jazzfish | Entries tagged with travel

I'm in Minneapolis with Steph and two round cats, and the sun is shining.

I flew through Saskatoon this time, for reasons that escape me but probably had to do with it being half the price of a direct flight. The flight to Saskatoon was pretty full; Sask-Mpls had somewhere under forty people (I counted), on a 32x6-seat plane.

Having no one else in your row in economy feels positively luxurious.

I've some homework to do today, and some to do in the next few days. I promised to make banana bread today as well. Mostly I'm enjoying the sunshine and the company.

LUCAS: You know, I think things are gonna be alright now, Joe.
JOE: Oh? And what makes you think that?
LUCAS: Who knows where thoughts come from? They just appear.
--Empire Records

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I'm traveling I bring a travel electric kettle, because I hate when my tea tastes like hotel coffee. I don't bring loose tea and a teaball, or even disposable teabags, because that's too much mess/hassle for a temporary space.

Instead I drink bag tea. Usually Stash Double Bergamot Earl Grey, though this time it's Bigelow Constant Comment because I haven't had that in at least a decade.

Today I realised: I drink flavoured tea when I'm traveling because the questionable flavouring masks the sense that the tea itself just isn't that good.

Better than No Tea, though.

>INVENTORY

You are carrying:
No tea

>TAKE TEA

No tea: dropped.

--Adams/Meretzky, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

In the event I made it through customs easily. My customs agent was a dead ringer for grumpy John Cena. He asked for my citizenship (US) and passport. and then glared at the passport and his comupter screen for about thirty seconds. I had enough time to start getting nervous and also to notice that his biceps were the size of my head before he handed my passport back without a word. I'll count that a win.

I'm in Niagara, at the Gathering, saying hi to folks and playing a bunch of games. There's sufficient variety and sufficiently pleasant social that even when I get stuck in a 2.5-hour game that is emphatically Not For Me it's still a decent time. And it's good to see people I know and who know me, and to feel, well. At home, maybe.

They've been issuing special black badges for folks who've been to at least twenty of these since before I started coming (which was I think number 24 or 25). Last year or this they started giving 'grey' badges to people who've been to at least ten, and I was a little startled to realise that yep, that's me. I'm pretty bad at recognising when I've become A Regular at a thing. In my head I'm stuck as The New Guy, there's plenty of folks who've been around longer than I have.

It's Sunday night. Four and a half more days of gaming and Gathering, and then Steph gets here for two and a half days or so, and then homeward. I do miss my kitten. I don't miss the rest of home, not yet, but I can see that from here. For now, things are good. I appreciate that.

Well. I just had the fastest checkin / security experience I've ever had at YVR: no one in line ahead of me to check in, two slightly slow people in the fast line at security. I think the time from stepping off the train to thru security was on the order of ten minutes, and most of that was walking from one end of the domestic terminal to the other and back again.

The gate isn't empty, but it's not as crowded as I expect the Toronto redeye to be. I'm okay with that.

What are you reading now?

Just started Melissa Scott's Dreamships, about which I know pretty much nothing except that Steph is a fan of Scott's work. (I think I read one or two of hers before moving here but they did not survive the Great Cross-Country Purge.) It's enjoyable so far.

What did you just finish reading?

For some reason I had a strong desire to read Gene Wolfe's four-volume crypto-Catholic generation-ship epic Book Of The Long Sun. I think this is somehow only my second reread; might be my third. I can confirm that the crypto-Catholicism is ... not really all that crypto. On the other hand the ending of "and then a bunch of us got on the lander and went down to the planet, and it turned out the Pope had been a vampire from the neighbouring Vampire Planet all along, the end" is more telegraphed than I remember. Though it helps if you remember the Pope really is a vampire from a previous read. (Er. Spoilers for a thirty-year-old tetrology, I suppose, though honestly if you're paying attention you find out the Pope is a vampire early in the second or third book.)

These are very Wolfean books, by which I mean they excel at doing the thing where something happens that means one thing to the characters in the book and quite another to the reader. They also have an awful lot of scenes of the main character explaining things to other people, which is less fun. But they're good, and there's not much out there like them.

