Words are inadequate

this post contains the active ingredient METAPHOR

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 19:00:34 GMT

Last week I reached into my jacket pockets to take out my gloves for I guess the first time this year, and pulled out one glove and a handful of dust. Apparently the one-or-two-a-week bugs I've been seeing weren't fruit flies.

The gloves were a gift from my ex, I think for our last xmas. They were handmade, and quite pretty: forest green wool yarn, with some interesting cabling. But they didn't keep my hands very warm, they didn't stay on as well as I would have liked, and the conductive thread woven into the fingertips didn't work. Looked good, but not terribly functional. I tossed them with no regrets.

My nice wool coat has some tightly-rolled cobwebs on the closet-side as well. No signs of damage, though. And I'm not seeing moth-sign on anything else, not that I have many other things they might go for (a down jacket with a polyester shell, a nice wool scarf from my aunt that I can't wear because I can't bear things around my neck). Guess I'm hunting up a dry-cleaner today. I've already vacuumed the closet well. I'll keep an eye on things and if there's a recurrence I'll take more drastic steps.

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LIST.TTD

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 17:25:07 GMT

To do today:

~~Eat breakfast~~ (the last of the freezer waffles)
~~Make a hotel reservation for next year's Gathering~~ (plus a few days earlier so I can catch the solar eclipse on 8 April)
~~Change sheets (shoulda done yesterday but by the time I got the suitcase etc off the bed I was just Done)~~
Tidy up from several weeks of Not At Home, incl new games Mostly done.
~~Vacuum, once the battery recharges from where I turned off the power strip it was attached to~~
~~Vacuum again, because after six years the battery is dying and it takes two rounds to get the whole apartment~~
~~Launder rugs (after vacuuming, so I can shake them out in the kitchen immediately before vacuuming and not hate everything when I walk in there)~~
~~Pick up groceries~~
~~RPG stuff~~
Bike ride?
Start rereading An Unkindness Of Magicians

To do or at least get started on this week:

A lot of journaling
Some email
Clean bathroom
Contemplate budget
Research into GIS careers
Apply for a tech writer job or two

Good thing I got laid off. Not sure how I'd get this taken care of otherwise. Apparently I am no longer thirty and able to bounce back instantly from travel etc.

(The answer is of course "in pieces in the evenings and mostly next weekend, and be tired/stressed until then." I don't miss most things about living with Emily but having someone to split the "keep the house in working order" burden with was really nice.)

(Also just seeing the name "Emily" in print feels strange and unfamiliar. Yay for healing, or something.)

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bah.

Wed, 09 Mar 2022 17:40:36 GMT

Today I am bitter and angry that I have nothing to contribute to this Captain Awkward post:

I want to hear from readers who have experienced Pretty Good Breakups, ones where even though there was crying and moving house and money stuff and difficult logistics, everybody was maximally considerate and kind under the circumstances.

Bah.

(It is entirely possible that this mental state is due at least in part to having woken up for yet another 6am meeting, only this one was basic tech training and lasted two hours, to be followed immediately by a more in-depth training session that I hope I retained at least two-thirds of but we shall see.)

(Comments off.)

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secret project scissors

Sat, 30 Jan 2021 02:42:52 GMT

Ten years ago today I got married, in a ceremony I still recall fondly. (I announced this on Facebook with "Brb gettin hitched" as we were leaving for the venue, a couple of hours before the ceremony. Jmax, a friend and invitee who lives in Annapolis an hour or so away, saw that, said "oh crap that's today," and managed to make it to the wedding.)

I have no cake to eat this year, but that's my own fault. I seriously considered making myself one earlier this week; just didn't get around to it. One more Tradition that's fallen by the wayside over the last few years.

SUSAN ANN SULLEY: I think that song just holds a lot of memories for a lot of people, "I remember on Christmas Eve 1981 I kissed me girlfriend for the first time to the tunes of Don't You Want Me," and people have got that sort of thing about it, which is nice.
PHILIP OAKEY: They're all divorced now.
SUSAN: *laugh* Yes, but it still holds dear memories for them.
PHILIP: Holds expensive memories for the men.
--from "Audio Liner Notes", The Human League: Greatest Hits

Coincidentally, two years plus a few days ago was the last time I saw Emily. Two years less a month ago, ish, marks the last time she communicated with me in a nonhostile fashion. Eleven months ago (to the day, huzzah for leap year) the divorce went through.

