Words are inadequate

The last time I got a FedEx package I put my PO box number on it, and FedEx complained and nearly didn't deliver my package because they wanted a physical address. So when I told work my address I told them to put the apartment number on there if it was going by not-Canada-Post. And of course FedEx decided to deliver to the post office this time, so my work laptop has been hanging out in the wrong PO box for nearly two weeks. I picked it up yesterday and it mostly seems to be fine. I say "mostly" because I'm getting a Trusted Platform Module error, which sounds like it's either irrelevant or going to break everything and I don't know which.

Meetings have been in the early early morning because they're with teammates in India.

I'm not nearly packed. I've got time but I wanted to be further along than this.

The last week or so I've been kind of shut down due to stress: not knowing what's expected of me from work, packing/moving, Sound of Music (which opened yesterday and went fine, but it is A Lot of time and driving and playing, so definitely stress there). This is not ideal but it's where I'm at for another month-plus, so.

I am, slowly, getting all the pieces in place for moving. Things like insurance, moving company, power, internet, all that stuff. I hate moving. Hate hate hate. I particularly hate doing it on my own. Last time I at least had the moving company in to pack the kitchen, and this time I'll have Erin which is much appreciated but still. There is just A Lot of everything.

So I am getting through and getting by and barely functional, which is really not my favourite. I should have told BMC that I couldn't start until I was bloody well moved and if they didn't like it then they didn't have to offer me the job, but oh well. Maybe I'll remember that for next time: Do Not Do Anything That Adds Organizational Complexity During A Move, No Matter How Good An Idea It Seems.

Bah. I am short on sleep and short on rest, tired and cranky and barely holding it together. In six weeks this will all be a bad memory except for the parts that are a good memory; I just need to hang on that long.

Sound of Music is going pretty well and is mostly fun but also frequently difficult, and I want to write more about that. Maybe next time.

Let's see. Last workday is this Friday. I am not looking forward to newjob, simply because I don't know enough about it to look forward to it. It's just the next thing on the list. I am looking forward to not having to deal with currentjob. We got acquired (again) back in November and the last several months have been an unending stream of nonfunctional tech integration, pronouncements from On High that make no mention of any of the products I've been working on, and the expected "your benefits will be a little worse this year". On Friday a message came in about yet another stupid trick the developers have pulled, and instead of getting annoyed I just said "in seven days this will no longer be my problem."

Current major stress source is moving. The moving coordinator I worked with to get up here last time, who was communicative and efficient and effective, is currently batting .333. It's an open question whether he'll find anyone at all, and if he does it sounds like they'll charge me double because I'm starting in an out-of-the-way location. The other option is to load up Erin's trailer and go south with that. I would much prefer to just throw money at someone else to deal with the moving logistics, and also the kitchen packing, and also the physical labor of carrying everything out and safely stacking it in a truck. Bah. Bright side, if I do end up using the trailer then once I get myself to the other end I can probably (probably) call Tranquility, the guys who moved me half a dozen times in three years, and say "hey, come unload this truck, it's half the work you usually do but you'll still get paid your full minimum."

Books. Reread This Is How You Lose The Time War, which has quickly become a Comfort Read. The slowly deepening relationship, the varied backgrounds, the way they play with words ("whacked seal"), the lovely lovely prose. It's just wonderful. Still halfway through a first reread of Fonda Lee's Jade War, the middle volume of her Green Bone Saga, which does not feel middle-volume-y at all, I'm just lacking in reading brain.

I've also picked up a game controller for the new laptop. Turns out that, as expected, I hate wireless controllers because I hate things that run out of battery when I'm using them, but other than that it's pretty decent. Unfortunately Apple's decision to ditch normal USB ports means I can't use it as a wired controller. Bah.

O yes: I'm generally pretty happy with ye new laptop ("Patrise," after the fellow in The Last Hot Time: dark, and powerful despite its stature). My main gripes are a lack of normal USB ports, an oversized touchpad that makes it harder to type than necessary, and a lack of a proper Delete key. Given time I can probably train myself into Fn+Delete but I shouldn't have to. Oh well. This has been a gripe for over a decade, and an insoluble one since 2017. The screen's lovely, as are the speakers, and the battery life and general system coolth make me quite happy.

