bucketlistpanic

I got my computer plugged in again, annnd Dad's bank doesn't recognize it anymore, so I need his help to get into it. Such a PITA. I was hoping that we'd be done with it by the time he got up.

Ah well.

Cal found a mouse hole yesterday. No mice have come up from it though. I don't think they will. I think that, now that the area is clear, they're going to go through another exit. We'll see, though.

I need to pick up some snacks and whatnot from Wegman's. And one of my credit cards is just not loading at all.

Oop, there it goes.

Okay, so, I basically have $70 to play with at the grocery store. Don't plan on spending nearly that much, and I still need to do Dad's checkbook, but we'll see how it goes.

Anyway, gonna start my day. Ciao.

thewayne

If you're familiar with Usagi Yojimbo, he needs no further introduction. For those who aren't...

Miyamoto Usagi is a rabbit ronin. Also a space samurai. The invention of comic artist Stan Sakai, he started out as a letterer for Sergio Aragones with the Groo The Barbarian comic in Albedo Anthropomorphics. He started Usagi in 1984 and has 219 issues published overall, including several crossovers with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in both print and animated.

I met Stan several times at San Diego ComicCon and got to speak with him. Really nice guy.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/usagi-yojimbo-rabbit-rnin-bundle-books

joshuaorrizonte

I made a Kain Highwind discord server last night. I need to pretty it up, but if you want an invite, just say the word!

Innnn other news, my surgery is in 5 days. I need to get the disability paperwork done, but that can wait until tomorrow. What can’t wait until tomorrow is plugging the “work” pc back in so I can pay Dad’s bills. I NEED to do that today.

I saw a roach in the bathroom this morning. I am so sick of this house, man. Mice and roaches… And once you have roaches they’re damn near impossible to get rid of without fumigating the place. I’m positive that I am so unwell right now because of all the vermin that’s in here. We’re trying to put things where they belong, rather than piling it up, but it doesn’t seem to be helping.

I wish Mom were here.

cimorene

...to learn to drive stick shift, which I did not learn as a teenager. (Automatic transmission is rare here.)

Email received from the school: "Welcome! Your place is booked and here's your password for our website! We suggest that you proceed in the following order: 1. Apply for a learning permit from the government at [This Link]; 2. Start reading the theory lessons on our site; 3. Come in and book driving lessons at your local office once you receive the permit!"

I clicked on [This Link], thinking, "How nice - I didn't have to search the government website for the link myself!"

An hour and a half later, I have six browser tabs open in three languages from two different government-related sites and am waiting for my wife to get off work so she can read them and check my comprehension, or do I really have to book an appointment to visit a government-associated office to make the application in person?

it's good to have your application filled out in advance when you visit this office,🙂

but you can't get it anywhere else but this office. 🤔

They want you to make an appointment in advance when you visit this office,🙂

even though they want you to just drop off the papers when you're there,🙂

which they want you to have prepared in advance,🙃

even though they won't give them to you in advance?? I'm. 🫠

Current Mood: Doing Stuff Was a Mistake

joshuaorrizonte

At work, someone basically didn’t do their job for 2 months and then blamed ME for it, saying I had neglected to get paperwork to her in a timely fashion.

1) That paperwork was bundled with other paperwork WITH A COVER SHEET. If they got the other paperwork, they got that one.

2) If I hadn’t gotten the paperwork to her, there would’ve been ZERO chance of her locating it in her department. NONE. Because once I (think I) have delivered the paperwork, it’s out of mind. I wouldn’t have even KNOWN they didn’t get it.

3) Even if I hadn’t gotten it to them, why the FLYING FUCK did it take TWO MONTHS to go, “Hey, we didn’t get this”? Like I said… The paperwork has a cover sheet, and I checked it. The cover sheet includes that paperwork, and I have absolutely zero way of forging it, as it’s downloaded directly from the bank.

I understand that she’s under the gun for poor performance but tossing me under the bus isn’t it.

brickhousewench

The first sentence in this AP News article is brilliant.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-musk-tax-bill-6e7845081259c34db785182c51569c0c

Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s alliance took off like one of SpaceX’s rockets. It was supercharged and soared high. And then it blew up.

The spectacular flameout Thursday peaked as Trump threatened to cut Musk’s government contracts and Musk claimed that Trump’s administration hasn’t released all the records related to sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein because Trump is mentioned in them.

