jazzfish | Entries tagged with money

Weird to think that I'm already halfway through my one course for the term. But the midterm went up on Friday, and I just wrapped it. Feeling reasonably good about it. No doubt there were a couple questions I missed, and a couple where I overthought the question and will have gotten "wrong." C'est la guerre.

Looking at the schedule, it looks like I'll have a couple of weeks between winter and spring term this year. Eh. I guess it'll be nice to have the course complete before the end of my practicum, and not have to worry about any coursework while I'm wrapping that up and putting together my presentation.

The practicum itself has been more frustrating than I'd hoped. The data I'm looking to read and update is stored in a Microsoft Power App, and I have yet to figure out if there's any API access so I can talk to it in ways other than "Excel import/export". So I may be spending the next month or so making something that looks pretty and is only incrementally better than the existing static PDF. Argh and oh well. Useful reminder of what working in real systems is like.

I'm doing ... okay? Remarkably okay, I think. I have things I want to do, and the ability to do some of them. I don't know what happens to me in six months and that's worrisome. I do know I run out of money in two months and will need to raid my retirement fund again, and that's more worrisome, but at least the money's there -to- raid. For now.

2024 was, in a lot of ways, 2023 redux. Not super surprising, I guess.

( another year in the rear view )

The pull-handle on my twelve-year-old carryon suitcase snapped on my way out to Erin's, and an impromptu repair job failed to do the trick. So I got to do There and Back Again lugging my luggage around like a primitive. WE INVENTED WHEELS FOR A REASON. Sigh.

Travelpro claims to have a Lifetime Replacement Warranty, and in fact I'd just used that to replace my check-size suitcase when one of the zipper heads went missing. Turns out "lifetime" is flexible, and they're no longer accepting registrations for luggage made before sometime in 2018. Bah. I even dug up the receipt and all. Which is how I know it was twelve years old: bought in October 2012 from one of the sketchy luggage places that used to be all up and down Robson Street, for CAD$200.

Eh well. It served me well and more than well. I've ordered a (nicer) replacement, which will turn up around the new year.

While I was digging around for the receipt I also turned up an actual $50 US Savings Bond. My grandfather gave one to all the grandkids back in 1993. I'd actually unearthed it two decades earlier, at which point I transferred it out of "the dresser drawer at my parents' place" and into "my stack of random stuff that will be important sooner or later". It stopped accumulating interest last December so I guess I should figure out some way to turn it into actual money. (Thanks, Granddaddy Taylor.)

Huh. From the (brief) linked journal entry, I still have both the "old hiking boots" (I'm pretty sure that's the first pair of real boots I got, when I was in seventh grade) and the new "decent pair of dress shoes," and they all still fit and still see some use. I knew I'd stopped growing up by the time I hit ninth grade; the ceiling fan pull in my bedroom was at eye level when we moved in and never changed. Guess that went for feet as well.

Xmas shopping as such is done. Today I pick up my new glasses (bifocals / "progressives," for the first time since I inexplicably had them for a year in about fourth grade) and my cleaned coat, and I guess some milk and other staples to get me through the week. My Xmas Day plans involve Not Going Anywhere; will see how that pans out. (Mr Tuppert certainly approves.)

Merry Xmas Eve. I hope you're well.

I'd poked at the Elections Canada website a couple of weeks two ago but there weren't any job openings. Over last weekend it occurred to me that that's because the upcoming election is provincial, not federal, and it's Elections BC that I should have been looking at. So I put in an application for various electoral-support positions in all the electoral districts within about a half-hour drive of me. I knew it was kinda late notice: the election's on 19 October, so they're at the very tail end of hiring. But hey, they were all still accepting applications, maybe I'd luck out.

In the event I got an email early Monday morning from the North Surrey office saying "hey can you come in for an interview this afternoon." I immediately said "sure" and dug up some vaguely presentable clothing.

Thank gods for West Coast casual. I am just about dead certain my actual suit doesn't fit me anymore, and neither do my two sport coats. But I do own long pants (black), and a long-sleeved shirt (also black; I have one or two in other colours but "bright satin silk" seems counterindicated for employment-seeking). My ties are mostly meant to go with a white shirt and dark suit but I've got a nice dark red one that I'm pretty sure I bought explicitly for my Le fils de l'homme Halloween costume. It wasn't until I was actually out the door that I realised I'd reflexively put on my sandals, and had forgotten entirely about socks and nice shoes. Oh well.

