ice water and ocicats

... "what day is it" week, "my diet has been weird" week. Also, a week with actual rest days in it. Heck yeah.

The actual day of Thanksgiving we just had Birdie over for a lot of the day; she played pretty music with heisenbug, and I guess they're similar enough level to have fun doing that with neither one annoying the other too much. It was hand-flappingly cute. On the same day, I was doing backbends at home and decided to replicate my "best ever" tight bridge photo from November 2020 -- why not? I still have the same outfit and the same yoga mat.

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So that's amusingly similar. I'm excited to be back around my "best ever", with backbands, and still feel like I'm making progress. Anyway, fairly chill. A pie was made. The day after that was the big gathering over at Blue-Green Street, and that was really nice and I had multiple conversations that I'm following up on for later. I used the whole thing as a motivator to again cast on for my double-knit hat, which maybe I'll make progress on this time.

What else?

• Got a bottle of multi-chrome nail polish from Mooncat so good that I shared, and four people are wearing it right now. It's not merely green/purple -- it can also flash blue or pink and even get a bit of amber in just the right lighting conditions. Wearing it is distracting, like having abalone or iridescent beetles on my fingertips.


• Had an extra-great date with the squirrel, in which an early Christmas present was bought for me and then I was fed an extremely good dinner at Scampo. And he paid, the rotten thing! I'm not generally much of a foodie, but they had squid ink spaghetti with cod confit and crab meat... and yeah, maybe a glass of Pinot Grigio. So that was amazing, and then there was curling up and sleeping which is my favorite hobby these days. I felt thoroughly spoiled (and complained that I will soon become all vinegary if such things continue).


• One of my besties is basically fighting a war with a roommate, and this week locksmiths were nearly summoned. It's tough. Really makes me think about the switch-flip that happens when person A entirely stops trusting person B, in all domains at once -- which, well, haven't I been there?


• Random social time included lunch with an ex-coworker, a kitten, and a virtual reunion of the people I once book-clubbed Designing Your Life with. So interesting to see all the paths people have taken over the last three years. One of them had just read Moral Ambition and therefore had a whole lot of ideas for what good I could be doing in the world now that I'm not working for The Man. And, well, maybe tomorrow, Satan, but right now I'm resting.


• Nobody has bitten on renting the new condo for a start date of Dec 1, but showings are starting to happen. Someone will bite. I've failed to get an HVAC person to look at the one issue I've found, so... I'll get back on that tomorrow morning.


• Finished up a crossword puzzle. This is my fourth to be submitted to the NYT, and I still have my fingers super crossed for the third one but this one's also a fair effort. Same collaborator as my first one.

With the new month starting, it feels like tomorrow is going to be busy. Goodnight, sweet readers.

The new condo is pretty much ready to go. ( Click if you like houses ) I also spent a while bagging up leaves in the back yard over there, and got added to the condo association bank account at Chase. I am, by virtue of sending over a sample budget based on my own house and saying I wanted the job, going to be the treasurer.

So that fix-up project won't be keeping me physically away from home so much more, which is good, because I've been away a little too much. My birthday present for the squirrel was ( yet <i>another</i> day of house stuff ) Satisfying, but tiring. He liked it... he'd wanted activities or acts of service rather than products of capitalism.

Physically I'm doing ever-better backbends, and did my TGUs at 60lb this week for the first time in 2025. My hip has been hurting from doing too much compression work and I've re-started my PT exercises for that, but I'm feeling good in general about where my capabilities are and how my athletic mojo is doing. Only acro is a little bit stalled out, and that's mainly due to my base's schedule.

I had two unusual social events -- one with a guy I lent some books to about 13 years ago and forgot about, but when he reached out, heck yeah I want my books back. And one with my friend A from the Costa Rica handstand trips; neither of us is going this year, so we met up over a giant breakfast sandwich in Boston instead. He's moving to LA, which I possibly shouldn't be sad about but am, in fact, slightly sad about. I like casting a fairly wide social net, because it's often the more distant connections that bring in the new and interesting recommendations -- plus there's more to catch up on when I don't see a given person often -- but this is one who I would have enjoyed running into more regularly. Like, I wish we'd had a weekly class together or been coworkers.

We saw a student show for the circus school, and I also watched the new Frankenstein movie (pretty, but too much cruelty for me to really enjoy).

