You know you need a vacation when...

Aug. 21st, 2025 06:44 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

We're going to be on vacation from the 16th to the 25 of September.

The other day I blocked this time out in my calendar. The most accessible way to do this involves inputting the start and end dates.

Today I was asked about a meeting for a random Tuesday in October and when I went to see whether or not I was free, I saw that whole day I was showing as "on leave." And the Monday before it. I'm not aware of any reason I'd have time off then!

Zooming out and every day was showing as on leave. Every day that month.

I investigated and, instead of making the vacation last until the 26th of September, I'd somehow gotten it to be the 26th of December.

My burned-out brain just wants an extra three months off, heh.

Phone, again [me, tech]

Aug. 21st, 2025 05:10 am
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Whelp, it looks like I'm in the market for a cell phone again.

On Saturday night, I noticed something dangling from the corner of my cell phone, which immediately struck me as odd, as there's no aperture in the protective gel case there for something to get stuck. Well, there's not supposed to be. On further inspection, I discovered the corner of the gel case no longer fit over the corner of the phone, and some random shmutzig had gotten wedged... between the back plate of the phone and the rest of the phone, to which it was no longer attached along the bottom. Pressing it back down didn't work: something in the middle of the phone was causing resistance to closing the phone.

Lo, verily, my phone's battery was pregnant.

Some of you who follow me on the fediverse might be thinking, "Wait, didn't you just replace a phone, the battery of which swelled up?" Lol, yes: late April. That was my work phone. This is my personal phone. Lolsob.

So, being a proper nerd, I went right to iFixit to order myself a battery. Whereupon I was stopped by something that did not bode well. I entered my phone's model information and iFixit, instead of telling me what battery to buy, alerted me that it is not possible to determine what kind of battery my phone took from the outside.

It turns out that the OnePlus 9 G5 can take one of two batteries, and which one a given OnePlus 9 G5 takes can only be determined by putting eyes on the battery which is in it.

Well, okay then: I clicked through the helpful link to read instructions on how to pull the battery on a OnePlus 9 G5. I read along with slow dawning horror at exactly how involved it was and how many tools I would have to buy, and made it to step twelve – "Use a Phillips screwdriver to remove the ten 3.8 mm-long screws securing the motherboard cover. One of the motherboard cover screws is covered by a white water ingress sticker. To unfasten the screw you can puncture the sticker with your screwdriver." – of thirty and decided: fuck this, I will hire a professional.

(I think maybe it was a fortunate thing that I went through the prior fiasco with trying to change the battery on the Nuu B20 5G, first, because it softened me to the idea of maybe I don't have to service all my electronics personally myself.)

Alas, it was late on a Saturday night and all the cell phone repair places around me were closed until Monday.

Fortunately, I had a short day Monday and would be getting out of work around 5:30pm. I called ahead to a place that is open to 7pm to ask if I needed an appointment and whether they did OnePlus phones. There was a bit of a language barrier with the guy who answered the phone, but he said no appointment was necessary and whether they could fix my phone would entail putting eyes on it, and please try to come before 6pm to give them time to fix it before they close.

So after work, Mr B took me there, and we presented the phone. Dude got the back of the phone the rest of the way off the phone with rather more dispatch that I would be have been able to, and pretty quickly discovered that he was in over his head. Credit where it's due – "A man's got to know his limitations" – he promptly backed off, and told me to bring it back tomorrow when the more-expert boss was in.

I'm slightly irritated that we made the unnecessary trip instead of him saying, "Oh, a OnePlus, come tomorrow when our OnePlus expert is in", but it did give me the extra time to do more thorough backing-up. I have never managed to get Android File Transfer to work, nor any a number of alternatives; snapdrop.io would only do single files at a time, not whole directories, and, weirdly, Proton Drive, both app and website, doesn't allow uploading whole directories from Android either.