Before that, Martha Wells's Books of the Raksura. I like these a little less on this read, I think. Partly it's that they're overflowing with characters that I have difficulty telling apart. Partly it's that they lean into the fantasy trope of The Evil Race. The final duology tries to undermine that, with the hybrid queen whose name escapes me but who is trying so hard... but then Wells brings in the groundling race who've decided that killing everyone else is fine if it means it kills off all the evil Fell as well. They're still enjoyable, they still have great characters with complex and real-feeling relationships. Just ... not quite as solid as I'd like.

What do you think you'll read next?

Beats me. Something else in ebook, since I only brought one paper book (Wells's City Of Bone). When I get home I may read Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun, the sequel trilogy. Or I may not; I remember it as being extremely depressing, mostly because it's narrated by someone who's not sure who he is and is extremely depressed about it.

Cripes, it's been a month. I knew I'd been doing poorly but hadn't realised it was quite that poorly.

I've been telling myself I've just been head-down on my practicum, which is true but not ... not an answer, not a reason, not complete. I've been head-down on my practicum, working full-time while also taking an advanced-level class (Databases 2, aka "big databases and how they store geographic data"), and that's a decent amount of work output. The practicum has taken particular effort to Keep Going, for reasons I'm not wholly clear on but which therapy has given me at least some insights into.

But everything has just been Difficult and I would rather sit on the couch and Not Think about any of it. I need to start looking for a job, which means I need to figure out where I'm looking for a job, since the BC Public Service is not even considering hiring anyone at all until probably July at the earliest. Add to that all the nonsensical horror / horrific nonsense from Down South and, well. Much easier to hide in front of the television.

So, this is the last week of my practicum. I'm making cookies to bring in to the office tomorrow, partly because I haven't done any baking for work at all and partly because making cookies is making a thing and that at least feels like ... progress, or accomplishment.

I'm pleased with what I've gotten done for the practicum. I spent the last three months creating new fire-centre maps of the Provincial radio repeaters, so that folks going out into the field will be better able to tell which repeater they're supposed to be talking to. It's not nearly as much as I'd wanted to do, or expected to do; institutional barriers and my own inexperience both worked against me there. But it's a start, and what I've got will be helpful.

It's also been feeling pointless, and it took me til today in counseling to work out why: not pointless in the sense of "the work is pointless busywork that no one will use," the way too much of my work for the last twenty years has been, but rather in the sense of "i will likely never see these people again." I'd wanted my practicum to be a first step towards BC government employment, and that's not happening, or if it is it's not for quite some time. So: marking time, staying apart, not getting involved, same military-brat playbook I've always run when it's spring and we're moving this summer.

I am proud of the PDF maps, though. Eventually they'll be up on the Provincial radio system website, and I'll put up a link then.

The Databases course is done (88%, coincidentally the same grade I got in DB1 under Stupid Rob). The only coursework I have left is Management Issues In GIS, aka "how to deploy an enterprise GIS system," and a final recorded-presentation and written-report on the practicum.

And then I'm done with schoolwork, again. I don't know what happens after that, other than "I look for a job in what seems likely to be an abysmal economy." I'm pretty deeply worried about that part but on the other hand there is literally nothing more I can do about it, so, shrug-emoji.

I'm going back to Niagara in a little over a week. I'm also nervous about that: making a land crossing in upstate New York with an X-gender passport does not thrill me with anticipation. I guess I can continue to be a useful coal-mine-canary: if I, a pale-skinned US citizen, get any trouble, that ought to indicate something.

I'm letting several folks, on both sides of the border, know when I'm crossing, and will ping them again once I'm through. I wish I thought I were being paranoid.

I love you. Stay safe and take care of each other.

Phone call 1: call Purolator to ask them where the hell my new suitcase is; last tracking update was Thursday morning of "undeliverable". Put in for a callback "within 45 minutes". No call back.

