So far, the cooler seasons are off to a great start for me, personally. I’ve not only learned that my apartment can get a decent enough cross-breeze if the wind is coming from the right direction, but that just closing the windows is enough for the temperature to start rising inside it, even after the sun has shifted from shining through the windows to just reflecting off the roof. Any day where I’ve felt like my apartment got too cold overnight (the lowest I’ve seen it so far was just under sixty degrees and that was a night it was almost freezing outside), all I have to do is close the windows and it will warm right back up again. My old apartment could not be counted on to ever warm back up and then stay warm throughout the day unless I had the heat running. As a result of all that, I actually had my windows open for over two weeks in a row, adjusting how open they were to control the temperature and enjoying every minute of fresh air I was getting. In fact, the only reason they weren’t open longer is because I left for the weekend to visit a friend and wanted to see what would happen during a relatively chilly weekend if I left all the windows shut and the air off. It worked out pretty well, though it never got quite as warm as I’d hoped it would, so I’ll probably need to run a few more tests to dial in my expectations.
Continue readingMusing
So Much For Restraint At Work…
It has been a week and a half since my boss told me I could take my side “research” project and work on it more actively. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to really do that since I’ve gotten sidetracked every single day by something that came up and required my attention. I did get to spend one evening of work earlier this week doing research on some of the tools I’d be using and I got to have a chat with a few people about how to make this useful for them, but I haven’t made much forward progress because the other people I need to talk to are busy during every free moment I’ve got. Between not being able to access people and running into my own time and energy limitations, I’ve actually done less work on this project in the last week and a half than I did in the single week prior. There’s just been so much going on and I’ve been unable to pull myself away from most of it since, after all, this project isn’t really my job. It is now a thing my boss doesn’t mind me working on, but I think we’re both aware that he meant I had to still keep up with the stuff that features more heavily in my job description.
Continue readingPassion, Drive, And Pumping The Brakes
Recently, while talking to my boss about what I’ve been working on, he suggested something that I’d been considering for a long time. Something that I’ve been halfway working on and hoped to eventually convince him (and the rest of my team) that there was a need for me to work on it more than I was. Something I would love to be doing instead of my current job. It was a very rewarding moment, to not have to wade into what I expected to be a battle and instead sail smoothly over a calm sea of mutual inclination. It was an incredible turnaround from just the week before (that inspired the Self-Destructive Repetition poem from last week) and that made it feel like the work I’d been thanklessly doing for almost a year now was actually going to pay off for something. I did my best not to react in surprise or shock, and I don’t think he noticed how surprised I was that he had jumped straight to an idea I was slowly building towards, but it was amazing that we both agreed that this thing (which I’m going to avoid the specifics about because it is way too early to do more than prepare and think about, not to mention I still don’t want any of my blog posts to connect to my actual employer or job so my coworkers don’t find out I sometimes complain about them here) would be a cool thing for our team to have, especially if I was the one doing it. Since then, with his express approval, I’ve been able to go from slowly working on this project in my spare moments to actually putting real time towards it every day.
Continue readingPersonal Warmth Thanks To Cozy Blankets And A Good Day
I spent the weekend relaxing. I did my chores, listened to podcasts, played more Baldur’s Gate 3 (I’m currently hopping between a few alternate save files as the mood strikes me), and enjoying the chilly weather. I got to sleep underneath my comforter for the first time in more than five months, maybe six, and I feel like I slept super well both nights I got to sleep past sunrise. I had a few weird dreams both nights, none of which I remember at this point beyond a few vague impressions (well, now that I’m really digging into those impressions, I remember most of one of them), but I slept like a rock. Both mornings, when I woke up, I had to carefully stagger my way to the bathroom because my body was so dead to the world that I could barely keep myself upright until I’d had a chance to go back to bed and lay around for a while, waking up slowly as I luxuriated in the comfortable sensation of being beneath a big pile of blankets and not being so warm that I was sweating through them. I’ve always appreciate a good, weighty blanket pile, but my past couple years of plastic-covered windows and desperate attempts to keep my apartment warm enough that my pipes don’t freeze and my pet bird doesn’t die meant that I couldn’t do my usual thing of opening the windows in my bedroom at night in the winter and burrowing under as many blankets as I could comfortably fit on my bed.
Continue readingFall Has Finally Fallen Over Wisconsin
After what felt like a never-ending summer (I’ve been wearing shorts and flipflops non-stop since I-don’t-even-know-when last spring, but it was easily five months ago since I made the change before my friends’ wedding), fall has finally arrived. It feels odd to see the leaves already making substantial progress give most nights haven’t dropped below the mid-sixties until very recently, but there have been enough cooler days that they maybe got the program. Or maybe they’re trying to provide an example since it feels like the temperature is following the leaves rather than the other way around. I mean, it is actually fall now, on the calendar, so it’s been weird seeing summer stick around as long as it has (with a significant resurgence in the last days of September and first days of October). Normally we’d have had a week or two of cooler days and many cooler nights by this point, but the day I’m writing this is the first time I’ve thought about leaving my windows open all day since it won’t get warm enough to wish I’d turned the AC on at any point in the next few days. Sure, it might wind up warmer inside than I keep the AC at, but I only keep it there so my home is cool at night and so my bedroom is cool enough for me to sleep easily when I go to bed rather than knowing I’ll have to resign myself to a sweaty hour or two before it finishes cooling down since I turned the air on after I got home from work.
