Words are inadequate

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.

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.

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 )

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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.