Phone call 2: call Delta to ask them to refund the $55 they charged me to check a bag on Monday morning. Westjet said "yeah they shouldn't have charged you but since they did we aren't going to give you any money, call delta." Delta insists they were right to charge me.

Phone call 3: call Purolator again and sit on hold for two hours. I suspect they have not actually staffed their phones on the weekend and will try again Monday morning.

This after Westjet bumped me to a later flight home yesterday and then delayed that flight by an hour, resulting in me not getting in til after midnight.

Bah. I have had a snack and shall attempt to do something else useful / constructive.

Current Mood: angry

or "Blackened Spaghetti" if you will

Turn the back burner on medium-high because this stove is old / underpowered. Put the pot on the back burner and add some olive oil.
Sautee some onions and garlic.
Add some carrots (yes) and bell pepper. If you had ground beef this is when you'd add it and brown it.
Add a can of crushed tomatoes (normally I'd use pureed tomatoes, or stick-blend them for a minute) and a bunch of mushrooms, and some more water.
Wait til it all comes to a boil.
Turn the front burner to Simmer.
Check on it in forty minutes or so. Swear because it's boiled dry and burnt to the bottom of the pot.
Have salad with leftover chicken and potatoes for dinner instead.

Unfamiliar stoves are the worst. Thankfully the pot was anodized, and pouring some more water to deglaze worked pretty well.

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 am home, after having been away for two weeks, which is (it turns out) a long time. Mr Tuppert has mostly forgiven me for the twin indignities of leaving him alone and then brushing him vigorously.

In Minneapolis I visited Uncle Hugo/Edgar's Bookstore(s) and met some of Steph's friends, and also her two cats. Then in Fort I petted a lot of cats and not a few dogs, and stacked wood and fed geese and pigs and helped plant some ritual-space trees. Also I made a second key lime pie (with normal limes instead) and it turned out pretty well.

I finished my classes and I believe I passed them all, for credential-granting values of "passed." Pretty sure I did quite well in three and acceptably well in a fourth. As for the fifth, I consider it a triumph that I managed as well as I did. Bah. And I have at least one and possibly/probably two more classes with this instructor.

I have also received an unexpected US$2000 check from the IRS. I have no idea why (I have a couple of theories but that's all they are) (UPDATE: It is in fact the stimulus payment from 2020/2021 that I missed, plus interest), and after spending an hour plus getting Verified, the account page is useless. So tomorrow I will spend some time On Hold figuring that out. Tomorrow is also for groceries and journaling.

Tonight is for petting the cat and staring at the wall. And also blathering about books, because Wednesday.

What are you reading now?

Deadhouse Gates, Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen #2 of 10 and then some. This one has taken a bit to spin up, I guess in the same way that Gardens of the Moon (#1) did, but it's rolling along quite nicely now. I'm enjoying most of the characters and much of the complex worldbuilding. My sole problem is that I can't tell if I want to be reading an ebook or not.

What did you just finish reading?

Rereads of Gideon/Harrow/Nona The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Gideon remains a triumph of imaginative storytelling, narrative deftness, and voice, and I unreservedly recommend it. Harrow feels sluggish and pointless until three-fifths through (specifically, page 302 of 500ish) but the last two hundred pages are worth the price of admission. Nona does almost exactly the same thing but on reread I find Nona hanging out with the kids to be less annoying than Harrow's angst. On the other hand, to quote Douglas Adams, "I think this is getting needlessly messianic." If I wanted to read far-future sci-fi with crypto-Catholic mysticism I'd reread Gene Wolfe. And sometimes I do want that! Here it just annoys me. (Granted, I am partly annoyed because Camilla Hect, the absolute best character in the series, has been SPOILERed.)

What do you think you'll read next?

Deadhouse is gonna occupy me for awhile. If I'm wanting something hardcopy I might dig into The Saint Of Bright Doors which I picked up in Mpls, after seeing recommendations from a rather diverse set of people. Or I might get into one of my Silvia M-G books. Or I might reread Fonda Lee's Green Bone books. Who knows.

