Words are inadequate

I just vacuumed my entire apartment. This is amazing.

I got a Dyson stick vacuum when I moved into the first condo, Xmas 2016. It's fantastic for small spaces (like apartments), especially when it's mostly running on hardwood floors. Going through once a week or so means my feet are much happier with not stepping on random crunchy bits. Or, now, getting cat-hair clumps in my toes. Yes, I could sweep, but sweeping is a task that's aggravated me literally forever. It's obnoxious enough that I just Don't Do It when that's the option.

A couple of years ago the battery stopped holding much of a charge. At first that just meant not running it on the 'turbo' setting, which meant the rug and the carpeted bedrooms in my last place didn't get as clean as I'd like. Over the last six months, though, the charge has dropped off precipitously. At this point it runs for less than a minute before dying. This is still, barely, usable in here. Turns out it takes about three minutes to vacuum this whole apartment, so I got in the habit of running it once every day or two.

It is, however, Annoying. So over the summer I finally got around to ordering a replacement battery. It came in back in August and I tried to replace it.

One of the battery screws had stripped the plastic housing enough that it wouldn't come out, and it was recessed enough that I couldn't get in to get it out.

So I called Dyson's support line and they offered to sell me a new vacuum at twenty percent off. This is more money than I really wanted to spend at a time when I'm not actually bringing in any income. They allowed as how they could maybe sell me a replacement housing for the vacuum I had, maybe, if their warehouse stock indicator wasn't lying to them.

Spoiler: it was. I waited three weeks and it never shipped, which they'd warned me might happen.

Today was the last day to return the battery. I had two options: give up and return the battery and spend too much money on a replacement vacuum, or deal with vacuuming for a minute every day until the battery completely died. Instead I took a third option: break the plastic cover off the handle so I could get the screw out, replace the battery, and hope there was enough handle left for it to still be functional.

In the event, I was able to pry the cover up enough to pop the loosened screw out, without breaking anything. The new battery went in with no problems at all. It even came charged enough to vacuum the entire apartment. The handle is now a bit warped but I don't notice when I'm using it.

Turns out, in order to fix things sometimes, I have to be willing to break them.

This feels like a broadly applicable principle.

---

Mostly unrelatedly, my parents came up last weekend. They were on a riverboat cruise in Oregon, so they took the train up from Portland for the weekend. It was ... fine? We all more or les behaved ourselves. They saw the new condo and the new cat, and we went up in the Vancouver Lookout and down to Granville Market.

I'm missing something in that relationship and I don't know what it is, and that frustrates me. I guess this is part of what counseling/therapy is for.

So my maternal aunt Susan sent me a thumbdrive with a whole mess of scanned-and-digitized photos from her side of the family (Shackelfords and McKinnons). It's pretty neat: it goes back, oh, I guess over a hundred years now, there's a bunch of photos from Carl Oscar Bergholm in there.

(Sidenote: Carl Oscar Bergholm emigrated to the US from Sweden via Finland. He fetched up in Minnesota like ya do, and married my great-grandmother Iris McKinnon from whom I take my name. They moved back to Texas for his health, and then he died of heart trouble in 1929, when my grandmother was seven. C.O. then turned up in a Supreme Court case, Bergholm v. Peoria Life Insurance Company, in which Iris / Grandmother Bergholm tried and failed to recover C.O.'s life insurance payout. The case still gets cited from time to time. Immortality of a sort, though not the kind that buys food in the Depression.)

Anyway. I recognise maybe half of the names and can put recognisable faces to maybe half of those, but it is definitely interesting to see Gram and Pop, and Susan and Mom and Jim and later Bill, through stages of their lives.

At first glance it looked like the most recent batch was from Xmas '77 (labeled '76 but I'm pretty sure it's '77, I'm in those and I look closer to thirteen months than to one month). I tossed one of those with baby-Tucker in up on Facebook. Susan saw it and posted another from Xmas '82, when my sister was about that age and I was in first grade and had just gotten glasses.

I took a look at that one, enjoyed seeing my relations look like my first memories of them. And then I registered which one in the photo was me and got a sudden shocking reminder of just why I hated pictures of me for so long. Bowl haircut, awful glasses, stiff posture, weird expression. Nothing to be done about any of it, not that I knew there was anything that /could/ be done. I once broke down in tears during a family slideshow because I couldn't stand seeing other people looking at me.

I can't find words for it and I've been trying since last night.

And when I stopped hating how I looked quite so much, which would probably be "eighth or ninth grade" in a combination of contact lenses, hair, and people who'd never known me any other way, I still never particularly liked most pictures of me. (I did like my senior photo from high school, and there's a handful of others I've kept from around that time, but.) The angle's wrong, or it catches me at a bad moment, or or or. Stiff posture, weird expression.

Which isn't to say that I didn't /want/ to like them, or to like how I looked in pictures. But it took a damned long time, and repeated encouragement from Erin among others, before that could even approach actuality.

I dunno. There's something important there. I sat on the couch and /shook/ this morning trying to write this. But I don't, quite, know what it is.

