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It's January 12th, and I've spent most of the new year so far with an absolutely vicious flu. Not even when I had Covid did I think I'm going to end up in the hospital with this, aren't I? but I definitely thought that on Friday the 3rd due to 104 fever and severe chest congestion. Luckily, diligent application of medication has gotten me through so far without hospitalization but I'm nonetheless a bit cranky at having lost so much of the new year so far to illness.

Before that, Bry and I spent the days between Christmas and New Year's in New Orleans as an anniversary trip, as we married on New Year's Eve. It was overall a lovely holiday. We wandered about the French Quarter for days on end, eating, drinking, shopping, and enjoying fascinating sights, people, and music. We leaned against the railing of the Riverwalk at midnight, in the tiny little bend where the Mississippi flows due north, and watched the New Year's fireworks all along that majestic river.

And then we woke up the next morning to hear the news that just a couple of hours after we went to bed snug in our hotel room, a domestic terrorist had driven a vehicle into crowds on Bourbon street.

Sometimes it's frustrating just how much weird maintenance goes into owning consumer electronics. In the past week, I've:

checked my USB cables with the awesome USB cable tester Change sent me, sorting them into data, charge-only, and dead

carefully cleaned my ergo keyboard after my cat Wicket whacked my teacup with her magnificent tail and so dumped a full cup of heavily honeyed tea into it

finally fixed a year-long problem where my music was being synced to my phone with the wrong album art attached

On that last one: I don't consider myself much of a visual person, my memory at least is really oriented towards words & text. But I can't even describe how aggravating it was to check my phone or the screen in my car to see what music was playing and to see the Rocky Horror album cover when Taylor Swift was playing, for example.

Google results suggest that this has been a widespread problem for people who sync from itunes to apple phones, and my solution suggests it was an iphone music database corruption issue: I solved it by turning off music sync from itunes (and syncing the phone to apply the results), turning off cloud sync of music to the phone, and then manually deleting the many, many albums/songs on the phone that should have no longer existed at that point. After that, a multi-hour full sync from my laptop left the music with the correct album art. No idea if I should turn back on cloud music sync or not. It would be a heck of a lot more convenient if Apple would provide an option for I'm pretty sure this synced music database is corrupt, want to start over? but I bet a lot of people would get into a lot of trouble if given that option.

Just your friendly neighborhood sysadmin here to tell you: managing consumer electronics is haaaaard.

A couple of months ago, I attempted my first swimming flip turn in at least a decade and discovered that my right knee, that joker that likes to develop runner's knee if I so much as think about walking on land at a swift pace, did not like flip turns very much.

Today I tried them again and discovered that the knee had gotten over its dislike of them. The rest of me, however, is of two minds. For pure unadulterated thrill, it's hard to beat a flip turn without some sort of combustion engine providing some acceleration: one moment, you're following that blue tile line at the bottom of the pool to where it would have you crash into the wall and the next moment you're simultaneously spinning and tumbling and conserving your momentum by means of using your legs as giant springs to send you off in the exactly opposite direction. But at this point, they're significantly more exhausting in that bone-weary way than the stop and turn I've been doing up until now, and I have only one explanation: my brain needs that half-second of break with my head out of the water to be sure that I'm getting enough oxygen. It's not convinced I can do that with freestyle side breaths alone, something that's already obvious by how frequently I need to coach myself while swimming that I don't HAVE to take a breath every darned stroke.

My brain is simply not convinced that I'm a fish yet. I think it's being silly, tbh. I first learned to swim at 6 or 7 from a babysitter who let me wrap my little grade school legs around her waist and ride her back as she swam under water in our back yard pool. I joined the community swim team in 4th grade, late for central valley kids in that era, and spent the next 6 years at swim practice or swim competition 4 or 5 nights a week and many weekend days from April through July. I was always the kid who annoyed my parents on trips by wanting to stop at every creek or stream, and still it's barely a camping trip without an ocean, lake, or stream nearby. I'm obviously part fish.

What with my community's devotion to hot tubs and everything, it took most of a decade without one for me to eventually conclude: my well-being requires me to periodically immerse my body entirely into water, and standard bathtubs don't count. So I'd been swimming at the Y for 6 months before the pandemic, but the Y's pool is indoors and I've been unwilling to go back. Eventually, after way too long, I got a membership at the College of San Mateo gym, which has an outdoor pool.

