This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.
For anyone who hasn’t already heard: I got hit in the latest round of layoffs at work. I’m super excited about this since it gives me the ability to take the rest of the summer off to spend with my kid, something I’ve wanted to do for a while.
We have a plan to hopefully move my work open source project to be under a foundation (to be decided by the other maintainers and me), since work will no longer have the resources to maintain it in-house. We always could have forked and moved since it’s GPL but this way it should be a nice friendly transition. I’d set the groundwork for a lot of this earlier this year and I’m glad it’s working out.
My severance is generous enough that I don’t have to look for a job anytime soon. I’ll probably start job hunting sometime after my kid starts school in the fall, but I’m effectively paid quite a bit past that and I’m hoping to take advantage and do some fun stuff of my own choosing.
I know a lot of my colleagues are heartbroken to be leaving, but I’ve been managing burnout for a while so I’m profoundly relieved and happy to get out. I’m sure I’ll be sadder to be leaving as I’m saying goodbye to colleagues when we get closer to our last day (July 15), but for now I’m leaning into the joy and finishing stuff up and getting ready to move on.
This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.
I had this idea to do some socks tracking how much time I was spending staring at my phone. A lot of knitters track things like temperatures, but that’s never really interested me, so I set about thinking about data that I’d like to track and could do with relatively minimal effort. (Some people may be good at tracking; I am not naturally inclined to it.) My phone provides me a screen time breakdown, so I thought that would be a good candidate and started taking a look at it to see what colours I’d want to use and what increments of time should represent one row and so on.
But what I discovered, when I started looking, was that I regularly had my phone screen on for more than 5 hours a day. That seemed like… a lot. I felt a lot the way I’d felt about TV in my 20s: it wasn’t the worst thing ever, but I could use the time for things I’d enjoy more. (Also for getting a PhD, but that’s probably not completely related to my dislike of TV.)
So instead of setting up my knitting project (which I still haven’t done but probably will eventually), I set about figuring out how to reduce how much time I spent looking at my phone.
Looking at my data
Once I started looking at my data, I realized there *were* some extenuating circumstances: I’d often spend an hour with my phone open to a knitting pattern but it’s not like I was actually looking at it the whole time. Sometimes I’d accidentally leave my tea timer on screen for an hour while my tea oversteeped (a tragedy for me as it gets too tannin-y). Sometimes the screen time was due to having GPS navigation on, which, again, didn’t feel like it should count. But some days I really was just looking at my phone that often.
One of the things that helped the most was having a big widget on the screen of my phone telling me how much time I’d already spent using the device (I put it beside my weather widget where I’d tend to look). I paired this with stickers in my journal every time I went below my target amount of time, so then I found myself correcting if I felt like I’d used too much time for the day already.
Another thing that helped was just setting the screen auto-shutoff to be more aggressive (30s vs a minute, making it so apps couldn’t keep the screen on) so I wasn’t having it on by accident. That helped me figure out where I was really spending my time, and did reduce my numbers just by itself (and improved my battery usage considerably!)
Removing low-value time sinks
My phone actually up and died partway through this project, in a way that I couldn’t carry over all my settings and apps. And that turned out to be convenient for this because I had to make conscious decisions about what to install. But also inconvenient because I lost all my screen time data from before this project so it’s very hard to compare!
Things that went:
Most mobile games. A lot of these have kind of dark-pattern things to keep you logging in each day but once I broke the streaks because I had no phone for a week I decided I could just… not do that. I kept a few but I’m finding I play them less because they just don’t feel as rewarding as my Switch games now.
Removed most social media, tuned what was left to have less stuff (mostly turning off boosts for most people in Mastodon, being more aggressive about my filters, unfollowing a few people who weren’t bringing me joy but *were* bringing a lot of posts.)
Threw out most of my RSS feeds. I used to follow a lot more news and craft stuff, but the news was making me miserable and the craft stuff was encouraging me to buy supplies I didn’t need. I kept enough so I could be an informed voter for my riding and read my friends blogs, then culled down the rest.
Most notifications got turned off. Wow, there were a lot of notifications.
