It’s also been a long 3 months since I last posted.
I’d like to say I’ve been busy, but with what? We’ve watched a lot of Dropout.tv. We’ve spent time riding our bikes around to different places. I’ve made some half-hearted attempts at crocheting projects. But it’s hard to find anything to show for all the time passed while this place has sat unattended.
I stopped by to check on my perpetually defunct blog and discovered something had gone wrong. So, I’ve spent a few days learning a bunch of stuff about WordPress and realizing just how much I don’t ever know what I’m doing here. But, maybe I’ve righted the ship, and we’ll head into calmer waters… for a little while anyway.
Meanwhile, the eXodus at Twitter continues apace. Bluesky crossed the 20 million account threshold earlier today. I have basically bricked my Twitter account at this point. It will remain as a placeholder. It took an evening to delete my remaining tweets and then I just went through and unfollowed everyone and then soft blocked anyone (except my cat Moxie) still following me. I’m a little sad it’s gone, but sort of sad in the way you mourn the passing of a senile relative. It was once my favorite place to be, and then it got mean and ugly in a way that made it damaging to be around. I’d go back from time to time, but couldn’t ever engage with it, because the core of Twitter just wasn’t there anymore.
Bluesky is feeling a lot more like Twitter these days. From the more active timeline to the general faces around the place, it’s lively and fun, and of course serious about a whole host of issues that the upcoming administration is waving in our faces.
So, the next two months are going to be long, but not long enough, because I have a bare idea of what’s coming at the end of them and I’m dreading it with my entire being.
Nothing really makes sense to me right now. I’m less panicked about that reality than I was 13 days ago, but I do still feel a bit like I’m in the wrong place, surrounded by the wrong people, and nowhere really feels safe. I’m honestly not even sure HERE feels safe, and this is my website.
I’m trying to get my head wrapped around exactly what “this is not who we are” means to me and everyone else. Because, it turns out that the collective “we” maybe isn’t as interested in the things I thought they were. I’m also just sad that between apathy and outright malice we’ve elected someone into office who has physically harmed other people on multiple occasions even prior to inciting actions that threatened our democracy as a whole. The cognitive dissonance of the hypocrisy eats at me daily, sometimes hourly.
So, I exist. This place exists. And hopefully both of those things will continue to be true in the face of whatever the hell is coming next.
When my wife hit that point a year ago, she made a comment about wanting to have walked a certain amount of distance before she hit 40. I thought it was a good idea at the time, but didn’t really think of it as any sort of necessary thing for myself in that time frame. I would be supportive (it would be good for the both of us if I participated) but I certainly wasn’t going to go overboard when 40 got closer on my horizon.
Then suddenly that 9 ticked over on my own timeline and it was there… looming over me; the need to “do something” before 40 hit.
I’d like to think I’ve found ways to meet that need since it first arose, but it’s taken some trial and error to get here.
We started being more diligent about morning walks when the temperature was consistently over 40 degrees in the morning. I don’t think a week has gone by where we haven’t walked, especially since this summer has been so pleasant. But, walking can only be so engaging.
We started tracking steps, walked to the grocery store a couple of times, I tried to get back into doing RingFit Adventure (with middling success). Just a mishmash of activities, basically.
Somewhere in the midst of that, I found Pikmin Bloom.
At first, I didn’t bother too much with it. My phone at the time didn’t much enjoy me using such a resource intensive game, but I was at least familiar with Pikmin in a way I never have been with Pokemon.
I was haphazard in my first month, not really caring about the month’s event or trying to make anything happen. Then, at some point, something clicked, and I was all in.
It’s been especially helpful having a couple of large flowers basically to myself in our apartment complex, as well as being in range of a few other locations that have mushrooms (the thing you battle to get more nectar, to then plant more flowers, and get more nectar).
Then I got into collecting the decor, and that’s probably when Ivory started to hear more about me walking around and collecting gifts on expeditions.
It’s taken up a good chunk of my time this summer, but there are only a handful of players in my area. Things picked up a bit during the 2 weeks that Unicon was being hosted, but otherwise I only regularly see one other player in the area I’ve come to think of as my own.
I know I’m pretty isolated here, but it really comes into focus visiting a larger city. When we were at the Hyatt in Minneapolis, the first week of July, we were basically on an uninterrupted carpet of flowers. Here, you can tell exactly where I have walked, every single day.
August’s theme is Ice Cream, so my specialized squad of Pikmin are adorned with scoops and swirls of ice cream and little extra touches. I’m pretty sure the flying pink ones shiver with a brain freeze since the massive scoop of ice cream sits right on top of their heads. It’s cute watching them bop around on my screen with pretty flowers bobbing on their heads.
I’m glad I found this game, since it’s certainly helped me get out of the house just a little bit more, even when I haven’t felt like it. I managed 10,000 steps yesterday thanks to trying to walk around our local park blooming flowers. It’s on odd, meandering sort of thing, but it made taking the walk a little easier, since I seem to need a more immediate intention behind these sorts of things.
I think this is the same reason I get more satisfaction out of riding my bike to do errands than just taking a short trip around the neighborhood for the heck of it. I’m assuming some of this comes down to needing the dopamine reward at the end, because once the novelty of the experience wears off it’s just not the same.
Pikmin Bloom is also slightly responsible for my new bike adventures, since it’s very easy to plant flowers from a bike. I’m enjoying that aspect, a lot.
I’m now 2 posts behind for this month. I’m hoping to do a couple of end-of-day recaps, depending on what we end up doing on our week off. We’ll see, I guess.
I capped off today by riding my bike on a Target errand and promptly collapsed at home for the night, because that’s just what time is like around here right now.
Before the weekend is over, I have to read 2 books and help get the apartment presentable assuming we might have guests at some point this coming week. This is how the summer goes by in a blur.
In the winter, we hunker down and never do anything. This summer, every weekend has involved running to the farmer’s market or some elaborate kitchen shenanigans, which certainly keeps the days entertaining but it leaves little time for the loafing to whiche I’ve become accustomed.
