Words are inadequate

I have Returned, and it is Good. Got in around ten-thirty Monday night; had a good sit on the couch with Mr Tuppert, who missed me, and then crashed. I tried to crash "pretty hard" but kept being ... it's not 'woken up' if you haven't fallen asleep, 'disturbed' I guess. Got around seven hours sleep all told.

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To the extent I had a Game Of The Week I guess it was 18India, an 18xx game where one has a hand of shares one can buy (some randomly dealt, some drafted) rather than all shares being available at all times. The game's doing some other neat things as well, with trains and gauge changes and track-laying. I played once and thought I liked it, then played a variant and thought I hated it. Turned out, when I played the base game again, that what I hated was in fact the variant, and the base game is more to my taste.

I also played a lot of Free Ride, a train game that I'd been thinking of as Friedemann Friese's Ticket To Ride but which Daniel Karp pointed out is more accurately Friedemann's Transamerica. I'd played once a few years ago and enjoyed it well enough but had trouble figuring out where the various European cities were on the uniformly-coloured map. Last year Friedemann came out with a USA version which a) is a more familiar map and b) colour-codes the cities into regions, so it's much easier to play. It's a good game. I'll likely be picking up one or both versions at some point.

And two games of Moon Colony Bloodbath, a sort of shared-event-deck-builder. You're nominally trying to build your moon colony, but really you're trying to have yours not be the moon colony that totally collapses due to bad luck and robot rampages. It's enjoyable but to me it feels like the gaming equivalent of empty calories. Everyone does their own thing, someone wins, shake hands and sure may as well play again. Then again this is how I felt about Dominion (same designer) way back when, and gamers do love them some Dominion, so there's clearly a market for that sort of thing.

Sometimes there are people that one just clicks with. For me at the Gathering that's the Massachusetts folks, who I originally thought of as "the 18xxers" and now only somewhat less accurately consider "Joe R--'s Discord". I don't really know what it is: mindset, outlook, humor, something. But I have a good time with them, and I feel ... better able to relax around them, or something. Always a pleasure.

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Steph arrived on Friday evening, so I shifted from 'gaming' to 'tourist/date' for the last few days. That was good: relaxing, after a week of Peopling, and comforting, and all such good things. We hit up an indie new/used bookstore on Saturday, of the "three levels and a maze of bookcases" variety. On Sunday we went down to the falls and wandered around.

We both flew out of Buffalo, which extended the goodbye a bit, and that was the right call too.

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Once more I have brought the plague back from Niagara. Sunday after touristing I started feeling a bit feverish, but tried to blame it on Too Much Sun. Monday, travel-day, the feverish remained along with clogged sinuses, which is No Way to travel by air. When it hadn't improved any by Tuesday I went ahead and tested and yep, two lines, though the one was faint and incomplete.

It's not as bad as last time. Yesterday I was more muzzy-headed than I think I was, but I think that has passed. The chest cough that started up yesterday has gotten slightly more serious. To the left, the sinus stuff may be letting up (or I may just be drugging myself more effectively), and I'm not noticing any taste deficiencies.

I have nowhere I need to be for another week at least, and only the one class. As things go this is about the best time to be laid up. Mr Tuppert approves of the increase in couch time as well.

It turns out that when you're a grown-up you can just make yourself a coffeecake and a big mug of tea and rewatch She-Ra and feel sorry for yourself, and no one can stop you. It's pretty neat.

I did not make the coffeecake in the toaster oven, because I did not feel up to dealing with a failed coffeecake. Also coffeecake calls for 375F, which is a temperature that my toaster oven does not do. It does temperatures by button pushes, which is a little weird, and the temp settings are labeled in both C and F, which is a little weird... and they increment by 20C. So there's 180C / 355F, which is close enough to 350 that's fine, and then 200C/390F, and then 220C/425F which is at least a real number. "Quirky," the reviews said. I am inclined to agree.