Swapped my phone to “flip for silent” and put a pretty case on it so I was more likely to flip it. This doesn’t seem like it should have made a big difference because I already had it in do not disturb frequently, but just taking it out of my pocket and putting it down made just that little bit more friction when I went to “just quick check something” so it wound up helping.
Finding other things to do
The big things I wanted to more of were: play actually good games (instead of crappy mobile dark pattern nonsense) and read books/fanfic. So I started actually carrying around my ereader in my pocket and learned how to stuff it with fanfic so I didn’t have to read a whole darned novel when I just wanted to do something for a few minutes while I was waiting for my tea or whatever, and I fell in love with playing Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on my Nintendo Switch so I started carrying that around in my knitting back (too big for my pockets, alas. Though I did also pull out my 3DS which is more pocketable.)
An old e-reader with a white cover that has flowers on it, and an Animal Crossing special edition Nintendo switch with green and blue joycons attached.
It’s kind of goofy to be proud of replacing some of my phone time with looking at different screens, but I am getting a *lot* more enjoyment out of my gaming time, and since I’m not *scrolling* for a tiny screen while holding a device, I can enjoy reading longer stuff while knitting. It’s also been great for connecting with my kid, as we’re currently both playing Zelda games and sharing tips and showing off stuff we’ve done.
The amusing thing about switching to my ereader was that it forced me to spend more time on my actual computer to transfer files, which encouraged me to spend more time doing personal writing. You haven’t seen this on the blog yet because I’ve been writing fiction rather than blog posts, something I hadn’t done in a long time. I’m not finishing a novel anytime soon, but I feel like I’m stretching some mental muscles and having fun. So far I’m mostly writing fanfic which is nice because people actually read it. I’ve also found great delight in writing more comments on fanfic that I enjoyed. It’s probably obvious in hindsight, but when you write to tell an author how much you appreciate them a lot of them write back with really thoughtful responses (I know, I know, who knew writers could write) and after all the AI crap I had to deal with for Google Summer of Code this year it’s felt amazing to talk to humans without some chatbot in between. Honestly, it feels pleasantly minorly transgressive to be writing un-monetizable fanfic by hand given the state of capitalism and art right now.
I haven’t really been into fanfic since the last time I was seriously burned out after finishing my PhD thesis and moving to the US and developing both migraines and a problem requiring surgery. (It was a rough two years as much as it was a great two years.) So I’m reading fanfic again and, no surprise, I’m hideously burned out now because of *gestures at everything*. I’m in a completely different fandom than I was last time and doing different stuff (last time I was an artist!) but it’s still helping me cope with the burnout as well as changing what my screen time looks like.
Beyond the “let’s just use different screens” strategy, I’ve been reading more books and starting to do some drawing and I continue to knit although I don’t think I’ve done particularly *more* of that since I already knit a lot. I did a decent stint where I was spinnning until March but I’m taking a break on that right now. Now that the weather is nicer, maybe I’ll get some biking time in too.
So how did it work?
Well, it’s May 2025 and I started putting stickers on my calendar in January 2025. I’ve gone from “regularly looking at my phone for 5+ hours per day” to “only exceeding 3 hours a couple of times per month, often with extenuating circumstances like being sick.”
I probably could have gone lower than my new normal of around 2.5 hours on average, but I found when tracked it that all the days I went over 2hrs it included stuff that brought actual connection: chatting with friends or editing and sharing pictures or writing about books. So I’m not inclined to go any lower than that, although I *did* move some writing stuff to my computer so it doesn’t show up on the phone time tracking when i realized how long it took me to write some things on my phone.
The greatest result has been more connection time with my kid: not because we’re gaming together (we already did that) but because I now am playing the single player games he likes as well. This started before I started really focusing on phone time, back when I bought Echoes of Wisdom for us in the fall, but I’ve been happy to find that the single player gaming doesn’t have to be a “selfish” use of my time since we share some similar tastes in games. It hasn’t really increased our offline time much because the phone screen time was happening when we were both exhausted, but now when I sit and he wants to watch videos after school while he eats his snack and rests for a bit, I’m getting gaming or reading time in instead of scrolling while I wait for him to finish. It’s not perfect — I’m more grumpy about being interrupted during some games than I would have been in boredom mode on my phone — but I think it’s better overall.