A few weeks ago, someone at one of my dad’s baseball games was talking about how she would take another COVID summer again. I feel guilty for knowing exactly what she meant. Instead of running around everywhere with a million things to do, we were just at home, and somehow, that was fine. Socially though, that sort of lifestyle just isn’t sustainable. You end up missing too many things, and the disconnect is unpleasant, or at least that’s my opinion on that sort of thing.
For as busy as it makes things, I do enjoy the kitchen shenanigans. Earlier this summer, we canned peaches and made peach ginger sauce. Before that, we got a bunch of strawberries and made jam (it’s more like jam on top, jelly on the bottom). I would make a million more strawberry things, since it’s my favorite fruit. I think the last requirement of the year will be tracking down a loaded crabapple tree and harvesting a bunch of those. I’m really looking forward to having apple jelly again. And loading up a steam juicer with a bunch of fruit is going to make that a cinch.
I was hoping we would be able to can some tomatoes (we have 4 plants on our balcony) but we just lost most of the fruit to blossom rot. So, I’m hoping the next round will be hardier and actually turn red, since they still need the heat, and it’s been very cool this week.
If I end up with enough tomatoes that we have to actually process them in order to use them all, I might have my own parade around the apartment complex to celebrate. (I’m trying to think of something really outlandish to tempt fate into giving me a bountiful tomato harvest… Because that’s how those things work, right?)
Here we are, week 2 of Blaugust. I’m still lost in the busyness of daily life, but, I’m trying.
Week 2 is supposed to be about introductions. This place is only a couple of years old, and I’ve only managed a single introduction post in that time, and it wasn’t even for Blaugust.
Here are the basics: I’ve written pretty much as long as I could manage it, whether it was letters, in diaries or journals, or short stories, or social media; I write. Music is also a big part of my life; I wonder how much of that could be chalked up to a childhood diet of Disney Renaissance movies. I love animals, but have only ever lived with cats; we currently have two: Rudy and Kochanski. I’ve knit since I was in college, and picked up crochet in the last year; we make a lot of things out of yarn in our household. That’s pretty bare bones in the grand scheme of things, but hopefully this week I can flesh out some of this stuff and you can get to know me a little more.
The website comes from the second screen name I ever had. Peridot is my favorite color and I figured lines covered… a lot of things. Lines of music, lines of poetry, lines on a page… lots of lines. So, peridotlines has followed me around for almost twenty years now. It used to be a LiveJournal handle, and for a while, it existed on the various LJ clones that came into existence; then Twitter and Instagram. Now, it’s mostly this place and BlueSky. Sometimes, I wonder if I should just switch to a website based around my actual name instead of this other thing, but it’s also been my “name” online for so long that it would feel weird not to keep using it.
The only other thing this screen name has been attached to is fan fiction, which I wrote a not insignificant amount of, up until a few years ago. It feels odd to think back on it now, knowing some of it probably still exists in random corners of the internet besides Archive of Our Own. I’m more than a little relieved that some of my first forays into that particular art have been lost to obsolete technology. Someday, I might come across an ancient floppy disk and there will be no way to extract the fan fiction I had written when I was fully invested in NBC’s Passions forever ago.
While that stuff has been lost to time, I have a stack of journals sitting in a box in our closet haunting me with the cringe of naive adolescence. I’ve tried, quite a few times, to type up those journals so I could get rid of this stack of things that’s just taking up space. I started keeping those when I was 11, and I can usually get through typing up the first few years, but then 13 or 14 hit, and some of it is just raw and real and uncomfortable. I could consider just tossing them, letting them go, but it turns out I put a lot of stock in written word, even if it’s clumsily scrawled cursive documenting our family vacation or the awkwardness of a crush.
I try not to let this place become like those journals, but sometimes it does descend into the deeply personal, especially when it comes to grief and talking about individuals I miss. For some reason, I find it easier to go there with writing than I do the light, airy subjects I see others covering. I wish I could be funny, embrace the silliness at times, but while I can put together words about something sad or dark, every time I try to do something funny, its like I can see the framework of whatever I’ve written, and I can’t see past that, and it’s not good enough.
I’m hoping Blaugust can help me get back on track a little bit with just writing something and getting it posted. I have yet to figure out a good schedule to get something up here reliably though. I thought maybe themed days would work, but if there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that if I’m not “feeling” it I don’t want to write about an arbitrary subject I’ve decided to shoehorn into this place. That’s the frustrating part, in the end.
So, this is me and writing. But tomorrow maybe it will be me and music, or me and fiber, or me and cats, or me and my bike. I guess, wait and see.
I have barely survived the first week of Blaugust 2024. Prioritizing this place on the daily feels next to impossible, especially with how little time I’ve spent here in the past few months.
We did manage to make syrup from the juice we made on Sunday. So, I’m hoping we have decent cherry syrup for pancakes, or maybe it will just go on ice cream sundaes, but it at least looks pretty.
We also made a short bike trek yesterday, and I’m finding that method of running errands to be more and more desirable, especially once we both have baskets to carry things around.
It’s gotten weirdly cold, which is going to make riding around even better. Honestly, I’m looking forward to fall a little more than I expected to be, since there’s a chance we might be able to hit part of the trail around the lake and take in some of the colors in the state park. I don’t want to rush to the end of the summer though; I’m enjoying it right now, and all the time I’m able to be outside. I don’t want to figure out other ways to be active, when I’ve only just found something I enjoy doing outside.
All-in-all not my best showing for the first week of Blaugust. I’m hoping I can get my legs under me a little bit more next week. Putting together an intro post sounds good, especially as things have changed in the last year. Plus, next week I’m on vacation, so as long as I don’t lose my brain to “vacation time” I should have a little more to offer here in terms of writing and photos.
I thought about posting yesterday, and then got sucked into nonsense on top of exhaustion, and completely forgot to write anything, so this morning there will be a recap of yesterday, and at some later time, I guess I’ll be putting up 2 posts in 1 day?
At some point, I need to take actual pictures of my bike, maybe even with me on it. For now, this is what we’ve got.