That was in June. My first swim at College of San Mateo was 9 25 yard laps. I was increasing that very slowly until a friend mentioned swimming a mile multiple times per week and I thought "huh. maybe I could do that." I got up to a mile -- over 70 laps -- in late September. My form and speed aren't bad, either. I can still hear my childhood swim team coach Heather yelling for me to reach, reach and to cup my hands.

You know what requires around a mile of swimming? Swimming from Alcatraz to SF. I think I'm going to do that next year. Now that I can routinely swim a mile in under an hour, I need to work on how far I can swim without stopping at all. I've seen a recommendation that one be able to swim 20 25-yard laps without stopping before beginning ocean training. The actual hardest part of this is going to be finding a full-length swimming wetsuit. I'm short and broad and curvy, and that's a combo that wetsuits don't cater to well. May have to have one custom made. There are coaches for the ocean training part, and weekly swims in the ocean at Aquatic Park in SF.

Anyone foolhardy enough to join me?

We're having a heatwave in the bay area, including a wildly unusual 4-hour thunderstorm that I slept through entirely last night. The heat has kept us melted to the sofas this weekend, but there was a bright spot: my family's hot-weather food game is on point.

Fridays are already pizza night thanks to 5pm family therapy sessions leaving everyone hungry and uninterested in cooking. And Bryan bought enough pizza so that there was leftover cold pizza for lunch yesterday. Then I made some pasta with pesto to throw into the refrigerator along with add-ins, so everyone could have cold pesto pasta salad with their choice of peas, salami, mozzarella, sun-dried tomatoes, chopped black olives, or any combination thereof for dinner last night.

Hot weather always makes me crave Japanese food, which I think came from having Japanese exchange students over hot central valley summers. So today was Nijiya Market sushi for lunch, and then cold somen noodles in the standard dipping sauce for dinner, which various members of the family rounded out with a cheese board and/or more cold pizza.

I'd forgotten how much I love cold somen noodles, and how easy it is to make. The simplest version is ridiculously easy: get somen noodles and bottled dipping sauce. Put the dipping sauce in the fridge. Boil noodles for 2 minutes. Strain and rinse in cold water until the noodles are cool. Serve each person with noodles in a bit of water plus one ice cube in one bowl, and an inch deep of dipping sauce plus another ice cube in a smaller bowl.

I'd also forgotten that the ubiquitous base flavor I think of as simply "Japanese" is a light fish stock made from bonito. So Bryan made his own dipping sauce out of soy sauce and wasabi, snd seemed to like it just fine.

We didn't even eat the tofu with sesame dressing that was planned to be another dish for dinner. So between that and having more somen noodles and dipping sauce, our heatwave weekday lunch meals should be on point too.

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March was a nightmare, and April was a blur.
( catching up )
( catching on )
( and books )

Definitely proving that you don’t know anything about anything until you measure it on that six books per year estimate.

Book #3 was Mira Grant’s novella Kingdom of Needle and Bone, a sharp and well-deserved criticism of the anti-vaxer movement in fiction form. CW: child death.

Books #4 and 5 were Trade Me and Hold Me, romance novels with geeks in them. I was particularly amused that one of the characters in the latter is taking up programming quantum computers, as I took an intro lab on it at a conference right before reading the novel. I bet the character didn’t find that they need to brush up on their linear algebra as badly as I do.

Books #6, #7, and #8 (in progress) are the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, Crazy Rich Asians, China Rich Girlfriend,and Rich People Problems. Honestly, I should read something liberal and hippy after devouring these books so quickly. I’m finding them hilarious, but also I know that I’m fairly suggestible and so try to curate my inputs a little more than this particular set of binge-reading — I noticed that it took me around half an hour to figure out why a politician enacting a post paternity leave job tenure requirement would be inappropriate. Memo to self: I can sympathize with just about anyone, and sympathizing with the political/labor viewpoint of your average billionaire is not a good idea. Also, library ebook borrowing FTW on this one; I managed to time my holds on these immensely popular books so that they all came in within 2 weeks, so I haven’t lost the thread on any of the characters between books.

