i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

No webinar today. Late last night, I was thinking about getting up in the morning and sitting on chat for three hours and couldn't stand the thought. So I decided to take a mental health day. I almost always set an alarm, even on days I plan to sleep in, but although I thought about it last night, I apparently didn't actually do it. I woke up about 10 minutes before the webinar. Ahahaha.

Of course, now my entire day is fucked up. I live with a carefully balanced schedule of vitamins and supplements, meds, and meals. Super duper multivitamins and iron have to be taken at least 2 hours apart from the (3x/day) calcium chews, and need to be taken with food. I woke up so late that there was no breakfast which meant having to rearrange things so I could still take my vitamins and iron with lunch and get the breakfast calcium chew in with a snack, which I had after coming back from a haircut and long walk.

The temperature is rather nice and there's a lovely cool breeze. Alas, it's so effing humid that my clothes were sticking to me and I had to take a quick cold shower when I got home. *sigh*

There's a new edited volume just out about women in quantum physics. One of the essays is about someone I came across in Seaborg's journals. My copy arrived today, so I'm hoping to read that this evening.

I've been tired and cranky all week. I'm putting part (most?) of it down to the weather. It's no longer HOT but it's still too humid to even consider opening the windows again. And it's been rather gray the last couple of days. I've also had way too much chocolate this week. That probably doesn't help matters.

Yesterday was rather nice, humidity aside, and I did go to PokemonGO raid hour. I was mildly sociable as I was doing some trading, but I was rather less sociable than usual. Hopefully I will be in a better frame of mind for Saturday's event. Also, I'm having dinner with S on Saturday, so fingers crossed.

I had signed up for two webinars yesterday. The first I skipped because I'd gotten a later start than planned and I was in the middle of strength training when it started. It was a mid-year analysis from TIAA and I'm meeting with my TIAA guy in a couple of weeks, so not a huge loss. The second was the every other month Bariatric Advantage "support group" webinar - not so much support group as webinar - and I was mildly looking forward to that one. Although the topic wasn't one that I was super excited about. When I got the reminder, I just couldn't. They did send the recording and slides.

I should be in another webinar right now, but I just can't deal. Last night/this morning was one of those times when I woke up around 5am and just couldn't go back to sleep. I wound up doing stuff on my phone for a couple of hours before finally getting up around 8:45. Which gave me plenty of time to do a 3 mile Walk at Home video rather than a 2 mile.

I'm also signed up for a webinar tomorrow but I'm not optimistic about that one, mostly because it's right after I spend 3 hours on chat and during lunch. I don't even remember the topic, just that it's something historical, maybe English? Aha, Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers. We'll see. There'll be a recording at any rate.

My hair stylist has been out for a couple of weeks, I assume on vacation, and I've got an appointment tomorrow afternoon. I got a text a few minutes ago and was afraid they were canceling, but fortunately it was just a confirmation text. I can't wait to get the back trimmed - it grows the fastest and bugs the crap out of me when it gets too long.

I don't have much to say about books or TV, because I am still in the middle of my current read and current show. But! For those of you who casually enjoyed the podcast The Strange Case of Starship Iris, the third (and final) season is coming out now. There are a couple of "mini-sodes" which will help you catch up to what's going on, and two regular episodes, and the third will be out soon (it's out to high-dollar Patreons but I am a low-dollar contributor). I listened to the mini-sodes when they came out, and today on my run I listened to the first two regular episodes. Again, I kind of feel like I'm using dystopian fiction about authoritarian regimes as escapism from actual authoritarian regimes...

But the real reason I wanted to post was to say that I'm a bit more than 55% through Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, and there's a 30% discount for it in the Steam sale which ends tomorrow, so - if my post last week intrigued you, I encourage you to buy it, it's inexpensive, it's captivating, it's sophisticated and spooky and atmospheric with occasional touches of humor, fourth-wall smashing, and weird supernatural stuff, and the puzzles are clever and thinky and (mostly) fun. As I mentioned, I told my brother about it and he bought it - and he finished it last night! He admits he got so into it that he put in way too many hours too quickly, but he really loved it.

If you do buy it, the hints page at https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3249636035 is really great as it is nudge-y rather than sledge-y; it points you in the right direction (or tells you what a wrong direction is) which for me is mostly all I have needed.

Also, there are in-game espresso machines.

Boring stuff: My week this past week involved doing homework, sleeping, and being lumpy. Though I did exercise four times, so I wasn't that lumpy. A walking lump maybe.

Adventures: Today M and I did an art trail on one of the islands, and it was great. Cool art, a glass blower who does Venetian glass making techniques with all these amazing patterns in the glass let us watch her make glasses and explained everything while she did it and it was really cool.

We hit up one of our favorite bookstores (The Book Rack in Oak Harbor) and drove and looked at water and looked at sculptures and walked a few trails and it was a wonderful day. Now I am very tired. Photos here: https://flickr.com/photos/27659024@N08/albums/72177720327356511.

Tonight I'm taking one of the kidlets to a paranormal/horror cirque de soleil type thing, so we'll see how that goes. People bending in ways they're not supposed to and doing things I could never do in a million years. Can't be all bad.