I managed to ride my bike to and from work yesterday without incident. I only made one bad move in my travels, and those always seem to happen when other cyclists are around. Thankfully, it didn’t lead to anything harmful. Mostly, it just reinforces how much I still have to learn when it comes to actually traveling by bike and not just tooling around on smooth paths with no cars beside me.
Other lessons learned: getting on a step-over style bike (aka a “boy” bike), with a basket containing a computer bag is a lot harder than just getting on the bike, especially while wearing jeans. I’m still just very new to all of this stuff; the getting on the bike, moving forward after coming to a stop, getting OFF the bike; basically me using this bike is still a big old awkward thing. But, I really do enjoy riding it.
I especially enjoy riding it compared with the one I chose to use as a reintroduction to riding bikes.
If I put my new bike next to this old one, I feel like the old one would look spindly, frail, and very light, but when we experimented with hanging this one up, we realized it’s so much heavier than either of our new bikes, and between that weight and the drop bar handles, we decided this one just wasn’t for us. So, now we have to figure out how to get rid of re-home it. I’m not sure who would want a 1970’s department store bike, but hopefully someone else would like a free experience on re-learning to ride a bike before moving on to something better. I’m just hoping it won’t still be in our garage come fall, since space is always at a premium when it comes to apartment living, even with a garage.
It’s much easier to get out and ride now that my wife has a working bike of her own. I had to laugh last night, because she wanted to do a few loops around our apartment complex, and then after hitting every section of the parking lot I heard “Okay, this is boring, let’s go to the trail.” It had looked like it was wet and maybe wouldn’t be fun to ride, but then we took off for the park, and it was just a nice night to be out on a ride. I think today will also be a good riding day, since it’s not going to be very warm, but the sun looks like it will be out most of the day.
I really thought we might be in for a cool and unpleasant summer, but it’s been pretty enjoyable, even if it’s rained a lot at times, and been momentarily humid. We still have some time before the season officially changes, but it’s certainly been a nice summer, especially on a bike.
We finally used my grandmother’s steam juicer today.
If you’ve never heard of one of these things before, it’s something like this. I will never make crabapple jelly without one of these, because you get the most crystal-clear jelly you will ever see, without having to cook apples and then hang them from cheesecloth to drain for hours; risking cloudy juice in the process.
We bought around 9 pounds of cherries yesterday and ran them through the juicer and are now attempting fruit leather with the remnants of the fruit. The main goal of the juice is to get some cherry syrup, which is the ultimate pancake syrup in my opinion (if it’s chokecherry syrup, it literally cannot be beaten).
I’m glad it’s been relatively cool and not oppressively humid all weekend, considering we steamed fruit for 2 hours and then had more steam pouring out of the oven when we started drying the fruit leather. Hopefully that will last when I have to cook the juice to make syrup and then run the canner on it.
A little over a year ago, I was canning peaches for the first time. I’ve done strawberry jam, and another round of peaches since then. I can’t wait to see what the jelly looks like. My favorite thing is to use the faceted jelly jars, because when the jelly is really clear, the jeweled aspect of the jars really pops. It’s one of those visually satisfying things I wish I could explain better than to say “it just looks pretty.”
It still feels bittersweet doing things like this. There’s the accomplished satisfaction of completing a slightly complex task, followed by the sadness that I’m doing this without the aid of the person who originally taught me. Being this was also the first time I’d used the steam juicer, I feel like there was still some of the lingering smells of my grandmother’s house and kitchen. When I washed it and then started boiling water, there was one last waft of that very specific smell, and then it’s probably gone forever. The power of sense memory is something so strange and wonderful.
We keep being busy, which means I’m still doing Blaugust at the last minute of my days. I think August might continue to be this way. I have a full week of work ahead of me followed by family visiting from out of town the same week we have book club and D&D; and then August will be half over and the end of summer will rear its ugly head. The rapidity at which summertime moves is also mind boggling.
With Monday around the corner and a busy day behind me, I’m still looking forward to whatever the week holds. I’m planning to make my first bike commute, and then… well, I guess we’ll see.
Back in May, I spent $25 on a bike at a garage sale, only to realize I’d forgotten how to ride. Between my rusty skills and the rusty bike, I’m not sure how I managed to find the courage to pedal any further than our apartment garage, but I did eventually figure out how to make the bike carry me around with a modicum of skill.
As an exercise in re-learning how to ride, that $25 was worth it. Of course, between the age and style of the bike, it wasn’t going to work for me in the long term. I ended up going to one of our local bike shops and testing out a couple of bikes before taking home something more upright, with better brakes, and easier shifting.
I’ve spent the past month riding around on this lovely new bike, trying to overcome the hurdle of arriving somewhere slightly overheated, sweaty, and out of breath.
I ride my new bike, slightly terrified wheneven I venture beyond our neighborhood path. Sharing the road with trucks that might not be able to see me scares me to death. And, there’s the fact that I’m still developing the balance to be comfortable looking over my shoulder, or even considering lifting a hand off the bike to signal. But, now that my bike is outfitted to carry me and my things to other destinations, I’m compelled to use it to commute to work.
Depending on the route I take, it will be anywhere from two-and-a-half or three miles. The hardest part, is one street where traffic will likely be the busiest, depending on the time of day I choose to ride. Going out on a Saturday morning, just after 7am, is an entirely different endeavor than at what qualifies for “rush hour” in our area.
I’m glad I didn’t make the decision to just take off at 7:30 on a Monday morning, without making this first (lower stakes) attempt. Some of it went exactly as I expected, but then there are the little things, like finding out the shoulder on the busy street is much bumpier than I realized; in a slightly uncomfortable way. I’m pretty sure taking an alternate (smoother) route might lead to me driving through a few poorly aimed sprinklers, but on a hot day, maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing. It also turns out maybe it will be less stressful for me to cross at a busier intersection than somewhere I was expecting fewer cars to be. Getting the bike moving after coming to a stop is still a difficult endeavor, but it is getting a little bit easier with practice.
At some point, I will stop forgetting these posts, and have some photos to share, since I have yet to take pictures of my bike.
My wife also just joined the New Bike Club, so it’s possible there will be cooperative bike adventures for us in the future.
