jazzfish: A small grey Totoro, turning around. (Totoro)
Any summary of the events of 2024 is necessarily overshadowed by: a week ago Erin broke up with me. Details don't matter; I made a couple of choices that hurt her, and she decided she was done. To me it feels a little shocking and somewhat ... not inevitable, but maybe right. We'd been struggling with keeping the relationship at a level where 'good' encompassed more time than 'work' for a long time, compounded by at least somewhat divergent ideas of what the relationship entailed, or should entail, or something.

I spent last Sunday in a daze of sadness and semifunctionality, and was well cared for. Since then ... I don't really know? Absorbing, adjusting. I don't think I'm shutting down or shutting up. Ask me again in a week, maybe.

We're still friends, still talking. Remains to be seen where that will land, I guess. At this point I'm used to exes' pronouncements of "we'll still be friends" turning into radio silence, so I'm hopeful but not wholly optimistic.

(Comments off; sympathy and well-wishes are taken as given, and I'm not particularly up to pretending to be a social human around it.)
jazzfish: Pig from "Pearls Before Swine" standing next to a Ball O'Splendid Isolation (Ball O'Splendid Isolation)
Been a minute. Have a ramble.

I spent last week up north with Erin, which was ... it's good to see Erin, and the critters, but the weather was mostly grey above and rainy and muddy, which all makes it hard for me to, well, function. In my own space that manifests as just kind of zoning out a lot. Around someone else or not at home, that's less of an option, so it was hard. But there was tasty food, and snuggling, and talking, and overall it was much better than not.

Now I'm back and have a bunch of classwork to get through in the next week and a half: four lectures, three assignments, two quizzes for stupid Rob, and a video presentation and a practicum proposal for the other class. Doable but I'll be busy.

Canada Post workers are on strike. I'm planning to go out and support a picket location on probably Wednesday, will be good to get out for a bit anyway.

The strike, and the fact that the union and management are apparently pretty far apart so it will either last for awhile, or they'll get ordered back to work, is colliding in my head with the recent elections (etc) and the way that lots of folks I know are having a particularly hard time the last while. No particular coherent thoughts, and certainly nothing actionable. Just noting that civilisation, society, is in fact slowly crumbling as all the money concentrates at the top.

I read David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks a couple of weeks ago (on William Gibson's recommendation, whenever I heard him speak at the one VCon I went to), and it was quite good. The part that stuck with me is the last section, 2045, set in a rural community in Ireland where the civil government is collapsing and pulling back, and people are struggling to Make Do as the twilight deepens. It's sort of hopeful, I guess, overall, on a longer timeframe, for other people. Felt real and immediate, though.

My passport has made it to the passport office in Philadelphia. An acquaintance observed in passing that there's a good chance that passport renewals with X-gender that aren't processed before mid-January could be held indefinitely, so maybe that was an error. Guess we'll see.

I did bring a big jar back from Erin's with me, so this weekend I was able to put up my cinnamon to make into extract. That'll finish out, mm, four to six weeks, so either just before or just after solstice. (Cinnamon extract is supposedly good in anything you'd use cinnamon in, but especially in things where it's nice for the cinnamon to dissolve, like french toast.) The vanilla from June is still going; decided to let it keep soaking. I'll decant it this spring and make up sugar then, and it can be 2025 xmas presents or something.

Right. Lunch, and then back to presentation work. I hope you're doing well, and keeping warm physically and emotionally as best you can.
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
Erin and I went camping last weekend with a couple dozen other folks. Camping remains a Good Thing for me generally. This spot in particular is just fantastic. It's on a sandy bank of the Stillaguamish river in the Washington Cascade Mountains. The river's, I dunno, fifty feet? a hundred? across, and the bed's filled with large rocks. Out in the middle it's deep enough that I can't touch bottom, but if you choose your path carefully you (I) can walk from one side to the other without fully submerging.

It's exactly what I needed. Sunlight and warmth and more sand than muck underfoot. I was barefoot outdoors for two straight days. I went swimming repeatedly, in water that was cold enough to be chilly but not so cold as to keep me from going in. I sat on rocks in the sun and watched tadpoles and water-striders and dragonfly larvae. I walked a small laybrinth, I found a bit of spiritual reconnection.