Finally, I saw a mention that the Android app Solid Explorer "does FTP". I wanted to make a local backup to my Mac, but, fuck it, I have servers, I can run FTP somewhere just to get my files backed up off my phone. Imagine my surprise on opening up the "FTP" option on Solid Explorer and discovering it wasn't an FTP client it was an FTP server. Yes, the easiest way I found to exchange files between my Android phone and my MacBook Pro was to put an FTP server on my phone.

Worked fine. My FTP client on my Mac sucks, but I'll solve that another day. (Does Fetch still exist?)

Mr B and I discussed it and decided he'd bring the phone in the next day, Tuesday, to spare me the hike. He returned with the phone, still with the back off, and the news that they had discovered, as I had, you have to get at the battery to even figure out which battery to order. And that he was told that the battery would be in by 3pm the next day (Wednesday). The only surprising thing here is that they could get the battery that fast.

So, today (Wednesday), after 3pm, Mr B took my phone back for a third visit, and they attempted to install my new battery.

It was the wrong battery.

Hwaet! The saga continues... )

Trying to reframe things

Aug. 21st, 2025 05:02 am
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

5am and I'm awake from bad dreams. My brain is being a jerk...

Or, it's tired, I've been pushing it too hard for too long. It's trying to take care of me. It's trying to identify potential threats and think about what to do about them.

It's not its fault that the "what if there's a tiger after me" adrenaline and cortisol-based hardware is the only response available to the "complicated family and memories and bullshit email job" emotions that the software is currently running.

I got back to sleep, yay, but I very convincingly dreamed witnessing an accident and having to accompany family members (D and his sister and then somehow V as well) to A&E. I had every detail: bad phone signal when calling 999, not being able to get an ambulance, waiting all day, seeing excellent and nice clinical staff who are very busy)... I stayed with D and knew to look away when they did something that I know in real life would freak me out.

We were just getting to leave, both of them patched up, when my alarm went off.

If I didn't have such a busy day, and a deadline that depended on me doing something not just today but first thing this morning, I might well have called in sick. I never do that, but I honestly felt like I'd just spent a long eight hours looking after severely injured loved ones. It felt unfair to have to go to work too right after that.

But I did.

siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Yall. I am so tired.

Last thing first. Investigating the other thing, I discovered this. I'll just cut and paste what I submitted as a ticket to Patreon:
I took a break of a few months, and when I came back my fees spiked. What gives?

I just did a month (July 2025) that extremely similar to last January (2025): similar revenues (466.19 vs 458.50), similar patrons (160 vs 162). According to my "Insights > Earnings" page, my total fees went up from 11.4% to the astounding 14.6%. Drilling down, most of that is an eye-watering 3% increase of the payment fees (5.8% to 8.8%). There was also a minor increase of Patreon's platform fee from 5.6% to 5.8%.

That represents a FIFTY-TWO PERCENT INCREASE in processing fees, and a 28% increase in fees over all.

Care to explain? Was there some announced change in payment structure or payment processor fees I missed?
I have received no response.

But the other thing is this: Patreon has dropped my business model.

Apparently by accident.

When I went to Patreon to create the Patreon post for my latest Siderea Post at the end of July, I was confronted with a recent UI update. In and of itself it wouldn't have been a problem, but, as usual, they screwed something up.

They removed the affordance for a post to Patreon to both be public and paid. The new UI conflated access and payment, such that it was no longer possible to post something world-accessible and still charge patrons for it.

I found a kludge to get around it so I could get paid at all, and I fired off a support ticket asking if it was possible but unobvious, or just not possible, and if it was not possible, whether that was a policy or a mistake. I have received very apologetic reply back from Patreon support which seemed to suggest (but not actually affirm) it was an unintentional:
From what we've seen so far, the option to make a post publicly accessible while still charging members for it isn't possible in the new editor. Content within a paid post will only be available to those with paid access, and it won't show up for the public.

Other creators have reported this same issue, and I want to reassure you that I've already shared this feedback with our team. If anything changes or if this feature is brought back, I'll be sure to keep you in mind and let you know right away.
So it's not like the reply was, "Oh, yes, it was announced that we wouldn't be supporting that feature any more," suggesting, contrarily, they didn't realize they were removing a feature at all.