Did I forget I still need to do a post today and it’s after 7pm? 100% yes.
Life now is busier than it was when I was doing this a year ago. It’s weird to realize there are lots of things taking up my days, and somehow I made the choice to be doing them. After 2020, so much of my time slowed down to pretty much just being at home and maybe going to meet our knitting group once a week. Now?
I’ve been making an effort to be more active while the weather supports it. We somehow had a blessedly cool start to the summer, and I’ve spent so much time outside just enjoying the ability to do that and not freeze, broil, or breathe smoke. And then the last 3 weeks hit and it’s been hot, and then humid, and then smoky, and apparently I’ve built up enough of a habit doing things on the daily, that when I can’t I get a bit antsy and on edge, frustrated that it’s not in the cards for the day.
Our Thursdays have also gotten busier. It used to just be a weekly knitting group, but then we decided to search out a Dungeons & Dragons game and someone was good enough to take us in. We spend a lot of time going over the ins and outs and trying to keep up with a high level campaign every other week now. I’m playing a Lightfoot Halfling Monk, and trying to get used to throwing myself into combat since Niv has the HP and constitution to do that while Kate wants to hang back and be sure they’re making the “right” move.
And we’ve been watching a lot of Dimension 20. We’re just winding up our watch of The Seven, which I think we found even more compelling than the Fantasy High series it spun off from. I’m hoping we can try Never Stop Blowing Up next, since we’re really making use of our Dropout subscription (which has totally been worth it).
It’s been a while since I was just this busy living life. Having fallen out of a journalling or blogging habit, it feels more like I’m trying to wedge this into a packed schedule. But, when I take a step back and look at things, I probably have time. It’s more of a question of motivation than anything else. So, hopefully Blaugust will help me find the motivation, since this place is still important to me.
I’m hoping I can bring some of the busyness here, especially the bike adventures, now that I have a rack and will be able to start doing more errands and using it around town. I’m still thinking it will be carrying me to the office on Monday, so stay tuned to see if I actually have the nerve to “commute” the mile and a half from work to the office. (The scariest part is going to be navigating the roundabout… At least I hope that will be the scariest part)
I am no more prepared for this endeavor than I was last year, but, here goes nothing!
At least this time around I knew this was coming. Of course, it’s Thursday, and one of my busier Thursdays at that, so I’m hoping I can get something short and sweet thrown together to mark the occasion, and go on with my day.
For those not in the know, there’s a helpful informational post covering the basics of this whole thing. In the wake of social media really fracturing into a bunch of different factions, I was hoping blogging would see a bit more of a resurgence. I’m not sure I’ve seen that coming true, but Blaugust is still happening, so it’s not like blogging is dead.
I’m hoping to use the BlueSky Feed to keep track of others participating this year. I’m sure things will fall between the cracks, but I got a little overwhelmed looking at the wall of posts in my RSS reader (yeah, those are still a thing) last year.
So, find me over at BlueSky or comment here if you’re doing Blaugust 2024.
I’ve been lost in a bit of a haze when it comes to my life online lately, but I’m hoping to find some other blogs to follow, I’m just not sure what it is I’m looking for. Some of this comes down trying to relive to my old LiveJournal days, but I still appreciate being able to read long form content, and I’d love to look at something besides posts on Reddit.
I’ll be doing an introduction post some time next week, but in short, this place is mostly rambling on the following subjects: cats, LEGO, fiber arts, gaming (rarely), life in northern Minnesota, and (something new) bike adventures.
It’s June, also known as Pride Month, and I’m looking at this blog I abandoned 8 months ago, because October got hard and life (of course) just kept happening.
Life has been an endless string of weeks that start off with dread for the days ahead and end with me wondering how it’s Friday “already.” We got through the holidays, started a new year, picked up some new hobbies, and now summer is around the corner and the next 2 months will go by in an absolute blur.
We never got around to using our snowshoes this winter, since there was barely any snow. Maybe we’ll get dumped on next year and actually be able to use them again.
We also joined a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and are slowly learning the ins and outs of tabletop role playing. My halfling monk, Niv, is a blur on the battlefield, when I manage to roll my dice well. I still need some work on the storytelling side of things, since it’s been a hot minute since I played pretend with a whole group of people. It’s a fun challenge though, especially watching my fellow players do cool things.
The only other adventure in store for me right now has been re-learning how to ride a bike. I’ve been going on a bunch of daily walks through the neighborhood (one of the many perks of working from home) and a bike at a yard sale caught my eye. $25 later, it turns out I’ve retained maybe 5% of the bike-riding skills I used to possess.
Ivory was kind enough to sit outside today, making sure I didn’t ride into the swamp by our apartment. YouTube offered a lot of helpful tips on getting started, and by the end of 30 to 45 minutes, I was actually pedalling and able to mostly control where I was going. Having now fixed the handlebars so I can brake properly, I’m hoping to try again with greater success tomorrow.
I won’t even joke about entering my cycling era, because I can barely entertain the idea of leaving our apartment complex. Still, I did feel pretty good once I was able to get going and maintain my momentum. There’s now a smooth (if hilly) path on the edge of our neighborhood, so I’m thinking that might be my next excursion, if I can get over the fear of going “too fast.”
Hopefully it won’t be another 8 months before I post here again.
Happy Pride to everyone who celebrates, and for everyone who would rather we weren’t celebrating… I’m not going to be confrontational about it but, good luck with your discomfort this month.
We’re not even a full week into the month and October is already proving to be a little much: we’ve welcomed a new nibling into the family, it’s been a year since Ivory’s father was laid to rest, and this weekend we celebrate our first anniversary as a married couple.
If there’s anything I’ve learned to appreciate as an adult, it’s the bittersweet nature of events. I’m assuming it comes with time, because the longer you’re on this planet the more likely you are to lose someone, and to think of and miss them during big moments. So, here we are, looking forward to meeting our niece in person, celebrating a year of love and commitment, and at the same time faced with the reminders of loss.