What I've recently finished reading:

Lamentation by C.J. Sansom, the 6th Shardlake novel. This is all about the heresy hunts in the last few years before Henry VIII's death - one faction wanted to go back towards Catholicism, one wanted a radical re-imagining of religion and social structures, and if you wanted to stay in the regime's good graces, you walked the narrow path of "the King is the divinely ordained leader of the Church, and whatever he says goes." Warning for historical burning of heretics, plus canon-typical violence; also for weird religion and contentious legal cases. Matthew Shardlake still has a crush on the queen (Katherine Parr).

What I'm reading now:

My hold on Katherine Addison's The Tomb of Dragons came in, so that. Just barely started.

What I recently finished watching:

American Primeval, which, huh, I've never before encountered media in which the Mormons are the bad guys. (This is not a spoiler. It's pretty clear from the get-go, but it gets more pointed and cartoon-villainy toward the end.) Definitely violent and gory, though also it felt very clearly written to Tug The Heart Strings (and then, often, deliberately kill the character it's just tried to make you care about) at which at least for me it failed to do. I liked Abish, Two Moons, and Captain Edwin Dellinger, and James Bridger amused the hell out of me, but - I mostly enjoyed it, but I don't feel it was superlative. I got tired of the filter to wash out colors so it looked almost old-photo sepia.

I did enjoy the historical setting of the Mormon War; as I mentioned last time, I researched it for my Yuletide story, and I think it's just an interesting time, the settlement/colonization of western North America.

What I'm about to start watching:

Murderbot! We always wait until enough episodes are out that we can watch ~every other day and not have to wait.

What I'm playing now:

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, which was recommended to me as a "spooky atmospheric puzzle game", and I'm enjoying it a lot. You play as a mysterious woman who has come to a mysterious hotel full of locked doors in what might be Germany in 1963, at the request of a mysterious man for reasons of ??? I told my brother about it because it's cheap in the summer sale at Steam, and he decided it sounded good so he is playing it now, a bit behind my progress but because of the nonlinearity he's ahead of me in some things. We're trying to give each other elliptical hints when needed.

When belladonna shares a tweet that got screencapped and put up on Insta:

@ madisontayt_: imagining a vegan who won't drink nyc's tap water because of the microscopic shrimp
@ TheWappleHouse: The what now

and I was like "Yeah! There was this whole thing about NYC's tap water possibly being not kosher because of copepods in the water supply a few years back. Which might've meant that NYC bagels, whose lauded taste and texture were credited to the tap water used to boil them, were potentially treyf. But then other rabbis weighed in and said as long as the proportion of these microscopic crustaceans was less than 1/60th of the total volume, it was okay by the principle of בטל בשישים (bitul b'shishim/beteil beshishim), thank you Shabot6000."



... and then I realized "a few years back" was 21 years ago.

We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

Hello my friends! I have not done this in 80 bazillion years, which is apropos since I haven't done a lot of things in 80 bazillion years. Like, I used to write. I used to have ideas. But I've been going to school (getting my BS in psych) and working and doing the booster club thing, so I've been busy and so brain-full that creativity has been restricted to those things. However I'm in my last quarter of school and I'm on summer break from the job, and hockey season hasn't started yet, so I thought I'd try to get back into the habit of being human and stuff.

I spent the past weekend at my mom's helping her with her annual garage sale. It was fine, and we always have fun, but it's a multi-person garage sale, and one of the ladies that is there (who is a good friend of my mom's) drives me a little bit bonkers because she never. stops. talking. Which I guess is good because it makes me get up and walk around.

I bought a walking pad a while ago and haven't used it, but I'm working on getting back into a rhythm with it. Luckily I have decided to do it during the hottest days of the year so far, because that's how I roll. This would likely not be a thing if we had an air conditioner, but we don't, so there you have it.

My other goals this summer are to do some mini-adventures, rewatch Generation Kill, listen to serial killer podcasts, read a bunch of books, graduate, sleep a lot, and come up with ideas for hockey season. For today, goals are to do some errands, do the walking pad, then do some school stuff. I got a late start because I didn't really sleep at my mom's, so I slept in today which was amazing and I approve of it. We'll see if I can manage adding posting here to the summer goals as well.

And, because I wouldn't be the person I am now without it - I shall shout out two of my bb!hockeys - Carter Bear and Shea Busch who got drafted this year to the Detroit Redwings and the Florida Panthers respectively. So proud of my boys. (my kids are my kids, the kids I work with at school are my kids, and the hockey kids are the boys. It's kind of a system).

Anyway, hi friends! I have been reading about your lives, I promise. I love you all.

hyounpark and I wrapped up our extremely concert-filled June last weekend with two shows in Wine Country, backing up Andrea Bocelli and friends. Three rehearsals in ten days with almost entirely new-to-me repertoire - it felt good to have that kind of intensity of practice again. It's different from regular rehearsal, where we have a month, two, sometimes even three to slowly, steadily polish a single piece. Harder to cram into daily life, but always worth it.

Saturday was also Hyoun's birthday, so I was highly amused when the sound check opened with La donna è mobile from Rigoletto. Because I originally learned that melody in fourth grade as a birthday song!

( Archiving the lyrics here because I know I was able to find it on the internet at some point in the past, but no longer. )

( the rest of the Bocelli concert experience )

And now, my Wednesday nights are free for a (very) few weeks! (Summersings start July 23, and then after that we're right into rehearsals for Verdi; I hope I'll be able to cram in one or two Wednesday night Friends With Bikes rides during the time off, but we'll need to see.)