The support person I was corresponding with encouraged me to write back with any further questions or issues, so I did:
Hi, [REDACTED], thanks for getting back to me. I have both some more questions and feedback.

1) Question: Am I understanding correctly, that the new UI's failure to support having publicly accessible paid posts was an oversight, and not a policy decision to no longer support that business model? Like, there's not an announcement this was going away that I missed? As a blogger who often writes about Patreon itself, I'd like to be able to clarify the situation for my readers.

2) Question: Do you have any news to share whether Patreon intends to restore this functionality? Is fixing this being put on a development roadmap, or should those of us who relied on this functionality just start making other plans? Again: my readers want to know, too.

3) Suggestion: If Patreon intends to restore this functionality, given the way the new UI is organized, the way to add the functionality back in is under "Free Access > More options" there should also be a "charge for this post" button, which then ungrays more options for charging a subset of patrons, defaulting to "charge all patrons".

4) Feedback: The affordance that was removed, of being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content, was my whole business model. I'm not the only one, as I gather you already have discovered. In case Patreon were corporately unaware, this is the business model of creators using Patreon to fund public goods, such as journalism, activism, and open source software. My patrons aren't paying me to give them something; my patrons are paying me to give something to the world. Please pass this along to whomever it's news.

5) Feedback: This is the sort of gaffe which suggests to creators that Patreon is out of touch with its users and doesn't appreciate the full breadth of how creators use Patreon. It is the latest in a long line of incidents that suggests to creators that Patreon is not a platform for creators, Patreon is a platform for music video creators, and everybody else is a red-headed stepchild whom Patreon corporately feels should be grateful they are allowed to use the platform at all. It makes those of us who are not music video creators feel unwelcome on Patreon.

6) Feedback: Being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content is one of a small and dwindling list of features that differentiated Patreon from cheaper competitors. Just sayin'.

7) Feedback: I thought you should know: my user experience has become that when I open Patreon to make a post, I have no idea whether I will be able to. I have to schedule an hour to engage with the Patreon new post workflow because I won't know what will be changed, what will be broken, etc. It would be nice if Patreon worked reliably. My experience as a creator-user of your site is NOT, "Oh, I don't like the choices available to me", it's that the site is unstable, flaky, unpredictable, unreliable.
I got this response:
Hi Siderea,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful follow-up and for sharing your questions and feedback in such detail.

To address your first question, I can’t speak to whether this change was an oversight or a deliberate policy decision, but I can confirm there hasn’t been any official announcement about removing the ability to charge members for world-accessible posts. If anything changes or if we receive more clarity from our product team, I’ll be sure to keep you updated.

At this time, I also don’t have any news to share about whether this functionality will be restored or if it’s on the development roadmap.

I know that’s not the most satisfying answer, but I want to reassure you that your feedback and suggestions are being shared directly with the relevant teams. The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better.

Thank you as well for your suggestion about how this could be reintroduced in the UI—I’ll make sure to pass that along, along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods. Your perspective is incredibly valuable, and I just want to truly thank you for taking the time to lay it all out so clearly.

If you have any more thoughts, questions, or ideas, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to take a further look. I appreciate your patience and your willingness to advocate for the creator community.

All the best,
[REDACTED]
Several observations:

0) Whoa.

1) That is the best customer service response letter I've ever gotten, for reasons I will perhaps break down at some other junction. But it both does and does not read like it was written by an AI. I didn't quite know what to make of it, until someone mentioned to me the phenomenon of customer service agents at another org using AI to generate letters, and then I was like, oooooooh, maybe that's what this is. Or maybe not. Hard to say.

2) Though [REDACTED] could not confirm or deny, it sure sounds like an accident, but one that impacts such an uninteresting-to-Patreon set of creators that they can't be arsed to fix it, either in a timely way or at all.