Winter is once more the time when awful things happen, is I guess what I'm saying. I spent roughly fifteen years (1995-2010) noting that Bad Things tended to either happen or start happening in February, but after my uncle Jim shot himself (and my then-partner offered basically zero sympathy/understanding), it felt like that was kind of the end of that, like it had gotten about as bad as it reasonably could get. And indeed, Februarys for the next several years were grey but functional. Not so much worse than any other time. Better, even, the couple of years we said "this is stupid" and booked a week-long trip to Mexico for sunlight.

Oh well.

I miss Emily.

I miss the friendship we had, more than anything. I didn't want to remain romantically involved with her; I didn't want to live with her. But I always wanted to stay friends, to be a part of her life and vice versa. Three and a half years later, it still hurts more than anything I can think of that she explicitly doesn't want that, in any form.

... I am also, finally, starting to get angry at her, because while I was Not A Great Partner for the first six months of 2017, she has been bloody awful to me since then.

Time and past time for some therapeutic private journaling, I think.

The engagement was "secret project rock" and the wedding was "secret project paper", so.

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arrived

Sat, 26 Jan 2019 20:33:17 GMT

As of yesterday morning, I am a Canadian citizen.

This is, I think, the end of a journey that started a little over fourteen years ago, in the wake of GWB's re-election. ("I think" because there's always the possibility that I'll renounce my US citizenship, though I'm not currently planning to. Too much hassle, no real benefit.)

I surrendered my Permanent Resident card and filed into a room with seventy-some other proto-citizens. We watched a video from Justin Trudeau (I may have sniffled a bit when he ended it with "Welcome home"), and heard a short speech from a judge, and spoke the citizenship oath in English and (bad) French, and sang "O Canada". And then they gave me a certificate and told me that I'm not allowed to apply for a passport for another two business days, which seems fair enough.

Erin was there for support, as was ex-roomie Mya, which was lovely on both counts. Emily and I were civil and courteous and not not-speaking, which was also nice. Emily's cheering section consisted of the two people who I know for certain took sides in the breakup, and they ignored me altogether, and that was alright too.

Afterwards Erin and I went for brunch at Chambar, where I had waffles with fancy syrup (very good maple, and I believe raspberry-caramel; Erin had something involving pistachio and rosewater), and acquired a nice cast-iron skillet from a thrift store.

Today I fly back north, and tomorrow I start making headway on unpacking my apartment. Kitchen first, I think, and then maybe trying to figure out where exactly the shelves of books and games are going to go. Wall space, as always, is a problem.

Onward.

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so tired

Sun, 13 Jan 2019 06:58:02 GMT

I can tell I've been tired because I've had Gareth Hanrahan's debut novel for well over a week now and haven't had the brain to start it. (Gareth is an RPG writer I've been following since, um, at least as far back as 2000. I must have run into him on the Unknown Armies mailing list.) The Gutter Prayer looks to be gritty fantasy set in a city, with weird magic and twisty plot. Very much the kind of thing I like and I have just not been able to focus enough to read it.

(Also I still have a lingering cough from the xmas plague.)

Movers came Friday and packed the kitchen and loaded 99.9% of my stuff into an orange truck. On Friday I also got winter tires put on Hactar and gave the summer tires to the movers. I then loaded the last of my stuff into Hactar and signed the "yes we're selling the condo" paperwork, at which Emily continued to not speak to me unless directly spoken to. And last night I crashed on a couch at a friend's, which was less restful than it might have been.

I am now in Hope, at the bottom end of the Fraser Canyon, because I wanted to get a start on the driving today but I didn't want to go up the canyon in the dark. (I've done that. Would not buy again.) Tomorrow I drive somewhere between eight and ten hours to Erin's place and collapse, with the worst of the stress over.

Then Monday I see a guy about an apartment, and Wednesday I take delivery of my stuff in said apartment, and Friday we fly back to Van for a kink conference, and fly north on Monday and back to Van again on Wednesday evening, and on Friday there's the citizenship ceremony. Which ought to be a joyous event but I am mostly anxious because two of the people who'll be there for Emily are ones who took sides in the breakup, and no matter how many times I recognise how much better off I am without them in my life it still hurts and it still makes me nervous.