What’s next?
I feel like I’ve made the habit change I wanted and I’m going to stop putting stickers in my planner almost every day (though they’re weirdly motivating, so I’ll likely keep them for some new habit tracking). I’ll keep the screen time reminders and other phone setting changes I made. I’m not intending to be quite so aggressive about cutting myself off after 2h, but I *have* bought a new game and new books now that I have time for them, and I’ve got a bunch of writing in progress so I feel like I’m at the point where the change will stick.
I might finally get around to knitting the screen time socks that I had planned, now that I feel better about what the data will show about me!
Overall, I learned some about my habits and made a good change. Go me!
Made it home from India without incident, by which I mean my green card was accepted at the border and no one asked me to unlock my phone. It's weird how I just went on a trip to a country where I couldn't drink the water and the front page of the newspaper had multiple rape cases and an acid attack against women and yet, crossing the US border was *still* the most scary part with the constantly changing rules.
The trip was great. I saw so many things I never expected to see, ate so much delicious food, and met so many people that I'm not sure I'm ever going to get everyone's names straight. The PyCon Pune conference was *amazing*. I keynoted to a room of over 500 people, and I've never had such an engaged audience! I did code sprints with people who were awesome, too -- we discovered that Mailman had something like 9 different dev setup guides, many of which were out of date, and yet somehow everyone got things up and running *and* folk helped patch up the docs to be consistent. If you ever get a chance, seriously, go.
Probably because I have three academic degrees and then worked in a university as a postdoc, I still center my life around September as beginning of the year. This year doing so that way feels especially odd because September is the one month where no one in my household is traveling so it's less busy rather than the usual school year of more busy, but it also feels apt because I'm settling into new stuff at work.
But let it not be said that because I'm out of school I'm not learning. I'm actually even signed up for two classes:
1. I signed up for a two-session spinning course at my local yarn shop. The instructor is a friend from the Saturday knit group and I'm super excited because I've watched and listen to her teach so I know she'll be great. I absolutely positively do not need a new hobby, but learning new things is fun!
2. I also signed up for a free online course in a subject I know nearly nothing about: "Osteoarchaeology: The Truth in Our Bones". Why? Because Kathy Reichs novels and crime shows have no doubt left me with a jumbled impression of how bone identification works and I like random real biology and science in my life (a hazard of being raised by biochemists). I plan to watch the first few lectures and decide whether to stick to it, which is something a friend taught me to do with courses when I was an undergrad and it's the one thing I wish everyone knew to do because it lets you try a broader range of things.
If anyone else wants to watch lectures and chat with me about them, I find I stick with these things more if I talk about them with someone, so hit me up for class gossip!
Other than that, I've been doing some more new-years-resolution type stuff:
a. I've been finishing up some work-in-progress knitting things that got shelved for various reasons, and it's strangely satisfying. Hopefully I'll get some time to do some pictures soon and write those up.
b. I bought a new band for my fitbit and am trying to be more serious about using the data it gives me to walk more and sleep more. It's not going super well because my schedule is so random right now, but I'm working on it.
c. I changed up all my subscription boxes, stopping Birchbox, Jimmy Beans Beanie Bags and trying to stop Yarn of the Month (although apparently I didn't get the email out correctly because I got a shipping notice). They're all great subscriptions, but they all piled up over the summer and I think I'll let myself enjoy what I have for a bit.
I did, however, sign back up for the Jimmy Beans Big Beanie Bags, which turned out to be a sanity saver for me several times because it meant I had small kits on hand when I was going somewhere without much notice and needed an easy thing to do. So the plan is to do that up to when the Rose City Yarn Crawl mystery-a-longs start in January and then decide if I need more or I need a break. :)
d. I'm back in work choir and am looking for some better ways to do vocal training, because Christmas music has a lot of high soprano parts and I'm a mezzo soprano with a lousy range that I know I can improve if I work at it. Advice and technological learning help much appreciated! I'll probably start with some Rock Band sessions, since I'm way out of practice from the summer.