Look, last week was a stressbomb shitshow, to the extent that I spent the entire weekend recovering and I'm not sure I'm there yet. Very little of it was my stress, at least, but: while Erin was down here visiting me things just Went Wrong: misplaced car keys, weird family drama at her brother's wedding, massive migraine attack that looked like norovirus, chaos at the farm that the farmsitter was ill-prepared for, etc etc. I'm glad she was here but oof. Insert old truism about needing a vacation from one's vacation.

The week before that was unambiguously good, though. Erin came down that Sunday (this is, um, two weeks and a day ago), and the next day we drove down into Washington state where Sherry the potter is. I then spent several days surrounded by trees and light and working potters, and it was Good For My Soul. I even got, mm, call it two-thirds through the initial comments on Blood On Her Hands that I've been sitting on since November.

Sherry's a working potter who makes mugs and plates and bowls and things for various faires and events and such. Erin has been getting back into pottery this past year, which has been lovely to see. I don't engage myself; I've not tried anything with clay since elementary school but I expect it would run afoul of the 'fine motor control sucks' thing and the 'visual arts are not my language' thing, and I'd get frustrated. So I looked in on what they were getting up to and wrote and cooked breakfasts and walked and relaxed somewhat.

Mostly I just enjoyed being in a space that felt right. There's green here but it takes a little doing to get to. And of course there's green up north. But conifers are not the forest of my heart. Apparently I did in fact imprint on a place as 'home' and that place is the Virginia Appalachians. More than that, though, there was light, and space to move and breathe, and just a sense that it was, I dunno. Safe, or something. That's not wholly right but it's not completely wrong either.

Anyway. I'm home and on my own here now, catching up on schoolwork and cat-petting, and seeing if getting out on my bike is in fact good for me. I feel like the last month or so was a jumble of not-much and I'm not sure why. Might need a meds adjustment. Might just need to poke myself into Doing Things a bit more. Will try the latter, and if that doesn't work then look into the former.

I've missed you. I hope you're well.

Yesterday was all travel all the time: a three-hop flight from Cleveland to home. Turns out three flights is Just Too Many Flights. I was ready to be home about the time we were taking off from Calgary to Vancouver. In the event I rolled in shortly before midnight, unpacked my CPAP, and went to bed. Mr Tuppert was happy to see me at least. He's happier today when I'm Behaving Properly, sitting in the work chair and petting him. (And, yep, there's the demand for playtime.)

But: I am Home. I have my cat and my tea, in a mug that Erin made special for the eclipse. (Beautiful coppery glaze with a black sun.) I know I used to go straight back to work from a redeye and I am unclear how I managed that. Younger, I guess, and more willing to push through / ignore pending exhaustion. It's easier when someone else is telling me what to do, too.

Today: schoolwork, cat, and hopefully eclipse journaling. And also books.

What are you reading now?

One of the few advantages to not being at the Gathering right now is that my copy of Lyorn (Taltos #17) showed up while I was eclipsing. (Being eclipsed? Probably more accurate but sounds less good.).

Lyorn opens with a dedication to Mike Ford, "because it breaks my heart that I can't show it to him." Five pages in I said "Oh, because it's a theatre book." Two pages later, and less amused, I said "Oh, because Steve thinks he can write How Much For Just The Planet?." (Planet is JMF's Star Trek novel in the form of a musical comedy.) So far, thirteen pages in, we've had versions of "Modern Major General" and "My Favorite Things". I am still interested but my side-eye is armed and waiting. Which, it occurs to me, has been my response to most of the Taltos books post-Tiassa. (That one included the in-retrospect-prophetic line "I was told you think you're funny. That's alright, I think I'm funny too.")

I've also read a couple of chapters of Gardens of the Moon, the first book in Steven Erikson's ginormous fantasy sequence Malazan Book Of The Fallen. It's good: a bit more grim than I've been into lately, but good. Looking forward to getting back into it.

What did you just finish reading?

Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire (Hexarchate) trilogy. The first, Ninefox Gambit, remains my favourite: I quite like Cheris as a viewpoint character, and the occasional missives from one opposing character to another were a lot of fun as well. I -think- Raven Stratagem, the second, is probably the best of them? It's doing a bunch of interesting things with the plot and with the ideas of, well, empire. I'm not as fond of Brezan's narration, though. And Khiruev, the character who spends the most time with Cheris (who mostly doesn't get viewpoint anymore), is interesting but reminds me how much I miss Cheris.

On first read these felt like a duology with a third book tacked onto the end. I'm seeing a lot more thematic coherence this time, and I appreciate Revenant Gun more for it. It's not going to ever be a favourite but it's a fine conclusion to the trilogy. And the servitors, the intelligent robots, are some excellent characters too.

What do you think you'll read next?

Apart from Malazan? I've also started on Lee's collection Hexarchate Stories, and will doubtless finish it. At this point I am unfortunately prepared to concede that short story collections are Not For Me Anymore. I read an awful lot of them in junior high and high school, and then... I slowly dropped off. And now I have trouble switching gears from story to story. I still enjoy the stories quite a bit but multiple in a row have become difficult.

(I also hope against hope that Commonweal #6 will see the light of day sometime soon, but that depends heavily on Graydon's mental and financial state.)

Oh hey, it's been a minute.

( ADHD )

( Classes )

( Cat )

( Travel )

Overall? Things are good, I think. I'm worried about money and the future but that's a future problem. Right now I'm ... mostly happy. It's nice.

Between the rainygrey sky, the end of DST, and the contrast with overly-sunny Tampa, I feel pretty much like I've been in a cave all day.

Tampa was a delight. As expected, Tuesday post-redeye I had a very limited amount of functionality. I had a nap and Steph shepherded me out to dinner and I slept well that night, and as expected that seems to have done the trick. I will continue to fly redeyes going east. I still don't much care for the Atlanta airport. Tampa's is ... fine. It does have a giant statue of an underwater flamingo, which is pretty cool. Barring very strange circumstances I doubt I'll be through there again, and that's okay too.

Steph spent days at her conference, while I did classwork and walked around a bit in the thirty-degree November weather wtf. Evenings we spent together, having dinner or watching a show or talking, basking in presence.

Thursday evening we went out to the eclectic Tampa art gallery, which featured a largeish exhibit on The Ancient World next to a room filled with contemporary Mexican scuplture next to American Impressionists. I got to see black-figure Greek vases in person for I think the first time, and a Monet, and maybe a dozen or so works that really caught my attention. (In particular there was an unfinished portrait study of a woman with as much character as, and a more forceful presence than, the Mona Lisa.) It's been a very long time since I've been to an art gallery. My recollection is that the Vancouver art gallery is in a terrible space (former courthouse) and not that great a collection, but maybe I'll stop in sometime. Noted: art galleries are a Thing I Enjoy. (Likely extendable to museums in general?)

Saturday we said our goodbyes and I flew off to Toronto (still the worst airport I won't pay money to avoid, and the other option was LAX which I WILL pay money to avoid), where I had a five-hour layover in the fancy lounge. Then the flight was inexplicably delayed for forty-five minutes. I stumbled home at two-thirty in the morning, to a cat who was happy to see me, and proceeded to sleep soundly for all of about four hours until my east-coast-time brain decided I'd slept in long enough.

Today I think I'm mostly recovered from travel. I've done my EI filing and ordered groceries to be picked up in a few hours, and fed myself. There was a nasty windstorm in the lower mainland on Friday night / Saturday morning and it looks like it took out power to the BCIT data centre, so I'm unable to log in for any of my classes. Should be fine: I'm caught up on lectures and homework is done through Tuesday, and I at least have the assignments downloaded so I can poke at them even if I can't complete them.

It's nice to be home, for sure.

And so after just over twenty-one years, I got to go to another concert with Steph.