The ritual itself was a wash, mostly because my ability to social has been malfunctioning for at least the last month and a half. But it was good to be out in the woods and water, and out with other folks.



We drove up to her place on Monday, and I drove back on my own yesterday. It's a long drive but it remains absolutely gorgeous. Over twelve hours conifer forest gives way to scrub desert which turns into deep rocky canyon, then foothills straight up against river delta farmland. Majestic. Coming from the Appalachians, I didn't really believe mountains could be that big or that close.

I like driving the Fraser Canyon (roughly, Highway 1 between Cache Creek and Hope). I especially like driving down it: up is nice but for whatever reason one gets the best views going back down. Or maybe it's just that I'm more often driving down alone so I have more mental space to take in the scenery. Whatever the reason: when I can take a day to do that (two days, really, one up and one back down) and the weather's decent, I'm happy to do so.

And now I'm home and catching up on a great many things, including sitting with / petting / brushing Mr Tuppert. It is Good.
jazzfish: artist painting a bird, looking at an egg for reference (Clairvoyance)
Look, last week was a stressbomb shitshow, to the extent that I spent the entire weekend recovering and I'm not sure I'm there yet. Very little of it was my stress, at least, but: while Erin was down here visiting me things just Went Wrong: misplaced car keys, weird family drama at her brother's wedding, massive migraine attack that looked like norovirus, chaos at the farm that the farmsitter was ill-prepared for, etc etc. I'm glad she was here but oof. Insert old truism about needing a vacation from one's vacation.

The week before that was unambiguously good, though. Erin came down that Sunday (this is, um, two weeks and a day ago), and the next day we drove down into Washington state where Sherry the potter is. I then spent several days surrounded by trees and light and working potters, and it was Good For My Soul. I even got, mm, call it two-thirds through the initial comments on Blood On Her Hands that I've been sitting on since November.

Sherry's a working potter who makes mugs and plates and bowls and things for various faires and events and such. Erin has been getting back into pottery this past year, which has been lovely to see. I don't engage myself; I've not tried anything with clay since elementary school but I expect it would run afoul of the 'fine motor control sucks' thing and the 'visual arts are not my language' thing, and I'd get frustrated. So I looked in on what they were getting up to and wrote and cooked breakfasts and walked and relaxed somewhat.

Mostly I just enjoyed being in a space that felt right. There's green here but it takes a little doing to get to. And of course there's green up north. But conifers are not the forest of my heart. Apparently I did in fact imprint on a place as 'home' and that place is the Virginia Appalachians. More than that, though, there was light, and space to move and breathe, and just a sense that it was, I dunno. Safe, or something. That's not wholly right but it's not completely wrong either.

Anyway. I'm home and on my own here now, catching up on schoolwork and cat-petting, and seeing if getting out on my bike is in fact good for me. I feel like the last month or so was a jumble of not-much and I'm not sure why. Might need a meds adjustment. Might just need to poke myself into Doing Things a bit more. Will try the latter, and if that doesn't work then look into the former.

I've missed you. I hope you're well.
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
Erin came into town the weekend before last, which was lovely. I am still unaccustomed to people actually coming to see me; my mental framing, which has held sturdy since at least 2006, has been "people don't come to me, i go to them." But now that I've had two in the space of six weeks, plus Mya coming over I guess once a month or so for dinner, I should perhaps re-evaluate that.

As a result of Erin driving down, I now have a fridge filled with eggs: two dozen chicken eggs, nearly a dozen duck eggs, and unsure but probably not quite a dozen goose eggs. In my experience duck and goose eggs are great in baking (one goose egg is about three chicken eggs, depending) but have a weird texture when cooked on their own. Will see how long this lasts me.

I also had my first cookie fail (hubris ftl): creamed the butter and sugar, added in the (duck) egg and vanilla, and then let it sit for half an hour or so while we had dinner before finishing it off. Result: dry and crumbly cookie dough, dry and crumbly cookies. Ah well. I'm assuming this is a result of leaving it to sit rather than the duck egg. Will conduct further experiments (involving duck eggs rather than "leaving to sit") to determine.