It's a good start to a new year, even if it isn't a new year exactly!
Yes, it went well, aside from one of our friends getting a sprained ankle walking in and having 3x the amount of food we needed I think.
No, there are no honeymoon plans, as I need my vacation for family this year. Perhaps another year.
Yes, I did make my own dress. Note the pocket I added the morning of my wedding day. It was invaluable as it meant I could carry my cell phone and give my parents and grandmother a bit of a personal tour of the site.
No, I am not becoming American at this time. Do you people even know how long that takes? (But I don't want to anyhow, so it's moot.) I got my green card some weeks before the wedding, so this does not affect my immigration status in any way.
Yup, so far! J too. But J's dad has had to switch companies. Thankfully, he got an interview and offer right away for a position that's up his alley, so that's cool. Sadly, he'll be moving for the new job shortly after our wedding.
How's that wedding planning going?
Actually pretty well. We're hardly done, but we spent time this week painting the stairway and reading stuff from the choose-your-own-adventure ceremony guide our most excellent officiant sent. Some of the options in the book were... hilariously not us. Much laughter ensued. :)
But yes, we've got a list and we're ticking things off it. Being internet generation that we are, the list is actually a Google spreadsheet and the closest thing we have to a wedding planner is a grumpy sysadmin in Denver who is determined that we won't run out of food. Okay, we also have a whole IRC channel full of folk who are also double and triple-checking our checklist. We are seriously lucky to know such great people.
Are you getting stressed out yet?
Not this week -- we've actually been relaxing a little again. We've got a great community of friends, as I said above. And especially lately, J and I have been especially in sync as we sort out tasks and try to finish the last house reno stuff. (I would never have thought looking at carpet could be so hilarious, but it was!) We were pretty worn out after Pycon and the cold we caught, but we've been kind to ourselves and each other, and it's been good. It probably helps that neither of us cares deeply about the details: there'll be food, and friends, and a legal tying of the knot, and everything else will work out or it'll be a hilarious story to tell people later. We're so very lucky that there aren't huge complicated wedding traditions on either side of the family, but also that both of us are quite happy to say no when we're told we just "must" do something. ("But there have to be flowers!" "There are, they're in the garden" "But couldn't you just buy..." "... buy more flowers and put them in the ground?")
Anyhow, life is good, but painting the guest bedrooms and dealing with lists *is* taking up a lot of my evenings, so you might not be hearing *that* much from me for the next few weeks. Wish me luck!
Sorry about the crummy and poorly written update, but since people keep asking me:
Hardwood floors are in and don't stink so much any more from the finishing (it was really bad for a week or so)
Tile floors are started, but the decorative tile bit is apparently slow-going. No ETA.
Still no baseboards, but they'll happen after the tile is done.
I still want to do one more coat on the laundry room but ugh, so tired of it all.
Still some touch-ups where we got wall paint on the ceiling but I need John for some of them so they'll keep 'till after he's back.
I think we're probably hiring pros for the rest. Definitely for the tall parts, but we've been so wiped out lately that I think paying pros is the right compromise.
Unpacking has started, but it's slow because I can't carry that much on my own and we don't want to put up all the shelving until the baseboards are in.
There's still a *lot* of cleanup needed from the construction and reno; there's drywall and sawdust everywhere and tape and paint buckets and ladders in random locations around the house.
I'm without support this week to deal with cleanup and minor unpacking. Let's be honest, I was without very much support last week too because he had demos to prep, and the week before that because he was getting artemis ready, and there was the week where J's parents were visiting (which was a nice break!) and there was some travel before that too. J's doing the best he can given his travel schedule but between his travel and mine we're looking at only a handful of days of overlap where we're both in the same city for all of October.
We got some living room furniture up while we were both here so I can sit and read in my big comfy chair, and that's nice. And now when I clean things they don't immediately get covered in sawdust or drywall, which is an amazing luxury that has not been true for all of September and some of August. Hopefully we'll be able to find a new cleaning service, but there's not much point at the moment.