The tech entrepreneur even shared a post on social media calling for Trump’s impeachment and skewered the president’s signature tariffs, predicting a recession this year.

Trump ... ratcheted up the stakes when he turned to his own social media network, Truth Social, and threatened to use the U.S. government to hurt Musk’s bottom line by going after contracts held by his internet company Starlink and rocket company SpaceX.

“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” Trump wrote on his social media network.

“Go ahead, make my day,” Musk quickly replied on X.

Such delicious schadenfreude.

Edited to add - Things are escalating quickly. He's only been out of the White House what, a week? Musk Calls for Trump's Impeachment

cimorene

"I never know what I mean in my telegrams—especially those I send from America."

—Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

cimorene

I have a long-term To-Do list, and last week I got this list down to two items, one of which was oiling the sewing machine so I don't really count it, and took myself quite by surprise. You wouldn't think that would be possible, and yet I found myself unexpectedly with Only One Thing On The To-Do List.

And I said to myself "Wow, this thing won't take that long! I will probably finish it quickly and easily tomorrow!" (I still haven't finished it.)

Only then the next day I woke up with a whole long list of things I suddenly needed to do first: clean the counter, paint my nails, have a bunny photoshoot, sweep the bunny cages, ink my italic pens and photograph sample writing. I thought vaguely in there, "Maybe I won't get it done today, but soon!" Except then I finished all those things in the day and also finished reading the book I was closest to the end of. (If I'd just done the last thing on the list instead of reading, I'd've finished after all.)

And that's when it occurred to me that I've been putting off the tasks on this To-Do list not simply because they are difficult or intimidating, but to avoid finishing my To-Do list.

At the end of the To-Do list lie all the other things that I should do, but don't know how to start! (Like removing a lot of wallpaper, because I've already tried several ways that don't work that well. We probably need to build scaffolding, which isn't something we are at all qualified to build.) Even worse, items like "Find more social activities and make more friends" are down there! They're things with a sense of 'should' but with no obvious first steps or convenient handles for executive function to get hold of.

What's more, I realized that I would never even have realized this (that I was trying not to finish the To-Do list) if I hadn't hurt my shoulder and had to stop knitting.

Because all this winter I've been furiously occupying myself with knitting, knitting itself has been serving me as a bottomless To-Do list.

This To-Do list dysfunction also means that anything I don't urgently or impulsively do at once - anything which then lands on the list - is in danger of being indefinitely procrastinated, even if there's nothing inherently difficult or anxiety-causing about it (like buying another batch of ebooks, so actually the list now has two things besides oiling the sewing machine again).

joshuaorrizonte

Humbug!

It’s been a few days, because we got home and the battery backup on my “work” computer was going off. I unplugged everything and turned it off, and it’s been fine since, but I haven’t plugged anything back in yet. I need to this weekend; gotta pay Dad’s bills.

Work sucks and I don’t feel like talking about it much. But I will say that the new program was JUST CURIOUS when it asked if it could allocate the money we just put in. It doesn’t actually DO it. I’m really, really hoping this is all sorted by the time I get back from leave.

Innnnn other news, Breath of Fire 3 is coming along, as is Suikoden 2. And I’m gonna buy some tea. Maybe some Liquid IV. I dunno about the latter yet. I’m gonna try to get some nutrisystem food, too, I dunno if I’ll be able to swing that, but we’ll see. It would be nice to have for my recovery, but if I must make due with regular meals, that’s fine too.

Anyway, I better get dressed and get to work. Sigh…

cimorene

Neve the wild mini phalaenopsis orchid started to bloom! From above you can kinda see the size difference compared to Georges and Ella next to her. She's got so many buds already.

Wax's philodendron Jungle Boogie or Henderson's Pride, if that is in fact the one it is (apparently hard to tell, came without a proper label, on sale after being sadly mistreated at a hardware store), has made a new leaf recently and it's making a branch. I really love the leaves which are very majestic, but I keep trying and failing to get pictures of it. It's just so large and the light is from the wrong direction where it lives.

cimorene

Speaking (as I did yesterday) of calligraphy practice, here's a quote from The Talisman that's funny, but not because it's homoerotic.

( transcription )

Final emphasis mine.

Lettered in modified Carolingian (or "Caroline") style in Diamine Jade Green with 1.1-mm oblique stub nib vintage Pelikan 400. Heading in Rotunda (aka southern european Textualis or gothic). Atribution in chancery cursive.