3) "The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better." is a hell of a sentence. Especially in conjunction with "...along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods.". Reading between the lines, it sure sounds like the support people have been inundated by a little wave of outraged/anguished public-good posters, and the support people, or at least this support person, is entirely on the creators' side against higher ups brushing them off. Could be a pose, of course, but, dayum.

So that's what I know from Patreon's side.

The kludge I came up with for the post I made at the end of July is that I used another new feature – the ability to drop a cut line across a Patreon post where above it is world readable and below it is paid access only – to make a paid-access only post where 100% of the post contents are above the cut line.

Please let me know if it's not working as intended. This unfortunately has the gross effect of putting a button on my new post saying "Join to unlock".

So.

In any event, I strongly encourage those of you following me as unpaid subscribers over on Patreon to make sure you're following me, instead, here on Dreamwidth, because Patreon is flaky.

I will make a separate post with instructions as to all the ways to do that. You can get email notifications of my posts (either all or just the Siderea Posts), follow RSS and Atom feeds, get DM inbox notifications, and, of course, just follow me on your DW reading page, all on/through Dreamwidth, anonymously and completely free.

Weddings

Aug. 19th, 2025 06:45 pm
liv: Detail of quirky animals including a sheep, from an illuminated border (marriage)
[personal profile] liv
This weekend one of my oldest friends got married, and my partners celebrated their 20th anniversary with a Jewish blessing and wedding canopy. So I had a lovely lovely time, and also I'm very much reminded that there's a crowd of (mostly somewhat connected) people I've been friends with for most of 30 years and I should make more active effort to actually spend time with them because they are awesome.

wedding squee )

I sort of want to see if I can make it to my brother's charity's ceilidh next week. But Friday evening events in Brighton when I have a bar mitzvah in Cambridge on Saturday are a bit unworkable. And although I enjoyed the dancing, what I want more of isn't mainly dancing, it's spending time with people. And waiting for my friends to have reunions in the form of weddings isn't very efficient! I'm amazed that there were even two weddings this year, with most of my circle being in our 40s. [personal profile] jack has planned a bank holiday picnic next Monday; it will be fully outdoors, which is good for infection risk but possibly bad for enduring summer weather. But if you happen to be in Cambridge you're most welcome.

Vignette

Aug. 19th, 2025 10:22 am
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

I'm sitting at a table on the train, and a family with little kids has joined me. I'm delighted to see that Thumb War ("one two three four I declare a...") is a game basically unchanged from when I learned it 35 years ago on another continent.

When the girl asked her mum about the wireless charging spot on the table, I showed her how it worked by sliding my work phone on to it (she grinned when the screen lit up).

Her little brother then held his toy car over the same spot and we all (him too) laughed at his joke about charging his car.

(no subject)

Aug. 19th, 2025 10:22 am
lathany: (Default)
[personal profile] lathany
Bea and I have just had a weekend on our own. Ryan was away with his girlfriend and her parents and Dom was crewing for a LARP in East London. We watched The Cat Returns, which I really loved (excellent Studio Ghibli), and ate macaroni cheese.

The weather has been decent and mostly not too hot, although I've avoided commuting when it gets too warm. Reeve spends much of the days outside.

There's been a bunch of small outings. We celebrated our 30th Wedding Anniversary at Trinity. Dom led the GMing team for Sulphur and Quicksilver (loosely based on Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood) which including Bea, Tricia, Elle and myself. I've been to Kew a couple of times including going up the Pagoda.

Multiplayer computer gaming is mainly Dune Awakening. Solo is Tiny Bookshop (you run a mobile bookshop and recommend books – excellent!) and was previously Song of Farca (hacking). It's been a good year for computer gaming with Strange Antiquities (running an Antiques shop) coming out next month.

As ever, the household is busy and crowded; but, with some pussly exceptions, fairly harmonious. We still have plenty of house projects to do (dining room floor, bathroom floor, garden, etc) though we're currently taking a post-kitchen break.

Work itself is busy (as always) – August is rather heavy on trying to cover things for other people who are on holiday.