I seem, by coincidence, to be reading a lot about Jewish stuff lately. There's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which is fiction, and Ezra Klein's episode about groypers, which sadly isn't. I find it interesting how Jewish culture has a strong "resisting assimilation" thread to it. But some of the Ezra Klein episode made me feel weirdly naive -- like when some noted anti-semitic guy always mentioned Goldman Sachs but not Morgan Stanley, for instance. Did I just miss some class, maybe in high school, where I was supposed to memorize which last names are associated with which countries/regions/cultures? Asking because I would never have noticed that particular difference. If asked flat-out "is Goldman a Jewish name" I might have said yeah, sounds plausible. But I wouldn't have known that Sachs was, or that Morgan or Stanley weren't. I don't know how and where people learn all this.

I'm getting tired early, with the short winter day and the return to Standard Time. I'm not quite sure what to do with tired evenings -- play games, and make lists of things to do in the morning, maybe. Or just keep crunching along and accept that it'll be slower. What do you do, gentle readers?

The weeks are tumbling over each other like fat, happy, stupid puppies. I've gotten a little bit out of the habit of keeping daily snippets, as these last two weeks especially have been very "go, go, go". I had the thought, a couple of nights ago, that as I fall asleep the things I regret not doing more of tend to be a) self-care type exercise, b) reading, c) email; that last one not because I love it, but because I dislike feeling behind on it.

This week, same as last week, I again bounced around between condos. At the new one I finished ( a bunch of stuff; click if you like houses! )

Physically, I did my TGUs at 55lb for the third week in a row and then touched the back of my head to both feet while in a backbend; only the second time in my life I've done that. I also had a walkover lesson that was surprisingly pleasant.

Spent an afternoon at apfelsingail's place, helping with winter window treatments and discovering an excellent hole-in-the-wall bakery. And painting our nails with the results of a recent mooncat order. (There's a peachy-pink color that it surprises me to really love.) I also had lunch with mindways, and was extremely tickled to learn that he's dating another kind, helpful, competent person I've known for a few years... sometimes the universe makes a very satisfying click, as pieces settle into place.

Media recommendation for those who like philosophical TV shows: I watched the first two episodes of Pluribus with the squirrel, and really like it so far. It's like a darker version of The Good Place, and holds up American hyper-individualism very effectively against a world that is largely a lot more collectivist. So it appears that the squirrels have a new show! The bug and I also just finished up the single season that exists of Scavengers Reign, which was recommended to me by someone at Zillian and which went delightfully all-out on the alien botany. Text is still my medium of choice, but my recent string of 2-star reviews on Goodreads says I'm doing weirdly better with TV lately.

Did I mention I've been training a lot? Off to the Epsom salt bath with me.

A few other things from the week:

• Got to meet a potential new polycule member. I liked them. I'm a little worried about sketchiness -- I just don't love it when someone's been separated-not-divorced for many years, their stated reasons for not divorcing don't hold any water, and their spouse purportedly doesn't want to hear anything about other partners. But it's not up to me. So... who among us hasn't taken a gamble and hoped that the sketch would fill in nicely?


• This reminds me, I had lunch with Lion on Tuesday and it went fine, especially after we discovered we're both playing Blue Prince. Exposure therapy works! It's actually much much weirder that Lioness smiled at me at the circus school on Sunday. I'm trying to just let my system respond to that without my brain getting in the way.


• My house has a leak, and the neighbors fretted for a while about who to go with for the permanent fix, because we already spent the condo association's reserves on paint this year. In the meantime, the leak was on the side of the house with my tiny native plants, and I think they're almost all trampled. Sorry, little things, I failed to protect you. Maybe I'll try again next year.


• Went dancing at ManRay on Saturday with the squirrel. I think we're pleased with ourselves for finally going. It was on our Bingo board of dates for the year, and now we have two bingos. Good squirrels!


