Words are inadequate

Well that was exciting.

My first thought was the (small child? large dog?) upstairs being especially stompy. Felt like it was hitting the whole apartment, though. It kept going and thought "Oh. This must be an earthquake." Mr Tuppert jumped off the chair and ran, stopping in mid-run to look back at me kind of freaked out. I was about to get up and ... I dunno, stand in a doorway? Leave the building? when it stopped.

First earthquake I've ever been through. Looks like it was northwest of me, "22 km north of Sechelt", 5.1 Richter.

Neat but not something I really feel compelled to repeat.

In my experience, the usual pattern for the beginning of summer in Vancouver is for the long weekend to be sunny and Pleasant and feel like summer is here! and then for the temps to drop and the clouds to return and "Juneuary" to take hold. Then summer proper gets into gear just before Canada Day.

In the event, it was Too Warm a few weekends ago; last weekend was the long weekend and my understanding is that it was rainy and chilly. (I was up north, where it was also a bit rainy and chilly.) It's been clear and warming up the last day or so, though. Yesterday I was vaguely irritable and lethargic all day, which has an obvious source that I didn't even consider. I was, of course, Too Warm. I didn't realise this until I woke up at 12:30 in an absolutely stifling room. Set up and turned on the fan, and that was enough to get me back to sleep until 4:30, and after a bit more tossing and turning until 6:30ish. So, that's like eight hours of sleep, which should have been plenty but due to interruptions left me feeling grumpy and, well, tired. But not the "falling back asleep" kind of tired.

So I grumbled and got up and did an hour of yoga for the second time this week, and ... that seems to have helped. Most exercise doesn't. Sunlight reliably helps my mood, but exercise as such does nothing for me. Except, for whatever reason, for yoga, when I can manage it.

I am also reminded that my body likes to do physical things, and likes to get better at them. On Wednesday I biked from Joyce Station to the optometrist, about half an hour, and then from the optometrist all the way back home. No trouble at all. (I also got to stop and read my book under a tree for half an hour or so, which was entirely lovely.) Tuesday morning I did a round of yoga; Tuesday night my muscles and joints ached from being stretched weirdly, but it was the kind of ache that I knew would go away if I just did that a few more times. My breathing's improving, at least when there's not a ton of smoke in the air.

I used to land somewhere between hating my body unerservedly and thinking about it as little as possible. Since Erin and yoga, I've been able to come to more of a detente, off and on. It's complicated. But it's nice that it's complicated, instead of straight-up loathing.

Anyway, the cold robot is active today, which is good because it's been up around 27 our there, and things are mostly alright. It's nice.

Some serious winter weather came through most of BC in the last couple of days. In the Interior this manifested as being Very Cold; I don't think it ever got down below -40 but definitely approached it.

Here we got a bunch of snow, maybe fifteen cm on Sunday and then another thirty on Tuesday. On Sunday I foolishly went out to have brunch with Mya and a couple of her friends. I drove very slowly and carefully and only had the antilock brakes kick in a couple of times. I was still nervous coming home; I live on the side of a hill, so I could either try to go up and maybe get stuck, or try to go down and maybe just slide to the bottom and then get stuck, possibly crashing into things on my way. In the event it was fine, though a bit nerve-wracking.

The real problem is that I was supposed to fly north yesteday, so I'd be up there for solstice. Instead YVR cancelled something like 90% of all flights yesterday while the snow was falling. I was a complete wreck yesterday, trying to do work while getting ready to go and keeping an eye on the flight schedule, and ended up doing little work while failing to get ready to go. So I switched my flight to this morning. ("But your flight is still listed as ON TIME," the Westjet person said. Ha ha, good joke, everybody laugh. When I checked back later that night it too had been CANCELLED.)

So I hauled myself down to the airport this morning. I left myself extra time to get there and it still took twice as long as normal. If my flight hadn't been delayed I would have still made it (with minutes to spare, even) but it would have been a close thing. Alas, all for naught: I used the delay to get breakfast and by the time I was done it had moved into CANCELLED, along with many many other flights. Stupid airport.