Book #9 is likely to be Come As You Are, a book on cis women’s sexuality I’m slowly working my way through. It’s providing a significantly more nuanced model of cis female sexual response than the previous one occupying my head, which is always a good thing both for my own life and for the situations where I end up as trusted advisor to others. It’s not a fast read for me, primarily because I need frequent breaks from its peppy self-help book tone.

It’s taken me most of a month to read In An Absent Dream, the latest in Seanan McGuire’s set of novels about children who go on and return from portal fantasies. She’s got a rhythm of one present-day (whatever present day is in that universe) book, then one backstory book.

It took me a month because the last backstory book stabbed me in the heart, and I dreaded this one doing the same. In fact, it did, though thankfully not in the same visceral, sobbing quietly at 11:30pm so as not to wake my sleeping family way as Down Among the Sticks and Bones, which was a story about sisters forced into competing/complimentary roles by their parents and their own obligations to shake off those roles and become better people. This one was also about sibling bonds, but also about fairness and rules and living with the consequences of one’s own choices, a subject on which I am somewhat less wounded and much better adjusted.

I checked out and started Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, but I’m not sure if I’ll continue it. I’m stuck in the backstory here, too, and it’s currently describing how she ruined what sounds like an otherwise lovely marriage with impulsive infidelity during grief about her beloved mother’s death, and I’m finding my usual stores of empathy lacking.

I'm thinking of keeping a book list this year, inspired by my estimating that I'd read maybe 6 books in 2018 and then realizing that I'd read at least 5 Seanan McGuire books last year, putting that total into doubt. Do I read 6 books per year these days? 16? 25? I have no idea anymore.

2019's first book was The Power, by Naomi Alderman. It's an alternate universe history of when women developed the power to shock and kill people with their hands. I'm still not sure of how I feel about this book, but I do think it was a good idea to start off with a book that says some big things about gender, whether or not I agree with them. It's also wildly satisfying to have a book with a feminist premise not fall into the trap of believing that all women have unimpeachable ethics.

I spent my 4th setting up fireworks for a mid-sized city show, which was fascinating and I generally recommend doing it if given the opportunity. It was a LOT of work, though, so maybe not more than once.

Somewhere in the middle of the day, I realized that I'd be handling explosives with only, like, a 10-minute safety briefing. So I asked, what's the worst accident that's happened at one of [friend who's running the show]'s shows? and was immediately shushed by some colleagues and told not to talk about it.

I don't believe there have been any particularly bad events at the shows of the friend organizing that would lead to any particular embarrassment. Instead, I think the colleagues heard me say tell me about how terrible our mutual friend is at a job he loves doing, when what I meant to convey was what actually is the likely risk profile of this dangerous endeavor I've agreed to undertake?

I'm going to think about how to better phrase that for my intended meaning, of course. But I'm not actually sure the gap is bridgeable; I've run up against it before and noticed that there is a wide spectrum of beliefs about the inevitability or lack there of of risk due to human error, and my profession puts me way the hell on one end of the spectrum -- to wit, towards the risk through error is inevitable; humans gotta human. You reduce the risk as much as is pragmatic, decide on whether it's worth it, and move on. Still, I clearly need to up my game on the skill of eliciting interesting stories in a friendly way, because in their proper context anecdotes are indeed data.

And perhaps next time, remember to decide on whether or not it's worth it after having determined what the risks really are and how to reduce them.

Current Mood: pleased

I unfortunately don't have time to show my work today, though I'm hoping to get back to it later, just the result: emotional complexity is what I DO.

I can't remember the last time me and the kids both stayed home sick, but it was definitely a full house today. Super-proud of one of the kids, who looked up today's homework online and did the ones that they could do without handouts. Also super-envious, because what must it be like to live in a world where your high school teachers post homework online!

I'm not here much yet, but I'm planning to be. Life has been a bit complicated over the past couple of weeks, so doing the import-here-delete-there thing is scheduled for sometime in the next 10 days.

