Words are inadequate

A couple weekends ago the Urban Forage session performed for the local farmers market. It was fun; the audience seemed to enjoy it despite the wind blowing against us the entire time. Julia recorded the performance from right where we were playing, so the recording turned out pretty well too.

This was the first time I've gotten to hear how I actually sound with everyone else. It's surprisingly good. The low tonics or fifths or whatever don't sound out of place, they really do add a bit of flavour. So that's good to know.

Last Saturday I went to a play-by-ear workshop with a visiting artist from East Clare. This is mostly notable in that it demonstrated just how poor my ability to play by ear is. I mean, it doesn't help that a) I'm trying to hit notes that are an octave off, or b) I'm the only one playing in my octave so it's Really Really Obvious when I miss, but still. Something to work on.

Sunday was the normal weekly session. This week there were a whopping two tunes I knew (plus one I thought I knew but was wrong); usually my hit rate is five or six. More interesting is that for one of those I could get the notes in my head but had immense trouble translating that into actually playing. It's one of the most recent tunes I've learned, so it's probably just a lack of familiarity, but still. Very strange.

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At the workshop on Saturday, Sorcha the presenter offered an interesting(-to-me) perspective on learning Irish traditional music. First: are you in Irish trad primarily for musical or social reasons? That is, are you more wanting to play well, or play with people? These aren't necessarily in opposition, but they are in tension. Second, and obvious-in-retrospect: if you focus on playing a narrow repertoire of tunes well, rather than learning a whole bunch of tunes well enough, your general musicianship will improve faster and further.

I'd been wanting to learn as many tunes as possible as fast as possible, so I could actually play at sessions. On reflection this is somewhat counter to my actual desire. Turns out I'm more interested in playing well. Partly this is because I objectively think my general musicianship is not up to snuff; partly it's that gifted-kid "if it's worth doing it's worth doing perfectly" brainwashing. Regardless. It's not like I'm gonna stop learning new tunes, but I'm not laser-focused on them.

The thing about fiddle, probably about any musical instrument, maybe about any art or craft, but I'm noticing it most here, ANYWAY, the thing about fiddle is that there's a nigh-infinite number of things you can adjust that will make the sound very slightly different. The whole process of 'sounding good,' aka getting the kind of sound I want, is going to be extremely fiddly (ha), calling for fine motor control of exactly the type that takes me ages to do well and never ends up as well as I want it to. (Example: I did a lot of origami in elementary school, because it gave me something to do with my hands while I was bored out of my mind. I got very, very familiar with folds not quite lining up right because my creases were that tiny bit off, and the resulting object looking just a tad lopsided or wobbly.) Add to that the difficulties in playing a weird instrument, most notably much slower response time on the strings so it's much much harder to play well fast, and I am for sure doing this on Hard Mode. Oh well. "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

And I do seem to be improving, though I couldn't tell you specifically how. It just ... feels like it sounds better. I dunno.

Phone fell out of my pocket as I was on my way to my first fiddle lesson. Didn't notice until I'd arrived.

It is currently turned off and in an apartment building in St Paul. It being turned off implies v strongly that the finder has zero interest in returning it.

This of course comes just when I need to contact the doctor's office (because they're billing me) and the county (because I still haven't seen any Medicaid paperwork, so maybe the doctor's office is correct to be billing me), and when I am theoretically waiting for a call from an increasingly unlikely job opportunity.

Adding to the fun: I cannot access my Canadian bank accounts online, because they want to send a text message to my phone, and in order to not do that I will have to call them. I can at least see that my US account and card are not being touched.

Fuck everything.

I was going to go check out the apartment building this evening but instead I just completely shut down. Steph came by for a little bit and that may have helped.

Comments on but responses unlikely.

I am forced to face the cruel reality that merely putting things on my to-do list does not magically result in them getting done. Apparently I have to not only write them down but then actually DO them. This seems deeply unfair.

The move-in process has stalled out where it always stalls out: hanging art. Will get some of the easier things up today. "Easier" is I guess defined as "it's in a frame and I have an idea where it's going." There's only limited wall space available in the main room, so that helps with the decision process. Once I've got the art up in there I can also re-point the track lighting, which will make me happier.

First counseling appointment this coming Monday. The last time I was starting therapy and felt like I needed it (as opposed to "I can benefit from this") was back in 2003, when I had private "insurance" through Anthem (hereinafter Those Pigfuckers). After several months they sent me a letter saying "yeah, we're not covering any of that, since you were dumb enough to get diagnosed with depression when you turned eighteen, so you, a broke college student, now owe your therapist $1500." One of the great What Ifs of my life is "what if I had been able to keep going in therapy at that point." Water, bridge, etc.