I got there exactly on time. The office is in a warehouse/industrial stretch; I drove past it once, expecting it to be, I don't know, bigger, or more permanent, or better signed. They let me in and put me through about ten minutes of grueling Generic Interview ("describe yourself in five words" type of thing). I stumbled over this somewhat: I'm used to "convince us you're able to function in an office environment" and "convince us you're able to write" interviews, not ... whatever this is.

At some point while I was stumbling through "three strengths, and three weaknesses" ("well obviously Talking Off The Cuff is a weakness but I can do alright if I know what I'm doing and basically prepare myself a script beforehand") the lead interviewer started nodding and maybe smiling a bit, and eventually held up her hand and said "I'm gonna ask you a question, and you absolutely don't have to answer, but ... are you neurospicy?"

Record scratch, freeze frame.

Thought process:

ABSOLUTELY DO NOT DISCLOSE
What the fuck positive relevance could it even have?
She said 'neurospicy,' that's a shibboleth
You know, whatever, if this loses me the job I didn't want it anyway.

"Yeah, I am."

Ice completely broken. "Yeah, I thought I recognized that. I am too, and so are three of my five kids. This is a neurospicy-friendly office."

... well alright then.

We talked through some slightly more job-relevant things ("if someone comes in to the office to register to vote and gets really agitated about the requirement to show ID what do you do?" "I go get my supervisor!" etc). They showed me the big training room, which was warehouse-y and full of VERY LOUD fluorescents, with "if this is a deal-breaker for you I totally understand." If I had to do office-type things in there all day it would be a problem but as it is, I can handle it for a couple of hours at a stretch.

I left feeling pretty confident that I'd done well but not at all confident about getting the job. They only had the one position and had had an awful lot of applicants. But as it turned out at 10PM I got an email saying "you're hired, send us your references so we can check them."

As of today, nearly a week later, they still haven't called at least one of my two references. I'm probably bottom of the list, though. I guess we'll see. My official first day is 15 September. Things will ramp up from there through the election on the 19th and then taper off again pretty quickly. I'm not entirely sure what I'll be doing, even, other than "voter registration" and "tech support for the voting teams." But it'll be good to have an actual income again, if only for a little while.

Still no real word from the BC Ministry of Forests on getting a practicum placement for spring. This is way over in the category of Stuff I Can't Affect at the moment. Classes start in just under two weeks as well; hopefully the Project/Practicum Prep course will include "how to get a placement".

Other than that? I'm doing alright, I think. Happy meterological autumn.

I wonder if I'm actually doing as well as I think I am.

I feel like I'm doing okay? Classes are going alright (the big group project in Tech Issues is about to start kicking my butt, but other than that). I'm eating reasonably well most of the time. I'm reading, and playing with rope and ye catte. I don't think I'm losing too much time to screens.

I feel much less like I'm constantly in some kind of crisis, so therapy is starting to dig into deeper issues. Which is nice, honestly.

On the other hand I'm not writing much here, which is usually a sign that something is off.

I'm sure some of it's my book: finally reading RF Kuang's The Burning God, which is bleak and callous and depressing (and also very very good), as one would expect from the conclusion to a trilogy about the horrors of war. Rin is a mostly unpleasant, wholly understandable, and often sympathetic viewpoint character. Being in her head is probably not good for me. Only another hundred pages or so, though.

I'm pretty worried about money. More specifically I'm worried about finding a job that a) pays enough to live on and b) I can do while taking classes in the fall. Or I could look for a short-term contract and hope it pays well enough to coast through. I guess we'll see. I may qualify for the Canada disability tax credit as well, now; my doctor needs to fill out a form that I presume talks about how my disability has affected my life, and then I wait some number of months. That ... might be significant money, especially since it can be retroactively applied, but I'm not holding my breath.

I'm lonely, but no more so than usual, and not feeling motivated to try and be more sociable. I'm a bit tired a lot of the time. Inclined to blame both of those on wintergrey, which feels like it hadn't hit as hard this year until the last couple of weeks to month.

Terminal City Tabletop Convention is next weekend and I'm not particularly looking forward to it. I'm going down to Bellingham with Julianne on Sunday, to see Labyrinth in IMAX, and I'm only barely looking forward to that. Hm. Definitely not good. I'm at a bit of a loss to know what else to do about it right now, though.