Sunday the weather was quite nice, and we went and hung out in Pier Park with a bunch of mugs and a butane stove and a kettle and some tea, and some folks dropped by and chatted and drank tea and went home with mugs. Erin's been doing pottery fairly intensively for the last ... while, I guess, several months? Which means that she ends up with an awful lot of different pieces, mostly mugs, in different glazes. So some of them found homes over the weekend. It was lovely: beautiful pottery all shimmery and bright-coloured in the sun, and tea, and people I don't know terribly well but generally like.

On Tuesday we drove north, for a generally good and low-key not-quite-week. I managed to forget my toiletries, which meant that I got to once again experience several days of beard growth. This is definitely Not For Me. I like the look of a goatee, but that takes actual effort and morning thought to maintain, so it just all comes off. Quite relieved to be home to my razor on Saturday evening.

More importantly I also got to experience life without ADHD meds. It's hard to say what effect this actually had on me since there wasn't really much that needed doing in a specific timeframe while I was there. The main thing I noticed was a return of sugar craving. Thankfully a couple days back on the Concerta has squelched that down again.

Winter term is complete; spring term starts tomorrow, and on Friday night I fly out to Ohio to hang out in what looks to be heavy cloud cover for a total solar eclipse. I am of course pleased that folks in Niagara will get a clearer view but also irritated that it had to be -this year- that I'm missing it. C'est la guerre.
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
A couple of weeks ago I had an assignment that needed to get done, that I knew needed to get done, and that I'd been planning for a couple of days on getting done. So of course I procrastinated on it until sometime after lunch. Thing is, I could tell it was a normal (for me) procrastination, and I could also tell that once I got started on it I wasn't going to need to stop every ten minutes or whatever, I'd be able to just keep going. Which was in fact the case. It's so nice to have my brain back to not-working in ways I'm used to and expect. Yay drugs, basically.

This also feels like further evidence for the idea that something happened to exacerbate my lack-of-focus between two and, mm, five, years ago. I'm inclined to blame my case of covid in April '22 but who knows.

Anyway. It has been A Few Weeks, i tel yu whut.

erin, steph, misc )
jazzfish: a black-haired man with a big sword. blood stains the snow behind (Eddard Stark)
Worldwide 2023 was a shitshow, yes. Me personally, I had a shockingly decent year.

state of the tucker 2023 )
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
And so after just over twenty-one years, I got to go to another concert with Steph.

I'd managed to forget, or not really process, that the concert wasn't just "Dessa" but "Dessa with the Minnesota Orchestra." So: full orchestra, Dessa, a rotating cast of five or six additional backing vocalists, and another rapper who I assume is also from Doomtree, the hip-hop collective she's a part of. I have no idea how long the show was, must have been at least two hours. Orchestral arrangements ranging from "decent" to "mindblowingly good." And Dessa of course gives a fantastic show.

She didn't play the songs I'd most hoped to hear (for future reference: "Matches to Paper Dolls," "Dutch" which I will likely never hear live because it treads the same lyrical/thematic ground as the objectively superior "5 Out of 6,", and "Life on Land" which has been stuck in my head off and on for coming on a month now). But she did her big hits, ending the first half with "5 Out of 6" and at the close of the night playing "Fire Drills" as the encore. And on "The Chaconne" the concertmaster played the Bach Chaconne, which is arguably how the song should have been conceived to start with.

(The "song without verbs" was Talking Business. I'd noted it as being extremely impressionistic, kind of like a movie in still photographs. I hadn't realised that that was a result of "no verbs," though that makes sense.)

Big energy, fun patter, a crowd that's happy to be there. I had a really good time. I've not really had a night Out in awhile. I didn't really get dressed up any fancier than usual but it still felt good. Would concert again. (Good thing, since I've already got a ticket for the Seattle show at the beginning of October.)