Oh, and there are also some phone interviews in there, because I keep getting headhunted by people who don't believe me when I say "My current workplace is cool with me being onsite one week a month and I'll need you to match that." It's flattering but ultimately kind of annoying.

But I had a bath tonight. And tomorrow I can listen to either any music I want, or the first episode of a number of Serial Box things, to see if I've gotten any better at processing audio books.

I miss you.

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blackbird over the dark field but i am invisible

Wed, 09 Aug 2017 22:43:47 GMT

Erin's staying with me for the week, which is lovely. She got in on Friday afternoon, and we've spent the extended-weekend snuggling and cooking and talking and running errands. It's been well over a decade since I've had a partner come to stay with me for longer than an afternoon, excepting Emily for the couple of years we were in DC and not living together. (And this past Xmas, I guess, though that was its own kettle of awkwardfish.) It's worked out rather well.

We went and got most of the Cargo furniture on Saturday, and it fits into the space pretty well though not quite as easily as I'd hoped. Gonna take a bit more rearranging to get it the way I want. Also, I'd like to get some art hung up sooner than later, in the hope that that'll help it feel more ... more real, more mine, something. I'm really good at getting my space about 80% of the way there, and then just not bothering with that last 20%.

Trips to the old condo are now most definitely Difficult, emotionally. Emily's solidly settled in and she's made the space her own. It's good to see her doing well. It's also rough to surround myself with... with how effectively I've been removed from something that used to be shared. There are still a couple more things that I need to do there: sorting artwork, for one. Maybe if I know / admit in advance that it's gonna be rough it'll be easier. Maybe.

I said "extended weekend" and I meant it. I took yesterday off work to get my second tattoo.

I've gone into extended detail about my first. This one took much less dithering and deliberating. A couple of weeks ago I went in and spoke with Rachel Lige, an artist that Erin recommended, and tried to describe the idea I'd had in my head. She made approving noises and asked a few questions and used words like "negative space" that I hadn't had the vocabulary to put into my description and quickly sketched something that looked like it might conceivably approximate what I was thinking of. I put down a deposit and made a tentative appointment for, well, yesterday, and emailed her some reference material that afternoon (a few silhouettes, plus the Le Guin and the Richard Siken poems), and tried to think no more about it.

Until last week when she sent me a preliminary design, and it was just about perfect. As an added bonus, seeing it, rather than trying to visualise, gave me the ability to describe it. "On my left pec, a silhouette of a hawk in flight, dark purple and filled with stars, over a dark grey sketched-in landscape." I wrote back to her with a couple of minor suggestions and confirmed Tuesday.

The whole experience was markedly more pleasant than the previous one. Some of that's having Erin there for much of the time (she ducked out for an hour or so to run a few errands), some of it's feeling more comfortable with Rachel than with Gilda, some of it's just having been here before and knowing a bit better what to expect. It took, mm, somewhere between three and four hours. Much of it was painful but not so bad: bits directly over ribs or sternum pinched unpleasantly, and the area down towards my armpit was just plain more sensitive. Then the last half-hour to forty-five minutes, in a combination of 'going over parts that have already been poked raw two or three times' and 'body is just Done', were sheer unpleasant agony. So we got most of it done, and I'll be back in a month or so for touchup and to finish some of the outside bits.

It looks lovely, though right now it's more red than I'd like. One expects that that will improve as it heals. The landscape's more detailed than I'd expected, and maybe darker, but I'm happy with it. I'm particularly pleased with how the stars in the hawk came out.

I was distinctly lightheaded when I sat up: not just a standard low-blood-pressure thing, but a very specific floatiness and absence of conscious thought. It's neat. I'm glad Erin was there: she fed me half a litre of chocolate milk and guided me to the Ethiopian place on the Drive where we ate raw cow and spicy lentils, and then took me home and generally kept track of me. So that was lovely, too.

I've already got vague ideas for next/additional pieces. The first tattoo I ever considered, back when I was still in engineering, was an electrical ground symbol on my Achilles tendon, and I still (or maybe again?) think that's relevant. I've recently kicked around the idea of a tiny orange, though that might be a passing fancy. And I've a mental image of a larger, brighter, piece on my right shoulder and upper arm. No sense of what it is, just that it... ought to be there, somehow.