So I'm at home on solstice night, alone with a cat who's decided that the proper way to express "play with me" is through teeth.

Vancouver in the snow, at least as seen from the skytrain, is gorgeous, I will give it that. Snow drifting on the evergreens, and snow on the soft lines of the rooftops, and the snow-dusty mountains in the background. If I had been more awake I would have enjoyed it more but it was still something of a balm.

There's a guy who's putting together a bus run from Prince George to Vancouver and back. If there's still a seat, I could take the bus north on Friday, and fly back here on Tuesday like I'd planned. Will see what shakes out from that.

Time is getting away from me rapidly, so have some odds and ends before I forget them entirely.

Last weekend I failed to find a condo in Vancouver, after looking at a half dozen. There's one that might work out; it's not yet on the market, but Rhonda the awesome realtor sold the person into the condo so she wrangled me a sneak preview. It's in New Westminster, which is Not Ideal but maybe less Not Ideal than other options. Bah. All were either too expensive or not pleasant to inhabit even for the short time I was viewing them. I hate house hunting in Vancouver. I don't know if I hate it elsewhere but in Vancouver it is a constant source of frustration.

Other living options might include "renting," which is problematic because the places in Van I know of to rent from are even less convenient than New West; Victoria, which might be fine and would certainly be cheaper but would entail starting over again on the social front; possibly somewhere with Erin?; and just staying put and being depressed. Always an option, that last.

Other than that I had a good weekend in Vancouver, crashing in Holly/James/Zee's new house (which they bought with Rhonda, whom I recommended, so I can take some small pride in that). It's a Vancouver century-old house: it has high temperature gradients and questionable remodeling choices, but it's also quite pretty. It's in the same neighborhood as my old condo. I miss that neighborhood.

As a consolation for house-hunting nonsense I bought myself a magnetic "wallet" (credit card sleeve) for my phone, because I wanted a better solution for transit passes and hotel keys. The wallet is pretty neat: it connects solidly and is mostly unobtrusive. It also, unsurprisingly, includes a location tag, so I can theoretically find it again if and when I leave it somewhere. No speaker, so I can't make it make noise, but still.

My new Macbook arrived. As noted elseweb, this computer cost more than my first car; to the left, the car caught fire after I'd had it for three years, whereas the Macbook boasts some significant advances in heat dissipation. Its footprint is very slightly smaller than that of my current machine despite having a larger screen (15" vs 16"); it's slightly thicker and not-slightly heavier. Other than that I have no opinion of it just yet, since it's still in the process of restoring from backup. It does look pretty; I'll certainly give it that. I don't expect to be using it nearly as hard as Pelorios, my current machine, so here's hoping it lasts longer than five years.

I finished Wyrd Sisters last week but it's being stubborn about being written up.

Snow and ice this week. Winter would appear to be here.

Snow in Vancouver, so of course I came back this week. It's been record-breakingly cold (minus teens, I believe), and the snow from the weekend hadn't melted when it dropped another I'm guessing 15cm last night / this morning. Translink is referring to it as "an extreme travel day" and recommending that people stay home.

I came in to work, mostly because I walked out the door of the coffeeshop where I got breakfast (poached eggs on smoked salmon on toast; not quite an Eggs Halifax but decent) and saw someone getting out of an Evo (Vancouver-based carshare). I was already Not Excited about sitting in my Airbnb and using the work VPN which spent last week being extremely flaky, so I snagged the car and took half an hour to drive the 5km to work.

This is I suppose better than back home, which got ~20cm of snow last Friday morning when we left and was reportedly minus forty degrees this morning.

... and now it's dumping something serious out there, again/still. Definitely time to head for "home".

I got a haircut today. I think the last professional haircut I got was a year or so after I moved to DC in 2006, and it wasn't all that pleasant an experience. Sometime after that Emily offered to snip my split ends, which she did once a year or so until 2017.

This one went pretty well: had a no-nonsense barber, which is the best kind of barber, who was happy to just lop off a couple inches of badly damaged ends and trim up along my neck. I feel a bit better. Gonna be weird trying to wash my hair in the morning, though.