• Most interestingly, Birdie's father E came for a visit. She was nervous about it beforehand and a little overwhelmed during, so I stepped up more than I'd previously intended to on planning and hosting (and I had already planned to put E in my new condo on an air mattress, which indeed was done, and saved him a few hundred dollars). That visit kind of dominated Thursday through Sunday. It was interesting to see the parent/child relationship in the middle of that mid-20s individuation thing. I think E was slightly startled to watch Birdie ransacking my bookshelf and playing with my cat and trying on all my boots -- yeah, she has settled in quickly to the local nature of our relationship. A mildly invasive but cute development. E thinks I can be good for her just by modeling a fairly healthy life, and if I can do that then I'm certainly happy to; he was able to give me some hints of what not to model, and luckily I don't tend to do those things anyway but can easily take a bit more care with my language. I made them both stop at a scenic spot in the cemetery to take photos, taught them how to play Wavelength, and E got home safely. So -- good visit.

My base flew back from Europe tonight and we decided to punt on tonight's acro, giving me a much needed evening of rest. Somehow I'm super tired. I did some really solid strength work this week, but I think it's the one tumbling class (ok, walkover lesson) I took that really left me feeling unbalanced and sore. Gymnastics is a harsh discipline.

I got pretty discouraged after handstand class today because, honestly, I am going through just huge paradigm shifts about how handstands work and nothing feels the same anymore. Not only did I totally break my jump-up, it's making me feel like I've been wasting my time until this year.

If I wasn't learning this then what the hell was I doing? Preparing my tissues for the load, I guess.

( Three insights. I really want to draw this out as a comic, but for now you get words. )

So now some of this is very actionable and has given me a whole new set of cues to try, but everything feels unfamiliar. Stuff I slacked on before suddenly feels intensely critical, and I have no idea if I can put these new understandings together into a functioning body movement. Like: what the hell have I been doing all this time? I've never in my life, until today, focused on trying to keep my scapulae wide during a jump-up! But when I do, the freedom is uncontrollable. I've fixed something critical in my understanding and completely destroyed my intuition.

Sigh.

It's a sleepy sleepy Monday, which it probably is for a lot of people because a) it's a holiday and b) we are having a nor'easter here, which means rainfall. Many cozy feelings are thereby created.

Weird number of postponements and rejections this week:

• Major News Outlet said no to my first crossword puzzle submission, although they did it in the nicest way possible. Not a form letter. They gave real feedback about what they liked and didn't, and encouraged me to try again. Joke's on them, another is already in their queue and I have two more in progress with different collaborators. One of which made a ton of progress this week!


• I was supposed to meet with my financial advisor. It got postponed, but in preparation for that I did my numbers for the year so far and looked harder, especially, at my latest six months of spending. Insert some annoyance, here, with my budgeting program... but I fixed things up until I believe the data, and the good news is that I'm spending less this year than I have any year since 2021. Even with all the circus lessons. This stands in contrast to the returns from the market so far, which don't feel real or make sense to me at all.


• I was supposed to close on my stupid new condo tomorrow. Guess what got delayed again. This time it's most proximally the town's fault. *shrug* At least other people (Unit 2 buyers in the same building) are providing urgency on it now; they can wake me up when the sale is actually happening.

Some other happenings:

• It's been... six months since I retired? I think I'm planning to do a 6-month update post on LinkedIn, but my biggest lesson is that six months aren't enough. I never expected it to be, but now I know it's not, and that's conceptually a little worrisome. The larger milieu of politics, finance and tech seems messed up, and apparently all I can manage is dropping out and playing dead.


• My neighbor suddenly got rid of all the ivy that used to cover our front yard! I knew she wanted to pull it back from the house, but didn't realize she was going to remove ALL of it until it was already done. I was startled. But I also remembered telling her to do what she wanted in the front, and the time (at my last address) that I was trimming hedges only to have the older woman upstairs yell at me in the street. So I simply expressed mild surprise. Maybe it was time for a change anyway.


• I had coffee with my walkover coach, who is pregnant with a donor egg, and talked her through some of how it went with me and Birdie and E&V. I need to do more follow-up on that since, weirdly, E is going to be in town next week, and probably my coach would rather talk to the egg recipient than the donor.


• Went climbing with jadia, which was super fun except when I confidently failed the belay test by engaging my circus rope-pulling circuits (in circus you NEVER let go of a rope entirely but it is considered OK for it to slide through one's hands; in rock climbing it's the opposite; and both endeavors consider it a significant safety concern). This spun off a conversation on a Discord server I'm on, in which apparently belay technique maybe has also changed in the last 10 years, but my particular cross-wiring was almost certainly circus. We were prepared to fall back to the auto-belay routes which were really fun, and I also got to be belayed on a nasty no-hands-section climb that made my legs all shaky.