Work bookclub has been The Husbands (my pick) and The Ministry of Time. The latter was very slow moving, the described future was bleak and I wasn't a massive fan of the main character, but was OK overall (I just had higher expectations than it warranted). In non-bookclub reading, I'm re-reading the Witches of Lychford as the next one is out next month.

How *am* I doing, anyway?

Aug. 18th, 2025 09:37 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

Counseling after work today was about how I'm doing well in some ways -- I said I'm finally getting that much-needed holiday, we'll be away for nine days; she asked me how long it's been since I had that long a vacation; I said I didn't know if I ever had. (Turns out I probably have, but the fact that I legitimately couldn't think of any of those occasions is indicative (and that's partly because they're trips back to Minnesota and visiting family isn't really time off).)

So I talked about how fortunate I feel that I have the stability to do that: this is the first time I've had the money and the ability to have time off; before I either had time or money but never both at the same time.

But I also talked about how badly I spiraled on Saturday when some gloomy news about the Twins of all things. (tl;dr: billionaires ruin everything. The hope that things would improve when the team sold to different billionaires has been snatched away; the current ones are keeping the team and it's very clear they're going to starve it of funds -- bad teams make more money than good teams and this family believes they need money right now. They don't share the view that beat writers and podcasters and fans of the team have which is that a sportsball team is a civic institution; for them it's just a way to make money. Like Gleeman started his article the other day, "It's hope that hurts the most." Or as I learned it from English pals: "I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand.") I was like I don't have a dog any more, awful things are happening in the country I'm from, I couldn't go back for my grandma's funeral or my family, work has been so stressful all year, I can't even manage to organize a hookup...and now I can't even have baseball as a little fun escapist thing??

So am I doing pretty good or pretty bad?? I feel bad about feeling bad, being aware that my bad-feelings are floating on a sea of basic-okayness and worrying that I'm being insufficiently grateful for it. But my counselor said that it's not like one is true and one is false; both can be valid.

I guess it's part of leveling up Maslow's hierarchy: once you get the basic shit sorted out you do start caring more about that higher-level shit. I didn't expect that to happen automatically; indeed against my will but it seems to have. I don't want to lose track of the fulfilment I do have. But also basic stuff isn't taking up all my time/mental capacity any more so I have to figure out what else to do with my adult life.

Giving my brain a brush

Aug. 15th, 2025 10:01 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

Despite the misery of getting there, the conference was worth attending. Thanks to D's help I got the bus I needed, I wandered in the direction I thought I was supposed to go from the bus stop and immediately was spotted by someone calling my name; it was one of two event organizers who'd recognize me. That felt very lucky.

My keynote speech was the second of three, which meant I didn't have to deal with all the technical failures of the first one and I wasn't the last thing in the day so I could decide after little sleep and long days in hot rooms and trains that I could leave early. My travel home was much smoother (if sweatier) and being home at dinnertime instead of bedtime did wonders for me.

The conference only had a couple dozen in-person attendees but apparently seven hundred online. I forgot the whole introductory section I had worked so hard on, but it went fine without it. There was still good discussion in the room during the Q&A bit, people are saying nice things on LinkedIn, and I was able to make friends with the first keynote speaker over lunch and she's a very useful work contact for me.

Yesterday at work was rough. I slept through my alarm -- something I never do -- and when I turned on my laptop an hour late I already had missed a call from my manager who'd had to route around me not being available when his manager tagged me to do something. So that was stressful but I was able to complete the task in a reasonably timely fashion, and while it is not my best work I think it ended up being one of those things that we didn't end up needing anyway. It was a slow day at work otherwise.

Unusually for a Thursday, there was no Doof so D and I decided to go to a queer social that we usually miss because it's every Thursday. He'd also invited a person new to the local discord and it was great to meet them too. We stayed out late (for us: he had to do his last-minute before-midnight duolingo lesson while we were waiting at the bus stop to go home!) and had a great time.