Onward, and perhaps tomorrow will be lighter?

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 )

EI just ran out. Turns out that it's (now?) time-limited based on the unemployment in the region, and with unemployment in Vancouver under 6% it's capped at thirty-six weeks instead of the fifty-two-ish I'd been expecting.

(Yes, I've been absent. I had a lovely week up north with Erin, a hectic half-week of classes, a lovely half-week with Steph visiting, and a hectic week of classes including midterms and registering, successfully, for next term. I am doing well, just have been very busy. Which is not at all the usual state of things.)

Current rate of burn exhausts available funds in six months, end of August. Not an emergency but also not ideal. Guess it's time to figure out where money comes from this summer.

Worldwide 2023 was a shitshow, yes. Me personally, I had a shockingly decent year.

( state of the tucker 2023 )

Shoutout to all the people who went undiagnosed in their childhood because despite never fitting in and feeling like you belonged, you got good grades, and that was all that mattered to anyone.

--@ skyler @ furry.engineer, 2023-09-23

This is of course an exaggeration. Other things also mattered, including "going to church every Sunday," "practicing cello," and, later, "Boy Scouts". But it was made real clear to me early on that "feeling like I belonged" was pretty much irrelevant.

(This isn't really about that. It's about ADHD. But that's a part of the story, so, here we are. CW: historical casual suicide talk below the cut.)

( AD(H)D, etc )

I've been unemployed for two months now. Everything suddenly, as of five minutes ago at this writing, feels deeply unreal.

My table is here, though I've not used it for gaming yet. I'm doing yoga and going out biking and generally eating better than I was two months ago. I feel like I'm getting somewhere in counseling, which is always nice if sometimes painful/sad. I'm reading books and petting the cat. I'm sleeping better, but still not as much as I'd like.

Money is happening, or maybe it isn't. I don't think I'm eligible for student loans due to making too much money last year. On the other hand, I had a few hours of panic yesterday morning when I thought that I wouldn't be able to draw EI while I was in school. That seems to be inaccurate: as long as I take enough credit-hours, BCIT considers me a full-time student, regardless of the fact that I'm enrolled in a "Flexible Learning (formerly Part-Time)" program. I have a form to fill out but I have questions about it. I'll phone the financial aid office again tomorrow. There's also, I discovered just now, an education allowance for withdrawing money from my RRSP (Canadian for 401k). So that will also be helpful.

My days are slow and calm enough that when something throws me off my stride, like finding out that I might not be able to get EI if I'm in school, I can say "okay i am clearly just going to be really upset about this for some amount of time, so i'll let that happen, and once i'm done being upset i can do something about it." And then I can let myself be mad/scared for an hour or two, and then I'm calm enough to make a phone call to finaid.

I like this slow pace. I also know it's wholly unsustainable. But: I can relax and regrow capacity for a couple more months, then dive into school for a year, and then try to figure out where money for year two is coming from once EI runs out. Then hopefully a job that won't burn me out the way tech writing seems to have consistently done.

Meanwhile I'm going to Minneapolis in a few days, to 4th Street and to Steph, and that feels unreal too.

I don't know what happens next. It's nice to have the mental space to find out, and maybe the energy to enjoy it.

Waiting on Telus, because my internet has been out (again) since at least Saturday. Supposedly they'll give me a call in the next hour or two, and then show up and do something to fix it. I am not optimistic.

Also my new glasses have picked up a permanent smudge on the inner left lens. It looks like a coating has degraded or fuzzed up. I am Not Best Pleased. Going in this afternoon to talk to the optician about that. I have an unpleasant suspicion that these are about to become a backup pair of glasses and I will spend Too Much Money elsewhere for another pair that I like less but can see out of. But perhaps I'll be wrong.

Speaking of Too Much Money I have registered for fall classes at BCIT. I figure I'll do the two-year program, front-load as many classes into the first year as I can and find some sort of employment starting next summer, and look into financial aid once my internet is back. I am nervous as all hell but I have faith in my ability to scrounge money out of somewhere. If nothing else I can raid my RRSP. (Unsurprisingly therapy yesterday dug up A Lot of anger at my ex. Maybe someday I'll figure out something to do with that other than say "oh well" and try to squelch it.)