In the meantime, I can focus on healing up from this one.

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weekendy

Mon, 31 Jul 2017 21:52:53 GMT

After all that, the weekend was pretty decent.

( people, housing, stuff )

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endings

Mon, 03 Jul 2017 03:06:35 GMT

PSA: uilos and I have split up.

We still love each other a lot, and it's gonna be pretty rough for both of us for awhile. That said, if you feel like you need to choose between Team Tucker and Team Emily, I suspect Team Emily will need the support.

Doubt I'll be replying to comments, but we'll see.

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what remains of a good plan

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 22:52:21 GMT

Friday evening I'd intended to meet Emily for dinner at the only source of gator in Vancouver and then catch a music performance. On the way to the restaurant we passed a theatre advertising that this was the last weekend they were showing Angels in America Part 1, and figured we'd go to that instead.

Only, I'd started feeling a little chilled after I left work, and noticed myself drinking a lot of water at dinner and generally feeling kind of ... not really lightheaded, not really spacey, not really achey, but ... feverish. So instead we went home, and Emily finished her sign for the Vancouver Science March ("Be part of the SOLUTION not part of the PRECIPITATE") and I took an hour and a half hot bath.

I woke up the next morning feeling pretty much okay, and saw Emily off into the damp while I waited for Erin. We'd been kicking around the idea of going down to the States this weekend with some other folks, but I think we'd settled on just having a calm couple of days at home.

On the way there I got to experience my first moving vehicle accident. Not very fast moving, but still. Erin had just pulled out to turn left when someone who'd looked like they were turning right didn't.

I've been in several other accidents, from the time when I managed to come to a stop but the person three cars behind me didn't to the time when a concrete pillar at a gas station scooted into the passenger-side of my rental car at five in the morning. There's something different-- more visceral-- about being fully in motion at the time, and also about not being the one driving. Couple days later I'm still occasionally flashing back to the moment of impact, because I happened to be looking in that direction. It's not horrific or frightening, it's more "i can't believe this is actually about to happen."

Erin's car was rendered undriveable: body crunched up, tyre shredded, likely a snapped axle, possibly some engine damage. Probably totaled, since those things will cost more than two grand to fix.

We retreated to the safety of my place, and eventually made our way to Erin's, and the day turned from "quiet relaxing" to "recovery" and then "buying a car." Erin's out of pocket all this week for a school thing, and had been planning on driving her car, with a bunch of her stuff, up north the middle of next week. Which meant that she needed a car, pronto.

So Saturday was spent looking for cars, and on Sunday I rented a car (I'd been planning to anyhow) and we drove up to Squamish to test-drive one, and she ended up buying it. But that still took up much of the day, and much of the rest involved her frantically packing for a week away on a school trip, and then heading out past Maple Ridge for that. Not precisely the restful weekend I'd been hoping for.

Enterprise put me in a Hyundai compact that reminded me a lot of Straylight, my last car. Straylight was a low-riding Saturn coupe that I bought after my previous car caught fire on I-81. It was no hi-performance sports car but it was still fun to drive, and I enjoyed the existence of the trick third door as well. For city-driving or traffic-driving I would have preferred a somewhat more maneuverable Smart; for highways or just point-to-point, Straylight was wonderful.

(When I moved north to the land of carlessness, I sold Straylight to my friend Stephen. I believe it had an unfortunate encounter with a tractor trailer in the Affle House parking lot a few years ago. Sic transit gloria transita.)

By the time I left DC I hated driving, partly because I had to drive to get anywhere but mostly because driving in DC means traffic. Looks like five years was about enough time for that to fade. I genuinely enjoyed driving up and down the Sea-to-Sky. Even the backroads of the camp I left Erin at were kinda fun, though also stressful, due to rain and hunger and uncertainty as to exactly where I was going.

I miss road trips. I miss the freedom of getting anywhere without concern for transit schedules and flaky buses. I miss Straylight. I never thought I'd say that.

At least there was yoga this morning. I feel much better for that.

There's something bubbling under the surface about yoga and about things that make me feel more like me, and how that's changed, but it's not ready yet.