• More social: dinner with a bunch of Zillianaires, which... was honestly pretty exhausting. Overall positive, but way out in the boonies in a house that made me slightly twitchy.


• Backbend progress -- both a contortion class and a walkover class in which I did New Things and my body graciously put up with it. I've been working out twice a day, most days this week, which is on the high side.... but there's a lot of joy happening and I'm not injured, so I got a tub of creatine and am going to carry on as long as coach availability is this good. There'll be downtime later.
  

It's a lot, right? The time I used to spend on "work" has exploded into a lot of smaller things, and I know that what is important can get lost in here's the pile of random shit that happened. But if nothing else, this is true to my experience too. I think life is good. I miss my squirrel, who's been away for two weekends running, but that will end soon.

Continuing to feel super burned out at the mere thought of working, or constraining my schedule too much. I know this makes sense. I know it takes more than six months to recover from 17 years of cortisol flooding my system. Gotta drift along and observe the whirling world for a while, and have faith in neuroplasticity.

In the meantime, physical workouts are only getting better. In some ways, there's joy in recovering ground I've lost before, because I can be confident in the path to gaining the skill again; for instance, I know that once I can bop my chest against the wall in a backbend, my kickover isn't too far away. And I know that once I have a dropback (check) and a kickover (as of today, check!), a back walkover will be coming along. This is easier on me in some ways than the -- exciting, for sure -- improvements into things I've never had before, where I don't know what comes next or where I'll max out, or how much faith to have. Anyway, in the last week or so I've gotten a set of 5 chinups back, and my kickover back. (The week before, also in backbend territory, I touched each toe to the top of my head in turn; that's a maintenance marker not touched since last December.) There was a cramping episode that made me think I should carry some runners' salt chews, but overall I'm doing really well.

Today in open studio, Birdie and I and another friend set up a station for walkover drills (tick-tocks) and worked on them for about an hour. It was so fun, and useful to really work on one thing for quite a while.

Also this week I ordered some organization stuff for our IKEA cube unit and for the freezer.

I spent a whole day helping a friend move (third one this fall, for anyone counting). She had a lot of the same Zillian swag as me, from working in the same office and, for a few years, in the same group, and I had all kinds of complicated feelings about seeing those items. Mostly sadness and a desire to avoid them. Neither she or I sees a way back to working the way we did when we got those things.

I floofed off to Portland Maine for the first time ever, with the squirrel. On the way up we listened to a podcast about fear, anxiety, exposure therapy etc, and had a good conversation about fears... later that day a tiny not-very-scary spider got onto my hand in a park, and I said "wait! exposure therapy!" and let it crawl around a little before putting my hand on the ground to let it get off. The squirrel was proud of me for letting it live, I was just proud of myself for doing something I'd literally never done before.

I'm sure there's more, but the sleepiness is rising fast, and I must succumb.

Knock knock.
( I promise, I like dark humor! Let me see it. )

So for those who aren't local, Be It Known that the vast majority of apartments here have leases beginning on or around September 1. Simultaneously and relatedly, the streets fill with U-Hauls and the sidewalks fill with random boxes and pieces of furniture marked "FREE". This last phenomenon is called "Allston Christmas" after a local suburb, but it happens across many towns in the area. It's like a big, disorganized Everything Swap.

• I picked up two new kitchen pots from the squirrel, and ended up giving him an onion chopper device that he loves... amusingly this was not as a direct swap, but it worked out well.


• Tuesday I spent about four hours helping a distant-ish friend pack stuff intended for a storage unit. I learned how to vaccuum-bag, which was cool, and MacGuyvered some garment-hanger boxes, and then was able to ferry a bag of stuff to the ballerina. And... silently I judged, because there was so much stuff. I came home, and the next day I got rid of a big bag of clothing and put out my own "FREE" stuff on the sidewalk and reorganized my kitchen. LOL.


• Friday I spent nearly 8 hours helping my acro base unpack and organize. Our goal was to get all his boxes open / broken down / gone, and we did it. So satisfying. We took a 2BR place from a giant pile of boxes to a place that looked like he lived there (and had had a messy week). We also got to see a couch left on the sidewalk disappear within an hour, and the same for a few other things that just didn't seem to have a place in the new apartment. He has different hobbies and different stuff than I do, but his attitude about objects is so much more like mine that it made for an interesting contrast with Tuesday.