I did get my desktop up and running so I can play video games for some escapism. Still haven't found most of the cables or my keyboard and mouse, so it's kind of cobbled together and has no sound, but we made do last night.
Did some digital cleanup today too. Reviewed a couple of ebooks that I won't repost here because frankly, they were both in need of editing (The down side to getting free books off the internet in exchange for fair review, I guess), but you can read them at that link if deeply flawed larpers and psycho-magical crime-fighting lesbian vs lovecraftian horrors are your kind of thing. You'll be disappointed, though; I was. Answered some emails that had been sitting in my inbox; if you were expecting an answer from me on the subject of something or other, re-send because I'm pretty sure I answered anything that still needed answering but I might have been heavy-handed with the archive button. Declined some job interview related requests. Unsubscribed from a lot of mailing lists, probably should unsubscribe from more since I'm not really reading them.
I've got a bunch of of posts I need to write and queue up on my maker blog, but not sure if I'll get started on those tonight. Want to hit up the farmer's market and I'm betting once I'm outside coming back in to sit at a computer for hours won't seem so appealing!
Painting is much more fun now that we're past the annoying part of the ceiling. Because of all the holes the ceiling was retextured, and slightly off-white and stupidly obnoxious to get paint in all the nooks and crannies but impossible to see when it wasn't daylight. So yeah. Crankypants T and J. After 3 coats, it is looking ok, but I still kind of want to spray paint the ceiling downstairs rather than do this again.
Anyhow, main floor is starting to look good. 1. Hallway is now light blue (but needs another coat).
2. My office is mostly done in a lovey medium blue that turned out exactly like I'd hoped. We'll take the tape off tomorrow and do some touch up (mostly to cover a few blue spots on the ceiling).
3. The powder room is now a lovely teal that, as I hoped, goes pretty nicely with the wood in there. It also needs tape removal and touchup.
4. The laundry room and pantry ceilings are done (white, because the floor in there will be terracotta coloured tile and I didn't want to push J's colour palette too far) but only one wall of the laundry has a coat of paint on it, because we were rather eager to have a washing machine again (and the new machines are great! They even sing a little song when they're done, which is adorable.)
5. There's a couple of closets that need doing. I prepped one last night and J's dad gave it a first coat, but the other two aren't prepped.
That's all we're planning to do on that floor right now. I'm going to do the kitchen after I refinish the cabinets and know what colour they will be, and we're going to pay pros to do the two-storey parts of the house (living room, dining room, upper portion of the stairs and probably the hallway up there too because the walls connect). We're taking a break after this floor because coming home and painting every night is exhausting, and because the basement is full of stuff and it'll be easier when the main floors are done. Hopefully the flooring guys will be able to come in shortly after we get the painting done!
Other than that, got some stuff going on in lives that intersect my own that's going to make this a hard week, but please don't ask about it because it's not mine to share, just don't be surprised if I'm quiet at a time when you might think I'd be showcasing photos of the newly painted house.
We got some minor dents and holes filled yesterday, and taped a lot of things today.
I have learend that scotch brand blue tape is inferior to 3m "original" blue tape (despite being made by the same people), because the former has "scotch blue" written all over it in yellow, making it much more annoying to see if you've got a nice straight edge.
We have a first coat of ceiling paint on my office, the hallway, and the powder room. The laundry and pantry are on the todo list and I actually got them taped but not painted. I hate textured ceilings a lot and look forwards to making paid professionals handle the 2-storey rooms, but I am trying to remind myself that the ceilings are the worst and it will be more fun when I get to the walls. Paid professionals likely can't show up 'till october and I am eager to be done with some of this before the flooring guys come back to finish.
(Actually, that's true any time. I'm a photographer, and I like taking pictures of things. So when I don't supply a picture, there is typically a reason. Seriously, I got asked for pictures of an entirely theoretical concept project that I had just invented while in the airport and I was not pleased.)