Today, the editing process my report has to go through was finished unexpectedly early, so I had to decide whether to accept or reject thousands of track changes. The editing was a weird process last time which we tried to streamline this time because we're up against a tight deadline. I tried to write to the style guide (now that I've laid eyes on it! I didn't know there was one before), but the style guide sucks and the editor I have to work with isn't good at using it. He also thinks all his own opinions and foibles are "just general grammar" and twice lately he mentioned "not using the passive voice" as if that was a) desirable or b) well understood by people who claim to care about it. I cannot cope with someone who doesn't know the difference between what's "correct" by even the widest interpretation of that word, what's a matter of register, and what's stylistics.

After work I had two startling and unsettling things happen in the space of about 15 minutes, the first of which I won't talk about here but the second of which is that I'd forgotten about my mom mentioning that some family friends were traveling to England on vacation and "are going to be somewhere near you." Of course I asked where and of course she didn't remember. She wanted to know if she should tell T to call me when they got here, "...if their phones even work there..." FFS. She should know their phones won't work here because hers and my dad's phones never work when they are here but of course she hadn't thought about it that deeply. She just is a boomer so would call. Well we're millennials so we can email!

I forgot immediately about this of course, in the sea of parental nonsense. T is an anglophile and a history teacher so tends to come to London and Canterbury and whatnot with school trips of teenagers. At least one other time, before covid, we vaguely arranged to meet up when she was here on a vacation but she was in London then and I think it was around Christmas so the trains were all fucked up and I was too poor to go to London on short notice anyway.

My mom might think they're "close to me" when they're in Ireland or something so I wasn't worried about it. But it turns out they are close to me! D and I now have plans to go see them on Sunday!

This does bring up the awkward point of how, if at all, I'll hide my life from them. My parents exhibit untold levels of oblivousness but surely other people might think my beard and voice and everything are surprising enough to be remarked upon when they get home!

I made the plan like normal but am not sure how to approach it now.

Brushing

Aug. 14th, 2025 04:48 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

One of the best people I've found on fedi is Dan ifixcoinops@retro.social -- along with his classics about Home Assistant, the dick mousetrap, and how clothes shopping should work, he's just added another that I think will become part of my idiolect:

Y'know when you're doing this big multi-step DIY project that involves doing many things and getting parts and tools and materials and you're holding all this stuff in your head and you notice how much of a big noisy scrungly mess it is up there, all the thoughts and worries and tasks overlapping each other like spaghetti all going in different directions, and you grumble "This is ridiculous, a guy can't get anything done with all that yammering going on," so you start up the computer and the text editor and write out what's going on up there, not because you don't know what's going on but just because thoughts go wibblywoobly like gummy worms and writing goes left to right in a straight line and to turn your oh-I-need-to-do-this-and-that thinkings into a ah-I-need-to-do-this-THEN-that shaped Plan you need to untangle the spaghetti and make it go in the long straight writing-shaped hole

Do you ever think of that like brushing your brain

Like oh no my brain's all tangled I've gotta spend a few minutes giving it a nice brush and make it purr

My brain is all tangled. So much so that I haven't even been able to say it lately.

Unpickled pickles

Aug. 11th, 2025 11:06 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

Everything is so much.

I did get my hair cut between work and circuits today (missing a call from my boss by skiving a little bit early, oops).

And circuits was good, the last week our usual trainer is doing it! They have to reassure us that they'll still be around, they're still doing lift club, but they need their Monday evenings back. They're self-employed and they work long odd hours, and they have a kid and everything. Fair enough but I'll miss them! We've already had their replacement a couple times and it helps to know I like them too but still.

We always have music playing on a big speaker during circuits, and they asked everyone to pick a song to play tonight. I chose Calvin Harris's "Summer" because I'd already had to listen to some metal nonsense and an actual ballad (who wants breathy singer-songwriter types in the gym??) and I needed some dance music. I did my burpees so much faster when "Sandstorm" was playing!

Biggest achievement of today was getting the report draft to the copyeditor on time. Second biggest is making sure my best binder has been washed and has a chance to dry before I need to wear it tomorrow afternoon (and Wednesday). Third biggest achievement is finally, only after I got back from circuits, starting to think about what my keynote speech on Wednesday will entail.