I'd managed to forget, or not really process, that the concert wasn't just "Dessa" but "Dessa with the Minnesota Orchestra." So: full orchestra, Dessa, a rotating cast of five or six additional backing vocalists, and another rapper who I assume is also from Doomtree, the hip-hop collective she's a part of. I have no idea how long the show was, must have been at least two hours. Orchestral arrangements ranging from "decent" to "mindblowingly good." And Dessa of course gives a fantastic show.

She didn't play the songs I'd most hoped to hear (for future reference: "Matches to Paper Dolls," "Dutch" which I will likely never hear live because it treads the same lyrical/thematic ground as the objectively superior "5 Out of 6,", and "Life on Land" which has been stuck in my head off and on for coming on a month now). But she did her big hits, ending the first half with "5 Out of 6" and at the close of the night playing "Fire Drills" as the encore. And on "The Chaconne" the concertmaster played the Bach Chaconne, which is arguably how the song should have been conceived to start with.

(The "song without verbs" was Talking Business. I'd noted it as being extremely impressionistic, kind of like a movie in still photographs. I hadn't realised that that was a result of "no verbs," though that makes sense.)

Big energy, fun patter, a crowd that's happy to be there. I had a really good time. I've not really had a night Out in awhile. I didn't really get dressed up any fancier than usual but it still felt good. Would concert again. (Good thing, since I've already got a ticket for the Seattle show at the beginning of October.)

And after that I blipped up north for a quick low-key date with Erin, and that was good as well. We talked a decent bit, which we're starting to get back in the habit of doing, and it feels ... a bit safer than it has in the past? Like we're actually connecting? Like I'm able to actually connect instead of being desperately terrified, I guess.

August has been an alright month so far. It's nice.

And ... that's a draft? 7269 words. There's another couple hundred I can and probably will cut, a short scene that's a useful transition but I'm not sure it's doing enough else to justify its existence. And likely plenty of places I can trim as well.

And of course I've been staring at it long enough that it's reached the point of "this is terrible, why did i ever think this would be good." I will let it sit for a few days and then see what if anything I can do for it on my own, and then I guess I'm looking for critiques.

Tomorrow morning I get up far too early to fly to Minneapolis for Stephanie's birthday (early) and a Dessa concert. This is somehow only the second concert I've been to with Steph, and the first in twenty-one years, after it turned out she was going to the same David Bowie (and Moby, and Blue Man Group, and a couple of other acts) show I was and thanks to a no-show friend of Sarah's I could get her a better seat.

I've been listening to Dessa off and on since December, by which I guess I mean mostly "on." It's been a very long time indeed since I've taken this deep a dive into a musical artist. I dunno. Spectacularly dense lyrics, a sensibility that's by turns sharp, wry, and kind, and pop-ish music that all sticks in my head well.

Some music:

Shrimp (45 seconds, lyric video)
Blush
5 Out of 6
Matches to Paper Dolls (not a video, sadly)

(She's playing another show in Seattle in early October, which I am strongly considering going down for, depending on how school is going at that point. It's on a Thursday night which may not be ideal.)

Anyway. Concert and Steph, for a couple of days, and then north to Prince George for a couple of days with Erin. Then home again home again and time to sort through my various financial aid options.

I'm not doing everything I'd like to be doing every day, but I'm doing some of it. I'm enjoying where I'm at, I think. Curious to see how slamming into school intersects with that.

Fourth Street Fantasy may well be the con of my heart. It is small (somewhere over a hundred attendees this year), it's a single panel-track so you can talk about the panels with everyone and they probably saw them too, it's surrounded by walkable lunch and dinner options. Most importantly it is friendly. A few folks take on the role of Meal Ambassadors and during scheduled lunch and dinner breaks wrangle a small group off to a local restaurant. I continue to dislike Large Group Restaurant Meals but six or so people makes for good company, and there's plenty to talk about. I expect I'll be back next year, and for longer. (Perhaps the writing seminar on Friday, certainly the post-con party Sunday evening.)

My sociability is evidently still fairly rusty, so I found it easier to mostly talk to people I didn't know at all. But I did at least manage to say hello to everyone who I knew would be there. Part of going for longer next year is so that I can be both rested and sociable, and not staggering around feeling like I just got off a plane.