I suppose five things make a post.

"Exhausted" is a word that I reserve for the feeling of having pushed past my own limits for quite some time. I'm not exhausted right now.

But I am very very tired.

The power adapter for my CPAP came today. Technically I guess it came on Friday but I didn't see that it had arrived until well after the post office had closed for the weekend. So tonight will, I hope, be my first night of good solid sleep in, what, two weeks?

Interview at 6AM this morning, because I read the offer of an interview at "between 6-7:30 PM" as being my time and not India time. It went well, I think. I am a poor judge of these things. I should hear back about next steps later this week.

I want to write up Pyramids (Discworld 7) before I forget any more of it, but I am definitely too tired for that at the moment.

It's been cold cold cold since xmas, -20s pretty much every day and -30s some days. And the new windows that got put in over the summer have a pretty significant draft around the edges, where the windowframe attaches to the wall. I've stuffed socks into the worst of it but my electric bill will still be substantially higher than last year. Bah.

There's been quite a lot of snow, too, which is for the most part pretty lovely.

I have tea and a book, and I expect I will be going to bed soon. Last week was a significant amount of "don't wanna go back to work." I hope tomorrow will be better on that front.

The sun is out and it's a reasonable temperature (well, it's like ten or so, but that's reasonable enough) and for the first time I can remember I find myself wanting to sit on a porch/patio/balcony and read in the sunlight. Unfortunately the ground floor apartment that I took because a) cooler summers and b) cheaper rent (point c, more windows because corner unit, was a happy accident) doesn't have outside access. Oh well. I miss the balcony in New West, the one that looked out over the Fraser from thirty stories up.

I also miss people but that's nothing new. I am going through one of my periodic cycles of feeling functional again. Spite-viola-practice (because upstairs neighbours) has developed into actual-viola-practice. I sold off a number of boardgames I don't play much anymore, which has me thinking again about the ones I do play, or rather that I'd like to play. First vaccine shot brought with it a sense that All This will be over someday, but "someday" isn't today. Etc etc. For the last six months my world has been my apartment, the post office, the grocery store, and Erin's place, barring a trip out to Smithers over the solstice.

Dropping down to four workdays a week has not really decreased my frustration with work, mostly because work has stepped up the frustration to account for that, but it does seem to give me a bit more breathing space. I miss not being perpetually annoyed by work. I have determined that I am actually quite bad at management and I absolutely Do Not Want to do it, which, yay for self-knowledge but boo for being stuck here anyway.

I just want to go out for dinner with my book, and eat something that I don't have to cook but is still tasty and somewhat elegant. Been craving the cajun chicken alfredo from Zeppoli's in Blacksburg lately. Or, more likely, my memory of same, there's no way it's still as good as I remember it being. Dinner with my book and a movie at the AFI Silver, or the Pacific Cinematheque in downtown Vancouver, and then maybe wandering around afterwards with ice cream or gelato or something.

I miss you.

Not a whole lot, but that's been the refrain of the last ten months. I've played a lot of Hades, Supergiant's fourth game. It's really good, in ways that really work for me. Gameplay, obviously, but also storyline and art and music of course and the voice-acting and the pacing of how the various story aspects get revealed, and just, it's really really good. I should go back and play Pyre, I never did get around to that one.

I loved Bastion, Supergiant's first game. Then I quite enjoyed Transistor, their second, despite having a ton of complaints and criticisms that boil down to "the pacing is awful in multiple ways". Transistor's art-deco-Tron aesthetic made me quite happy.

... huh, I played Transistor the winter I was laid off. I'm not laid off this winter but I'm working from home and finding it difficult to keep focused on work, due to *gestures at everything*, so it's similar. Supergiant makes games that I'm happy to get lost in, I guess.

---

There was an election and the Democrats took the Senate, which was a source of great relief and joy for like twelve hours before it got overshadowed by a literal if disorganized coup attempt. Things are back to "normal," by which I mean we'll see if the Senate Dems can unite among themselves enough to do anything or if they choose to let the minority party dictate what gets passed. I am ... hopeful but not optimistic.