Overall I'm doing fine day-to-day and distantly terrified about the medium-term future. Cooking/baking, practice and sessions, cat care, talking to folks, occasional gaming. A few days ago I sat down and listened all the way through to (the tracklist for) a mix CD I put together in I believe 2008, maybe 2007. Pleased to report it holds up remarkably well. Life goes on.

I have just emptied the Last Lousy Box.

This is not, technically, the last box. There's things like "the Christmas box" and "the camping tub" which could both stand to be sorted through again but are deliberately permanent fixtures, or "the box with Pop's clock" which could likewise stand to be taken out and checked but is unlikely to be set up in this apartment or any apartment (it is Loud), but those don't really count. There's "a box of cords and cables" which is not a 2010s fantasy novel but does need to be likewise sorted through and put in a smaller box once I find one. Most significantly there's the box of bookshelf stuff, mostly stuffed animals, that remains full because I'm dragging my feet on wrapping up the living room.

So that's, what, three that want dealing with, only one of which is really a Box.

But this is, was, the Last Lousy Box. For years it contained a bunch of stuff that I didn't want to get rid of but didn't have anywhere to put. Now, thanks to some mild downsizing and moderate reorganization, I have an entire half-height bookcase on which to put Stuff. Some of it got chucked, though less than I'd expected. Most of it stayed.

This has been the Last Lousy Box for at least fifteen years. I know this because when the movers loaded everything from Virginia to Vancouver they wrapped all the bankers' boxes in packing tape, and the packing tape was still on this box so it had never been disassembled.

End of an era, or something.

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I had most of the bookcases in place and filled by the middle of last week, because just seeing the piles of boxes was stressing me out. Sorting the furniture took longer. For the first time in a decade my living room is not "couch opposite wall of bookcases" and I'm not sure how I feel about that. (The couch is at a right angle to the opposite wall, providing some visual definition between the kitchen/dining area and the living room.)

The kitchen took longer but is mostly organised now. I knew I was going to miss my previous kitchen: it was a little too small but extremely well laid out, and the pantry and bar/shelf helped a lot. This one has more cabinets, no pantry or bar/shelf, a stupid linear galley layout, and about the same amount of actual counterspace. I'm making it work but it's a Process.

The only casualty of the move was my Instant Pot, which developed a significant dent sometime between being put in its box in Vancouver and taken out here. Unclear whether I'm going to replace it; I didn't use it as much as I would have liked to. C'est la guerre. I'm also missing one of my favourite card games, but there's still a couple of places where that might turn up.

There's still some amount of bigger stuff that needs homes, and honestly I need to just take everything out of the closet and put it back in again. But I'm basically moved in.

It's weird.

My POD crossed the border yesterday evening and is in St Paul. I have a delivery date of Friday. THAT IS A DAY AND A HALF AWAY AAAAHHHHH.

I get to have stuff. I get to have furniture, not just a bed and a kitchen table and a couple of not-terribly-comfortable kitchen chairs. (And a desk I'm not using except to hold my viola case.) I get to have my bookcases filled with books and games. I get to have clothes beyond the half-dozen shirts and underwear I brought with me. I get to have kitchen accoutrements and to be able to cook for real. I get to make my apartment look like mine.

I've found movers based on "a guy I played some train games with had them deliver a couch and he was really happy with them." I am mostly nervous; I'm not convinced they're gonna send enough guys (at least two, three might be better) or equipment (at least a sturdy dolly, and a flatbed cart would be useful as well). We'll see how it goes.

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I spent much of last week with Steph and family at their cottage on the St Lawrence, in Ontario. It was good to be outside and among trees and water. The whole thing made me wish I could draw or paint, a litle. It's pretty, yes, but also... I don't know. I could visualise what coloured-pencil sketches or watercolours of the landscape would look like.

I started off by swimming the hundred meters across the little bay, and that was rough... and then tried to swim back, which turned out to be upstream, and that was much much worse. The chill and the muscle exhaustion were bad enough, I was having trouble "swimming" and was mostly "flailing sort of forward while trying to get enough oxygen and not sink." That coupled with fighting the current, and the sense of not moving any closer, added despair and muted terror to the list. I got myself over to a dock that was about halfway across, and hung on gasping until Steph came out to fetch me on a paddleboard. Not recommended, at least not without some conditioning beforehand.