And after that I blipped up north for a quick low-key date with Erin, and that was good as well. We talked a decent bit, which we're starting to get back in the habit of doing, and it feels ... a bit safer than it has in the past? Like we're actually connecting? Like I'm able to actually connect instead of being desperately terrified, I guess.

August has been an alright month so far. It's nice.
jazzfish: A cartoon guy with his hands in the air saying "Woot." (Woot.)
And ... that's a draft? 7269 words. There's another couple hundred I can and probably will cut, a short scene that's a useful transition but I'm not sure it's doing enough else to justify its existence. And likely plenty of places I can trim as well.

And of course I've been staring at it long enough that it's reached the point of "this is terrible, why did i ever think this would be good." I will let it sit for a few days and then see what if anything I can do for it on my own, and then I guess I'm looking for critiques.



Tomorrow morning I get up far too early to fly to Minneapolis for Stephanie's birthday (early) and a Dessa concert. This is somehow only the second concert I've been to with Steph, and the first in twenty-one years, after it turned out she was going to the same David Bowie (and Moby, and Blue Man Group, and a couple of other acts) show I was and thanks to a no-show friend of Sarah's I could get her a better seat.

I've been listening to Dessa off and on since December, by which I guess I mean mostly "on." It's been a very long time indeed since I've taken this deep a dive into a musical artist. I dunno. Spectacularly dense lyrics, a sensibility that's by turns sharp, wry, and kind, and pop-ish music that all sticks in my head well.

Some music:
(She's playing another show in Seattle in early October, which I am strongly considering going down for, depending on how school is going at that point. It's on a Thursday night which may not be ideal.)

Anyway. Concert and Steph, for a couple of days, and then north to Prince George for a couple of days with Erin. Then home again home again and time to sort through my various financial aid options.

I'm not doing everything I'd like to be doing every day, but I'm doing some of it. I'm enjoying where I'm at, I think. Curious to see how slamming into school intersects with that.
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
I feel more functional.

I have had a generally lovely long-weekend with Erin. The weather was crap: it's melting time, and thus mud season, and the wind over what's left of the snow was biting while the sun decided to hide until today. We had an honest-to-goodness hailstorm for about fifteen minutes Sunday afternoon.

So we slept and napped and petted the cats and the occasional dog, and made tasty and low-stress food, and watched an awful lot of videos about cats (manul / Pallas's Cats are still my favourite, though the weasel-looking jaguarundi are pretty great too), and generally just enjoyed being in the same place without anything in particular that needed doing. I feel suspiciously rested despite waking up at 6:30 this morning. I did still laze in bed for several hours, so that helped, but still.

It's ... really nice to feel functional again.

Mr Tuppert seems to have forgiven me for leaving, as well. I am about to go in to bed, and we'll see what he thinks of that; I suspect that will be the final "oh good you're really back".

Now I have two days of work, and then I fly out to Niagara for a week and a half, certainly for gaming and hopefully to see Steph as well. This will not be precisely low-stress but I've gotten good at making the Gathering into a vacation rather than a MUST DO EVERYTHING con so it will still be restful.

Eric and the rest of the 18xxers will be there; I'm looking forward to seeing them as always. Some of the folks from DC won't be, alas. More seriously, my friend Steffan has said that this will likely be his last year at the Gathering. Steffan is ... I mean. He's my friend, he's someone I look forward to seeing and talking to every year, we generally get in a couple of games and sometimes a dinner. He's a fine example of "i am not really sure how or why this person became my friend, they just are." Bah. I have never really learned how to deal with grief. And it's not like I'm losing him, we chat occasionally on FB. But still. It's complicated.
jazzfish: Randall Munroe, xkcd180 ("If you die in Canada, you die in Real Life!") (Canada)
It turns out I do have an exception to my PUB ORDER DAMMIT rule. Michael Moorcock's Elric books should be read in internal-chronological order, to the best that anyone can determine what the heck that is anyway. I assume I feel this way because that's how I discovered them, in six slim silver paperbacks with Michael Whelan covers in the school library. Later additions (Fortress of the Pearl and Revenge of the Rose) can be inserted at the appropriate point. I haven't read the early-2000s trilogy but I'd assume it can be shoved in as well.