Priorities!

I've got a few slides and everything. Our pal V gave me a lift home from circuits and when I told him I had no idea what my talk was going to be about and maybe should be worried that I'm not more worried, he said "I think I'm more worried for you now!" Oh no. He really did seem it too, bless him. I should text him tomorrow and tell him that it's fine.

The best thing that happened today is something I mostly sorted out a couple of days ago: some friends having a shitty time and dreading the UK heatwave said they'd benefit from getting some groceries delivered. One of them was able to give an idea of what kind of food would work and V told them I'm a genius at sorting out groceries online so no pressure. I took the suggestions and what I know of them and what kinds of things were on offer. The first message we got this afternoon was "It's arrived! Just put it in bags and taking a breather. From first impressions: you know us very well :D" Aw. I'm just glad it's stuff they can eat.

The next message was one of them describing the other's reaction to seeing baby cucumbers (which I'd chosen as easier to eat than having to slice up one big cucumber): "oh they're unpickled pickles!" I've been smiling at that ever since.

Dog show

Aug. 10th, 2025 09:28 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

After we got back from the dog show and picking V up from a social visit, I tried to get my hair cut but they were already closed; turns out they've changed their Sunday hours. Which is fine, but argh. I could really do with a haircut, and I like them before big work events like I have on Wednesday. Which I leave for Tuesday afternoon, which means dealing with this on Monday. When I have circuits after work, and it's just annoying trying to fit everything in.

After 5pm I couldn't go to the gym, I couldn't get my hair cut. So much still goes un-done.

And it's not as if I mis-spent any of my day: I slept until 11 and I think if I could do that every day it would fix me. And in the afternoon D and I went to the dog show that is my favorite part of our local pride. The chonky shiba Oscar! The boopable chocolate-brown Bruno! The best-dressed Artie in Hawaiian shirt and straw hat! The elderly lady Poppy with her cute neon pink and orange legwarmers! A family let me sit on their bench with them so I didn't have to stand. The sun was perfect, the weather was perfect, the beer was cold.

D's idea of a successful weekend is to feel on Sunday night like Friday was a long time ago. And it definitely does. But I still want more weekend.

Queer is fun!

Aug. 9th, 2025 10:51 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

The local pride has the best parade. They don't (can't!) close the arterial road we'd march down but we do get half of it. So we stay on the left side and oncoming traffic is on the right.

Pretty soon I noticed the chants whenever a bus was coming toward us. The most frequent bus on that road is the 192. So I heard (and soon happily joined in, enough that I nearly lost my voice by the end of a pretty short parade): "One nine two! Gay for you! One nine two! Gay for you!" Just nonsense, but it was fun. And we kept it up as long as it took for the bus to get past us.

Halfway through, we encountered a rail replacement bus, a common sight while Stockport station is closed. And pretty soon I heard (and yelled "Replacement bus! Gay for us! Replacement bus! Gay for us!"

At the end, we added a "One fifty! Gay for me!" and "One seven one! Queer is fun!"

Some of the bus drivers waved at us, some just stoically went about their job. But apparently everyone on the 171 was looking grumpy. I'm sad to see a bus I used to get to and from work being so unsupportive!

Poltergary

Aug. 8th, 2025 12:16 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

When V was making breakfast and I was wandering around the kitchen checking what groceries we needed, they told me "Well, the spirit of Gary is causing mischief." They pointed out that the sheepskin they use on their dining room chair was on the floor.

They initially bought themselves one but the first time Gary encountered it he claimed it, and they couldn't bear to take it back so just bought another one.

He ended up with three over time.

We got rid of (most of) his along with his other things, but V does still have theirs of course, on that chair.

It probably fell on the floor when I was putting the chairs back after they'd been on top of the table so the dining room could be cleaned yesterday. But regardless, Gary is such a big presence still.

I miss him so much. I think about him every day.

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