Continue readingThe Wearing Down Continues
Every so often, I just have one of those days where I forget to take time for lunch and wind up clocking out, turning to grab my bag, and noticing my lunch is still sitting on my desk where I left it when I got into work that morning. Today was one of those days. When I got in to work, I went to my desk, unpacked my bag, and then left to go check on the test I’d left running overnight. Three hours later, at twelve thirty, I returned to my desk for the first time. I left seconds later and didn’t come back for another hour. After typing up a quick message, I left again and didn’t go back for another two hours. When I stepped away to go get some files off my testing laptop, I got swept up in a “let’s go have a meeting at the local ice cream parlor” event and didn’t get back to my desk until almost five. So all I had to eat today, before I came home and ate dinner, was my fiber supplement, a Nutri-Grain bar, my daily coffee, and a scoop of rainbow sherbet at the ice cream parlor. All despite running around so much that I felt like a disgusting, sweaty mess before I’d even gone on my daily walk, much less worked several more hours and gone on a 4-mile round trip bike ride to a nearby ice cream parlor. And I was so tired by the first time I realized I’d never eaten lunch at 3pm that I just wasn’t hungry anymore.
Continue readingTrying To Break Free From Identity Defined In Opposition To The World I Live In
While I was mulling over my identity and coming to reflect on the decision I’d made years ago (largely out of self-defense, given how absolutely locked-in I was to my parents’ vision of who they wanted me to be), I was listening to a lot of Friends at the Table. A lot of stuff they said there informed the way I think about my place in contemporary society and the way my identity fits into the world I inhabt. Not because I was entirely unfamiliar with those ideas, but because the thinking they explored as a part of their science-fiction themed seasons (especially Twilight Mirage, their fourth season) helped build on what I’d learned in some of the classes I took in college, in the research I’d done on my own, and the helpful things I’d coincidentally read along the way. One the things that stuck with me the most was the GM, Austin Walker, talking about how he wanted to push the boundaries with their fourth season. I don’t remember the exact quote, but he said something along the lines of “we need to imagine the most radical thing we can and then take it one step further.” The idea being, he explained, that all of us are limited by the world we live in, by the society we’re used to, and that a civilization that had progressed to the very edges of what we could conceptualize would be able to imagine modes of being/ways of life/etc that we couldn’t even conceive of because we are so anchored by the world we know, and that the society he wanted the group to attempt to represent in this season should have progressed beyond even that.
Continue readingThe Risky Nature of Digital Ownership
Last night, after I finished the book I was reading (Mélusine, by Katherina Addison, the first in a series I’ll be writing about once I’ve finished them all), I went to open the next one in my NOOK app on my tablet and discovered the entire thing was blank. It said there were a bunch of pages in the book, but no matter how many times I swiped forward, I could never make it to page 2 or get any kind of anything to appear on the page. It was frustrating since it wasn’t time to get ready for bed yet but it was too late to really start anything new. Plus, you know, I’d bought an ebook that had turned out to be entirely useless to me. Nothing I did could fix the file (or the file of the 4th book in the series, which was bugged in the same way), so I found the support line, spent forty slow minutes trying to troubleshoot the problem with someone on their online helpdesk (which, to give this person their due, was available at eleven at night, central time, and seemed to be fairly competent at their job) only to eventually be given a refund since nothing they did seemed to resolve the problem for me. It was annoying and, sure, I got my money back, but I didn’t want money. I wanted to read the book!
Continue readingWorkplace Preparation for Afternoon Peckish Pangs
As someone who frequently works long hours at a job that takes either absolutely no focus or every ounce of attention I can muster, one of the most difficult problems that invades the later portion of my day is hunger. I’ve dealt with it before, usually in much more difficult situations overall, so this isn’t a problem in the way that my insomnia is a problem. It’s more of a problem in the way that my penchant for flipping between the same few websites when I get distracted is a problem. It tends to mostly impact my mental health and my ability to stay focused on whatever I’m doing, which in turn impacts how frequently I wind up flipping between websites or taking a break to do a little writing. It’s ignorable if I have the spoons to put into the effort, but when I’m working a bunch of ten-hour days in a row (or eleven-hour days, like this week as I cope with an unexpected confluence of schedule disruptions), I’m usually better off saving my spoons for something that isn’t a problem I can solve with a little foresight and planning. For most of this past year, that has looked like bringing an apple and an extra banana to work every day, so that I’ve got a snack when I start to get hungry in the mid-afternoon (three hours after I’ve eaten lunch) and then a second snack, if needed, for when I start to feel hungry in the late afternoon or early evening.
Continue readingAction and Consequence in Pursuit of Mourning
My grandmother’s funeral was on Friday morning [here’s a periodic reminder that I write these a week ahead of them getting posted]. It was at half past eleven in the morning at a church I’d never heard of before, despite driving past it many times as a child. My extended family, in a series of decisions inscrutible and unknowable to an estranged member like myself, scheduled every part of the process of saying goodbye, wake to funeral to post-funeral lunch, all in one day. A long twelvish hours for everyone involved, from time they had to rise to prepare until they all arrived home or at least had finished going their separate ways for the day. I rose at six, following a night of poor sleep–my waking hours filled with anxieties about what being spotted at the funeral could mean and my sleeping hours filled with frenetic, fragmented nightmares about what going unseen at the funeral could mean–and shuffled my way through my morning routine. I left fifteen minutes late, pushed to almost half an hour by the time I finished getting gas and enough caffeine to keep my tired mind awake for the drive, but arrived five minutes early by only taking a single bathroom break during the two and a half hour drive, and that only when I’d gotten within quick driving range of my destination. Also speeding. Lots of pushing the speed limit during the empty mid-morning hours of my inter-state travel.
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