Last week, I pulled out the ham bones we’ve been saving and made some split pea soup. It was appropriately cool at the start of the week, and the idea of a pot of soup seemed soul-warming, especially thinking of my Grandma Marie, since I use the recipe she gave me to make it. But then, I was surprised to end up dreaming of my other grandmother, my dad’s mom, the night after I made the soup. Grandma Doris was also a wonder in the kitchen, especially when it came to delicious baked goods, so it probably wasn’t much of a stretch to be thinking of her, but it’s been so long since she was in one of my dreams.
I can’t say I really put much stock in it meaning something to dream of someone you’ve lost, it’s not even something I really clung to or thought of as important; I’ve always considered that to be what memories are for. Still, in the last year, I’ve found relief the mornings I’ve realized I had a dream of Moxie, even if it was just something brief and inconsequential. There was an equal amount of relief to have dreamed of Grandma Doris, especially because we were having a conversation about how people show you they love you, and that not everyone shows it the same way. She also demanded I give her the biggest hug, and the last time I would have done that was probably close to 20 years ago at this point. The dream ended with a bunch of bumble bees the size of canaries showing up around the tree in her front yard, so things really took a turn…
I’ve thought back to that dream a lot in the past week, probably because of some of my internal frustration when it comes to communication, and the emotional distance that seems to widen between myself and certain people. When I wrote about saying goodbye to Grandma Marie, I mentioned how glad I was I got to know her as an adult, and that’s very much something I missed out on when it came to Grandma Doris. I wasn’t even out of college when she died, and there was a lot I didn’t know about myself then. I often wonder what she would make of my gender and sexuality, would it be something contentious? I can’t lie that I’m glad to have skirted the “difficult” talks with my grandparents, helping to maintain a little more sweetness in my memories instead of some of the bitterness that could have been there.
It’s about to be a busy weekend. We’re attending a Yarn Tasting tomorrow, and have family coming from out of town. So, I’m about to shut my brain off for the next few hours after what was a pretty busy week.
I’m hoping I’ll be able to post a bit more here next week. As my scrolling of Bluesky increases, my need to pour words onto a page decreases, so that’s something I definitely need to keep in check.
I saw someone on Bluesky comparing that scene in so many disaster films, where hundreds of people have survived an event and are then rewarded with the relief of being reunited with their family and friends to the feeling they get seeing a familiar face showing up on Bluesky. I know the feeling all too well.
There are also so many people I’m missing. Some of them don’t have accounts and remain on Twitter, others created placeholders and have yet to interact, and others seem to have vanished into the ether. Bluesky seems to offer new options pretty much every other week these days (actually working hashtags might be on the horizon), but I have a feeling it’s very much going to be what Twitter used to be. That thing people heard of but rarely used or didn’t understand. Truth be told, I still sort of stumble over how to talk about it when I mention something I saw to my wife or a friend. I have yet to use “skeet” (it feels almost as awkward as “toot” did when discussing Mastodon), and I’m pretty sure it’s not well known enough for casual users of technology to know what it is.
I don’t want it to be Twitter, with the algorithm and the outrage machine, but I do want everyone I knew under one umbrella so I can stop trekking back to the hellsite once a week to see what I’ve missed. I sort of treat it like an experiment I can only observe these days. I don’t like or retweet anything, the only thing I will post is an update if I have an invite code to Bluesky (there’s actually one available as I write this, if someone out there is interested). Sometimes, I have to remind myself not to engage, but the reminders are less necessary than they were a month ago.
At some point, maybe I will stop going back there, but Bluesky doesn’t have enough of a finger on the pulse of the news cycle for me to completely abandon Twitter, even if it’s only to pop back and scroll through the trending topics as a refresher on whatever is going on politically or culturally.
In other news, check out one of the Northern Flickers that have been hanging out on the lawn outside of our apartment. They’re a little chatty and very skittish, so I had to lurk on the balcony with a long lens camera just to get this mediocre photo. They’ve been interesting to watch, since the 6 or more of this particular guttering pace around the grass pecking at it with determination at times.
Having spent the summer with every manner of fan circulating air around our bedroom (and the rest of the apartment) it became next-to-impossible to hear any of the sleep podcasts we like, without blasting the audio in a way that wasn’t remotely restful. The past two nights, things were finally quiet enough to try listening to them again and we both slept so soundly; it was such a relief.
Considering I’ve spent most of the summer sleeping with earbuds tuned to YouTube commentators gossiping about drama, it was past time I went back to something more geared towards sleep. The silly thing is, we both basically crash the second the podcast starts, because we had a pretty good habit going before we gave it up; there’s something about a soothing voice telling a story that just makes the entry into sleep so much smoother, and in turn, it just makes it easier to stay asleep.
I’ve used a variety of sleep podcasts over the years. There was Sleep With Me, which had such an extensive back catalog, when I first discovered it, I would just queue up 8 hours worth of episodes and let it play all night (I eventually found the “creaky dulcet tones” less restful and a little too quirky to use it to actually fall asleep, it’s only good when I’m straight-up exhausted).
Get Sleepy, was my go-to for a long time, until they got syndicated advertising that would play just after the introduction. I have nothing against ads in a podcast, but it’s one thing for it to be an ad read from the host and a completely different thing when it’s a State Farm ad that’s set to music and entirely different from the tone of the rest of the show.
The makers of Get Sleepy also came up with The Sleepy Bookshelf, which just takes stories in the public domain and breaks them up into pieces and reads some of the story a couple of nights a week. The only times that one hasn’t been good for sleep was the torture of Journey to the Center of the Earth (I found it too claustrophobic and a lot of the story was just too creepy), the Beatrix Potter Stories (I was obsessed with being able to hear The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin in its entirety), and the end of Anne of Green Gables (it actually forced us to turn the lights on so I could find a tissue I was crying so much).
Our tried and true sleepy standby now is Nothing Much Happens. I had actually forgotten that was an iHeart podcast, because it doesn’t do ads the same way so many of their shows do (annoyingly, with the same 3 ads every 20 minutes). If you’re looking for something to help you sleep, I can’t recommend it enough. We rarely make it into the story portion of the podcast these days. I was surprised that even when we picked it back up again, it was very easy to fall into the routine of taking a couple of deep breaths, mentally sending some relaxation through my extremities, and basically zonking out for the night.