A friend writes My goal since March 2020 has been "do not give anyone covid" and honestly same. Like, I guess my main goal was "don't get it myself" and then "don't get it again" but "don't give to anyone else" has been pretty high up there as well. So I continue to wear masks on transit and indoors in public places as much as I can, and I limit my going-out-to-things, etc etc. It feels futile at this point but not doing it would feel futile and defeatist, so I continue.

I've put in to adopt a senior cat from the New West animal shelter. There was also an article today in a local newssite about how the shelter is overcrowded, so I may have a cat by the weekend. He comes with the name "Tuppert" which is phonemically awkward and may need to be changed. Then again when Jonathan C-- adopted his latest cat Walter he reported "we were going to change it to something more in line with our other cats, something like Derp Gently... but it turns out he answers to Walter, so we're kind of stuck with it." Tuppert is a reasonably handsome twelve-year-old tuxedo-ish. We shall see what comes of it.

And now I have a workmeeting in ten minutes, to bookend the workmeeting at seven AM every morning. The joys of working with a team based in India. At least I'm still employed.

Bah. I still have a nagging cough and probably will for another couple of weeks, because that is how respiratory illnesses do. I was supposed to go to a work conference this week but was foiled by Regulations (I needed an authenticated covid test from ten days before travel, and the home test I took wasn't authenticated).

On the bright side that meant that I could spend this week working on getting the apartment in order. I got replacement bookcases on Saturday, and at this point they're all pretty much full. I still have a dozen or two boxes, mostly of Misc, but ... it's coming together.

Meanwhile, Wednesday. One thing I have been able to do is read.

What are you reading now?

The chapbook that came with Elizabeth Bear's Bone And Jewel Creatures. I am embarking on a readthrough of her ... you know, I don't know that they have a name, but there's the two Messaline novellas, the Eternal Sky trilogy, and the soon-to-be-complete Lotus Kingdoms trilogy.

I like these. I'd forgotten that I enjoy Bear's writing, after the disappointment of Ancestral Night. I'm looking forward to becoming engrossed. And it feels good to dig into some of my physical books after they've been boxed up for a month.

What did you just finish reading?

Bone And Jewel Creatures, of course. Also Guards! Guards!, of which more tomorrow or Friday.

And Aspects, which I wrote a lengthy bit on elseweb that I shall preserve here:

When John M. Ford died in 2006 he left behind an extremely messy estate and most of the first novel of an ambitious fantasy trilogy. For reasons too arcane to get into here, the novel has finally been published, in its unfinished form. What you get for your time is an introduction to this rich complex fantasy world that is clearly drawing from 1850s England and is equally clearly its own thing, with a society in the midst of a great deal of change and a cast of characters that are hurt and damaged and trying o so hard to be careful and gentle with each other... and the beginnings of the ways the characters crash against that society and how they'll shape it. And then it just stops, with a couple of fragments from what would have been chapter 8, the last chapter of the first volume of the trilogy.

Chapters one and five are preceded by sonnets, and the published book includes four additional sonnets (plus a variant on the last one) for the rest of the proposed trilogy. So there are hints, just hints, of where Ford was likely going with the emotional/thematic journey.

It's incomplete. But my god, the characters and the worldbuilding are so, so worth it.

(And there's a lovely introduction by Neil Gaiman, which he put off writing for eleven years. It consists mostly of Neil trying to come to terms with the fact that his friend Mike is still dead, fifteen years later, and there really won't be any more brilliant insightful emails, or World Fantasy Award-winning Christmas cards... or chapters of Aspects.)

What do you think you'll read next?

Book of Iron, the second Messaline novella, and then on into Eternal Sky. Ebook, I have no idea, if anything.

The Gathering was good: lots of people, lots of gaming. No particular highlights/standouts, I think, but no real lowlights either. Played most of the games on my "i am curious about this" list, determined that I do in fact like most of them.