Other than that... there was cooking, there was weeding, there were boat rides and walks and ice cream. I brought my viola so there was some music, and that was good. It was also a deeply lonely experience. "But Steph was there!" Yes, in her natural habitat, with her family, taking care of her kid. I am notoriously bad at identifying 'belonging' but am pretty sure that for a variety of reasons this wasn't it. It might be, later; just not now, or yet.

My life has been fairly unsettled since ... call it a year and a half, since I realised that I wasn't going to be getting a job with the BC government. It's been mostly upended and in boxes for going on five months now. I'm hopeful that having an apartment that looks like mine will help matters.

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Interview this morning for an election judge position that would run from mid-September through early November. That was followed by an unexpected call from a place where a friend of Steph's works that was looking for a tech writer. That position didn't pan out; they want someone with an active clearance. But there's similar positions open, that will sponsor one for a clearance, so she passed my resume etc along.

And then I got a pingback from a place I'd applied for a GIS position, and an interview tomorrow morning. This is the place that ghosted me at about this time last year, after being exceedingly flaky about getting an interview scheduled, so I am not terribly optimistic, but at this point I am intimately familiar with the beggars/choosers dichotomy. So we'll see.

The tech writing thing would pay extremely well, which would be nice, and would be wholly remote, which would be nice assuming I can get myself into work-mode. The only downside is that it's tech writing. Well, and it's for a contract for DHS ("but not ICE!" the person on the phone was quick to assure me). The other would be GIS work, but for much less pay, some amount of on-site, and with multiple smallish red flags waving already.

Onward. To bed, right now.

Mr Tuppert calmed down once we got on the plane, where it was dark and quiet, and slept the whole way. He and I then spent two nights in a hotel, and got into the condo on Wednesday. This is our fourth day here and I think he's getting used to it. I might be too.

In Corvaric he spent a lot of time on his heating pad on the table, or on the foot of the bed, where he could see me. Here he's been burying himself in the bedclothes a lot. It may be chillier than he's used to; it may be just stress and overstimulation. Today I've turned the temp up a notch and he's out asking for attention, which is nice.

I'd hoped to get a new bed for move-in day, but the earliest they'll deliver is Monday, so til then I'm sleeping on an air mattress of Steph's. It's fine, now that I've laid some blankets between me and it.

The apartment is... it's also fine. The living room is a bit narrower than I'd thought/hoped. There's no pantry and no bar/counter, so the kitchen may well have both less storage space and functionally less counter space than previous, which may be a Problem. On the bright side there's laundry, and a giant bedroom closet, and a nook in the bedroom for a desk and/or cat tree.

I've got or am getting a sufficiency of Stuff to tide me over: a few plates and bowls and mugs, a new nonstick skillet. A table and two chairs from a thrift store, which I consider myself to be renting. That sort of thing. The living room is all but empty, as is that enormous closet.

It still feels ... unmoored, temporary, unreal. And it likely will until my stuff gets here, in two to four weeks.

Yet I'm doing ... well, I think. Optimistic, and even hopeful. A plan has come to something like fruition, after months of being stalled out. There's an enormity of logistics to sort, still, but they're sortable, they're things I can make progress on. I'm no longer wholly waiting on other things to happen to make them possible.

And I think it's gonna be alright
Yeah, the worst is over now
The morning sun is shining like a red rubber ball

The farmers market is just downstairs in the parking lot, so I shall go and see what wonders that brings.

I left Blacksburg before I learned to hate it, though it was a close thing. DC ... I was never in any real danger of hating DC. DC was first the golden land of childhood from which I was rudely snatched, then a safe haven for high-school me to start learning who I was, and finally my material just desserts for dragging myself across the finish line of university and into The Real World. I never spent enough time in DC to get a real sense of who it is. I hated the heat, and I hated the traffic, and that was enough to convince me to leave.

I fell in love with Vancouver the first time I visited in 2009. I was lonely as hell when I moved here but I figured that was just me having trouble finding people. I still loved the city.

When I started spending time with Erin in 2016/17, I didn't understand the anger and vitriol she had for this place. From listening to her, I started to understand it. I began to see how the city doesn't care about its residents, how every year it squeezes you tighter, how much of what I loved was surface.

It's not only the money, of course. Turns out I am a houseplant and I don't do well when there's no sunlight for eight months of the year. Too, I blew up my social circle in the last half of the last decade, and haven't really been able to put it back together. It's not entirely fair to lay the blame for that on Vancouver... but it's not wholly unfair either.