• You are wondering: well, miss minimalist, did you get any free stuff this Christmas season? Yeah, I did. The two pots (I got rid of one), a pint glass, and a pair of parallettes from R (good for doing pushups without having to warm up my wrists first).
  

Overall a very domestic week. If you count the intended-to-be-final walk-through for my new condo, I put serious time into four different places. Then I went kitchen-feral on Saturday and made both quatre quarts cake and sushi. Workouts did go okay as well, but with less to specifically report.

I groused and griped about the final outcome of the Google-vs-DOJ antitrust case, which of course Google lost. ( If the powerful can be found guilty but then nothing happens to them, what good are the courts? ) The judge could have hurt browsing a bit, and instead he hurt all of tech. Maybe all of the country.

I learned a good new insult from an otherwise so-so book. The insult is "fish drowner", and I am taking it to mean someone who fucks up the apparently unfuckable. The person who snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, the person who manages to drown a goddamn fish. The person who maybe had one job, and had the power in his hands to break up a known monopolist, and... simply didn't do it.

This last week's theme, if there was a theme, was "staying up until 1AM reading". Also, half-assing my workouts, which is something I'm explicitly working on fixing. (Half-assing my lunches is strongly related; I'm not quite eating enough early in the day.)

Fun thing: playing Öoo from end to end. You play as a cute caterpillar who looks like the game title, and it's just an inventive little puzzle-platformer that doesn't overstay its welcome.

Also fun: reading The Witch Elm with the bug as part of our two-person book club. I am starting to feel a little torn on Tana French; she writes wonderfully about deep friendships but also has a lot of idiotic male main characters, and wanting to wring their necks while I'm reading isn't always pleasant. She also writes smart women, and sure enough, my favorite book of hers so far has the smart woman as the narrator. Looking over her books, I think there's one more of those.

Confusing: spending a few hours pulling black swallow-wort (or sometimes just its pods), on the nicer days and while listening to Alien Clay on audiobook. It's a pleasant enough endeavor, and I'm up for an hour or so when it's nice out, but it's hard to know whether I'm doing any good.

Slow: the buying-a-condo project. I spent time on it last week, measuring windows -- they're all the same -- and ordering window blinds, privacy window film, coat hooks. Also applying for homeowners' insurance for the thing. And informing the closing agents that the way I'm taking title is Sole Ownership, thankyewverymuch... of the options they offered me, all of them were for joint title. Feeling the burn of being a single person in a world designed for couples, I guess, and I'm not even single!

I submitted my second crossword puzzle to the NYT, this one aiming at much earlier in the week. It's easier; the theme is simple but cute. Construction of the puzzles is a little bit dangerous for me, in that it can be very distracting and engaging. In terms of feedback loops, dynamism and discovery, the "fill" part is midway between a video game and programming... both of which are known to bring on flow states, and make people wonder where the last 2-3 hours went. So, while I think this is a fun creative thing and suits my needs in a lot of ways, I also should be careful with it. (With that said, I have a proof of concept complete on my third puzzle. My plan is to take a break from filling to re-score a bunch of words, and give the poor flooded NYT staff a chance to accept or reject the first two puzzles. They have a limit of 3 in the queue per constructor, anyway).

All of this is in the continued context of wanting to wind down the big projects and do a better job with smoothly running my days. In particular, I want to be exercising differently. Lots of things are going great, but some are not. It's been pretty easy, over the last few weeks, to start addressing the various bits of joint jank that had built up in my body -- and this is part of the "going great" -- but it's been less easy to regain some of the strength moves I used to maintain as an absolute minimum a few years ago. So I want to get more regular about those. So far the Turkish Get-Ups are on their way back, just the way I used to do them, and I am LOVING that; but chinups are much slower to return, and I probably will need to get back to 3x/week to get real gains there at this point. Pistol squats too. In general it's always been harder for me to gain than to maintain, and standard strength moves haven't been my #1 fitness priority for the last few years of handstand obsession, but I miss them. I know it might be harder to get them back now that I'm older, but I also let them go for a while, so who can tell? I want to pick them back up. And as mentioned earlier, that means I need to start eating better lunches. Back to basics, as a true priority, is likely to feel really good. So with that, I'm getting on the elliptical machine like I meant to an hour ago. :P