It was also, unsurprisingly, a massive plague chamber. More people started wearing masks on Wednesday, after the first positive test reports trickled in, in the manner of a farmer barricading the door to the barn once the horse has vacated. I had a supply of KN95s and an improvised head-strap so I wasn't relying on the painful-by-day-three earloops, and I seem to have mostly done alright. Random symptoms coming and going (runny nose! coughing! irritable stomach!) but nothing persistent.

Until yesterday, when I woke up feeling run-down and possibly-feverish and woozy. Took a rapid test and got a negative result, but it's my first time doing a test on myself so I may have screwed it up somehow. I'll try again this afternoon. It's also entirely possible it's just a nasty head cold, of the kind I've dodged for the last couple of years. I'll chow down on Tylenol and clean out my CPAP bits this evening (meant to do that yesterday but, well, woozy) and hopefully that will help to shake it.

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Moving-in continues apace. The bathroom is functional but requires a medicine-cabinet posthaste, or at least one of those racks you stand up behind/over the toilet. The bedroom is usable but I haven't finished setting up the bedside table. I am going to try rearranging the furniture in there: the current setup works but feels cramped, and I hope a different setup will feel less cramped and not sacrifice too much in the way of "works". I kind of want someone else to help me move things, though, and that's not happening until this weekend at the absolute earliest and more likely next weekend.

The kitchen is Organized, which is not the same as being unpacked. I need another shelf for one of the cabinets to put the tea on, and I need to unload the random condiments etc into the pantry, and I need to figure out a solution for a couple of pots and pans. It's mostly usable, though, so I also need to do a serious grocery run so I can stop eating restaurant food.

And of course the living room remains a disaster. I may have solved the bookcase problem thanks to Craigslist etc, but I still need to reattach the backs to the survivors, and move boxes so the bookcases can go against the walls that the boxes are currently against. Bah. I was hoping to get some of that done in the evenings, and I probably will, but the endless "move this here to move that there to move this over here" just feels overwhelming.

I am still annoyed at my movers. Jerks. This should have been ... not a non-issue but a solved problem by now.

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I am finally reading Aspects and it is amazing and delightful and I am mad that there won't be any more. So far (halfway through) it is a deeply Fordian character study. It sparks thoughts on, o, friendship, and damage, and the ways close-knit groups shift and work over time. I may have to reread it immediately.

The core, perhaps, is that I used to arrange my life in such a way that I knew what was coming: not just "tuesday is dinner-and-rpg, wednesday is counseling, one saturday a month is a big boardgaming day" but ... the feel of it. There was a rhythm to my life that I knew and understood and felt, bone-deep and everywhere. And within that rhythm I had plenty of time and space to break out of it: there's an interesting thing to go do this weekend, or this evening I want to write about a particular book, or I should get xmas presents for folks near and far.

For whatever reason, when I am entwined with Erin (probably "with anyone") I lose that rhythm. I enjoy, sometimes more sometimes less, the time I spend with her; that's not the issue. It's that it becomes difficult to impossible to live in the rhythm of my own life. I've been trying to push through, to find the rhythm again around and within that, for three or five years now, with scant success.

Case in point: I have no year-end roundup for 2019 or 2020, to refer back to and see how things compared. Some of that's cowardice and depression, knowing I was doing poorly and not being willing to face up to it. Some of it's the plague year and the malaise it brings. And some of it's that reflection takes time and energy, and finding those when my rhythm is disrupted is hard, sometimes impossible.

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So. 2021. The Plague Year Part 2.

I did travel last year, unexpectedly enough: I squeezed in an August run to Niagara and the Gathering before (or more accurately, in the midst of the rise of) the Delta variant. And I went down to Vancouver several times, mostly for gaming with Holly, Zee, and James. I'd like for more travel this year: I'm signed up for both the Gathering in early April and Beach Week with my DC ex-gaming-group in late May. We shall see whether the plague cooperates with these plans. To the left, I have no particular desire to play tourist. There are places I'd like to visit, for various reasons: Wales, Rome, Santorini... but I'm more interested in exploring where I land, rather than going somewhere specifically to explore. Like, oh, Farthing Party was a good excuse to wander around Montreal. That sort of thing.