As I look back through this post, I keep seeing I have something against advertisements, except that’s not actually the case. If you ever get to listen to my “the MLB doesn’t want me to watch or listen to their games anymore” rant, you’ll hear how I actually enjoyed all of the local Boston ads when I would listen to the Red Sox streams; it set the scene for me basically, and I wasn’t ever annoyed to hear those. I only gave up on streaming the radio games when they started playing generic ads over the local ones (and coming back to the game in the middle of at-bats. With the ad reads that used to start off Get Sleepy, when they were in the voice of the creator, I really didn’t have a problem with them. I just don’t like listening to ads that are aggressive in their need to sell me something, especially as I’m trying to fall asleep. I also gave up on any iHeart podcasts when they played the same three ads every 20 minutes, regardless of the length of an episode. I’m sure the goal here is to make the ads so annoying to compel listeners to pay for the premium service, but persistent demand avoidance means if I “have” to do something I’m much less inclined to do it.
I’m a little embarrassed at my persnickety attitude when it comes to something so random. “How strange to be so opinionated about when and where ads should play.” But, I guess that’s where things are on a Tuesday afternoon.
I can feel the malaise of “life after Blaugust” beginning to creep in. I noticed it first with how completely silent my Mastodon feed had become, and now I can feel it in my reluctance to open up a new post and click and clack some words on to a screen. Bluesky seems as bustling as ever, while Twitter (the place I haunt in silence, unless I have a Bluesky invite code to share) exists as a shell of the thing I used to love; and I don’t know what to do with that. Some of this is down to that disconnect I still feel when it comes to so much of social media these days. I enjoy following along in the conversation, but participating in it has felt… off.
It reminds me a bit of the time that I had a conversation with a former employer, and as I was reflecting back on it later I was ticking off all of these boxes in my head, thinking about how I had successfully managed to offer her a compliment without it feeling forced or weird, and how we’d managed to have a somewhat lengthy conversation without any of the lulls I tend to find so disconcerting. I was congratulating myself on having successfully “peopled” without including any of the cringe-inducing mannerisms or comments I would usually berate myself over for days after.
Social media feels a bit like that to me now. Like, I know all of the rules to the game, I can follow other people playing the game. And then it’s my turn and suddenly I’m stymied and over-analyzing every possible thing I could say and I just sit there until my time is up and think “maybe I’ll try again tomorrow.” Granted, playing the game of social media is actually just a dopamine slot machine I feed mental quarters into and hope I’ll hit a jackpot at some point. I feel like I’ve gotten terrible about hitting the jackpot these last few years. And, then I get annoyed at myself because no one liked that thing I said, and then I’m annoyed for feeling annoyed.
I try my best to focus on just posting to post, to maintain the habit, because I know that siphoning these words off from my brain helps me function. I don’t know what it is about curating my thoughts for public consumption that is so ridiculously helpful to me. I just haven’t figured out how to turn these sorts of things into a conversation. That’s always my issue in the end. Even in actual conversation, sometimes, it feels like I say words but they just result in a dead end. It’s unproductive, or at least, it feels that way.
I can’t help but to wonder if I did actually gamify my day-to-day activities when it came to people, how would it work out? Would it let off some of the pressure, because I was trying to follow some rules? Would my brain turn on the “it’s just a silly game” track and force me to devalue the entire experience? I talked myself into buying dice at ConVergence this summer, and they’ve sat virtually untouched since then. For a while, I was thinking about trying to do solo RPGs or just trying to use them with some basic character building, just to get a feel for the mechanics. But, then Blaugust happened and all of my gaming habits were benched as I devoted my whole self to this place. Now, as all of the obvious subjects have been exhausted, my mind flits back to the math rocks sitting in their respective containers, all looking very pretty, but entirely unused.
I busted open this 3-D printed turtle egg with so much excitement
So, what’s next? Will I go back to the obsessive D&D googling habit I was cultivating in July? Probably not. I think things are still cooking a little bit. It’s like there’s an idea sitting there, but it needs to germinate a little longer before I can figure out what to do with it. Hopefully ruminating on that here hasn’t exposed it too soon, since I suffer from “startitis” and exacerbate it by revealing my plans too soon. It’s like I out-run the dopamine or something.
I take for granted having grown up learning and speaking in English. As a language with a reputation for stealing the good bits from a bunch of other languages, there’s a part of it that could almost feel universal. And then, I hear a something that’s not entrenched in the realm of English as I’m familiar with it, and it feels like such a stupid thing to know. Especially when there are prettier and somehow more evocative languages.
Every year in elementary school, we would have a week or two with students from the high school who came to teach us German. It was always German, which was my secret frustration as a kid. For a long time, I think that was the only foreign language offered at my small K-12 school. At some point, Spanish entered the ring, and then I would live in hope that we’d get Spanish II students in our classroom for a couple of weeks, but it wasn’t ever to be. When it came time for me to pick a language in high school, I chose Spanish out of pure spite; I wanted nothing to do with German.
I think I also chose Spanish because on some level, I could see such clear lines between it and English. Our first day of class, the teacher did that immersion thing, where she spoke in Spanish the entire time. I’m not sure how the rest of the class felt about it, but for me personally, it was fascinating. I still think back to that first day of class sometimes, because it was probably the most fun I’d had with pure learning in a very long time. It was so easy to do high school by rote and memory, and for some reason it felt like that practice went out the window for the final hour of that first school day.
I didn’t have any more immersion in Spanish until I took a lone semester of it in college. In retrospect, I should have taken more of it, because there were days when I would be walking back to my dorm room and it was like my brain had jumped to a different track and my thoughts were in (admittedly jumbled and jerky) Spanish, and I enjoyed that feeling. I didn’t have that happen again until I went on an extended Duolingo jag; coupled with stumbling into a telenovela. There were some weird dreams in there, and I would wake up in the morning with the idea that my subconscious was doing a lot of work to internalize this other language… and all of the drama in the life of Ana Leal.