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Last weekend I drove down from Fort to Vancouver (well, Burnaby, to stay at AirBnZee), and then the next day down to Seattle and back for Orpheus Descending rehearsal. Rehearsal went fine; the ritual/event is this coming weekend and I'm more or less looking forward to it.

On the way back I stopped in Bellingham, which is around halfway between Seattle and Vancouver (well, Burnaby). It's a neat little college town. Kelly lived there for a year when she was in grad school, and I visited her a few times, and then Emily and I used to pop down there two or three times a year. It's got a good music store, and two big used bookstores (I believe one has since closed), and a fantastic ice cream shop, and is just a pleasant downtown to walk around in. On Sunday the pouring rain stopped as I pulled up, and it was all autumnal and crisp and bright-leaves-everywhere and it just felt good to be there.

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On Monday I finally got around to writing down a list of all the things I want to accomplish while I'm in Vancouver. I understand why I've been feeling so overwhelmed for much of September. I'm used to having maybe a half dozen things hanging out that I feel like I need to do: go grocery shopping, or take out the trash, or whatever. The Vanlist had around twenty items on it. I hadn't realised it was quite that many.

Things have been coming off the list at a greater rate than they've been being re-added, which is helping a lot with the stress.

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One of the things on the list was to pick up a tenor recorder. Earlier this year I found my old soprano recorder from third grade, and it's been fun to noodle around on. It's a bit shrill, though.

G who's running music for Orpheus has written a simple woodwind theme for Pan, and she's got a nice wooden recorder (and I think she's borrowed a tinwhistle). I mentioned that I was thinking about picking up a tenor, and she sounded pretty happy about having that as a harmony.

It is Large, something like twice the length and three times the diameter of the soprano. My right hand aches a bit trying to stretch to reach all the notes. I do rather like the sound of it, though, when I can convince it to play notes and not squeak at me.

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I dunno. I'm tired. Maybe it's only four things this time.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

What are you reading right now?

Nearly through Max Gladstone's Last First Snow, the fourth or first Craft Sequence book. I did not expect urban planning to make a central appearance in these, though really I should have. I appreciated the awareness and explication of both sides (resident and developer) in the fight over the Skittersill slum. The book changes tone markedly about halfway through, of course: you know how this has to end, based on the status quo in Two Serpents Rise, but the change in tone is handled so deftly it's not really a problem that you're almost reading two different books.

One could in theory read these in chronological order: you'd lose the sense of dread and the familiarity of the characters of Elayne and the King in Red, which would I think detract from the book's atmosphere, but I guess you'd gain an appreciation for Temoc's arc. I dunno. Same argument as for Star Wars I-VI, and I don't buy it there either. I'm sympathetic to "Machete Order" (4-5-2-3-6) but I tend to think setup-payoffs mostly only work in the direction they're written.

Hm, the other comparison is eBear's first two Edda of Burdens books, where All The Windwracked Stars does a lot of heavy-lifting for the worldbuilding and By The Mountain Bound gives the tragic backstory. (And then, based on my one read of it, The Seas Thy Mistress doesn't satisfactorially pull them together, but I should reread them before passing judgement like that.) Yeah. I definitely prefer the sense of impending tragedy one gets from reading in pub order.

What did you just finish reading?

Reread of William Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy. I picked up a remaindered Pattern Recognition when I was working at Waldenbooks and enjoyed it better than I'd expected to. Then, before we moved to Vancouver, I went on a book binge-and-purge: things I hadn't read or didn't remember well got fifty pages and if I didn't like them, away they went. Pattern Recognition was one of two books where that resulted in acquiring /more/ books rather than fewer: I reread it, and enjoyed it enough to go in search of the rest. (The other was Walter Jon Williams's Metropolitan.)

So. Pattern Rec is deeply of its time. All three are, really, but it's especially noticeable in Pattern Rec, written in 2003 and set in 2002. An internet of forums, a lack of smartphones. It's about tech, in a time when the tech was changing rapidly, and that makes it a fascinating snapshot. It doesn't hurt that it's a great read, or that Cayce Pollard is just a lot of fun to hang around with. I want to reread it sometime soonish, so I can get a better feel for how it's playing with its themes. This is unlikely to be a hardship.