My financial situation is dire enough that I will most likely be taking out a short-term loan from a friend to cover moving expenses. On the bright side, I didn't have to dip into my RSP to fund the condo purchase. I have no idea what my finances will look like in a year. At least the potential trips to the US are paid for: there's money waiting in a USD-denominated account to cover everything except airfare.

There's a sense in which I tried to fill up the void of the rhythm of my life with Things: fancy books, boardgames and RPGs I won't play, that sort of thing. One hopes that there'll be less need for that this year. But that will also take some return to specific discipline, telling myself "no." Which it's about time for anyway. An advantage of having a tiny condo, perhaps.

The other thing about money is that I did drop down to 80% time and pay back in April. The pay cut didn't matter as long as I was living here and not going much of anywhere, but, well. I'm expecting to ramp up my job search in the coming months, and I expect that a new job will be at full-time and for more money than I'm making now, so it'll be a more than 20% pay bump. Which will help. I don't know whether going back to full-time will be a mistake or not but there's really only one way to find out. (Run a blind A/B test cycle.)

My physical condition has consistently deteriorated over the last three years. Exercise for the sake of exercise seems to be nigh-impossible for me; yoga worked because it was a Thing that I went to do and someone else told me what to do there. Again, hopefully this will change when things become within walking distance and there is not a large hill (and a poorly-sidewalked highway) between me and groceries-on-foot. I suspect, though I do not know, that my body will still adapt relatively quickly to being moved and used again, and that my lungs will re-develop basic functionality. With any luck at all this will also aid in sleeping and maybe even in my basic self-image.

My social network has likewise deteriorated, which, again, no surprise. I played in an online RPG run by Joe in DC, which mostly served to reinforce that multi-person videochats are really not a good social milieu for me. I spent a lot of time with Erin, which was quite good except for the rhythm-breaking per above. I saw Sarah once for a few days in August, and djinn not at all. I've still got a handful of Vancouver connections for when I'm in person, and a handful of people to talk to online when I'm feeling up to that. Turns out the isolation is rougher on me than I would have thought. Oh well. One learns.

So what have I done, with my plague years, my northern years? I survived, mostly. I started learning to play the bass guitar, and then put that on hold while I'm playing viola for Sound of Music with the high school down the road. I read a bunch. I bought a condo. I became a little more bold about publicly adopting labels like 'autistic' or 'nonbinary.' I learned some things about who I'm not, and maybe about who I am.

I didn't learn how to talk to people, or how to want things in such a way that I can express it, even to myself, without putting fire to what's around me. I didn't learn how to negotiate or compromise or even fight. Three (!) years ago I thought that At this rate I might be a functioning human being in another decade or two. Ha, well. I suppose there's still time for that.

i'll walk home with snow falling
deep on frozen lawns
and i'll leave
all those others celebrating
all the things that they have done

The sun is out and it's a reasonable temperature (well, it's like ten or so, but that's reasonable enough) and for the first time I can remember I find myself wanting to sit on a porch/patio/balcony and read in the sunlight. Unfortunately the ground floor apartment that I took because a) cooler summers and b) cheaper rent (point c, more windows because corner unit, was a happy accident) doesn't have outside access. Oh well. I miss the balcony in New West, the one that looked out over the Fraser from thirty stories up.

I also miss people but that's nothing new. I am going through one of my periodic cycles of feeling functional again. Spite-viola-practice (because upstairs neighbours) has developed into actual-viola-practice. I sold off a number of boardgames I don't play much anymore, which has me thinking again about the ones I do play, or rather that I'd like to play. First vaccine shot brought with it a sense that All This will be over someday, but "someday" isn't today. Etc etc. For the last six months my world has been my apartment, the post office, the grocery store, and Erin's place, barring a trip out to Smithers over the solstice.