The plumber is coming tomorrow so there will at least be laundry again soon. I'm wishing John hadn't ripped out the laundry sink; it would be really useful right about now. (He plans to replace it but hasn't done so yet)
But yeah, exhausted, cranky, and do not want to hear about the bright side of anything from anyone unless you are willing to show up at my house for the next 4 days and paint.
We've had the house for 2 months, and I finally couldn't take it any more and put out some bloody chairs and a table that's actually inside. (previously I had to sit on the deck for breakfast)
Not *literally* bloody chairs, although I did smash up my pinkie finger pretty badly today, the only blood shed by me this evening came from a scratch on my ear and didn't reach any chairs. (Although there was a close call with a mosquito...)
So, yeah.
But more precisely, here's the state of renovations:
- The wiring inside the walls is done, but not everything has a terminator and cover panel. J is doing that so we'll be paying the low-voltage wiring guy tomorrow and letting him be done. Yeay!
- The drywall folk have closed all the holes, but there appears to be sanding and texture work to be done. I am hopeful that we will be painting this weekend but won't know for sure until J talks to them tomorrow.
- The plumber didn't want to put the connectors in for the washer/dryer hookups until the drywall was done, so we have had no laundry since we moved. Hopefully the plumber will be in next week, but J didn't want to call until he's talked to the drywall team.
- The flooring is on hold until the drywall mess is cleaned up, which is quite sensible...
....but OMG I've been living in a single bedroom for 2 months because the rest of the house either has no floor or is filled with boxes we can't unpack and I'm sick of it.
So in summary:
I HATE RENOVATIONS AND THERE ARE WEEKS LEFT, BUT MAYBE SOME OF IT WILL END SOON?
Seriously, I know no one loves renovations and having contractors tromp all over their house, but I think it's significantly worse for me than it ought to be. I haven't had any predictable quiet solo time since more than 5 months ago when J's dad moved in with us and I need to introvert so hard that some days I don't even want to deal with J, let alone a bunch of smelly strangers who make everything filthy. But then on top of that (and that would have been more than enough), I'm finding that my lingering PTSD from the breakin two years ago is making the constant stream of strangers an actively terrifying experience in little ways that I can't always anticipate and prepare for. I'm also on day 3 of post-travel headaches so I'm a bit generally cranky.
So yeah, hating on the reno with a passion that I don't think the average person can even understand.
One kind of awesome spot, though:
Our low-volage wiring guy is so passionate about this work and such a good friend to J that he's been pretty much acting like a general contractor for us while we were out of town this weekend, going way above and beyond in making sure the drywall guys didn't slack off. What a nice guy! I've told J we really need to give him a bonus!
Came home from Defcon and promptly got another eye infection.
Yup, peri-orbital cellulitus, again. Last time was January, so at least they didn't have to give me different antibiotics. If I catch it again, they're going to CT scan my head to see if there's something wrong with my sinuses.
Between the exhaustion from moving, the exhaustion from con, exhaustion from renovating the house, the exhaustion from the infection and now the exhaustion from the antibiotics (which are much stronger than regular ones so they destroy my gut biome)... let's just say I'm having a lot of trouble being civil. Or doing much beyond sleeping and wanting to murder things.
Here's hoping the coming weeks are better.
Rather than going on about everything sucks, here's a few good things:
The antibiotics are working, so I don't have to run to the ER for antibiotics via IV.
J figured out why the laundry room smelled funny and fixed it.
(When he took out the sink, he didn't think about filling the sink trap to stop sewer gas from coming in.)
I got a departmental award!
This is especially impressive as security folk rarely get these, so it was super cool of the team I worked with to include me.
I bought a bike today!
It's not an impressive one, just a cruiser-style putzing around town kind of deal, so it doesn't really replace my road bike. But it *does* mean I'm not horribly trapped when J takes the car without warning me first, and it does mean I can go back to taking my sweet time on finding a road bike that fits me perfectly. (This has been a struggle; I'm both small and reasonably picky, and thus I haven't had much luck test riding things.) I should get it tomorrow; they're going to put the fenders and rack on for me.