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a smaller list than often, but no fewer thanks

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 02:05:03 GMT

This year we're not really celebrating Canucksgiving. We had a quietish weekend at home, since uilos did *not* fly out to the southern tip of the Outer Banks in a hurricane. I am, however, drinking an Orange Julius in YVR and waiting to board a plane to SFO, and thence to DC for a little over twenty-four hours and then to Martha's Vineyard for the VP reunion.

It's a bit sad to miss out on an opportunity to gorge on good foods in good company, though. uilos is already talking about cooking a turkey for Yanksgiving next month. I am not objecting to this plan in the slightest.

The lack of a big celebratory feast makes the holiday feel smaller, more compact, more personal. I'm okay with that. The couple of things I'm most thankful for are pretty personal too.

There's uilos, obviously. I can say "Graydon has spoiled you for epic fantasy, hasn't he?" and she nods sorrowfully and then we spend the next five minutes talking about whether The March North ought to be labeled Book 0 Of The Commonweal. Such people are to be treasured, and you can't have this one because I found her first. (I mean, unless she decides she wants to.) Also, it is now and not seven years ago, and Now Is Not Then (something that perhaps she realised before I did), and while I wasn't looking we seem to have built ourselves a solid foundation for the next while.

"Only another fifty years,"
I say, "and then I promise
to let you go."
--Elise Matthessen, "Response ..."

And if Thanksgiving came in mid-September instead of mid-October, there it would have stayed, with probably some added grumbling about things that aren't as bad as I complain about them to be. Instead I get green-haired Erin, and what seems so far to be exactly the right relationship at exactly the right time. Erin, who patiently wormed her way past my defences, who thrives on touch as much as I do, who has become a Significant Presence in my life far faster than I would have ever expected. I am deeply curious to see the shape that this takes as it continues to develop; meanwhile, I'm thankful that someone who meshes so well with my quirks has dropped out of the north and into my life.

(I am not nearly prepared to quote poetry about Erin. I am barely ready to quote poetry to her.)

Happy Thanksgiving, all.

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re friday's episode of Needlessly Cryptic Theatre

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 01:00:35 GMT

E will need to retake the Canadian medtech certification exam in October.

Plans for a better future have been put on hold for one Friedman unit (for non-political-blog-junkies, that's six months).

The weekend has been rough. (Understatement.) Normal service will resume one of these days.

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so, that was a (Paper-ful) weekend

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 20:36:12 GMT

As previously mentioned, rbandrews and diadelphous came out from Texas for the weekend. On Friday they braved the flurrying snow and went into the District to wander through the Smithsonian, accompanied by uilos. I joined them all for dinner at Afterwords and we browsed the bookstore and got cupcakes from Hello Cupcake. (While waiting for them I had time to read It's A Book, which was very cute and also had a monkey.)

HC was out of the day's gluten-free cupcakes, which was a disappointment since half the point of going to Dupont was to pick some up so we'd have them the next day. Oh well. The cupcakes they had were delicious and totally worth the trip.

( But why, you may ask, did we need gluten-free cupcakes? )

Sunday we got up and saw our Texan visitors off, and stopped by my parents' place for my father's birthday lunch. Then we came home and collapsed for several hours.

People keep asking me if I feel any different. The only answer I've been able to come up with is "Now I have less cake."

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thx

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 23:33:05 GMT

Meh. I'm thankful for friends, more than anything. For darkfyre_muse and elf and babushek and everyone else who's asked me "how are you doing?", or offered *hug*s, or listened when I needed to talk and had good and wise and comforting things to say. For an old acquaintance who I've seen maybe a half-dozen times in the last fifteen years, who looked me in the eye and said "Take care of yourself, okay?" and meant it, because she was concerned about me; for a new friend who has twice told me something I needed to hear at exactly the right time. For uilos, for whom words are inadequate.

I'm thankful for my job, both that I have one that doesn't suck and that it's enabling me to flee to Vancouver where (I hope) I belong. I'm thankful that I'm self-sufficient and debt-free and could drop two grand on a new laptop a month ago.

I'm thankful for writing, though it doesn't really seem that way right now. (But I am a writer, and I will finish the shit that I started.) I'm thankful for all the stories that have been a part of my life.

