Carefully Random

This week was a little less heavily scheduled. I've fallen out of the habit of recording daily snippets, and I wonder if that's part of why I had meaner voices in my head this week. The voices are adaptive and can keep up with whatever I do or don't do. Lately they are super harping on the idea that I can't work a corporate job anymore -- which, if that's even true, is true because I don't want to anymore, and obviously wanting to is a pretty solid precondition for doing it. As someone kindly said to me, Michael Phelps can't do another Olympics either, and so what? But I'm no Phelps, I'm just another crispy critter from the burnout zone that is tech. Sometimes that's scary, and sometimes I think recovery/pivots are going just fine.

Satisfying continuations on last week's stuff: I used the serger to make a cover for the serger, out of scrap denim, which felt right and proper. One thread still has a tension issue I haven't solved. And we bought a new dining table, a very beautiful refurbished teak table that will take weeks to get to us but which will probably be Our Table for the rest of our table-owning lives. I fed the new squirrel tenants every morning.

I had two catch-ups with old friends, outside of my usuals: one helping to unpack a new kitchen, and the other one playing in the friend's home gym. The friend has an aerial point with some straps, and spoke temptingly enough of straps as cross-training for handstands that I tried to sign up for straps 101 at circus school next session. Failed, but I just confirmed I can do the one cool exercise she taught me on my monkey bars in my home gym. Shrug.

Words I looked up: AIXI, philippic, sapid, abreactive, Blahaj, colliery.

Things I learned about: population axiology (not that I've finished the whole paper), gooners and gooning (those wankers are just the kind of bizarre subculture I love to read about), environmental causes of Parkinson's disease. Money quote from that last one: “The Human Genome Project was a $3 billion investment, and what did we find out? Five percent of all disease is purely genetic. Less than 40 percent of diseases even have a genetic component.” Oooof.

And just because it is the season, we now have a tree in our living room. Not decorated yet, but it smells nice.

• Sewing? I looked into using a serger at the local library, but then coraline had a spare serger to lend me (whoa) and we had a good time talking about clothing construction. I got as far as making sure the serger works, and figuring out how it cuts the fabric as it goes, before getting utterly derailed by the next few things. However, I have the machine and my other machine, and have ordered a few accessories to Get Going Soon. Let the mending and alteration begin.


• Death of a Table: during the above, with two sewing machines and a laptop and part of a friend on my dining room table, the table decided to disintegrate into its five component pieces. Amazingly, nothing and nobody else was hurt, but every single screw came out of the extension mechanism. It's time for a new table. The one we had was "mid-century" style, solid pine, and probably from about the 1920s -- we got it used, nearly 15 years ago, from a peer who got it from his grandmother. I just want another extensible oval, but the bug wants really nice wood, so we might eventually be headed for something like this. I've never paid a lot for a table before, but I guess it's up there with couches and mattresses in size and importance.


• New place: I had to lean pretty hard on the contractor to get someone to come over and fix a small issue with the HVAC. Wasted a couple of hours there, and more hours getting quotes on snow removal that none of the other unit owners wanted. But I also spent a couple of gratifying hours fixing a door so it doesn't scrape on the floor anymore, thanks to heisenbug coming over and helping. A door is really a two-person lift. Then there were tenants who wanted the place and then stopped wanting the place, but in between those two events I went through my last lease and identified all the little places to change wording for a new lease at this place. It's really so, so nice now. Someone is going to have a lovely time living there.


• Blue-Green place: the same unit that had a ton of trouble with AC this summer had their heat cut out on them, including for one very cold night that we felt guilty about (they had a space heater, yes, but they also have a baby). But eventually we got a really nice HVAC guy who walked me through the whole heating system, taught me a bunch of things I later took notes on in a Google doc, and found/fixed the problem with the boiler. Which stemmed partly from nobody realizing it needed water added to it manually every now and then, sigh. The boiler is also super old, so in the spring we'll drain a lot of our reserve fund and replace it. This all involved some running around on my part, over two days, but I do enjoy learning about the system.


• Social: cookie swap at my acro base's apartment (oh, yes, I baked cookies) and tree trimming over at Blue-Green Street. Things are getting kind of intense and stressful again for Helios and Perse, as one of them seems to attract job offers even when not looking and the other seems to attract surgeries even when definitely not looking.


• Circus: I guess doing 60lb TGUs is just normal now, but I did do that again, and also possibly did my best middle splits ever? I got down to two of the thinner yoga blocks, which means a height of just under six inches.

I haven't been playing any video games; real life has been compelling enough. I'm reading some books though (just started The Left Hand of Darkness on Audible), and poking at a knitting project, and curating gifts for Xmas. It's been fun.

I am also making the world's slowest progress on planning a trip to my birth state next spring. I hate it there, but I'll go. And Birdie will go, which is going to absolutely make my dad's whole year as well as introducing her to her genetic granddad. The bug will go, which always helps a ton, and it's starting to look like the squirrel, curious about my origin story, might go too.