This update brought to you by the discovery that Moorcock is releasing new omnibuses of the Elric books, including a brand-new novel. I am slightly tempted but only slightly. I last read these over twenty years ago and suspect the Suck Fairy has been hard at work on them.



Thankful?

I'm thankful for Rainbow House for inviting me to a meal yesterday. Thankful for these past six (!) years with Erin, which among many other things gave me the ability to make a cinnamon creme pie with relatively little stress.

(Also, you know, the whole "support while learning to be a less codependent human being" thing. That's been invaluable, and I am more grateful for it than I know how to say.)

For Canadian citizenship and gainful employment (for now at least), which combined mean I can at least in theory get weird medical things checked out.

For gorgeous if slightly too warm fall weather, for biking in crisp air over crisp leaves. For books and tea. For Corvaric. It's been a rough landing indeed and it's not over yet... but it is a landing.

I'm thankful that I'm finding myself again, enough to write this post anyway.
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
Erin came down to visit last weekend, and it was really nice. We worked companionably in the same space on Thursday, and then on Friday she went and did Vancouver things while I worked and had some alone-time. We had oysters and Mexican and crepes and talked and watched Elementary and just generally had an extremely pleasant time of it.

I'm really glad. I was worried, and still am somewhat, about what would happen to us after I moved down here. But whatever it is, it's not gonna be the 'oh by the way i'm not actually talking to you anymore' that I got from Emily. (I know it's unfair to worry about that but one does extrapolate from past patterns.)



I've started doing yoga again. Way back at the beginning of the plague I bought a couple of multi-class cards from my yoga studio, in the interest of keeping them afloat. I've been to a few yin classes so far: they're not requiring masks, but the yin classes are sufficiently low-exertion that I'm okay with being basically the only masked person there.

More importantly I'm doing it on my own again. I'd been doing it for awhile and then just stopped, pretty early on in the plague. I don't really know why. But I'm going again, and I think I might be able to stick with it. A probably incomplete of things that make it easier:
  • A better yoga mat
  • Hardwood floor instead of carpet
  • I dug up a list of the modo sequence online, so I'm not going by flaky memory and can look at the list and say "oh, right, that's next"
  • Yoga music in the background (Youtube search for "yoga music" and pick one), which so far keeps my brain from getting too bored with the whole thing
  • Strong motivation to regain lost flexibility/strength/etc
Yesterday was the first day I'd gone through the whole sequence, at lunchtime. Afterwards I was absolutely starving, and devoured a bowl of chicken and rice curry and also several handsful of cashews. Today I was at least much less MUST REPLENISH CALORIES.

It's nice that my body remembers the shapes, and can generally even get into them. (My legs have somehow managed to get even tighter / less flexible in the last few years. Even sitting-kneeling puts a bit of burn on the fronts of my thighs.) And ... every time I get back into some form of exercise, I'm always a little surprised to rediscover that my body enjoys working. It likes doing things, it likes getting better at doing things.

I'm mostly hoping the yoga will have a salutary effect on my breathing, which has never been good but got worse early in the plague, and then again after I had covid in April.



This week I reread The Club Dumas. I like it a little less than previous: the pages-long scenes of people telling each other things they already know, about trivia that are mildly interesting but only tangential to the plot(s), began to wear on me about a third of the way through. But I really admire how Pérez-Reverte plays fair with everything that's going on: he lays out the facts, he doesn't obscure important information, but he does let Corso obscure it for himself, and draw all manner of wrong inferences. And near the end, the last conversation between Corso and "Irene Adler," that's absolutely lovely.

It's also still my favourite book-shaped object, by far. And it seems likely to remain so, Subterranean seem to favour larger oversized editions these days, which are much less pleasant to hold and read.


At lunchtime I bought a huge orange --
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave --
They got quarters and I got a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It's new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I'm glad I exist.

--"The Orange", Wendy Cope
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
After I found out that the movers weren't coming today I called Erin, who talked me down and through it. Which was very much appreciated. I'm glad I still have Erin.