I'm thankful for the chance to Get My Shit Together, because the only way out is through.

I'm thankful for the cat who was sitting on my arm half an hour ago, and the cat who's curled up next to me right now, and all the other cats who have ever stopped by to say hello to me.

Mostly, though, I'm thankful for uilos.

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a difficult weekend

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 16:36:38 GMT

My calendar tells me that Friday was National Boss Day. Mine celebrated by getting sick and going home midway through the day. I don't remember where Friday evening went; we must have stayed home.

Satyrday I slept lateish, and made pancakes because I was wanting pancakes instead of an omelette. Eventually I got on the road to head out to D&D, a little later than I might have liked, and stopped at Safeway to pick up crack chips. Was running not nearly so late as I'd thought, so I figured I'd swing by Trader Joe's to pick up a couple things of Vintage Cola (which, incidentally, tastes like the Platonic ideal of Coke).

( Cut for traffic bitchery. )Thankfully, after all that I got to hit a bunch of things with a hammer, so it was all okay. (In retrospect a Big Freaking Axe might have been a better choice than the Big Red Hammer. The difference between d10+2 ("d12 brutal 2") and 2d5+2 ("2d6 brutal 1") damage is mostly a matter of taste and whether one prefers a bell curve; the slight deficiency in average damage in the former is compensated for by its "high crit" quality, which means that if roll a 20 on my to-hit roll I get to add an extra die of damage. And most of the time I'm rolling two d20s to hit and picking the highest one, so my chance of a crit is effectively doubled.) (Here endeth the D&D neepery for the day.)

Satyrday evening daghain was in a play, and it would have been good to have seen that, but I was sufficiently beat that I just wanted to stay home. So I did.

Sunday started off with the sink flooding the kitchen during laundry again, which was about as much fun as it sounds. Eventually I got that cleaned up and finished and headed out for a ramble through Riverbend Park (on the Potomac, just north of Great Falls). Too warm, too many small children, and it turns out that what I was wanting was a ramble in company, but a decent walk anyway. Came home, had a fight with nixve, had dinner, tried to clear the sink with Drano, vacuumed, wrote email.

Was unfortunately still online at just after one in the morning, which led to an unexpected continuation of said fight, which led unrelatedly yet inexorably to getting sort of half-assedly dumped around two. There followed an hourish phone call during which, after some prompting, the dumping was performed with a whole ass, and then the ritual Changing of the Facebook Relationship Status, and then uilos being a Heroine of the Revolution. I remember hearing the clock chime four, and later hearing it chime 6:15, so I guess I slept for two hours in there. Emailed work to say "not today, sorry" and probably got another 2-3 hours of sleep. uilos also called in sick, so I had someone to fall apart on at random times throughout the day.

The apartment maintenance guys came by to fix the sink pretty quickly, which was nice. Later, I confirmed with nixve that it was neither a bad dream nor one of those things one says when exhausted but regrets the next morning, and talked with ancientsong, which helped an awful lot as well. Then home, and crashing.

Today I've listened to Inches and Miles and Trees Still Bend (which made me sniffly the first time I heard it, a little more than a year ago, and now just feels right and true). And now I'm at work, where I have an annoying blurry ache in my eyes and no keyboard tray.

Tonight is sushi with someone cool, and Wednesday is probably pumpkin acquisition, and Thursday is likely to be hanging out with elf, and Friday is Belly Horror, and Satyrday is Ren Faire and then ABG if we feel up to it, and Sunday is rislyn's followed by Tribal Cafe. I'm keeping busy, and sociable, and both of these are probably good things.

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domestic, um, something or other

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 03:07:52 GMT

uilos: And that's why I make you cook lima beans. Because you are capable of putting them on to cook and leaving them there.
Me: Well, yes. That's what the directions say to do.
uilos: But how do you know they're cooking if you don't poke at them and stir them?
Me: Because the directions SAY they're cooking.
uilos: You don't know that! You have to DO THINGS to make them cook!
Me: No, the DIRECTIONS SAY... how did we end up with duelling OCDs[1]?
uilos: I don't know about you but I don't have OCD.
Me: ... I am totally telling LJ about this.

[1] "Neuroses" would have been a better (more accurate, less potentially hurtful) term to have used, here.

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