Last week Martha Wells pointed me at Nancy Werlin's graphic memoir-in-progress (lengthy; content warning for excessive narcissism, emotional abuse, and abandonment of an animal) and I spent my not-staring-at-work time for the day binging it. It's ... first-draft-y, and incomplete, and very raw in places. Also compelling reading, at least for me.

(If you're so inclined, once you're caught up you can follow along at nancywerlin_feed.)

Nearish the beginning Nancy is in therapy, talking about her parents and her autistic sister whose care took up much of their attention. In the midst of that there's this strip, which made me sit straight up and say Oh.

NANCY: But I understood even as a child.
ANGELIKA THE THERAPIST: Really? You never made a bid for attention?
NANCY'S MOM: No! Nancy was a remarkably mature child! We never had to worry about her! Such a relief!
THERAPIST: Any chance the remarkable maturity WAS your bid for attention?

This wasn't a huge revelation for me. It's something I came to a few years ago, though of course I'd phrase it a bit differently. Something more like "whenever i did something wrong it always got substantial negative attention / punishment, so maybe if i did everything right that would get me the positive attention i needed."

But seeing it just ... put out there, like that ... I think that's the first time since reading the Military Brats book that I've felt like I'm not completely alone inside my head. That this really is stuff that other people have dealt with. That maybe there's a way through it.

Sitting in a cafeteria outside Granville Station, watching people walk by, reading. Or too tired to read. How does that even happen? I know how it happens when it's past bedtime, but at five in the evening?

Watching people. Today I have: gotten a music stand and mute so I'll feel less awkward practicing the viola; done some repetitive work correcting a thing I did a month or two ago that I thought would be useful, and was but had unexpected side effects (unrelatedly, work does not appear to be doing the stupid thing from last week, so yay); written to my parents again and perhaps it will get through this time; taken a profile-silhouette photo of myself a la Hitchcock; listened to David Francey's "Nobody Lives Here No More" "Torn Screen Door" a dozen or so times; gone running. I think that's it for useful.

They worked their fingers to the bone / Nothing left they can call their own / Packed it in under leaden skies / Just the wheat waving them goodbye

And tonight I'll write with Steph and Kat and Theresa, at least in theory, and then I'll go home and intend to practice and we'll see how far intention gets me.

I am tired, wrung out, stretched thin. I don't know that this is actually the case in any larger sense but that's what it feels like. Possibly too many people at housewarming yesterday? Possibly too little actual downtime? Possibly too much rattling around in my brain to settle down?

Had a life that they tried to save / But the banks took it all away / Hung a sign on a torn screen door / 'Nobody lives here no more'

I should enjoy the people-watching from here, I think, if I didn't have someplace to be. Coming up from and going into the Granville skytrain at rush hour, all manner of interesting and no sense that I have to be a part of it.

Onward.

I'm not writing much here these days. This... is probably not a good sign.

---

Weekend before last my parents were in town. We had quite a good visit: hit the Maritime Museum and Granville Island, wandered arond Queen Elizabeth Park (a large hill in the middle of the city that used to be a quarry, so it's got some very neat planned-gardens and waterfalls and such, and also a domed conservatory with lots of birds), and ate much tasty food. Dad and I got our "portraits" done in magic marker on cardboard, by an itinerant artiste while we were loitering in Gastown.

They left very early on Tuesday morning, and I was thinking "it would have been nice if they'd stayed another day or so." I think this means that the visit was exactly as long as it should have been.

---

My viola finally arrived yesterday. Stupid Long & McQuade. It is in fact black and not green, as I'd requested, and the electric pickup seems to work, and in general it looks quite nice. And maybe sounds as well, at least when someone who knows what they're doing is playing it.

That is clearly not me. I feel like between the Gathering and my parents' visit I have lost most of whatever skill I'd developed and have been fumbling worse than usual trying to get it back.

It'll come. I keep telling myself that. I think I'm now past the point where any jumpstart I had from cello is doing me any good, and am having to learn the hard way like anyone else. Frustrating. Practice, practice, practice.

---

That may be part of my problem, honestly. I'm not really doing much of anything that I'm *good* at. Rather, the things I'm good at are either not things that I want to be doing (tech writing) or of very little use (boardgames). I'm a beginning violist with all that that implies, and a fiction writer with limited experience. And doing those things is how one gets better at them, but it's really annoying to spend my days feeling like I'm terrible at everything I try.

Which may be part of why I've been hiding. I don't know.

My in-laws descended upon my house from Tuesday evening through Sunday morning. If you have ever wondered whether it is a good idea to have your high-maintenance in-laws stay with you at your workplace for several days while you're recovering from a nasty cough, I am here to tell you it is not. uilos occupied them during the day as best she could; this mostly involved the three of them leaving around ten to go do something touristy and coming back around two. To their credit they didn't actively try to disturb me during my workday. It's the passive disturbances that got to me: not being able to pace without running into someone unexpected, noises in the kitchen (right behind my workspace), all that.

I am starting to feel more human again. Key being 'starting.' Spent most of yesterday in a fog. Arguably I shouldn't have tried to go running yesterday morning as my lungs may not be up to it yet. Bleh. Stupid body, work better.