That accursed Duolingo owl entered my life a decade ago, and has routinely guilted me into maintaining our relationship ever since. Has it made me a better speaker? Absolutely not. In terms of reading, writing, hearing, and speaking Spanish, I would say I’m most proficient in reading and writing (with the assistance of Google’s multi-language keyboard). Listening is best accomplished with subtitles (because: reading), and I’m a reluctant speaker; I loath the awkwardness of being bad at something. Also, until pretty recently, the app was terrible at understanding anything I said in Spanish.
I tried using Duolingo to learn Portuguese, because “it’s a romance language, it’s not the same as Spanish, but it’s close, right?” That lasted maybe 3 days and I was so annoyed at all of the different branches the language took in sound and spelling that I gave it up. Before Duolingo, I had a brief flirtation with French, because I found an online friend who is French Canadian. We exchanged some mix tapes, and she sent me a CD full of music in French. I’ve never tried to get the owl to teach me French though, I’m not sure it would go well.
I forgot how much I wanted to learn French after listening to this song.
The closest I will ever come to learning a different romance language is Italian, since my first 6 years of piano lessons involved a lot of vocabulary lessons and identifying what the random italicized words mixed in with the notes meant. It’s very specialized, entirely sporadic, and basically not useful to my daily life until I decide I need to start sitting down at a piano everyday.
Instead, I’m making tentative steps to learn Irish (Gaeilge), because it just sounds interesting.
I saw someone describe the feeling as “going feral” when they got to Gaeilge at the end. Feral feels a bit extreme to me, but it was something visceral, for reasons I cannot describe.
I’ve been thinking a lot about language lately. Some of that is down to Hozier’s new album, and the inclusion of Gaeilge in the lyrics of “De Selby (Part 1).” But, it’s clearly not the first time music has pulled me towards a language, or that listening to music with something other than English has been a more emotional or meaningful experience to me.
Always happy tears with this song
In the days when I listened to nothing but music podcasts (when I wasn’t listening to actual music), All Songs Considered turned me on to Sigur Rós. Before then, I think I had maybe listened to a handful of their songs, always the very ambient ones that played over random moments on TV shows. When the brass started at the beginning of “Inní mér syngur vitleysingur” I was taken aback, and then more thrown by how joyful it all felt. I tear up listening to the song, because it’s so intrinsically happy. I don’t know why happiness makes me cry, but that’s true of pretty much any intense emotion in my experience. To listen to something that sounds like distilled joy is going to bring it out in me, especially if I haven’t heard to it in a while. I know none of the lyrics to that song. I’m familiar with all of the vocalizations, because I’ve listened to it for 15 years, but I couldn’t tell you what any of it means. Sometimes, I wonder if what I’m hearing and identifying as words is correct. But, I also know that this group plays with their lyrics, and some of it is actual Icelandic, and other parts are… something else. I remembered it being referred to as Hopelandic, I guess in Icelandic it’s known as Vonlenska.
I can’t say which language in music will hit my guts and which one won’t. So much of it comes down to my mood I suppose. It doesn’t all have to make me cry for me to want to listen to it again, because I certainly had fun overplaying “Dragostea Din Tei” in its heyday on the internet.
I can only picture one thing when I hear this song, and it’s none of its original singers
But, not every piece of music featuring a foreign language will strike some hidden chord inside me and turn my brain into a sponge for the language. It would be nice if it resulted in me being multilingual, but mostly my memory contains snippets of lyrics I may or may not be able to translate. If it’s in Spanish (and I’ve listened to it enough times) I can probably figure out the words, anything else… maybe I listened to it on repeat and ran the lyrics through a translator enough times that I memorized it?
This post has gotten away from me… it sat in my drafts folder for a week, precipitated by listening to “De Selby (Part 1)” and then marinating in the back of my brain while life went on. There are so many languages I want to know, but can’t find the right avenue to learn them. I live in Northern Minnesota, where an effort is being made to include the Ojibwe language throughout our community, and the only avenues I find to learn are the content creators who take the time to share it. It seems fanciful to think that learning to understand those words might give me a greater appreciation of where I live, but I look at how much appreciation I get from other things where I’ve been able to see the influence of the language, and maybe it’s not that much of a stretch.
I’ve never been one for big celebrations. In theory, they sound fun, but in reality I’m almost always ready to tap out about 45 minutes in. The very premise of deciding to get married with a ceremony and a reception was honestly, horrifying to me. It’s odd, 6 years of competitive speaking, and still, somehow the idea of being the center of attention for the better part of 4 hours sounded like some sort of ritual torture.
In retrospect, there were several things that saved us. For starters, my aunt Beth catered, and I don’t think anyone can complain when you have a buffet of excellent food on offer, punch to drink, and some appetizers to snack on while things get reorganized. We also didn’t throw a monster-sized bash, and I’d like to think things moved at a brisk enough pace that no one was really stuck waiting for something for very long.
I’m always worried about whether or not everyone had a good time when they were there. I remember after my high school graduation party I was sort of bummed out that I’d barely gotten to talk with anyone, even though I’d managed to greet anyone who came through the door. I worried about the same thing in the time after my wedding. I especially worried about whether or not my family enjoyed themselves. I barely got to talk to anyone aside from when we were lining up to process in and out, and the brief turn we took making the rounds before dinner started. It seemed like a poor reward for inviting them to this big day. “Here, show up, march in, I’ll wave at you a couple of times, you can eat some food, and we’ll go about our lives!”
But, then I started going through our photos (we’re still working on putting together an album) and I was looking through them all, letting Google tag faces and find people for me, and I found this great series of photos of my wife Ivory, twirling with our nieces. It was before the ceremony, when we were getting all of the group photos completed. My mom and grandmother were seated off to the side, and my grandmother has this bemused sort of smile on her face, watching all of them twirling in their dresses.
It’s the kind of thing that gets lost in the chaos of a big day, but it was a relief to see a little moment of delight, even as things were bustling along. Because, of course people tell you they had a great time, or they rave about the food or whatever, but there’s nothing like a candid photo to tell you other truths that could have been missed, I guess.