The thing is, if the filibuster doesn't go, I give up. At that point the people who've been saying that Democrats are useless are right. They have a chance to make some real, lasting changes: a two-year window to show demonstrable improvements in people's lives and provide reasons to vote for them. If they choose not to do that, not to exercise the power they have, then it's by choice, and nothing will get any better because they don't want it to. Absent real concrete change I am hard pressed to see the Democrats holding the House in 2022 (it's gonna be an uphill slog regardless), even if the Senate math improves, which it might. And then it's two years of Republican intransigence and 2024 is a bloodbath, and watching that will not be good for me.

---

I read Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower and meant to write more about it, but it's really good. In a style that I didn't expect to like: the prose is ... not difficult but not transparent. I'm surprised and pleased that it still grabbed me.

After, I reread Brust's Hawk, which is a perfectly cromulent Vlad novel that's a bit too full of itself, and Vallista, which I don't like any better the second time, though I'm happier with the ending than I was with much of the rest of it. And then I tried to read A Memory Called Empire, which lots of people liked, and couldn't get into it, so it sits awaiting another try.

I'm watching Arrow, about halfway through S2. It is not great art or even great television but it's diverting, and I'm enjoying the characters, and the bits of backstory for Legends etc. Erin and I started watching Flash last weekend and I already find myself enjoying it more.

---

I've been noticeably shorter of breath than "usual" at least since I came back from Vancouver in July and got a covid test (negative). It got worse over December/early Jan, so I made a doctor appointment. In between I stopped using the humidifier with what turned out to be an unclean filter, and my breathing got better but not back to where it was pre-December. Doctor seemed unconcerned; he sent me for an xray "just in case" and will have another test done once the machine for the test is functional again in February. Meanwhile I'm coughing (less so since I stopped using the lung steroid he suggested I try), but not "none") and still short of breath.

Trying the whole exercise thing again. Hoping I can convince it to stick this time.

---

There's stuff about possibly moving that is still rattling around in my head.

Work is stupid but saying it sucks is an exaggeration. I'm not happy there, though. No bites on anything else yet.

Thoughts on autism and gender rattle around in my head and don't settle out into anything worth posting, much less coherent.

I dunno. I'm still here. I guess that's enough for now?

These days it somehow takes me a minute to summon up my birthplace, and when I do it always feels weird. "Oh, right, I guess I was born in Oklahoma. Huh." (Sill; lived there for the first nine months of my life before we moved to Broussard, Louisiana, which we also left before I was able to form memories.) I can still call up my father's Social Security number, though. At least I no longer get confused as to whether it's his or mine. Weird legacies of a military brat childhood.

Apparently sitting around waiting for work is not entirely unstressful. The VPN went down yesterday morning and didn't come back 'til sometime after two pm, on a day when I was meant to be sorting out the workload for the rest of the team. Couldn't really relax because I felt I had to keep checking every half hour or so to see if the VPN was back; couldn't do much because, well, no access to my machine. (For historical reasons involving the Horrible Awful IT Guy I don't have a work laptop, and instead remote-desktop into my work machine. This is as painfully slow as it sounds, but it does mean I only carry one computer when I travel.)

In general I disapprove strongly of how minor changes and setbacks are intensely disruptive to my ability to function, these days.

---

I finally finished Counterpart a couple of weeks ago. Counterpart is two seasons' worth of Cold War spy show with a skiffy veneer. The conceit is that in 1987 a physics experiment in Berlin created a permanent crossing between our world and another one that was just like it, but of course they started diverging in tiny ways almost immediately, and then more so when a flu pandemic decimated one world's population in the 1990s. There's an air of paranoia and bureaucracy, low-tech spy stuff and moral grey areas, and some amazing character work by (among plenty of others) JK Simmons and Olivia Williams playing two different versions of themselves. It's very much my thing, despite being a little slow at times. The show ends... acceptably; you can tell they were hoping for a third season but didn't necessarily expect to get one.