It never occurred to me that a purpose of journaling is to give me hope, many years later. My fears for the children sometimes overwhelm me: it's fucking hard to grow up sane and happy, when so much of their world is so insane. It all somehow has to come together: social and academic and life skills, knowledge and manners and figuring out how to deal with their emotions and sexuality and still get enough practice at the everyday mechanics of life to leave their brains room to tackle big existential thoughts. And they've had people throwing rocks in their path, huge boulders, for years. So hard to navigate all that and end up somewhere pleasant, without any map.

But reading through my old journals reminds me: I did it, eventually, to a perfectly acceptable degree. With more trapped and less help. They have me and

princeofwands and all of you, sometimes directly and even more often just showing us, their everyday parents, how to be better people.

They'll be fine.

Crossposts: http://karenbynight.livejournal.com/239640.html

Who do I know that has experience parenting (for whatever value of "parenting" works for you) teenagers? Because I have a lot of questions about how you handle or handled relationships, sex, teen angst, jackass behavior,... everything. :-)

Crossposts: http://karenbynight.livejournal.com/239545.html

I have a fingernail. Just one, to within about 1mm of the end of my finger. It's long enough to unexpectedly scratch things. I have a second that fully covers its nail bed, and a third that I'm keeping covered with a bandaid in hopes that it'll be there in a few weeks. The rest are in shambles, bitten to expose good portions of the nail beds -- situation normal for my nails, since I was a very small child.

I've been putting a lot of thought into the social transmission of unhealthy responses to childhood trauma. I've read that Dissociative Identity Disorder is unknown in some countries, although extreme childhood trauma is not. My mom's nails look like mine, but I think kids these days would cut their arms instead of bite their nails. This implies that really obsessive nail-biting lasted for at least two generations, but cutting has spread in one. The Internet speeds up all manner of communication.

My nails grow very slowly, around 1mm/week. At this rate, it'll take into next year to grow my nails out. The rate is probably a good thing. It takes effort not to bite the one. I keep the ones that cover their nail bed perfectly polished with glitter nail polish to keep up my resolve, and I imagine that it's much easier to paint two nails every two days than 10. It's my experience that it's easier to slowly adapt to major body changes than to do so quickly. Before I put the bandaid on the last nail, too, I'd better have some sort of substitute activity in mind.

This is not the first time I've tried to stop biting my nails. This is not the thirty-first time. Fall down seven times, get back up eight.

Current Mood: determined
Crossposts: http://karenbynight.livejournal.com/239217.html

I received a Pebble smart watch as a holiday gift, and have been asked how I like it. Sure, here's how I like it, in detail:

The Excellent

The Pebble is a bluetooth-connected wrist display for your Android or iPhone cell phone. It has an e-paper display for longer battery life. It's not really a wrist computer; if that's what you're looking for, you probably want to seek elsewhere. It shows a watch face, and then when I get a call, text, or reminder on my phone, the watch face disappears and it shows the message for a while. As a femme-presenting person who serves on call for her job, this is the killer feature. My phone can be in my purse, or on the desk, or in the living room while I'm in the bedroom and I'll still get that call/text. My prior method of managing the need to never miss an on call page was to make my on call page sound as annoying as possible to ensure I would hear it, a method that isn't very popular with family and friends and over the long term makes serving on call extremely stressful. Since I got the Pebble, my phone has been on silent almost all of the time. Because of this, the rest of this review is sort of irrelevant; if something happened to my Pebble, I'd run out and get another as soon as possible.

The Also Very Good

Although the Pebble is mostly a display, clever people have figured out how to do some nifty things, like be the display for the GPS that is your phone. Mine can switch to show me the weather, which is nice. Also, you can download different watch faces. There is an App Store coming out soon that will provide a single place to get watch faces and apps, which will make it easier to do so.

The watch is also waterproof, which is very nice. I can wear it into the shower and just not worry about it.

The Meh

Configuring for iOS is fiddly and sometimes counter to the sparse documentation available. The docs claim that in order for notifications to be sent to the watch, they have to be of type "banners", but I find that text don't send to the watch unless they're of type "alerts". However, once configured, it works fine.

I'm getting used to it, but I can't deny that the watch is HUGE on my wrist. The watch band plus keyboarding is a problem; I've settled on a velcro timex band for now, but probably won't be totally happy until I make my own so that I can ensure that the band is soft enough for everyday wear and my wrist isn't resting on a HUGE buckle while I type the entire day. (Discussions about whether my wrists should be resting on anything while typing are out of scope; my ergo choices are difficult and have been carefully considered.)