(Knowing Walter Scott's feelings about the famous flaws in medieval Catholic doctrine, I thought at first that this was deliberate. But it's highly unlikely, since The Talisman was published in 1825. That Austrian guy who noticed that deaths after giving birth were associated with doctors delivering after autopsies and famously got hounded out of medicine for advocating handwashing was not until 1847.)

And another calligraphy unrelated to germ theory or medicine:

( transcription )

Top: Humanist majuscule+minuscule in Sailor Yuki-akari ink with Lamy Safari 1.1-mm stub nib.
Bottom: Chancery cursive in Diamine Jade Green with Pelikan 400 oblique stub nib.

joshuaorrizonte

So the new program.

The ONE THING that it was meant to do. Manage benefits.

It DOESN’T DO THAT.

Accounting gets funds. Accounting deposits funds. Accounting records funds in the (new) program. Program says, “I’m going to allocate these funds LIKE THIS. Is that okay?”

We say yes.

IT DOES NOTHING OF THE SORT.

And of course, the babyfit manager who must get HR involved every time something doesn’t go her way, got in the benefits manager’s business, telling him that DONNA AND I WEREN’T DOING IT RIGHT. Rather than talking to us, she went straight to the manager. Who looked at the program. And said, ”No, the receipts are processed exactly how they’re meant to be. The problem is the program.”

No word yet on if Ms. Babyfit tried to get HR involved this time.

I cannot wait until I am out of that place for a month and a half. Hopefully this will all be fixed by the time I get back. It’s not looking good, though.

brickhousewench

Since I work for a 100% virtual company, we have a program where, if you sign up, a bot matches you with someone else in the company for a 30 minute chat once a month. I’m signed up for three different rounds of introductions, a general one, one for our women’s group, and one for the technical writers. I had one of my “coffee chats” with another member of the women’s group this morning.

She’s originally from Brazil, but moved to Sweden over a decade ago. We started off talking about general things, like the weather. And she pointed out that it was a beautiful day in Stockholm, but that it was already light out until around 10 pm. Which is crazy. How do you go to sleep when it’s light out that late? And then she told me that in the winter, it gets dark around 2:30 in the afternoon. And I thought Boston was gloomy with it getting dark around 4:00 pm!

I am never moving to Sweden. Their daylight hours are crazy.

brickhousewench

As CEOs trip over themselves to invest in artificial intelligence, there's a massive and growing elephant in the room: that any models trained on web data from after the advent of ChatGPT in 2022 are ingesting AI-generated data — an act of low-key cannibalism that may well be causing increasing technical issues that could come to threaten the entire industry.

https://futurism.com/ai-models-falling-apart

Heh, cannibalism.

cimorene

1. I used to spend maybe 8-12 hours per week on a sideblog on Tumblr for images from the history of the decorative arts. Then I succumbed to the idea of talking to the followers directly (it has around 8000 which is waaaaaay more than my normal Tumblr or my pet photo blog) and got some asks that threw me into social confusion and then shame and avoidance and I just didn't update it for like three years. In retrospect, also, the amount of time I was spending on it shortly before I stopped was not practical and sustainable. But I got into a discussion about rococo, and started looking some things up in curiosity, and I had never posted very much about rococo before. And now I started posting there again a bit! (It's called

designobjectory.) It started a week ago with curiosity about the early output of KPM porcelain (the royal porcelain manufactory of Prussia originally, iconic) and has led to the discovery of Weimar classicism in the form of Goethe's house.

2. I inked my two 1.1-mm stub nib fountain pens — well, actually, a Lamy Safari 1.1-mm stub and a vintage Pelikan 400 (mine is brown tortoiseshell, a holiday present a few years ago) with a (pre-existing) custom oblique stub that is about 1.1. — and have been practicing calligraphy a bit, which I haven't done in a while because I haven't had any of my italic pens inked. I spent some time on Gothic capitals, because I want to do more Rotunda, and then Carolingian, which I haven't bothered practicing in the longest time.

cimorene

“Have you read anything interesting lately, Gregory?” said Geraldine.

“No. No improper books have come my way. And I am too young to read anything suitable for me. If I don’t have to hide my books from my mother, I can’t take any interest in them.”