This weekend, there was a kiss of red and gold on the tops of the trees as we drove around the state. And tonight we have our first frost warning. This is the difficult thing about fall, when it seems like it’s so far off, and then suddenly it just jumps in front of us for a little scare. I’m trying to burn a reminder into my brain that I need to collect our extra sheets from the garage and gather all of the plants underneath them tonight if I want a few more weeks with our flowers. They’ve all been doing so well, and it seems a shame to leave them to the cold just yet. Plus, I have some work to do with our growing geranium collection before fall progresses too much further.
It feels like I’ve barely spent any time outside, between the relentless smoke and air quality issues and the general heat and drought making being the outdoors more punishing than enjoyable. I also know we’re barely through September, and these past few years we’ve had some furnace level heat waves late into the month. Of course, several people at the knitting group I attended last week warned us the rodent invasions were beginning, and the persistence of mice trying to winter inside is an indicator we’re in for a rough cold season.
No one could say for certain what “rough” meant. Will we be buried in snow? Will we have months long cold snaps necessitating 2am visits to our garage to run the engine in our car (We don’t have a block heater)? Will it just be relentlessly brutal? All I know for certain is: it will be winter, and we’ll have some snow, we’ll be cold; the quantities and duration of these things are never completely accurate in their predictability.
I’m also not ready for the seasons to change, because it’s such a tangible reminder time has followed through on its demand to march forward. The holidays are going to be rocky this year, the way they were rocky last year, and the way they’ve been rocky after any major loss. I’m not sure I’m ready for that side of things. I feel insanely prepared for all sorts of other things, like making a half dozen pies (because for some reason we possess that many pie dishes), but being prepared to do that isn’t going to make up for the absence of my grandmother in the way I actually want it to.
So, I’m going to just put blinders on and stumble into whatever comes next and probably forget mid-way through why everything is so difficult and then be reminded out of nowhere and fall apart. Which isn’t actually anything new, in the grand scheme of things. But, it never happens the same way twice, so I’m sure there are surprises waiting for me around a corner in the future.
I don’t want to think about what I was doing 22 years ago. It feels cliche to rehash it at this point, because my story is the same as everyone else’s. It also feels wrong to think about it now. I think a lot about the obsession everyone had with the American Flag in the aftermath, and how that flag has been twisted and manipulated into propaganda of every kind now and mostly I feel disgusted. Part of that probably comes down to every civics-centered event I participated in between being 16 and 17 years old, and how much was hammered into my head about how you treat the flag. I watch what people do with it now and mostly I feel like an idiot for having so much reverence for an object everyone else has decided to manipulate rather than respect. So, that’s how I’m feeling about things today.
I’m also just struggling a little bit in general today. Being out is the most exhausting experience at times, especially because I just don’t know how to be out, for myself. I don’t know how to interject the correct pronouns into a conversation. It feels like I’m just too afraid, too unsure to take the chance. Most of it comes down to practice, but when safe spaces are so difficult to come by, that leaves a lot of awkward places to advocate for my pronouns, for myself, and considering how averse I am to conflict it just becomes “easier” not to say anything. It’s not actually easier, but it avoids the awkwardness of exposing all of my weak spots to people who may or may not understand, who might just choose unkindness rather than acceptance.
I’m resisting the urge to just pour everything into this blog like the journals of my adolescence. I’m hoping to start doing some morning pages again, so maybe there will be a bit more in the way of mental clarity for this place. Those pages are where it’s completely acceptable to say anything, no matter how taboo it might be. Technically, I know I can say whatever I want here, but some of the things I want to say… well they’re better off said directly to someone if they’re ever to be said at all. Or, I could just take a big chance and spill everything that’s bothering me out into the void and bank on it going unseen, remaining unaddressed until the end of time. It’s one of those bad habits I’ve had for… basically my entire life. Rather than have the tough conversation, I just wait out the immediate need to talk about whatever has come up, and then I can pretend to move on because everything is fine. It’s like I had the conversation, except I totally didn’t, and it just builds up as this invisible wall between myself and others, until it’s so tall and heavily reinforced that it’s seems insurmountable. It’s not healthy, but considering I don’t know how to properly have anything resembling a difficult conversation or an argument, avoidance is a skill I rely on, way too much.
Happy Monday, everyone. Apparently it’s going to be a long week.
Here’s a photo of Chanski looking alarmed… possibly annoyed as a reward for getting through this post.
You know the fable about the ant and the grasshopper? I’m feeling just slightly like the grasshopper right now. I’m not sure it’s possible to get to the end of summer and not have a bit of regret about the things I should have taken care of during the appropriate season.
Part of my regret stems from the fact that things are about to get busier again, after a relatively quiet summer. I’m not sure I’m ready for the busyness. There’s going to be travel, and more socialization than I get in a week, let alone in a day, and I’m going to be away from home for repeated stretches again. There are little plans all throughout September and October, and then Halloween will be here, and we’ve been discussing a costume for months.
It’s an odd echo from a year ago when we were scrambling to do wedding planning and it was as though somehow the big day had managed to sneak up on us (of course, our first anniversary is mixed into the “little” plans in October). Things were a bit more chaotic then, which I can’t really say is a comfort this time around, because there are still big ripples from that chaos coming through right now. Funny how time works like that (time blindness too).
With all of that busyness in mind, updates here are going to be pretty brief for the next few days, and it’s possible I will just make a habit of going quiet over the weekends or holidays. I’m definitely still building up my stamina to keep doing this on a near-daily basis. Weirdly, it’s easier to imagine doing posts for 31 days straight when there’s a goal post in sight. But just doing them to do them? That’s somehow completely different.
For some reason, it’s difficult to be mindful about this place on the weekends. Saturday and Sunday are pretty much always where I will struggle, because those days are without form and structure. It’s ironic (I think?) to have 48 hours completely at my disposal, no work, no major commitments, and to somehow be unable to remember to do this one thing for myself, even when I remember to do it 5 other days in the week, when I’ve committed large chunks of my time to work and the necessities of daily living. It’s not a habit yet, which it turns out are things I have to aggressively cultivate in order to get them to stick. Maybe by next year this will be more ingrained somehow. That’s a long way away though.
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