Dropping down to four workdays a week has not really decreased my frustration with work, mostly because work has stepped up the frustration to account for that, but it does seem to give me a bit more breathing space. I miss not being perpetually annoyed by work. I have determined that I am actually quite bad at management and I absolutely Do Not Want to do it, which, yay for self-knowledge but boo for being stuck here anyway.

I just want to go out for dinner with my book, and eat something that I don't have to cook but is still tasty and somewhat elegant. Been craving the cajun chicken alfredo from Zeppoli's in Blacksburg lately. Or, more likely, my memory of same, there's no way it's still as good as I remember it being. Dinner with my book and a movie at the AFI Silver, or the Pacific Cinematheque in downtown Vancouver, and then maybe wandering around afterwards with ice cream or gelato or something.

I miss you.

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.

Bah. Woken up sometime after three due to my apartment door swinging open and light from the hallway coming into my bedroom. Must have not latched it properly. Can't get back to sleep, but too tired to read.

Over the weekend, my mother posted to Facebook a copypasta of "i'm voting against joe biden and the democrats." It was probably one of those things where she said "oh yeah this sounds right" and didn't bother reading or analysing or engaging with the actual content. It's still taken up more room in my head than it deserves. I emailed her yesterday to ask about the bits that seemed to contradict things she'd said to me back in October. I don't really expect a response.

I'm afraid that between the plague and the move into the assisted-living facility, my parents have finally fully closed their epistemological loop. And this week I'm afraid, actually afraid, of another Trump victory. Like... even if he loses in November forty percent of the US is gone, lost to reason and to empathy, and that's horrific enough, but if he wins...

And now I'm thinking of Abby, my semiestranged friend who was arguably the first casualty of the Trump regime. She killed herself on election night 2016, on I think the assumption that the ACA would be repealed and she wouldn't be able to afford the MS drugs she needed. She is, somehow, the only person I've lost in the last four years. I don't expect that to hold true for another four.

I'm scared, and tired, and alone. It's Emily's birthday. It's the hour of the prickly pear, the year of the plague. I don't think I'm doing well but I'm hanging in. I just... continue to not be able to fully recharge, maybe.

I miss a sense of calm and routine and control over my life. I miss thinking further ahead than the next few days, I miss looking forward to things. Or having fixed points where I knew what was coming next. Or maybe having more or more varied spaces and activities where I can feel like /me/.

I'm roleplaying again, every other Monday afternoon (Monday evening East Coast time). The system is Savage Worlds, which I know only by reputation; the world is RIFTS, late-eighties teenage powergamer fantasy. So far it's confirmed that I dislike multi-person Zoom calls. It's also reminded me that I have an absolute limit on the number of people involved in a game that I'm playing in, which this is bumping up against (the limit's eight; I won't run a game for more than five and that's pushing it, but I'll play in slightly larger groups). And that RPG combat scenes are not what I game for. And despite all that it's good to get my hands back into role-playing, and next session promises to be less fighty. Vaguely stirring up ideas of running something myself, though I don't know what. Or for whom, or when. I just want more... more like that, somehow.

These days it somehow takes me a minute to summon up my birthplace, and when I do it always feels weird. "Oh, right, I guess I was born in Oklahoma. Huh." (Sill; lived there for the first nine months of my life before we moved to Broussard, Louisiana, which we also left before I was able to form memories.) I can still call up my father's Social Security number, though. At least I no longer get confused as to whether it's his or mine. Weird legacies of a military brat childhood.

Apparently sitting around waiting for work is not entirely unstressful. The VPN went down yesterday morning and didn't come back 'til sometime after two pm, on a day when I was meant to be sorting out the workload for the rest of the team. Couldn't really relax because I felt I had to keep checking every half hour or so to see if the VPN was back; couldn't do much because, well, no access to my machine. (For historical reasons involving the Horrible Awful IT Guy I don't have a work laptop, and instead remote-desktop into my work machine. This is as painfully slow as it sounds, but it does mean I only carry one computer when I travel.)

