaining units vacant on april 1st.

for dinner i boiled a bag of frozen homemade chinese dumplings my mother gave me early last week but i never got around to eating because i had so much pasta salad. i'm trying to figure out what i'm going to be eating for this week. there's enough leftovers that i can probably survive off of that, but i also had enough ingredients for making some tasty salads. hot days like the ones we're due to experience all this week, i prefer cold foods.

i started using wireguard for my VPN, after receiving an e-mail from my service saying it was now available. supposedly it's better than IPsec or openVPN, faster, more secure, even less code. i tried it and didn't notice anything different, except it's new enough that netflix doen't know how to catch it just yet and won't try to block me for using a VPN. i figured that will eventually change but for the time being it looks like i can VPN while streaming videos.