- I gave two talks at Open Source Bridge. I think they went well! Links to slides and stuff on my speaking page: http://terri.toybox.ca/speaking/ - J and I took possession of our new house (on the same day as I was giving both of said talks!) - J's dad moved into his own lovely 2 bedroom apartment on Saturday and we helped him get it set up - Also on Saturday, my friend R from Ottawa came to visit for the weekend - Also on Saturday, our friends C and M arrived from Denver for the week - We had our first bbq at the new place on Sunday - R took off today (Monday) - GSoC midterms are due this week - my day job workload is heavy (but not yet unpleasant) this week - our yearly "invitational open source community leadership summit" is happening next weekend (that's what the Coloradans are up for) - J is the best and has been handling most of the finding of contractors for the new house - R is awesome and helped us move some pretty significant amounts of stuff while I was too headache-y to walk up and down stairs.
J and I had apparently mis-remembered when our lease is up, so we only have 1 month of overlap with the new house. This is not a problem since J's travel schedule meant we'd planned most of the stuff before August anyhow, but it does mean a bit less wiggle room.
The house is awesome and the yard is more awesome and I'm sorry but I'm too wiped out to deal with requests for pictures this week so please don't ask. I'll put some up when I've got the spoons for it, but I have a touch of concrud/headache/nausea on top of all the stuff going down this week and it's not going to happen for a while. Thanks for being understanding!
I was in France last week for work, but I've been home for a few days now.
I am pleased to report that my French was adequate for basic stuff like getting directions and translating menus into English for my Polish colleagues. My French colleagues were highly amused that I spoke the language at all, since I guess no one warned them that I was moderately fluent. No one was offended by my weird accent, or even seemed to have much trouble understanding me. I couldn't handle full on eavesdropping on the train, but I could get the gist of a lot of conversations when I had some idea of the subject.
I didn't try to carry too much stuff because my ankle is still sore from hurting it after my trip to Poland, but I was able to walk quite a bit even if I had to do it carefully and a bit slowly. 100k steps! It's especially impressive given that my leg still hurts all the time. Walking, as always, is much easier than standing still, so the 30 minute walk to the office was easier than standing in line at the airport. I am sore, but it seems to be mostly the usual chronic constant thing plus some bonus knots from sleeping on planes and trains and strange beds.
They stole my knife-free Leatherman at the Charles de Gaulle airport. It was especially frustrating because several of the agents pointed out to the guy who took it that it was absolutely fine under their rules, but he decided it wasn't despite their best efforts. The thing's under $20 and I sort of assumed I'd lose it eventually, but I was still upset because it was just so unnecessary and wasteful. Have ordered a new one. I may give up on traveling with it outside north america, though, as I expect I'm going to have to fly through France again. (Amsterdam, mind, had no problem with it.)
Jetlag is hitting me hard this time, with the headaches and all. I miss when this wasn't a guaranteed thing, but at least I have Serious Painkillers and coworkers who are pretty understanding about travel miasma. I did not donate blood this week because I was not well enough and not because I am miffed at the red cross for phone harassing me all week (seriously, I think they called 7 times without ever leaving a message) and then after I told them I was unwilling to schedule an appointment because I often get sick when I travel, they gave me two days of silence then called me at 4am while I was adjusting to the time zone in France. So now they're a blocked number, and I'm not sure I'm going to unblock them, although I'll probably donate again when I'm not cranky about it.
Anyhow, recovery will go better with more sleep, so I'm going to do that now!
Defcon is a con that doesn't have a great rep among women, so I'd given it a miss despite being curious until I'd collected a posse. It worked out well.
I was expecting the exhaustion, the chaos, but I wasn't expecting to feel artistically inspired.
I spent hours searching for a robot army and, when I found it, the robots danced with me.
I went to an elevator talk which wasn't about pitching to CEOs but was rather about hacking elevators. All other elevator talks are going to be disappointing now, but elevators are going to be more interesting.
I played a game that started with soldering a badge and meeting strangers that somehow plunged me into a little augmented reality that I was desperate to see more of.
I designed a t-shirt that a whole bunch of people wore, and more people asked me where to buy one.
