Audience of Strangers

I am putting this here at least in part because otherwise the last thing here is the post about Angus's passing and I just cannot. I am doing better, but I still miss him so much, and seeing those pictures makes me remeber how okay it was to sit in the shair and have him fall asleep on my lap.

Well, it's 2025. I just drove to and from the US to pick up a package which turned out not to be there yet. It was a very nice road trip--Chelle came along, f'd if I can remember how to tag people on here--but I do wish it had also resulted in picking up the things I wanted to pick up.

The US inauguration thing is happening today. (Dear future historians: I have not forgotten, I am not oblivious, I am just limiting the amount of mental real estate it gets.) It's weird how you can hit a point of both profound not-surprise and exhausted disgust at the same time.

Other stuff... Mhm. Apparently work screwed up the filing of the start date of my medical leave, so I'm trying to get that straightened out. I have clutter and too-much-to-do. I also have very nice things that are holding me together. (The LOML has cooked dinners for the last three nights straight, they have been amazing.)

I'm on Bluesky, and it's so much less awful than Twitter had become. I haven't imported or exported or however you do everything yet, and I should get to that, but (imagine me waving tiredly at my to-do list here).

Oh. The World Gone Wrong podcast is helping a lot. (So are some others, but I got to share this one on a bunch of the drive back.) Highly recommended. Very funny. Very sweet.

(yes I also have horror recs but not today.)

I hope you have a better tomorrow soon.

Okay. General catching up.

I still like the new job.

The not-hating my job (and the time to sleep, and the walking forty minutes a day) seems to have reduced my stress levels a lot, and I'm not writing. I'm not even really playing video games. I'm knitting and watching TV and reading, and I'm not unhappy, but apparently I have dived hard into sources of relaxation that require me to make absolutely no choices whatsoever.

(I have asked around and apparently this is kind of a normal reaction having a source of stress suddenly removed, but no lie that it's been a bit weird.)

I'm hoping it goes away soon, and in the meantime reminding myself that I am having a good time even though I'm not writing.

(I sound cool with it. I mostly am cool with it. This is still totally the kind of thing that I'm going to bring up in therapy.)

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I watched The Umbrella Academy, and I am very engaged with it. It does something that is not-quite a superhero narrative pretty much the same way that The Wire does something that is not-quite a police show, and has the added detail of (almost) every single character charging headlong into deeply deeply understandable but horribly flawed choices.

(Plus it has a fantastic soundtrack.)

Also I'm... maybe eighty-three percent sure that the one thing that I absolutely didn't expect, that was a genuine surprise, was telegraphed in a kind of quiet in-joke way in the first episode, and I love that.

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I also watched Weird City, and that was an entirely different thing, but still a lot of fun. And I found a horror author who wrote a short story that I like so much that I promptly went to buy his collection from Amazon, which is an option I generally skip if I can do anything else.

Speaking of horror, I sat down and watched Velvet Buzzsaw. It's interesting - the idea of horror spreading that way is fairly rare. It's not unique - you can see similar stuff in The Ring and In The Mouth of Madness and Smiley - but it's rare enough that that I don't really have a vocabulary for it yet. I'll think about it some more and maybe come back to it.

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I inked up the fountain pen that I bought with the gift card from my sister - the Monteverde Invincia Nebula. This thing is a brick - everything is steel and brass and glass, everything screws firmly together instead of snapping into place. It weighs nearly three times as much as my Lamy Safari, and while it's not uncomfortable to write with, I definitely notice it.

Okay.

(1) The job thing. I've mentioned it around, but: I have a new job, it starts Monday, the last week at my current job is being weird and quiet but not unpleasant.

(2) I'm teaching an SF course at Algonquin. I'm having a lot of opinions about the slide decks for the course. I can go on about them quite a lot.

(2b) ...apparently scrolling through Pinterest calms me right the heck down when I'm... I don't know if hyper-focussing is the right word, but I ca't think of a better one. This is actually super useful to know.

(3) I am actually feeling like I have more time right now. It's very odd, and part of my brain keeps going "It's a trick. Get an axe." On the flip side, I actually got to play The Flame in the Flood for a little bit this weekend past, and it was lovely. Also Weyrwood is utterly charming.