Aspects exists. I just got an email saying that my ebook preorder has dropped, and my hard copy is en route. (Should be here mid-next-week, so, either it arrives while I'm in Niagara or I have a long-awaited book to read instead.) I am holding off on reading it in ebook; for some reason I want to read it in hard copy first. That seems important. Also I lack the brain and emotional resilience right now to read The Last Of Mike Ford. ([personal profile] mrissa has some impressions of it. I am very much looking forward to this.)

Back in I guess November, when Kelsey came to visit, Erin rediscovered and introduced me to Bengal Spice Tea. Cinnamon and cloves and yum. So now I have a tasty thing to drink in the evenings. And I have my travel hot-water-pot, and the travel mug that my ex-company sent me a couple of years ago when they handed out swag in lieu of paying bonuses. So I have tea.

Laundry two doors down is not the same as laundry in the apartment, but it's a sight better than "laundry at the end of the hall and down a flight of stairs" or "laundry a twelve-minute drive away," which were the last two places I lived. (Technically the last one was "laundry at the end of the hall, also costing $4/load payable only in loonies," which is why it was a twelve-minute drive away instead.)

I went out this evening and bought myself a chair for the porch and a tray-table-thing, so now I have some furniture. The bar stool is good for perching on but no good for actually trying to work or anything. And sitting on the floor was getting old.

On Thursday morning my electric razor popped open and I lost one of the blades. I could order more, and will, but like Aspects they'd get here next week at the earliest. I could buy a new razor but I did that once already, my spare razor is packed and I don't need a third one. I could use an actual bladed razor but that is just an invitation to a whole lot of blood. So I'm experimenting with beardedness. It itches less than last time, at least so far. I doubt I'll keep it but it's nice to change things up from time to time.

The Indian place around the corner does a decent korma. The poutine place over the skytrain (less than a half-mile walk, though coming back is up a Significant flight of stairs) still has a delicious buffalo chicken poutine. River Market exists and I'll get down there eventually and have some barbecue from Re-Up, the only good barbecue I've had north of the Mason-Dixon line.

I have pots and pans. Mya, who came by to check on the place once a week while I wasn't there, found a decent set on Craigslist and left them in the apartment. I've also got an assortment of utensils: cheap measuring cups and spoons, a couple of forks from takeout, some misc stuff from the thrift store. So I can make breakfasts at least, and whenever I go grocery shopping for real I'll be able to make a few other things as well.

I don't like my situation at all, but it is not the worst situation I've been in.
jazzfish: a black-haired man with a big sword. blood stains the snow behind (Eddard Stark)
Well. Actually I write this sitting in the living room on the floor, back against the wall, next to where the couch will eventually be set.

My stuff is not here, due to the movers arbitrarily deciding to reschedule my delivery. I was surprised and displeased when I called them on Friday morning to see what time they'd get here and was told "Monday." I'm mostly calmed down about it now. It would be nice to have furniture, though.

(In a nice change of pace, the internet install that was also scheduled for Friday morning went quickly and smoothly.)

I still like this condo. The dishwasher is Really Loud but it's, you know, a dishwasher, which is an improvement. I'm still nervous that I won't be able to fit the bookcases in, and more nervous that I won't be able to fit the kitchenstuff in. I have also developed a fear that the bookcases will be destroyed in transit: the move-out movers were pretty skeptical that they'd survive. They're Ikea flat-pack particle-board and they've already made it through seven moves, so they're certainly beyond life expectancy, but still.

Erin rode down with me, through the fire- and flood-scarred landscape. I am genuinely impressed at the civil engineering done to reopen the highway through the Fraser Canyon after last November's flooding. They have entirely rerouted several sections of highway, including at least one railway underpass, and put in a temporary bridge that seems to be holding up well.

And now Erin's flown back north, and I spend my first night on my own in the new place. On an air mattress on the floor, same as the last couple of nights. It will all normalise eventually.

Only the margins left to write in now. I love you, I love you, I love you.
jazzfish: a black-haired man with a big sword. blood stains the snow behind (Eddard Stark)
It's been a busy month.