What are you reading now?

Aspects, first reread, because what on earth do you do when you've just finished something that's so good anything else is going to feel like a letdown?

The lovely thing about a reread is that I can savor a book. There's no tension over "what happens next?" or "will they live?" (or, in this case, "who are they and who are they talking about?"), there's just the characters and the prose and the scene-setting. And they are wondrous, and now I can savour Varic's intricate guarded dance around his feelings for Longlight and Winterhill's barbed jollity. And the words. I want to quote passages but they all want pages of explication as to why they hit so hard.

I will come to the fragmentary end and be sad and angry all over again that we won't get the other two books. And grateful that we got even this little.

What did you just finish reading?

Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh. Early candidate for best book of the year, and an easy recommend for anyone with an interest in space opera. Tesh's list of reference material in the afterword includes books on North Korea, Sparta, Scientology, and the rise of twenty-first-century fascism, but for all that it's not a grim book. (Thirty pages or so around the middle excepted.) It's a book of survival and recovery and ... maybe not healing, but maybe so.

Before that, Kat Howard's Unseen World duology. A Sleight Of Shadows is, mm, less focused? less tight? than An Unkindness Of Magicians. Still well worth my time. Both of these ... you know how when you watch a movie that's been made from a book it often feels rushed, because there's just not time to include everything needed? These each feel to me like they're an attempt to cram a network season of television into one book. Huge cast of characters, all of whom seem interesting and not enough of whom do we get to spend nearly enough time with to develop beyond seeming interesting; big sprawling plots and ideas, mostly well-developed but that would have benefited from having far more space to play in. Kat calls it a duology but then she called Unkindness a standalone, and there's certainly room for a third book exploring magic outside of the insular New York City world. I'd read it.

What do you think you'll read next?

Possibly Fonda Lee's novella Untethered Sky. Possibly Alix Harrow's Once And Future Witches or Silvia M-G's Mexican Gothic, because they're here and have been waiting patiently for several months and I probably have time to finish them in fancy hardcopy without trying to travel with a SubPress book. Or I might be due for a reread of The Last Hot Time.

Today I spent an hour and a half on the phone with the EI office, mostly on hold, in an ultimately successful attempt to report my severance pay, which came through today. Verdict: my EI payments won't start until mid-June, but on the bright side my (year-long) claim limit also doesn't start until then. I mucked with my budget a day or two ago and determined that the EI will more or less cover my bills, so that's a relief.

Today I also took a two-hour nap. I may be fighting off a random sinus infection or summer cold; Mya was over for dinner last night, and reported feeling ill this morning. I've got a bit of a sore throat and a bit of the general muzzy-headedness that I usually associate with sinus infections. Who knows.

Also today Tsalmoth arrived, so I'm making my way through it. Feels like a throwback, which of course it is, set just after Yendi and long before Vlad quit the Jhereg. It's good? I may be starting to lose my taste for Vlad's first-person-asshole narrative voice.

It's been summer-like out today, and I think will be for the rest of the weekend. I may ride out somewhere and read under a tree tomorrow or Sunday. Next week is for GIS-career research, and getting back into viola practice, and continuing to get out on the bike as much as I can.

Mr Tuppert is dozing on my foot. I'm quite glad I get to be his human.

As noted, I bailed on Twitter because they shut down access for third-party clients, including my preferred client, Tweetbot. This act of war pushed Tapbots, the Tweetbot developer, into overdrive on their Mastodon client Ivory. It went into wide release a few days later. I tried it out and while it's certainly an early release, it's enough like Tweetbot that I'm happy with it.

So, Mastodon. I'm at jazzfish@wandering.shop grr DW still wants to make a leading @ automatically DW-username-ize things (thanks to Nicky for the invite). My feed's mostly made up of my Twitterfolk that I could easily find plus a handful of other people I keep seeing retweeted / boosted and figured I'd go ahead and follow.

It's not as polished an experience as Twitter was and in particular I miss quote-retweet. But it's fun so far. (As with Twitter I'm using it primarily to read, and secondarily to retweet.)

Thanks to Mastodon I am following Cameron Reed (fka Raphael Carter, and once

centuryplant). Cameron's novel The Fortunate Fall is probably my favourite novel that no one has heard of, and I include Mike Ford's books in that judgement. Yesterday she mentioned that "A mere 26 years after The Fortunate Fall, I am working seriously on another novel." So that's rather exciting.

