ruminations and peregrinations

For many years, aroraborealis hosted a yearly confessional in February.
If you're not familiar, here's 2019's post.

This year she was ready to let it stop, but it felt to me like in this time of increased isolation and novel weird stresses and bizarre social conflicts (who would guess we'd spend this year negotiating quarantine bubbles?) like this space was needed again.

So with her permission (and copying liberally from her original documentation), I am hosting this year's confessional.


Tell me a secret! Tell me a not-so-secret! Whisper sweet somethings in my comment box. Express your maddest crush or deepest curiosity! Ask about personal habits you've always wondered if you're weird about! Expound upon the fabulousness of your friends or lovers or would-be friends or lovers! Or people you know or want to know. Share your best self-care for the political climate! Do it anonymously or with your name attached*; anonymous commenting is on and IP logging is off.

*I encourage you to default to anonymous comments unless there's special value in being identified with your comment.

When starting a new thread, give it a subject. It will be MUCH easier to pick out comments in response to it down the road. Trust me.

( Ground rules back here )

ok, Thanksgiving vacation meant everything snuck up on me, so short deadline.
IF YOU WANT TO BUY A CALENDAR, TELL ME BEFORE MONDAY DECEMBER 4!
Preferably, also paypal/venmo/hand me money before then as well, or tell me how you're going to do so :)

This year's calendar is LONDON -- 2017 was terrible for creative output for many of us, but I found some mojo on vacation and I have some very cool photos from London and Oxford for 2018.

So still mainlining books, almost entirely in the braincandy/fluffy category.

If anyone is looking for straight-up escapist Space Opera, in which almost all of the main characters happen to be women, I highly recommend Scalzi's "The Collapsing Empire".
There's nothing interesting about the gender politics of the world except how uninteresting they are -- it's the exact flip of the sort of space opera in which theoretically the genders are equal, but 9/10 of the main characters just happen to be men.
9/10 of the important characters are women and some of them are bookish and some of them are foul-mouthed and some of them are interested in sex and some aren't and it's just normal.
(It does exactly that thing of "when there are ENOUGH female characters, choices you make about each one don't have to be read as Statements About Women".)

Anyways I thought it was refreshing.

I'm on GoodReads now, if anyone else wants to connect there.

I'm not sure how strongly I can state the awesomeness of Ursula Vernon's (tkingfisher)'s fantasy books. Her middle-grade stuff is cute, her art captions have always been charming and strange, her fairy-tale retellings are lovely, but... I hope she has a long long life in which people pay her lots of money to write fantasy because I REALLY LOVE what she does when given free reign. (And I REFUSE to be superstitious about saying that in 2016. Years are just numbers, damnit.)
In this case: her recently-completed serial, "Summer in Orcus." Read it.

someone on the internet tells me livejournal is moving their servers to russia?
which i thought had already happened, but i'm uncertain. a bunch of people i know are concerned about it, but i'm not sure how it affects me.
i just re-backed-up to dreamwidth, and perhaps i will explore posting there and reposting here.

this entry is a good place to tell me if you post there under a different name, because at the moment i don't have a lot of content on my dreamwidth feed, and i do still have a reasonable amount of activity here!

also, anything anyone wants to mention about negatives from cross-posting... other than "losing my awesome collection of icons". i'm still exploring.

circus progress report:
- back in hoop 401 next session. feel like i will be stuck in 401 forever. even if this is true, it's not a bad place to be. totally learning new and different skills with T, and do believe he's a good and safe teacher. still not as effective a teacher for me as R, but the novelty is great.
- pretty sure i will never be able to take part in the student show unless it gets a lot less competitive. this isn't necessarily true, but at least i would need to set a goal of creating an act and devoting the time do that (private lessons, probably taking the "creating an act" mini-session). priorities.

later this month:
friday/saturday: working tech for a touring circus show at the armory
sunday: taking 4 hours of back-to-back trapeze workshops with one of the artists from the show
monday: flying trapeze with coffeekitty before TSNY:boston closes :(
tuesday: my usual lyra class