Of relevance to this post: after THREE MONTHS I finally have a new kitchen/hallway tiled floor, at no monetary cost to me. When the previous owners put in the new floor they didn't put in any transitions, and there's no way to get matching laminate five years later, so the budget called for basically replacing the whole floor. For the same (probably less) money, and way less hassle to me, I got them to replace the half-ruined entryway and kitchen floor in tile. It looks nice, and it supposedly raises resale value.

I also found out a couple of weeks ago that they managed to lose my dishwasher. I am not entirely sure how this happened, but whatever. They finally got me a new one on Monday. Which is good because that was the re-re-rescheduled photoshoot for putting the condo on the market. I believe it should be listed today or tomorrow. With any luck I will soon have enough money that I can withdraw it in rolls of loonies and build myself a coinroll cabin. Like a log cabin, but less insulative.

Now that the condo is on the market I'm starting to think about where I'm gonna be living. My current "plan" (if something this vague can be called a plan) is to find a house up north near Erin and a cheap room in Vancouver, and be down in Van one week a month. Unclear as to whether this will /save/ me any money over living in Van but it's unlikely to be any more expensive.



Last night Erin and I went and looked at a number of houses. Most of them were in town, kind of generic houses, in varying states of disrepair. There's one or two that might work out.

And then there's this gorgeous house. I'm not sure how long the link will be live; the realtor said she's taking it off the market today. Apparently the owner was looking to sell and move someplace else... and "someplace else" sold last week to someone else.

It has two major negatives, which are significant enough to keep me from buying it. First, it's about a ten-minute drive from town, and hence a half-hour drive from Erin's place. Second, and more importantly, the driveway is long, narrow, and uphill, and there's not enough room at the top of it to turn around unless you're driving a Smart. This is an annoyance for April through October, and a severe problem for snow-covered November through March. (There are two minor negatives, those being "the kitchen" and "the main bathroom," that can be solved by throwing money at them.)

But, gods. The view over the lake. The light, the ... openness? of the main floor. The nestled-into-the-forest-ness of it. I'm having almost the same reaction to this house that I had to one of the houses Erin and I looked at for her last spring: it feels like Pop Shackelford's house. I think that's a combination of one-storey (or at least looks-like-one-storey) and set-into-the-woods.

It feels like the perfect house for me. Only not for me as I exist but for a me three years in the future, or me at slightly oblique angles to who I am or where I am right now. And yet I want so badly to settle into that house and never leave it, make it mine and stay there for the next fifty years.

Oh well. Something like it will turn up again.
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written in another language.... You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

--Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
jazzfish: Pig from "Pearls Before Swine" standing next to a Ball O'Splendid Isolation (Ball O'Splendid Isolation)
It's been a rough couple of weeks. I'm not sleeping well again, primarily I think due to stress. Vicious cycle.

I've been listening to "Who's Gonna Help Me" by Salt Thief, the folk-rockish viola duo James and I went to see a few weeks ago. They're good, and I'm looking forward to the new album in November.

she said i've troubles of my own and no time to help you

I still have no dishwasher and a concrete floor in my entry hall.

Emily's understandably unwilling to float me a loan to buy her out of the condo. Depending on how much she's looking for I may (may) be able to scrape up the amount. Not having to find another place to live has a certain appeal to it.

... just heard back from the mortgage broker. The process of buying Emily out may turn out more complicated than she'll want to deal with anyway. Though I suspect that a lot of that complication will come up if we sell the place, regardless.

To the extent that I was "dating" the really neat person I met a month ago, I got dumped on Wednesday. Still processing that.

Things with Erin are strained. (Understatement, I think.) I may be going north tomorrow, or I may not. I have no idea at this point.

I am out of maple syrup. This is not the worst of calamities, merely insult to injury.

Onward.
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
So, we're under a wildfire evacuation alert. The smoke cloud is visible from the back deck, and the air's distinctly yellowish this morning.

Informative links: Evac order for the Shovel Lake fire, as of 13 August at nine PM. (If that link's 404'd, click "Home Page" and look for the most recent Shovel Lake fire evac order.) Wildfires of Note page for the Shovel Lake fire. On the map in the evac order link: find the vertical "Highway 27" on the right, and we're just across the highway from the W in "Highway."