I also binged the last season of The Good Place a week and a half ago. This show... this show. It is, I think, the second multi-season show I've seen (after Avatar) that had an entirely satisfactory ending. And yes, I cried quite a bit during the finale, but what do you expect when it's all about needing to leave the people you love. Really just fantastic work, all around.

Last spring Erin bailed on Moffatt Doctor Who midway through S5 (specifically, midway through "Vampires of Venice"). I've picked it back up this week. Matt Smith's Doctor is starting to grow on me, and I'm reminded that it took me about half a season to come round on Tennant as well. Amy Pond may be less aggravating than her original presentation as well. It's hard to say, because the Amy-and-Rory dynamic is so bloody annoying and awful, and the writers really don't have much respect for Rory. I shall grit my teeth and stick with it, and hope that either that improves, or/and the next Companion (Clara?) irritates me less.

UPDATE: Erin hopped back on board for "Vincent" and has continued. Amy-without-Rory was in fact less annoying, and Amy-and-Rory in general are less obnoxious in S6 when the writers start occasionally giving Rory something to do. Steven Moffatt unfortunately still Steven Moffatts the hell out of everything, to include River Song. "Let's Kill Hitler" was mostly hilarious, but the revelation that River's spent her whole life pursuing the Doctor... feh.

And there's a new season of Kipo (yay!), and I have all of Steven Universe which I am watching very slowly because at this point midway through S1 it's still too saccharine for my taste, and there's plenty of other stuff around too.

---

And hey, it's Wednesday.

What are you reading right now?

Ancestral Night, by eBear. Big giant space opera, set in the same universe as the Jacob's Ladder books but several hundred years later. (Grail is summarized in passing in a couple of paragraphs on page 86.) It is slow going. Langorous, is I think the word. Lots of neat stuff, some high-tension scenes, and the pace just feels slow. I'm enjoying the ride quite a bit so far but it's a bit more effort to stick with than I had expected.

In ebook, The Weight of the Stars by K. Ancrum, which I picked up because it was on e-sale. YA? Near-future, about a teenage girl who's trying to befriend another girl whose mother vanished on a space mission just after she was born. It feels rough: the prose, the plot, the characters, all aren't quite... believable, maybe. But it's interesting and it's got heart.

What did you just finish reading?

Network Effect by Martha Wells was everything I could possibly have hoped for in a novel-length Murderbot book, and then some. (Except for more Gurathin. I like Gurathin! I liked having someone around who didn't like Murderbot!) I especially loved new SecUnit "Three" and its completely different yet still wholly believable response to freedom. So many good things about this book. These books. So glad I picked up the first one.

What do you think you'll read next?

Well, I've got A Game Of You sitting on my coffee table, I'll read that at some point. Other than that I don't really know. I've got Suzanne Palmer's Finder and Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire remaining from the Great Space Opera Flood of 2019. And more ebooks than a stick can be shaken at, as well.

I haven't been posting because everything is stupid.

Work is reaffirming my desire to Not Be Management, Dammit. I don't, much, mind training the new guy; I do mind the overly hlepy writer in India tackling a bunch of work that I didn't assign her because it was a bit more complicated, while ignoring my "please handle these things" request.

Work is also reaffirming my desire to Not Be Here but that is the kind of thing that would take time to solve even in normal circumstances.

I am continuing to not have sufficient time to myself. This problem will solve itself rather drastically next week (more on which later), and after that who knows.

Due to the above, and probably other reasons too, I have not been keeping up with the flood of online social that has opened up, so there's a distinct sensation of Missing Out there as well.

And I'm still working (more than previous, in fact), so the "now i can get caught up on everything!" is not available to me either. Bah. Whine whine whine.

This was cool: On Triscuits (thread). It is not, in fact, "three" of anything.

I should probably eat a thing.

And thus ends the Four Weeks Of Ridiculously Busy. (We now return to your regularly-scheduled Busy.)