This past six months or so has been a pleasant reminder of the city I fell in love with. Downtown on a sunny day, The Drop (one of my favourite pieces of public art) and Douglas Coupland's lego orca. The Cinematheque. Farmers markets. Mountains and water, and whatever it is about the sunlight out here that just feels brighter and more vibrant than anywhere else. Touristing with Steph, Granville island market and Queen Elizabeth park, revisiting places I've forgotten how much I liked.

I'll miss the Wednesday night sessions at Hynes. I'll miss a handful of people, probably more of them than I think I will. I still don't belong here, though.

It's time to move on
It's time to get going
What lies ahead
I have no way of knowing
But under my feet, babe
The grass is growing
Yeah, it's time to move on
It's time to get going

Paul William Davies et al, The Residence

A cosy whodunnit set at the White House during a state dinner. About six hours' worth of material, spread over eight hour-long episodes. Rapid-fire dialogue reminiscent of Howard Hawks's screwball comedies, a fun birding-obsessed detective, and a great cast. Recommended.

Three thoughts after the last episode:

1) That last episode is emblematic of the Netflix Way. The detective gathers all the suspects to walk them through the crime, as is traditional for the genre (though she's doing it to see who will give themselves away, rather than because she knows). So she takes them all through a recap of everything that's come up in the series so far. Then, just in case you missed it, she spells out explicitly how the murder was committed, again, for the big reveal. Dumbed down, for people who've been half watching and half scrolling. Kudos to the writers for managing to keep the rest of the show interesting, but I was about ready to gnaw my arm off to escape yet more Here's What Happened.

I recognise that audiences can't be trusted anymore, what with the proliferation of videos explaining the ending of even fairly straightforward movies. I just wish it weren't so.

2) I did not so much call the culprit as really really want it to be that person.

3) The whole series demonstrates how mysteries are a fundamentally conservative genre. ( spoilers follow ) I have no beef with this in general; it's just really obvious, and not a little frustrating, in this instance.

Snapped the violin's E string a few days ago. This was a good reminder that the over-tight strings on the viola are probably not good for it. So, in celebration for selling the condo and also because I sold a couple of expensive SubPress books, I went ahead and ordered proper tenor strings. The one guy in the States is now directing people straight to the French manufacturer to buy them, because he's sick of dealing with stupid US tariffs. Hopefully those will arrive soon. I've ordered them to Mya's address in case they turn up after I move, in which event I will get them from her somehow.

Based on a very limited sample (cokes, bananas, trash bags), stateside groceries are the same price as groceries in Vancouver. By dollar amount. Not accounting for currency conversion. This is bad. I knew it was bad, I've known it was bad since January when Steph and I went out to eat and the restaurant prices in Bellingham were indistinguishable from prices in Vancouver, but this is Bad. On the bright side I can just copy over my budget spreadsheet and won't have to change the numbers.

The apartment complex I was looking at most seriously in Mpls turns out to have lied to me. When I talked to them a couple of months ago the guy said that having money in the bank would suffice to get approved for an apartment. Now they're telling me I have to show sufficient income, or get a co-signer. Bah.

I've been doing some internet poking-around and have determined that I'd like my next car to be a BMW i3. This is a zippy little city runabout with more passenger and cargo space than one expects. I used to say that Straylight, my late lamented Saturn three-door coupe, was more car than I wanted but as much car as I needed; I suspect an i3 would be similar. ("As much car as I wanted" would have been a Smart. Or a Saturn Sky / Pontiac Solstice, a fancy roadster whose trunk space I once heard described as "you could fit a two-four in there, if you poured it out.") The fact that the i3 also has trick backwards-mounted back doors just like the Saturn is, I'm sure, entirely coincidental. What can I say. I have an affection for small quirky zippy-looking cars.

The i3s are hard to find, especially ones from 2018-2021 when the bugs were mostly out of the design and the battery got beefed up. Not unattainable, though. Will see what shakes out. And of course if I don't get the NG job I'm not buying a new car, either.

The case of the 500-mile email: "We can't send [e-]mail more than 500 miles." I was reminded yesterday that this exists and am the happier for it.

Two Slice: "A font that's only 2px tall, and somewhat readable!" 'Somewhat' is doing a decent amount of work there; I suspect enough letters are distinctive that your brain can fill in the missing ones from context. Still, impressive.

Clues By Sam, a daily logic puzzle. Starts easy on Monday, gets gradually harder over the course of the week. Been doing these for awhile now. It's nice to start my morning with a tiny dopamine jolt.

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Let's see.

( a multitude of things )