(4, for the future) My Kobo battery is being wonky (spontaneously hitting zero, dropping from 41% charge to 20% charge after 1 minute of use), so I'm going to look at places that might replace the battery, and at saving up for a new one. Also need to look at saving up for a new phone; I got a replacement when my old one died, but the warranty is nearly up, and when I need to get an actual new one it'll be less of a pain if I've saved for a bit.

(5) I'm knitting a sweater! I'm knitting this sweater, in fact, in purple. It's going okay.

(6) I'm... working on cleaning things up, I guess? Clearing out stuff I don't use (bless the CDA and their pickup) and going through what I already have, rather than getting Yet Another new thing that will go into the pile of unread/unknitted things. It's more of a guideline than an actual rule, but it's a good guideline.

(7) Contemplating getting a notebook for Monday. Might be nice to have my own, but that could be over-egging the pudding; I could probably do just as well by making sure that my pens are inked up. Will figure it out.

Anyway, that's most of where I am right now.

In the last 105.5 hours, I have spent 42 on work. (Not at work, mind, since that would include lunches. Working. Am also not counting the weird dreams I have had about coding.)

I feel a little better about feeling quite so out of it, when I think of it that way. Which is ridiculous, since it's not a completely unreasonable amount, it's just... Yes. I can see it all at once now.

Plans for the weekend involve... I'm not really sure. Returning library books, perhaps, and sleeping in until 7, and other such luxuries.

Four job applications submitted today. Another handful to look at, but they're going to require a substantially different tailored CV, so I'm worrying about them later.

Going to try to focus on something relaxing now.

I get a couple of hours work editing content on a website. The cheque just came in.

It's not a lot, but I feel pretty damn good.

Mail took 35 minutes to sort today. Not open, date-stamp, or check. Just to sort.

It also arrived at the office at 3:18 p.m. I leave at 4:00.

Tomorrow morning will be interesting, I am sure. On the other hand, if I get in early, I can play music while I work for a bit. (I can, in fact, put a few songs on infinite repeat for a bit, and no-one shall deny me, mua-ha. All shall tremble before my tyranny.)

Two organization names that I ran into at work that keep amusing me:

• Nine Circles Community Health Centre
• Bob's Cool Air

It's the little things, really. (There's also a town called Burnt Church, and a street called Burning Glass Road.)

Everyone is very nice, by the way, which is good because I am a bit frayed. Tiny bit.

I keep reminding myself that we should see a thaw in a few weeks. Not a full-on thaw, of course, but the mid-February oh-sorry-were-you-looking-at-those-ice-sculptures?-oops warmer weather is pretty reliable.

There's been a bit of a shake-up at work lately, but figure I will be okay. Hope people are seeming a bit less shell-shocked on Monday.

I keep kicking around the idea of knitting something inspired by "The Yellow Wallpaper" and the King in Yellow (not any particular story about it, just the general concept). Yellow colours and harmful sensation and creeping madness. Cheerful stuff, but I have no idea exactly where to begin. Suppose I'll file the idea and see if it's still around to come back to in a month or so.

Things to do this weekend: haircut, edit, laundry, deliberate (verb, not adjective) jacket, hit the pharmacy, return library books, finish gloves. And the weekend is half over. Somehow I am unoptimistic.

ETA: 1:35 Sunday morning Slightly more optimistic.

ETA2: 5:35 Sunday afternoon Distinctly more optimistic. Gloves will probably need more work after blocking, but will count it a win if I can get them blocking tonight.

It has been a stupidly long day. I have been running on ?five? hours sleep and everyone (almost) at work went to a Christmas party, and I think the e-mail I sent my supervisor (not about that) got lost in the shuffle, and I have been killing the worst-designed-form ever and and and...

And I got home and John bought ingredients so that I could use my mojito mix packet and it's warm in here and I am sitting down and no-one needs me to do anything that involves ColdFusion, and I think I'm going to go look at Fallout 3, see if I can find anyone who wants me to kill Harold, and pick the meanest dialogue option possible in response. Because really. Harold.