catching up on the weekend...
friday night shabbat/birthday dinner for my sister went well. i am increasingly pleased with my take on the "no knead"/"artisan bread in 5 minutes a day" bread recipe, except that my version involves a lot of machine kneading. i still don't know how anyone gets the sort of loose-and-airy-but-still-chewy texture they show in their books with their technique, but my version (kneading for 5m at low speed in the kitchenaid when you first combine ingredients, rise in the back hallway for 4-6 hours, rise in fridge until needed, shape boule, let rise 40m, bake in pre-heated lidded dutch oven at 450) is pretty good. but it's going to be sad when that initial cool rise isn't possible -- i wonder if room temp initial rise will work as well?
saturday involved a brief trip to rhode island for some shopping and brunch, and then grabbing greek take-out and bringing it to the verse&vodka production of "inherit the wind". the show was very very good -- somewhat more formal (actual black-outs between scenes! a set-up more like a thrust stage than "theatre in the surround".) than their previous stuff, but the acting was generally very solid. antonin scalia's death did give drummond's speech about his opponent some extra poignancy, but the show was effective and affecting even without that (yes, especially bert cates, and yes, I'm biased).
the bartenders continue to be very nice and fine as long as all you want from your drink is "strong". mine failed to understand i wanted my bourbon IN my ginger ale, poured me an extra inch of bourbon in apology and then wouldn't take any money.
after the show fraterrisus and i went out to grab a drink at spoke with minkrose and a friend. we split a cheese plate and several cocktails and had a very good time talking and catching up.
sunday was valentine's -- eric and i went to formaggio's where we bought several tasty meats and cheeses and fruits for our usual valentine's picnic. then we went to our first partner acro lesson :)
( partner acro was a lot of fun. )
i've heard that acro is often where couples come to work out (or discover) their trust issues, but i feel like eric and i acquitted ourselves well -- we're pretty good at teamwork :)
after the lesson i stuck around and played a little on the hexagon, and then we went home to picnic.
after the picnic we decided to watch "grand budapest hotel" which was extremely pretty and made absolutely no sense at all. but it didn't act like it had any intentions to, so i just sat back and enjoyed the pretty.
monday i had off work, but i had to go set up an experiment for tuesday, so i'll bank those hours against my upcoming long weekend. afterwards i went to catalyst and got to spend time catching up with coffeekitty.

extremely random odds and ends.

this year has had many new experiences.

- first ear exam (for work purposes, since i'm working on a program with some noise exposure and they wanted a baseline. apparently i'm within 5dB of threshold, despite the company i keep.)
- first time having hair bleached/dyed in a salon (conclusion: biologists with three foot long dyed hair shouldn't go to salons. i expect the "this makes no biological/chemical sense" hair professional nonsense, but the part that was a problem was the lack of respect for my expert knowledge of what will and won't work with three feet of hair. i may use the dye she used, but the whole process mostly showed me i wasn't missing any secret tricks of the trade. though i may want to get someone to help me bleach just the roots of my hair next time, since it's annoying to do by myself.)
- first time playing at a friend's funeral/memorial. (eric and i played the flute parts to a stravinsky soprano solo for dan's memorial, and eric played the oboe on a britten piece.) it seems quite possible that will happen more than once this year. (it also seems to be the first year to go to more friends' funerals than weddings. 37 seems a little young for that.)
- first time floating in a sensory deprivation tank (that's this evening: i'll report back.)

i spent the weekend in new york city visiting zac&nina, which was delightful. excitingly, we managed to pry zac away from the distillery for a whole 36 hours or so. friday night was a cuddle pile, eating ice cream from the carton and drinking whiskey, while i picked nina's brains about project management, and rifled through the clothes she was getting rid of, stealing half of them. saturday zac and i made a coffee and pastry and fruit run and then nina made brunch sammiches. eventually we pried ourselves off the couch and went to williamsberg, where we played dress-up at crossroads thrift store for a couple of hours (i found zac a jacket that fit like a dream and originally cost somewhere north of $1000), and then went to the "brooklyn night market". reminiscent of the one in neverwhere, but with more hipsters. Z&N had bought a package that included food and drink and activity tickets. so we had japanese pork buns, and tacos, and weird brazillian sandwiches, and beignets with three different flavors of caramel sauce. we tried on jewelry and flower headbands and bought costume brooches and mocked the band. we played black-light mini-golf, and left the market with lemon-flavored cotton candy (which we ate on the subway) and piece of celebratory pi-day pie. our timing was perfect -- as we completed each activity we noticed the line had grown enormously, and when we left before midnight we felt extremely satisfied with our "we're old and we don't care" life choices. then there was a fashion show of all the clothes we'd bought, and the evening ended with all of us squished onto the love seat, with me feeding each of us from the single slice of pie.
sunday i met up with sara, and we brunched and talked professional challenges and crises, and went to the (very disappointing) morbid anatomy fleamarket, and stopped by the distillery for a bottle of their "technical reserve" (97% straight chromatography-grade ethanol, great for making bitters and limoncello and such).
definitely making it back to NYC more than once this year, comma damnit. if only for all the lovely people i DIDN'T get to see this weekend.

last week was the big installation of the device i've been sheparding through acquisition and training, and this week i'm flailing a bit at work. which wasn't helped by my desktop completely losing its brain and then the computer running one of our main pieces of lab instrumentation also losing its brain, and having to babysit the IT guys while they figured out what to do about them.

Anyone looking for some small contract programming work?
A friend writes:
"As you know, I have been working with the new startup, Kennis Research. We are in need of someone for some straightforward programming tasks, specifically implementing an user-registration form, file upload and email functionality. This is to be done in straightforward html, javascript and php. No special frameworks or content management system are to be used.
Would you know anyone who could help us with this? This is the type of
coding we usually do in-house but we have been very busy with other projects and it has not been possible to complete these tasks."

If this sounds useful, I can put you in touch.