As always, hanging out with writer-types awakens the part of me that wants to write. So I've opened Scrivener for the first time in *mumble* years and ... I'm still fond of that one story that I haven't yet managed to put a satisfactory climax to. But it might be doable, now, at least doable enough that I wouldn't be too embarrassed to send it to someone and say "hey, can you tell me if this works?" I have time and space to do that in, too, I think.

I also got to spend some time with Steph, and that was quite good as well. She's still in the same house she was in when I visited in 2006. As I'm now on my ninth residence since then I'm extremely impressed by the consistency. I loaned her Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans's 'goth Jumanji' comic DIE; she in turn loaned me Salman Rushdie's Haroun And The Sea Of Stories, which I am enjoying immensely.

I committed a minor tactical error in my trip back. My flight back left Minneapolis at ten and landed in Winnipeg shortly before midnight, and then left Winnipeg at six AM to get into YVR at seven. "That's okay," I told myself, "I can just sleep in the airport, there's plenty of benches there." I had reckoned without going through customs in Winnipeg and thus getting stuck on the wrong side of security. Airports have at least some measure of, I don't know, privacy or protection or something. Airport lobbies are deeply uncomfortable places to pass any amount of time. If airports are liminal spaces existing only to pass from one real place to another, the airport lobby is the liminal space's liminal space. In the end I slept for about an hour and a half, once the cleaning crew had left.

Mr Tuppert is pleased that I've come home. He's been politely demanding scritches and occasional bouts with the string or the red dot.

For reasons that are unclear to me, the first-year Suzuki strings song "Lightly Row," which is written in Dmaj, ends on an F#. If you know any music theory you are probably twitching just a bit right now. If you don't: I don't know how to describe it other than that songs have a pitch (or two) that they're "supposed" to end on, that when the song ends on that note it Feels Right and when it doesn't, it Feels Really Off.

Thing is, I knew this in fourth grade and I called it out, and all my teacher said was "well... it doesn't end on a D, it ends on F#, so just play it like that." Which, argh. TEN-YEAR-OLD ME WAS RIGHT DAMMIT.

Currently rereading Kat Howard's An Unkindness Of Magicians, because I remember almost nothing about it and the sequel's here. Mostly what I remember is that I devoured it in the space of like three days around solstice '21, in the midst of an enjoyable trip to the different smallish town of Smithers. So I figured it'd be good, but I had no context other than that. Can confirm: it's good. Hoping to have more coherent to say about it.

I've been meaning to go to 4th Street Fantasy literally since it started up (again?) in like 2008. But at first it collided with Origins, a gaming con that was the highlight of my summer, and then I moved and stopped going to Origins but at that point adding another stateside con seemed expensive. And then it more or less fell off my radar. I'd see people talking about it every spring and think "oh right, that would be neat, maybe next year."

Anyway, it's in Minneapolis, which means I can combine "go to the con i've been meaning to go to for ages" with "see steph for a bit". So, going to 4th Street this year. Maybe I'll see you there?

I am feeling shockingly functional this week. Here's hoping that maintains. And that it's sustainable when I'm doing actual income-related program activities.

I've made it to Niagara, where I can attempt to regrow my brain, at least a little.

This was a rough travel. It didn't help that the night before I only got around three hours' sleep: woke up out of a weird Twin Peaks-ish nightmare before two AM, couldn't re-settle. Or that the Amtrak train from Toronto to Niagara NY was cancelled due to track maintenance, so I had to do the multi-transit hop, light-rail to bus to walk (or, in this case, taxi) to the border to the hotel. In the event I slept minimally on the plane due to a small child kicking my seat, ongoing conversations, and at least one person playing a video game without headphones.

It turns out that being able to hear other people's electronic devices really grinds my gears. Not just "annoys me" but renders me unable to concentrate on anything else. I ended up putting in my earphones and playing instrumental music just loud enough to drown them out. I couldn't sleep but at least I wasn't fuming.