In a followup she said "It's strange to have too many ideas after such a long period of creative nullity. Changing the hormone levels in my brain has been good for me." Which ... gives me some hope that I might manage to get back to writing, myself, at some point. That I might be able to rebalance my brain and my lifestyle to support that. But there's a lot to unpack there, too.

Bah. I was more functional working four days a week, for sure, but looking for that will make jobhunting Even Worse. And it's an open question as to how I'd do with a 20% pay cut. Between the not-quite-doubled housing cost and the general increase in cost of everything, that might require some serious belt-tightening. Bah.

Current state: being extremely stressed out over condo-related program activities.

( stressors )

Current Mood: stressed
Crossposts: https://jazzfish.livejournal.com/694105.html

Small good things:

The bathroom is repainted (and Nic the assistant super cleaned it pretty well), the apartment windows are replaced. I've vacuumed and am no longer stepping on grit that someone else tracked in. Later today I shall take everything down out of the medicine cabinet and wipe down the shelves so I stop being annoyed by the white sawdust that drifted in through the doors.

I have figured out a meringue recipe I'm happy with. (Equal amounts egg-white and sugar, by weight; whip in the sugar a bit at a time so it doesn't just all sink to the bottom; when it's about done add a splash of vanilla and one of orange extract; spoon onto the baking sheet with small-eating-spoons; bake at 200F for two hours, then turn the oven off and leave them in there.) This is handy as it's Egg Season as of a couple of weeks ago.

I have three different RPGs that I'm actively excited about. Fate of Cthulhu, in which the characters travel back in time to stop a Great Old One from rising, is a version of Fate that I can comprehend. Spire has a straightforward mechanic and some genuinely interesting worldbuilding. And I recently picked up my old favourite Changeling and started reading through the 20th anniversary edition, and it still makes me happy.

I sent my tax stuff off to Chris the accountant, after spending half an hour last week trying and failing to find the last of my RRSP forms on various financial websites.

Two nights ago I slept for nine hours, with only a few brief interruptions.

Next week I begin working at 80% time, which will in theory result in me being 10% less annoyed at work. (I am taking a pay cut to do this, but it incorporates a long-overdue but still insufficient raise.)

And, perhaps most important: thanks to Erin being actually functional on Saturday morning and sitting on hold for awhile, I have an appointment for my first vaccine shot, for a week from Wednesday. I had thought the plan was for the vaccine to be rolled out by age group, but the powers that be seem to have decided that it's logistically better to just vaccinate everyone in small communities all at once.

I hope you're well.

Crossposts: https://jazzfish.livejournal.com/681205.html

I may be starting to recover.

In late October I went into "head down Do The Thing" mode, which is my standard response to stress. I knew I was doing it at the time and decided it was worth it to keep functioning, because there was an end date in sight. That end date has been further away than anticipated by several weeks at least. But I know it's there now.

I've got a little over a third of my books onto the bookshelves, and I already feel substantially better than I did this morning. Living among boxes is a huge source of stress for me, it turns out. I do a lot better when ... hm. I think it's "when my environment is uncluttered." When things have a place and are mostly in it. And, among other stressors, I've not really had that since I packed up half my stuff in October to show the condo.

I'm starting to feel like me again, is I guess what I'm saying.

Additional source of stress relief: the money from the condo sale has gone through. That is, I can see the deposit transaction in my account record, but I can't actually access the money yet. I don't require it for another week and a half, though, so that's most likely alright.

This is not precisely "no longer worried about money" but it does put me back in the situation I was in, mm, a little over a year ago, when I was thinking about moving back into the condo. I have enough of a cushion that I can wait and see how my current financial situation actually shakes out and where I need to do some belt-tightening. This is way better for my mental state than "i am very nearly at the end of my liquid savings." Very curious to see how my expenses shake out during my monthly Vancouver weeks, and what if anything I'll need to change around that.

Crossposts: https://jazzfish.livejournal.com/645649.html

Thoughts on completing my first yoga class in close to three weeks, and my fourth in the last six weeks:

1) Ow.
2) Damn I needed that.
3) Ow.