In general I disapprove strongly of how minor changes and setbacks are intensely disruptive to my ability to function, these days.

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I finally finished Counterpart a couple of weeks ago. Counterpart is two seasons' worth of Cold War spy show with a skiffy veneer. The conceit is that in 1987 a physics experiment in Berlin created a permanent crossing between our world and another one that was just like it, but of course they started diverging in tiny ways almost immediately, and then more so when a flu pandemic decimated one world's population in the 1990s. There's an air of paranoia and bureaucracy, low-tech spy stuff and moral grey areas, and some amazing character work by (among plenty of others) JK Simmons and Olivia Williams playing two different versions of themselves. It's very much my thing, despite being a little slow at times. The show ends... acceptably; you can tell they were hoping for a third season but didn't necessarily expect to get one.

I also binged the last season of The Good Place a week and a half ago. This show... this show. It is, I think, the second multi-season show I've seen (after Avatar) that had an entirely satisfactory ending. And yes, I cried quite a bit during the finale, but what do you expect when it's all about needing to leave the people you love. Really just fantastic work, all around.

Last spring Erin bailed on Moffatt Doctor Who midway through S5 (specifically, midway through "Vampires of Venice"). I've picked it back up this week. Matt Smith's Doctor is starting to grow on me, and I'm reminded that it took me about half a season to come round on Tennant as well. Amy Pond may be less aggravating than her original presentation as well. It's hard to say, because the Amy-and-Rory dynamic is so bloody annoying and awful, and the writers really don't have much respect for Rory. I shall grit my teeth and stick with it, and hope that either that improves, or/and the next Companion (Clara?) irritates me less.

UPDATE: Erin hopped back on board for "Vincent" and has continued. Amy-without-Rory was in fact less annoying, and Amy-and-Rory in general are less obnoxious in S6 when the writers start occasionally giving Rory something to do. Steven Moffatt unfortunately still Steven Moffatts the hell out of everything, to include River Song. "Let's Kill Hitler" was mostly hilarious, but the revelation that River's spent her whole life pursuing the Doctor... feh.

And there's a new season of Kipo (yay!), and I have all of Steven Universe which I am watching very slowly because at this point midway through S1 it's still too saccharine for my taste, and there's plenty of other stuff around too.

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And hey, it's Wednesday.

What are you reading right now?

Ancestral Night, by eBear. Big giant space opera, set in the same universe as the Jacob's Ladder books but several hundred years later. (Grail is summarized in passing in a couple of paragraphs on page 86.) It is slow going. Langorous, is I think the word. Lots of neat stuff, some high-tension scenes, and the pace just feels slow. I'm enjoying the ride quite a bit so far but it's a bit more effort to stick with than I had expected.

In ebook, The Weight of the Stars by K. Ancrum, which I picked up because it was on e-sale. YA? Near-future, about a teenage girl who's trying to befriend another girl whose mother vanished on a space mission just after she was born. It feels rough: the prose, the plot, the characters, all aren't quite... believable, maybe. But it's interesting and it's got heart.

What did you just finish reading?

Network Effect by Martha Wells was everything I could possibly have hoped for in a novel-length Murderbot book, and then some. (Except for more Gurathin. I like Gurathin! I liked having someone around who didn't like Murderbot!) I especially loved new SecUnit "Three" and its completely different yet still wholly believable response to freedom. So many good things about this book. These books. So glad I picked up the first one.

What do you think you'll read next?

Well, I've got A Game Of You sitting on my coffee table, I'll read that at some point. Other than that I don't really know. I've got Suzanne Palmer's Finder and Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire remaining from the Great Space Opera Flood of 2019. And more ebooks than a stick can be shaken at, as well.