I was down in Portland early last week, for the Write The Docs tech writing conference. It was good! Lots of friendly people, some good conversations. Nice to be reminded that tech writing is something that I sometimes enjoy. I also ran into ex-coworkers N-- and S--: about a year after I got laid off, they left MSTR and moved to Seattle, where they seem pretty happy. So that was kind of great. If I go next year I'm just taking the train home afterwards, and skipping out on the last session: I stayed an extra day and flew home too early in the morning this time, and that was both expensive and physically rough.

I also took the opportunity to wander through Powell's. I left with: Nnedi Okorafor's three Binti books; nice Easton Press editions of This Immortal and WJW's Metropolitan (!); a copy of Last Call because I don't currently own one; Noelle Stevenson's Nimona (which I've read online but I believe the print edition has more and/or different stuff); a giftable Dragon Waiting, the first I've found in some years; a set of interviews with Ursula Le Guin; and [REDACTED] for Julianne, whose birthday it just was. And also with a sense of wonder and comfort, because Powell's really is just that pleasant for me to be in.

(I did /not/ pick up Murderbot 2, because I didn't realise until later that it would be out when I was there. I did preorder it from Indigo, though, and have already devoured it. Quite enjoyable.)

---

Then on Thursday, Jenn P-- came into town. I've not seen Jenn in, o, I guess it's about three and a half years now, which is Just Too Long. We talked the evening away, and the next morning wandered around Van Dusen with her Todd when he got free of work, and I had a beer ("Berliner Geist" by Strange Fellows) that is the first beer not offered to me by Erin that I have voluntarily put in my mouth a second time, and then they went off to tourist for a couple of days.

I've missed her. I've missed that sense of connection and history, and of reconnection after an absence. I'm also glad that copy of Dragon Waiting turned up, as it left with her. Twenty-two hours was not really enough time: there were (being deliberately vague) some additional conversations I'd've liked to have had, that I didn't even realise how to put into words until a couple of hours before the end.

This is, to some extent, how I operate: I get new information and it takes me some time to process it, and I can't really process it while doing something else (like, say, holding a conversation) at the same time. When I'm aware of it I can take a brief break and recenter my head and be ready to act on the new information. In a stressful situation I'm not always even aware of it, though, and interacting with another human is often a stressful situation no matter how much I like them or know them.

The other tricky part, of course, is recognising when I'm squelching my responses because I need to process new information versus when I'm squelching my responses because I'm trying to bury the new information and not deal with it.

---

Had folks over for games again on Saturday, which went well but was certainly not low-stress. Friday evening and Sunday daytime became much-needed recovery days. I'm still moving a bit slow today.

And Wednesday morning I fly up north, for two weeks this time. Curious to see how it goes; I expect it will turn out to be easier than one week at a time. Very much looking forward to seeing Erin again, too. That's been easier as spring has set in, on a number of fronts: most notably, I've had more cope, and can start digging through things that I kept burying because I was in survival mode for so much of last year.

There. That's that month, except for the pagan stuff that I still don't know how to talk about, not really. Will try again later.

MILDLY ANNOYING COWORKER: Are you going to the company holiday party this evening?
ME: No.
M.A.C.: Why not?
ME: Because I hate people.
M.A.C.: *laughs uproariously*

Last week my boss Clare was in town (she's normally in London), and Wednesday turned out to be Team Outing Day. Dim sum at Kirin downtown (fancy, tasty, not the best dim sum I've had but quite good), followed by an escape room at which we did not embarrass ourselves even though we didn't make it out, followed by drinks.

That turned out to be Too Much Social for me, so instead of going to a stranger-ful munch like I'd planned I just went home. Unquestionably the right decision, even if I regret having had to miss meeting new people.

---

Meanwhile, on Friday I got a gum graft.

( cut for potential squick )

---

On Sunday I caught what will probably be my only VIFF movie of the year, Bad Genius. It's a Thai film about cheating on exams, and it was fun and tense and enjoyable to watch. I'm not super fond of the redemptionist ending but I'm not sure what sort of ending I would have preferred, so there's that.

I miss complex movies. This one wasn't super complex but it kept me entertained and kept me thinking. Maybe I'll try to make it out to another VIFF movie tomorrow, or more likely Thursday.