Things I would like to do this weekend include 'beta comments for thanate' and 'cut Bookwyrms by 2/3 so it's under the thousand-word flash fiction wordcount limit, where I think it and editors will be happier.' Also 'have pancakes for breakfast' and possibly 'get out to gaming for the first time in a couple of weeks.' I think (think) I'm good for more than 'stare at laptop screen / tv screen / Device screen / book,' at least for a few hours.

This kid I once knew: post-canon Calvin & Hobbes, in which "Daniel sends their whole improv group an e-mail saying 'check this out its fun1!1' and a link to a web comic called The Adventures of Spaceman Spiff." Very very good. Between this and Goodnight Room I'm seriously considering doing Yuletide next season.

Clash of the Pteridophytans.

That Dhimmi Kid: "Ignorant right wingers threatening manufactured teen-idols based on fake news. I think that says it all."

---

In contrast to Xmas, New Years was ridiculously full of family.

Friday was really quite pleasant: slow-ish morning, then wandering over to John K--'s ABG New Year. I'd planned on going from there up to Laurel but by ten I was already struggling with tired, and it's an open question as to whether I would have made it back home afterwards. So we played a couple more games, saw in the new year, and went home and collapsed.

If it weren't for the family bit we could have stayed in Laurel, I guess, but we needed to be presentable and in Rockville by noon for xmas-replacement uilos-family dim sum. Which was tasty and Not So Bad as these things go: I only really resent it for taking up perfectly good sleep time. More gaming after that: spent most of the afternoon/evening trying to learn and teach the four-player version of A Game of Thrones. It dragged on unnecessarily, in part due to being a first-time game, but also from way too much unnecessary extra chrome layered on top of the base game.

Woke up again Sunday morning (though not so early) and trekked down to Burke for Xmas with my family. (Originally scheduled for 18 December, and postponed when the Senate voted to cancel Xmas[1].) I still sometimes (around 5%, I'd say) think about spawning. Being around my sister's two helps a lot with that. It's not that they're bad kids: just very very attention-intensive. Other than that it went off without any major disasters. I gave my two-year-old nephew the DVD of Where the Wild Things Are because I believe firmly in scarring kids before they get too old to know better, and my five-year-old niece a copy of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles (to be read to her by my sister). From my parents I got a handful of things off my Amazon wishlist, for what may be the first time ever. (They got me Half A Crown [book 3 in a series] instead of Ha'Penny [book 2, and out of print in hardback], which is only a little awkward; I went ahead and ordered Ha'Penny this morning.)

And then we came home and collapsed and did Not A Damn Thing for the rest of the day. I think naps were involved. There were definitely pancakes.

Happy new year. I'm curious to see how next Xmas season shakes out.

---

[1] Dad's been working on the START treaty for about the last two years. For those of you who are unaware of the stupidity surrounding this, it's a nuclear arms control treaty between the US and Russia, and the last of the details were hammered out back in April. It should have passed the Senate then with no problems but the Republicants have been more interested in keeping anything good from happening on the Democrats' watch, so it's been stalled. Dad had to go in to work on the 18th to try and put something together that they would agree to. Which, eventually, they did, so yay for our side, or something.

A new holiday, and a hearty bite me to "family comes first." The comments, as always, are the best part. Q: How many children of a dysfunctional family does it take to change a light bulb? A: Your BROTHER would know. Happy autumn.

Faire on Satyrday turned out to be rather enjoyable. Saw pictsy doing her angelically aerial thing, caught a handful of other shows, had underwhelming food (fried ice cream: not so great, actually), and bought absolutely nothing else. Still and all, I'd go again, for the chance to wear garb and see random people and be amused. Had dinner afterwards in Silver Spring, at a tiny Italian place called Da Marco. It is my second favorite restaurant ever only because they don't have either cajun alfredo or that amazing gorgonzola walnut chicken that Zeppoli's does. (Poking around online indicates that their red sauces are somewhat lacking. I'm supremely partial to white and rosé sauces, so this is not a big deal for me.)

My brilliant plan to spend Sunday reading comic books got derailed by the arrival of Susan Palwick's _Shelter_. Palwick is the author of "Gestella," easily the most frightening story I've ever read. _Shelter_. . . is equally horrific in places. It reminds me a little of the movie _The Machinist_ (starring two-thirds of Christian Bale): you can watch the main character react in the worst possible way to various bad situations, which leads to extremely bad consequences, which leads to more bad reactions. . . all while continuing to have complete sympathy for the character.

I've been meaning to pick this up since Jo Walton raved about it, um, a year or more ago. "This is a novel about memory and identity and awareness and forgiveness and what it means to be a person." Yes, to all of that, and with characters that are infinitely more human and more sympathetic than Gene Wolfe's, who is the only other writer I can think of offhand that writes about all these things.

So, Sunday was a big day for curling up on the couch with a brick of a novel, instead of a fat stack of comics. I'm about three-quarters of the way through it, and genuinely irritated that I have to be at work instead of reading. Stupid work.