It's fall weather here. It snowed a couple of times last week up north, which seems a bit uncouth for "not even the fall equinox yet", but I'm okay with September acting like actual fall.

Results of various unpleasant tasks this morning:

1) Emailed Chris the accountant regarding what looks like an audit letter from CRA (Canadian for "IRS"). He got back to me quickly with "yeah, they send that to everyone who claims foreign taxes, send me the letter and any docs you've got and i'll take care of it." So I get to do that tonight.
2) Called the remediation contractor. They're still waiting on the strata management company to call them and tell them to start work, despite me having called strata management mid-last week to tell them to call the contractor. They kindly said they'd call strata management themselves and bug them about it.
3) Called the actual IRS about my %&$ tax return, which should have been deposited in mid-May, then by early September. Apparently there have been additional processing difficulties but it's actually through the system now, so I should have my money within four to six weeks, just in time for me to not travel to the US.
4) Have not yet emailed Emily with my last proposal for buying out the condo, but I am not convinced it matters much since I don't think she'll take me up on it anyway.

Regarding #4, even if she were to take me up on it, that would just shuffle the difficulty from "moving" to "finding a roommate," and it almost certainly makes more financial sense to sell the place anyway, and hey, if I'm not going back east in October I can use the time I've already booked to be off work to pack and find a place to live.

Crossposts: https://jazzfish.livejournal.com/638284.html

In case you were wondering whether the Vancouver housing market is still stupid: a one-bedroom unit in my building just went on the market. Its asking price is what we paid for our two-bedroom in October 2016.

I am pretty sure that this is the last nail in the coffin of my loose plan to find a one-bedroom place to buy this summer/fall. It's certainly one more not-so-gentle nudge towards getting out of Vancouver altogether.

Crossposts: https://jazzfish.livejournal.com/634242.html

I have acquired a bed, my first new bed in, well, ever. Bought a mattress and boxspring from a place near work that delivered them, and went out to Abbotsford to buy a nice-looking new-to-me wood-and-iron bedframe. It's a touch large for the room it's in, which is likely to be true as long as I'm in a Vancouver apartment. But it's not a modern solid headboard, which I hate, and it looks nice with Pop Shackelford's dresser and bedside table. And the mattress is pretty comfy.

Been spending a stupendous amount of money on getting the household up to speed. I think it's more or less there at this point. Furnishing a kitchen can get expensive, I tell you what, and I'm deliberately staying away from (most of) the less-useful kitchen gadgetry. But one needs knives and pots and cooking implements and and and...

And I have a rescue plant. It was a buck at Canadian Tire. Apparently it likes indirect light and not being watered for a couple of weeks at a time, which ought to work out pretty well all around.

Erin came down last weekend for a day or so, which was lovely, and then we (I) drove her new-to-her car north through a blinding snowstorm. I have never had the experience of not being able to see the road in front of me while driving, which happened for several seconds any time someone passed me in either direction. I can't say as I much care for it. Or for highway driving at 50 kph.

On Sunday the falling snow had all but stopped, but there were plenty of piles on the shoulder and slick spots on the highway. We passed a section where cars had been deliberately driving into a ditch the night before to avoid an accident in the road, and said "Yep, there's some tire tracks on the shoulder and a couple bits of car," and the next thing I knew I was headed into the ditch myself. Near as I can tell I drifted just a bit into the deep snow on the shoulder, and that pulled me into the rest of it, and there we were. Still drivable but no way to drive out of a metre of snow, so we waited a couple hours for BCAA to send a tow truck, and were fine if a bit shaken.

Other than that, we started watching Star Trek (the original). I'm finding it a curious and enjoyable mix of "of its time" (visuals, styling, occasionally the minor characters) and just plain good. Pretty sure most of my Trek knowledge comes from the first five movies and cultural osmosis. Somehow SF TV never really made an impact on me when I was a kid. I'm sure I've seen episodes but the only one I can recall at all is "Amok Time."

And now I'm home again, with a list of things I'd like to take care of this week and some uncertainty as to how motivated I'll be to do any of them. We shall see.

Crossposts: https://jazzfish.livejournal.com/626858.html

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

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

Meanwhile, on Friday I got a gum graft.

( cut for potential squick )

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

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

Crossposts: https://jazzfish.livejournal.com/617127.html

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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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other than that, mrs lincoln

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where the week/end went

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