Current thinking is that most of the evac order area will be on fire in the next day or two, if it's not already, and the eastern arm of the evac alert will change to an evac order by the weekend. Erin has borrowed a trailer from a coworker, and will be spending much of today modding it to hold a hundred birds. Or perhaps fifty birds, in two trips. Current plan, subject to more or less immediate change, is to leave in the next couple of days, ahead of the crowd, and take everything but me down to her partner Josh's place four hours south. (I get dropped off at the airport on the way.)

It's stressful but it's not the worst stress. On me, anyway; s'not my house. I am mostly trying to hold together in the face of some other unspecified stresses, and otherwise be a reasonable amount of support in the current situation. It's also possible that I will come entirely apart more or less as soon as my brain registers it as being "safe" to do so, which may be "as soon as i'm on an airplane" or "as soon as i'm at home."

Kind of puts my plumbing woes in perspective. Though I still don't want to go through that again either.

mornings

Jul. 31st, 2018 10:58 am
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
If I wake up early on a weekday morning, I get to go to morning yoga, which is awesome and stretchy and communal and just a really excellent way to get moving.

On the other hand, if I sleep in, or (more likely) if I let myself doze back off, I get to have breakfast at home, to include making tea with my good kettle.

It's nice to get to think of my life as choices between things I want to do.

Weekend mornings at home are of course better, because I can sleep in a bit, go to yoga which is either a delightfully strenuous workout or a relaxing stretchy yin class followed by a somewhat strenuous workout, and come home and have a proper breakfast. But it turns out one can't have weekends all the time.

(Weekend mornings with Erin are better still, though they don't usually involve yoga classes. I adore that she's also a morning person and that we can wake up to each other.)
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
It has certainly been a week. I'm back to writing fragments of entries, not finishing them, and then just tacking more on. Gonna try to break that habit this coming week, I think.



Last Tuesday I continued my longstanding tradition of messing up one foot every three years. This time I'm not entirely sure what happened. I mean, I'm certain that I overstepped and thought I was going down one step when I actually went down two, but I don't know what happened other than that.

At least there was no significant damage. Bruised up my pinky toe pretty badly and pulled something on the top/side of the foot. Walking was kinda painful for the rest of the day and not great on Wednesday. It's pretty much healed up by now, at least.



Then on Thursday night I got to participate in my first butchering. One of the ducks had prolapsed, and likely torn, and it was just easier and kinder to finish the job. And then one wants to go ahead and clean the bird as quickly as possible, while it's still fresh. So that was an unexpected and not overall pleasant evening.

It's definitely taken some of the glister off of farm life. I'm glad I was there for it; I am now somewhat less interested in animals of my own.



The Death of a Once Great City: a lengthy but good article on the hollowing-out of NYC, as it turns into a sterile playground for the super-rich. One could easily replace NYC with Vancouver throughout. And, as I noted elseweb, it's why I don't know that I want to stay in Vancouver now, and it's why I don't know if I'll even be able to.

Bah. Chinatown, the part of Vancouver I learned to love first, is going. Condos are starting to creep in, and with condos come the generic street-level retail that the article talks about, drugstores and banks. There'll be little left of current Chinatown in ten years. So it goes. And so goes the rest of the city.

And that makes me sad, and frustrated. After spending six-plus years getting here, and that long again trying to live here, I may have to look for what I'm after somewhere else, and the prospect of doing that work again does not fill my heart with joy.



I have made it home, and am simultaneously happy to be here and missing Threshold (Erin's place), and Erin, and the cats and the geese who come when called and the assortment of ducks and chickens. I even find myself missing Avallu, the very well-behaved fluffy guardian dog. (I miss Thea the puppyish guardian dog, somewhat less, but that's no surprise.)

And now I'm tired. Sleep.
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
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.

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Adventures in Mamboland

"Jazz Fish, a saxophone playing wanderer, finds himself in Mamboland at a critical phase in his life." --Howie Green, on his book Jazz Fish Zen

Yeah. That sounds about right.

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