Spook Country is the reason I'm rereading these. Emily read them for the first time a couple of years ago and couldn't get over how solid and real Vancouver felt (in the second half of the book), compared to, well, every other setting he's written. And it's really neat to know exactly what he's talking about: the confusing array of bridges when you leave the airport, the ex-industrial area by the port. (I think I know exactly where Chombo's apartment is, and I am definitely going to look up the restaurant where Hollis et al meet up at the end.) As a book ... it feels slight, though a little less so than it did the first time I read it. Of the narrators, Milgrim's almost a nonentity, and he and Tito are interesting mostly for plot reasons. And I like Hollis Henry a little less than Cayce, both as a character and as a narrator.

Which is deliberate, I think, based on how Zero History turns out. Of the three it's the one I have the least sense for the shape of it. There's a lot going on in it, plotwise and character-relation-wise, and I don't think I managed to keep it all straight in my head. Intricate and exciting, and decidedly my kind of thing.

What do you think you'll read next?

Almost certainly an ebook, since all my physical books are now in boxes once more. Likely Craft #5.

Also, having re-read Pattern Rec, I really want to re-watch The Wire, to see if the sense of being Of Its Time is consistent across 2000s media (post-internet, pre-smartphone) or if it's specific to the tech-centricity of Pattern Rec.

A collection of strangenesses from various places. Posting about half of these in the hope that I'll get around to reading them if they're easily available on my work machine.

I have a story to tell about this man: "This is what set Mr. Rogers apart. No one else would have done this. He goes, 'Do you want to tell me what was upsetting you?'"

Neural networks can name guinea pigs: "Yes, despite having no concept of what these furry round rodents actually are, a neural network is indeed uncannily good at naming them."

Offline: "Disconnect to continue." Nothing groundbreaking or original in the content, but points for the form.

List: 11 Ways That I, a White Man, am Not Privileged:
"4. I fought against a history of social stigmas and systemic biases to get to claim the tiny space I occupy.
Oh no, wait, this might be getting away from me."

"Unbury the Future": Martha Wells' Full Speech from the 2017 World Fantasy Awards: "With the internet, it shouldn't be possible for that to happen again. But we hear an echo of it every time someone on Reddit says 'women just don’t write epic fantasy.'"

On the (un)livability of Rain City:

'We stand to wipe out a whole era': how the 1970s could vanish from Vancouver

I Left Vancouver Because Vancouver Left Me

Followup: Lament for a Lost City

More: (More) Laments for Lotus Land Lost

To read:

The Wanderer and the Wu Xing, a puzzle-game by a couple of acquaintances of mine.

The New Midlife Crisis

Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift

What the Ctenophore Says About the Evolution of Intelligence

Harvey Weinstein's Army of Spies, by Ronan Farrow, who knows something of what he writes. (Mildly startled to see Kroll referenced in the first paragraph, as they're the company I answered phones for back around the turn of the century.)

The tops of my thighs are serious about letting me know that they have been Used. Yoga this morning may have been an error in judgement; even on a good day 'powerful pose' is the devil incarnate, and today even the prayertwists were rough. Hoping for good things from the "continue to work/stretch those muscles rather than letting them freeze" plan.

Had my first dropped chain yesterday. I turned to head up a steep hill, shifted down to low gear in front, and couldn't figure out why I was pedaling and still losing speed. Walked up the hill, took a look, and convinced it to reseat on the gear with minimal fiddling. YAY I FIXED THE THING.

First ride in the light rain this morning. (Not that Vancouver really gets any other kind.) Rather pleasant, honestly. Kept me cooled down, kept me alert, feet didn't slip off the pedals too many times. Suspect I'm gonna want a rear fender sooner than later.

I spent some time yesterday and today studying the city's map of surprisingly comprehensive bike paths. Makes me want to get out and ride the seawall. Or Stanley Park. Or, hell, just through some of the more pleasant and interesting East Van neighborhoods.