The hardware has some of its own unique challenges around charging. The charging connector is completely unique and rests on a groove in the watch to charge. You get one charging cable with the Pebble, and it doesn't appear that you can even buy a second. Other companies have started making cables, but the one I bought doesn't fit as neatly against the watch. All of the cables are 3' long, which doesn't support my strategy of always carrying the capability to charge any device I depend on. The watch itself doesn't have a display of how much battery remaining, just a low battery indicator. I'm told that that's because the battery is so small and the charge cycles are almost impossible to accurately detect, and so any percentage indicator would be perpetually wrong. Which brings us to the biggest "meh":

The company itself has some serious problems with timely and useful communication/documentation. The lack of charging indicator and the reason why is something I had to discover by reading the user forums; I spent the first several weeks trying to find it and mistaking a phone battery indicator on one of the watch faces I installed for a watch battery indicator. There's a new version of the firmware coming, with improvements widely anticipated and announced at CES as being available by the end of January. I expected the deadline to slip, of course; what I did not expect was no official announcement of the slip until a tweet at 6:45pm on Friday, January 31st saying they'd start rolling out the update on Monday. Given their communication so far and that their iOS support seems to lag behind their Android support, I still have no idea when to expect that the updates will actually make it to my wrist.

The Summary

Despite the issues detailed here, the Pebble is excellent at the thing that matters most to me: sending notification of text, calls, and calendar items to vibrate on my wrist instead of make sound on my phone.

Crossposts: http://karenbynight.livejournal.com/238518.html

I just realized this morning that my initial thoughts on the matter were wrong: the absolute best thing I bought last year was a passel of toy mice from IKEA. They're about 3" long and were purchased as cat toys. The first three I bought have survived a couple of months worth of cat play looking no worse for wear except all of their whiskers are shorter. Now we probably have around 12 of them in play, and they bring no end of amusement and good humor into our house. It's not unusual to see a cat galloping by at breakneck speed with a mousie in its mouth. The cats seem to have a color preference; I think Willow prefers the grey ones and Wicket likes the brown ones and nobody's all that thrilled with the white ones, which may be because they have somewhat less realistic looking of back feet. Willow seems to have a fairly standard pattern of chase the mouse for a while, note that it stopped moving, get bored. But Wiki clearly has a rich fantasy life as a hunter; she'll pick up a mouse in her mouth and manage to simultaneously cry and toss the mousie up in the air, then bat and chase after it and do it all again once the mouse is at rest.

princeofwands poses the theory that she's like a kid playing action figures with it, that the cries she's making are not a battle cry but intended to be the mouse's cry -- which is certainly the most entertaining theory if not the most likely.

And, seriously, nothing is more entertaining than returning to your bed and finding a collection of toy mice, all the same color, arranged in a neat little pile on it. These were a win for everybody in our house, feline and human alike. When one of them finally wears out, I'll have to deconstruct it and create a pattern of it for the sad day in the future when IKEA no longer sells them.

Crossposts: http://karenbynight.livejournal.com/238269.html

1. What did you do in 2013 that you'd never done before?
* taught a child to sew

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I try not to make official new year's resolutions; I just have some areas I try to note for improvement. I've made some progress, but all of the areas still need more work.

3. Did anyone close to you have or adopt a child?
yes! 4 friends had babies in 2013, yay!
( Read more... )

Crossposts: http://karenbynight.livejournal.com/237674.html

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Traveler's Luck

I can't recommend enough the zen trick of enjoying pretty much everything

Recent Entries

Not an Auspicious Start

Consumer Electronics Woes

Not Quite a Fish Yet

Throwing Myself into Bodies of Water

Hot Weather, Cold Food

Most Content Friends-Only

Catching Up and Catching On

Books #3-7, plus preview of likely #8 and #9

Book #2: In An Absent Dream

Book #1 The Power

Nerd Communication

Self awareness

Sick and Homework

Making the (Real) Transition, Too

A Purpose of Journaling

Roll Call

Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight

Exhaustive Review of the Pebble, One Month In