I discovered that casinos are pretty much all the migraine triggers at once and that as a result it was sometimes more relaxing being on the con floor than leaving it.
I talked about teaching and learning through games. I learned a few things through a game, including that there are still times where my desire to make games is much greater than my desire to play them.
I wish I'd gone sooner, but suspect I also made the right choice by waiting until I had backup.
I came home with a head full of things I wanted to build... and also full of congestion and mucus so it hurt too much to do anything.
... but I got back to building a game today, so maybe I'll get some of these other grand plans in motion too.
Let me tell you, it is a terribly awkward song to have in your head while hanging out with your boyfriend's parents, his brother, and his brother's fiancee.
So you can all be proud of me for not breaking out into excellent lines like "What is love/Where did it get me?/Whoever thought of love is no friend of mine."
I did not, however, manage to conceal my outright disgust at the diamond commercials on TV.
"But I'm sure you wouldn't object if someone bought you a diamond." "Well, actually, given the dubious human rights practices of the diamond industry..."
Anyhow, had a lovely time in Iowa, but I am glad to be back home where I can sing songs that aren't entirely hot on the subject of love and not accidentally cause an international incident. ;)
That makes it sound like I spent all weekend trying to not be me, but that's totally not true. There was also moments like an entirely hilariously awesome whole family dinnertime conversation about fecal transplants. They are fun people. :)
After all the chaos of surgery, recovery, job offers and moving, today's the first day I don't have anything planned. Which sadly, is not the same as not having a todo list, but at least most of it's not urgent?
John and I have made it to the Portland area, after a lovely long weekend in Denver and a few audiobooks to keep us from going crazy driving across the more boring bits of America. We picked up the keys to the new house yesterday morning, unpacked the car, found some pho, bought groceries, got internet as a surprise (their techs showed up several days early, but we're not complaining!) and hit up ikea for some bar chairs so that we have a place to sit other than the floor. Since we're basically in an empty house with internet and bar stools up against a tall kitchen island, I feel like I should make some coffee to complete the Bridgehead/Starbucks/whatever effect. I've settled for cookies and milk instead.
Our stuff arrives on the 10th, the heavy stuff gets unloaded on the 11th, and the containers get moved off our driveway on the 12th.
I'm still waiting for a work visa before I count on a work start date and make a public announcement of my new job. We're hoping for Sept 16th as a start date, but there's always risk of delays. Or outright refusal on the part of the government, which would send me back to Canada indefinitely. Not that it's a terrible fate to go home, but I am really looking forwards to this new job, as anyone who's interacted with me offline lately knows! In theory, I'm expecting an email from the law firm on the 13th, which doesn't give me much time to leave the country and re-enter on the correct visa, even if I am a lot closer to the Canadian border than I used to be.
Still, even with nervousness over work, I'm confident enough in this working out that I'm feeling like we can start settling in. Meeting hpa for lunch and then maybe I'll go check out the library and see if we can get library cards so I really feel like I belong here.
I got to help staff a table at roborave on Saturday. fun! I was too busy to take pictures, so don't ask.
GSoC ranking continues apace. It's actually less busy for me than it was, since I don't need to interact with the students as much until selection is finished, so I've gone from over a hundred people potentially wanting to talk to me to something closer to 20-30. (project admins + mentors with melange trouble). I expect there'll be some wrangling to make sure the Systers and Mailman don't have any overlapping project ideas, but that can wait a few days.
To save people from asking me: I'm not expecting to hear about the Portland job for another couple of weeks. This is actually pretty convenient for me since it means I can focus on GSoC during the selection period; horray for good timing!
You may have seen the link going around claiming that the Miss Korea contestants all look like clones. I chalked it up to some sort of racist "all Korean people look the same" nonsense, but this analysis of why they all look the same is pretty interesting. Short answer: makeup and photoshop by pageant folk. (Although I bet there's some racism involved in the spread of the link too.)
I'm not leaving yet, but it's just becoming increasingly hard to think about anything else. Which is really unfortunate, because my deal to myself was that I'd work this week (which is spring break at UNM) in exchange for taking next week off for hacking.