But I did get to walk across Rainbow Bridge and see the Falls on a gorgeous sunny day, and that helped.

I've made a big grocery-run, including stocking up on cinnamon pop-tarts as usual, and I am very tired. Tomorrow I see Steph for the first time in a decade, more or less, for a second first date. I feel like I should be nervous, and maybe I will be tomorrow. Right now 'tired' is sort of overwhelming everything. Goal is to stay up until at least ten PM.

I've been mildly obsessing over work (well, ex-work), too. I figure this is partly because the end was so sudden and partly due to lack of sleep leading me to focus on bad things.

What I know:

I got laid off.
My grandboss talked about it as though there were a bunch of layoffs happening, as did my boss.
Grandboss also mentioned that profitability was down this year, which goes against all the messaging we'd been getting but whatever.
Everyone who's responded to my 'goodbye' email has sounded shocked.

My working theory at this point: there's a rumour that the company is planning an IPO in the nearish future. For that to go well they want to look Lean And Mean. Grandboss got told to cut staff, and I have been underperforming. Maybe the tech side didn't have cuts, or maybe mine just got announced early because my last day was slightly accelerated (would have been Friday but I'd already planned my vacation).

There's a part of me that wants to take it more personally, to focus in on the 'underperforming' bit. But I got some nice notes from people I've worked with that went above and beyond to let me know that they thought the work I was completing was good, so that helps with that.

I also appreciate that this didn't come down until after the end of the fiscal year. That ought to mean that in a month I'll still get my annual bonus. Assuming there is one, between "me underperforming" and "profitability is down," though honestly I can't imagine they'd zero the bonuses. They aren't my awful previous company, after all.

I'm kicking around the idea of getting out of tech writing. This has some appeal: among other things, it might free up the 'writing' part of my brain to do more fun writing, which is historically hard when I'm putting words in a different kind of order all day. Too, every tech writing job I've had (sample size of three), I've been annoyed and frustrated by the end of it, and that point has come quicker each time. Plus I doubt I'll be able to dodge video production forever, and I hate video.

Erin suggested GIS work (I am pretty sure she's suggested a few things but that was one that stuck). I did a little GIS in high school, and I enjoyed it. From the small amount of looking-into-it I've done it looks to be a combination of playing with maps and playing with databases, both of which could be fun?

There's a full-time program at BCIT (the local two-year college) that gets you a GIS "diploma" in nine months. With that I'd be eligible for ... well, for jobs. And (again, thank you Erin for pointing me to this) it turns out that I can take classes and still get EI payments. Probably. There's a process, but it certainly looks like I'd be eligible.

So that's something to consider. Classes start in September so I have at least a little time to make a decision.

Of course my brain also kicked up "what makes you think you'd be able to get a job in GIS, you have no experience and you're competing with younger fresh-outta-school folks." So that made for a fun part-of-evening last night. That one I attribute primarily to being very tired and thus having less defence against jerkbrain.

I dunno. There are options. It's kinda nice.

In the event I successfully rescheduled my trip north for last week, and it was generally good. Good to see Erin, good to see her critters, good to see the North and a real winter and sunlight on snow. Mya came by to take care of Mr Tuppert and that seems to have gone quite well too.

I came back Saturday evening and spent Sunday not doing much, but it doesn't seem to have sufficed. Yesterday I was low-focus and decidedly irritable at just about everything except the cat; today I am just low focus. There are all manner of possible reasons: rainygrey nosun weather, not sleeping well, not eating well, not having had a 'real' restful weekend in several weeks, clutter from not having fully finished unpacking yet. Doubtless most or all of those are contributing.

Bah. Grump. Etc.

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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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HELLO DYING I AM DAD

and the hunter home from the hill

tea!

gathering successfully

travel and books

making cookies and thinking too much

further grump

recipe for Spaghetti Carbonizeda

varyingly ancient history

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everything dies and everything flies (economy)

back from florida

"he can play beethoven, but i wrote a song without any verbs, so ..."

you can't be sure / this far from shore / which winds prevail

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