—Ivy Compton-Burnett, Men and Wives

codyne

I had a dream the other night that my cat, Mister, was alive and well and, for some reason that was never clear to me in the dream, I was trying to rehome him. Actually, more like I was "auditioning" him for the position of someone's cat. I'd decided to take him to the church down the block, but I thought I should have some fancy basket or something to carry him in, because it was important that he be presented properly. But I didn't have a fancy basket. Finally, I decided to put him in the backpack carrier and walk backwards down the street to the church, so he would be in front as if leading the way.

Got to the church, let him out of the carrier, and began enumerating his excellent qualities to the priest and other churchpeople who were there, pointing out that he was friendly and soft and liked treats. Mister kept jumping down and heading towards the large double doors that were constantly opening and closing as people came in and out. I ran over to grab him, insisting that they must be careful not to let him out.

Then we were back home, and I suddenly began thinking, why am I doing this? He won't do at the church, there's no way of keeping him inside with those doors constantly opening and closing, why don't I just keep him? This is wrong. And I asked Mister, Do you want to go live at the church, or do you want to stay with me? Whatever you want is good. If you do go, I'll come and visit you often.

And he said to me, I am perfectly capable of walking back and forth from the church myself.

And I thought, if he's smart enough to answer me, he's smart enough to walk back and forth on his own. I should let him do what he wants.

Then I woke up, thinking, what the heck was that about? Best I can come up with is that the church represented the afterlife, and I was dreaming about how hard it was to let him go, even when he got so sick. But I wish he really could go back and forth as easily as walking down the street.

joshuaorrizonte

I'm feeling like shit still, but I can't afford to take off again. I'm gonna do my best. I lost a day of figuring out the taxes, but I think I had a good idea of what I need to do.

I voted in NJ's primary yesterday. I went for the dude who got arrested at the detention center. That was based.

I made the comment "I am tired of the routine, someone get me out of here." Somehow both Cal and his pastor interpreted that as suicidal. Both immediately dropped it when I explained that no, I'm just tired of the same thing day in and day out. Like, I'm not suicidal, no, but I am CLEARLY in distress. I don't know what to do or say to get someone in my life to fucking pay attention.

I'm trying to accept that I'm just not a priority to Cal. I need 2 weeks worth of help after my surgery, he's giving me three days before going back to work. But it hurts. We've been married for almost 20 years, and he's not at all interested in being my husband anymore.

joshuaorrizonte

OMG OMG OMG

Surgery in ten days

I’m not ready for this at ALL.

Current Music: Burning Tower, Namco Bandai

joshuaorrizonte

I’m so tired of The Routine. Someone get me out of here.

Day in, day out, I have to go to that horrible office. The worst part is that there’s nothing in particular that’s making me feel this way. Just. Over. And over. And over. There’s no variation. I work my week, do the same shit day in and day out, come home and do therapy and my goofy little hobbies, go to bed and do it again. Then I get two days to do grocery shopping an laundry and clean, and then Monday comes and I do it all over again. I genuinely feel like Sisyphus.

I forgot Cal’s lunch stuff and his brush when grocerying. I feel awful about it.

Sigh…

I got through the Greenhill event of Suikoden 2, and I’m running around doing Hix’s quest to pick up Hix and Tengaar. In BoF3, I just got to Genmel and am grinding for zenny to make sure I have all 16 weapons for whats-her-face, the Master who teaches you Steal. To be honest, Breath of Fire 3 is all I want to do. Alas, I have other things that “need” to get done. I’ll try to control my desire to do nothing but that.

I’m reminded very strongly of when I was unemployed in 2014. Cal would leave for work with me playing BoF3, and would come home with me playing it, and I was so depressed he was genuinely worried that I was playing it so obsessively because it was my ”reason” not to end it. Which, yeah, might not have been as far off the mark as I wanted it to be.

Anyway, I’m going to write for a bit. Ta.

Current Music: Lights, Ellie Goulding

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bucketlistpanic

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bucketlistpanic

Reading

That's a bummer.

Humble Bundle has an Usagi Yojimbo bundle up!

Kain Highwind Discord Server Get!

Signed up for driving school...

I am not amused.

Delicious schadenfreude

.

To-Do List Dysfunction

Bah!

Orchid blossoms still multiplying (currently 9)

Nevar Forget (handwashing edition)

Oh my god, these people suck

I am never moving to Sweden

Quote of the Day

what's up

No improper books have come my way

dreaming of orange cats

Ugh, Monday

OMG

Ngh…

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January 2024

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